Magnus Merriman (7 page)

‘What do you want?'

‘Whisky, and a big one. And you needna bother about soda. There's no guts in the drink here, and there's no guts in the men either.'

She took the drink and swallowed it at a gulp. ‘Come on,' she pleaded, ‘it won't cost you much.'

‘No,' said Magnus.

‘Oh, well,' said the slut, ‘there's a kiss for your drink. It wasna worth more than that.' And she reached up and kissed Magnus noisily.

‘An honest little whore,' said Meiklejohn.

Magnus, with wicked intent, answered:

‘For God's sake keep your tongue out of that plate,' shouted Meiklejohn. ‘I take you to a good Scotch pub and you quote a noisy, dirty-minded, untidy, romantical Englishman to me! I detest Shakespeare, and I'm damned if I'll listen to him for you or anyone else.'

Meiklejohn was dogmatic in his tastes, and professing a large enthusiasm for Latin poetry of the Augustan age, for classical French literature, for Viennese music, for the bothy ballads and ruder verse of Scotland, he would recognize no merit in what was written outside those areas. Essentially a romantic himself, he hotly denounced all romantic writing, and confessed his passion for Johann Strauss only because those rosy melodies brought to his eyes such fond and copious tears that his weakness was immediately discernible. But to Magnus, as to many other people, depreciation of Shakespeare was dangerously near to blasphemy, and Meiklejohn's scandalous denigration of England's most mellifluous and triumphant voice roused in him hot anger and resentment. For his new-come patriotism was not yet exclusive.

‘Forgive me for uttering so naked a commonplace,' he
said offensively, ‘but you drive me to it. Shakespeare is the greatest poet of all time,

‘A fustian, long-winded, turgid, slovenly ranter who never missed the opportunity to make a dirty joke,' retorted Meiklejohn.

‘Name a better poet,' said Magnus.

‘Racine,' said Meiklejohn promptly.

‘That dull, pedantical schoolroom exercise! That prosy, plodding, weary, unimaginative padding for a deserted library! That's not poetry: that's route-marching to Parnassus with full pack and a sergeant alongside to see that you keep step.'

Meiklejohn took Magnus by the lapel of his coat and shouted very loudly: ‘Listen to this, you chuff!'

‘Is that poetry, you poor simpleton, you Boeotian, you country slab?'

Magnus shook off the detaining hand, and in his turn shouted: ‘No, it's costive as you are, and flat as this beer you've given me, and colourless as an old hen's rump blown bare by the wind. Listen to this, you rattle in a tin can, you wind in a sheep's belly, you varicose puff!—

Meiklejohn interrupted, bellowing a single line:

By this time they had attracted the attention of the whole room. The pianist who had been playing for two or three pairs of dancers fell silent. The dancers came to a standstill. The drinkers took firmer hold of their glasses to keep them
safe should trouble arise. An old man with a pendulous red nose and a silver watch-chain across his greasy waistcoat, shocked by the sound of a foreign tongue, shouted: ‘They're Bolsheviks! Pit them oot!' His neighbour, a pallid man with red hair and no teeth, gobbled like a turkey and cried: ‘I'm a Bolshie masel! Pit me oot, if you can!' Two sailors, on leave from a destroyer lying in the Forth, set their girls down from their knees, stood, and hitched up their trousers in preparation for anything that might happen. And a tall barman came threateningly to Meiklejohn and asked: ‘Is that language for a gentleman like you to be using? Are you no ashamed of yourself?'

‘I was quoting a line of pure poetry,' said Meiklejohn.

‘Pure stite,' said the old man with the red nose.

‘Shut up!' said the barman, ‘it's got damn-all to do with you, anyway.'

‘They're Bolsheviks!' said the old man.

The barman ignored him and spoke sternly to Magnus and Meiklejohn: ‘Don't let me here another word from you! If there's any more of that dirty talk, out you go on your bloody dowps, the pair o' you!'

‘And now, will you give me two pints of beer?' said Magnus stiffly.

He and Meiklejohn sat together without speaking. Meiklejohn's drooping eyelid had fallen far down, and his left profile wore a sleepy look, while his right was set in haughty indignation. Magnus maintained an air of remote dignity, impaired though by no means ruined by a convulsive hiccup when he drank his beer.

The other occupants of the room returned to their previous amusements, and as closing time was imminent the barmen were kept busy pouring glasses of whisky and pulling beer-handles to fill those last cups that would sustain, for as long as might be, the Dionysiac euphrasy of the week-end—and would also ensure, when the traditional glory of Saturday had departed, a Sabbath morning queasy and grey and a mood most apt for piety and repentance.

The girls who had been sitting on the sailors' knees and had now returned to those warm seats, began to sing:

Then the sailors laughed loudly, and tickled the girls till they squealed, and one of them said: ‘There ain't going to be no lonely night tonight, Jenny.'

‘My name's no Jenny, it's Jeannie,' said the girl.

‘Jenny or Jeannie, Polly or Molly, what the hell do I care?' said the sailor.

‘Time, gentlemen, please!' shouted the barmen, and began to hustle those customers who were slow in finishing their drinks and to collect the empty beer-glasses, and to rebuke those ever-thirsty souls who pleaded in vain for a deoch-an-doris, a snifter, a valedictory nip, a homeward cup.

The girls stood up and laid on their captive sailors hands that were compulsive to follow. One of the girls sang in a voice of vulgar but cogent allurement:

Her voice rose and fell on the rhyming diphthongs with the exaggerated undulation of an Alpine yodel, and the cacology of the streets informed her pronunciation. But her voice was melodious.

‘Is that another Scotch song?' asked Magnus with urbane malice.

