Magnus Merriman (27 page)

Magnus, in his shirt-sleeves, was still at work on the toilet of the black gelding and the younger horse. He brushed them anew, and washed their legs. He rubbed sawdust into the long silky hair that grew from their fetlocks, and he re-tied the straw bows on their tails. Mere spectators who walked by, or paused perhaps to make some comment on the gelding, he regarded with a certain contempt: his busyness, his more intimate concern with the animals, raised him above their meagre stature. But to the men and boys about him who were also in charge of horses, and who, like him, were curry-combing and finicking with the last details of show-yard finery, he spoke as an equal and entered himself as a full member of their society.

When the time came for him to lead his charges into the ring his manner was dignified and remote. He obeyed the judges, trotted the horses up and down, and stood with an air of grave detachment till the awards were made. Each of his horses took a first prize in its class, and he accepted the decision and the red tickets with composure that politely indicated his concurrence with the judges' views. He returned to the picket-line to wait for his reappearance in the championship classes.

Now many people came to talk to him—friends of his father, cousins of his own—and his manner grew more genial. The strain of his debut as a show-yard groom was
over, and he had been gratifyingly successful. There were many jokes made about his appearance in the ring, and in the conversation of his friends there appeared a genuine undercurrent of surprise that he—who was now a famous man, so they had heard—should accept this menial task. But Magnus put on his Orkney accent and did his best to prove that all his ways and all his interests were more rustic than their own.

Then he caught sight of Rose in the crowd, and left his horses in charge of Johnny the ploughman's boy. He walked round with Rose, and gave her his impressions of the judging and of the more notable animals they saw. She listened obediently and gently agreed. Sometimes he stopped and passed his hand sagely down the leg of a horse, and knowingly felt its fetlock. Rose took him to see her father's cattle: Peter of the Bu had done well, and one of his young calving cows was reserve for the championship. Magnus was filled with admiration for its sleek and solid beauty: his devotion to his horses weakened: his admiration for the cow and his affection for Rose mingled, he held her hand, and almost asked her to marry him on the spot. He was determined to be a farmer.

Willy's horses were not so fortunate in the championship classes. One took a Third Prize and the other was Very Highly Commended. Magnus was a little cast down by this, till Willy told him he had expected no better, and was indeed very well pleased by an offer he had received for the black gelding. Magnus left Johnny to take the horses back to Midhouse, and went off to look for Rose.

He found her in the village, where the crowd, coming from the show-yard, now gathered about the cheap-jacks, the shooting-galleries, the swing-boats, and the fruit-sellers who filled the village-green. It was a lively and diversified spectacle. The vulgar simplicity of those who purveyed thick slices of melon for twopence apiece was in sharp contrast to the art of the man who sold gold watches: this was no dull shop-counter trading, but with a ceaseless flow of words the watch would be wrapped up in a ten-shilling note, half a crown and a pocket-knife added to it, and the parcel offered for a pound; or else the cheap-jack would start the bidding
at a pound, add cuff-links, studs, and second a watch when there were no takers, and sell the whole collection for thirty shillings; sometimes he would seem to give money for nothing: and sometimes a puzzled purchaser would find himself the possessor of a lady's wristlet watch for which he had mysteriously paid double the price he intended. He was an artist in words, a juggler, a psychologist, and a lightning calculator, and Magnus stood fascinated by his accomplishments while Rose was impatiently waiting to ride in the swing-boats. They lost some money to a foxy man who ran a modified roulette wheel and kept an anxious eye lifting