Meiklejohn made no reply, but took snuff with a gesture that seemed to dissociate him from the pervading Englishness that could corrupt even a tavern in the High Street. Reluctantly the crowd staggered from the bar, and down the rickety stairs met those emerging from the lower rooms. The sailors, firmly clipping their girls, marched purposefully away. A decrepit old man with dirty white hair and a drop at his nose stood in a corner mournfully contemplating a halfpenny that lay in the palm of his hand. It was worn smooth and bright, and he had thought for one blessed moment it was a shilling. Now, discovering its
insignificance, he cursed it slowly and carefully, dropping on its smooth surface abominable words that yet seemed, in his quavering tones, to lose their foulness and become the reasoned criticism of Job-in-the-gutter.

Magnus, still combatively inclined, saw the opportunity for another quotation, and aptly remarked:

‘Who said that?' asked Meiklejohn suspiciously.

‘The greatest poet of all time.'

Meiklejohn, with a temperate and judicious air, said: ‘It's better than most of his stuff.'

Magnus grew earnest. ‘My dear fellow,' he said, and paused to summon words so forceful and conclusive that his friend would of necessity repent his aesthetic blasphemy. Being now somewhat drunk—but solemnly, not riotously drunk—it seemed to him imperative and important beyond all else that Meiklejohn should confess the poetic supremacy of Shakespeare, and he strove with the fuddled resources of his memory for phrase and argument that would compel the admission from him. They were now on the dark corridor of steps outside the pub, and the crowd was fast disappearing, up or down, except for some in whom desire to journey anywhere had become inoperative; and they, idle as Stylites, leaned against the walls and contemplated in a puddle at their feet the black reflexion of the sky, and, in that dim mirror, the minute starring of tiny water-drops. For the rain had gone, and the clouds had settled lower, and small rain fell silently.

‘My dear fellow,' Magnus repeated, ‘think of the profundity of Shakespeare, and the enormity of his invention. The range of his understanding …'

Meiklejohn, equally in earnest and stammering in the speed of his desire to refute Magnus's assertions, said: ‘But think of Racine!'

‘Racine is a bore,' said Magnus.

‘Shakespeare's a periphrastic, platitudinous peacock,' said Meiklejohn.

Magnus began to recite Clarence's dream from
Richard
III
, and Meiklejohn attempted to over-shout him with the
passage from
Roxane
beginning: ‘Ah! je respire enfin, et ma joie est extrême,' but unfortunately, owing to the disorder of their minds, neither could remember more than a line or two, and their quotations expired in a common silence of defeat. They tried new pastures.

‘Quoi! pour noyer les Grecs et leurs mille vaisseaux,' Meiklejohn began, with less assurance than before.

said Magnus fiercely.

‘L'Aulide aura vomi leur flotte criminelle,' shouted Meiklejohn.

‘Will you listen to me?' said Magnus, and took Meiklejohn by the throat.

‘I'm damned if I will,' said Meiklejohn, and struck Magnus on the side of the head. It was a clumsy blow, but sufficient to unbalance him, and falling, he fell down several steps before he could recover himself.

In the meanwhile Meiklejohn had taken off his coat and hat and given them to one of the several nearby loafers, who happened to be Private McRuvie, late of the Black Watch. He had found Sergeant Denny waiting for him in a pacific mood and they were now on friendly terms.

Magnus, stripping in turn, gave his coat to the Sergeant, who encouraged him to go in and win. Meiklejohn, though somewhat unsteadily, stood in an attitude of defence, but Magnus hesitated to begin the fight.

‘I'll give you a last chance,' he said, ‘if you admit that Shakespeare's a better poet than Racine …'

‘
Merde!
' answered Meiklejohn rudely. Whereupon Magnus hit him lightly on the face, and Meiklejohn countered heavily to the body. Then they sparred for another opening.

‘Up the Gordons!' cried Sergeant Denny, and officiously thrust back the several spectators.

‘Mind where you're going,' said Private McRuvie, whose toes had been trodden on.

‘Away and take a running jump at yourself,' said the Sergeant.

‘There's no bloody Gordon with a white strip in his kilt
can tell me to take a running jump,' answered McRuvie indignantly.

Then by common accord McRuvie and the Sergeant threw down the coats they carried for the other combatants and began, with great gusto, to punch and pummel for themselves.

The yellow lamp outside the tavern grotesquely lighted the swaying figures of Magnus and Meiklejohn. They had drunk too much to be either strong or accurate in their hitting, and for some time they fought without inflicting much damage. Presently for lack of wind they fell into a clinch, and Magnus, with no regard for orthodoxy, seized Meiklejohn by the hair and pulled back his head till, panting, he gaped at the lamplight like a dying fish.

Magnus, himself almost breathless, had just enough strength and animosity to gasp—as though setting his flag on a conquered town—

At this moment two tall and robust figures, helmeted, dark, a glisten of rain on their black capes, silent and portentous, ponderous but alert, came into the lamplight, and seeing them the spectators fled, one turning as he ran to say: ‘Look out, boys, it's the polis!'

But Magnus, still regardless, though a heavy hand fell on his shoulder, continued to recite:

Now Meiklejohn, with a last effort, kicked his opponent's legs from under him, and they fell together, breaking the policeman's grip, and rolled down some dozen steps, locked in each other's arms till they came to a flat landing. Bruised and bewildered, Magnus rose, and immediately a policeman had him by the neck and arm, and a moment later his wrists were handcuffed. But Meiklejohn lay where he had fallen.

‘Now stand there quietly, if you don't want to get hurt,' said the policeman, and knelt to examine Meiklejohn.

‘Ay,' he said, ‘this'll be a bad night's work for you, my man. Your pal's clean knocked out, and maybe worse. We'll need to get the ambulance.'

But Meiklejohn, not yet defeated, opened his eyes and struggled to get up. Leaning on one elbow he said, very slowly and distinctly: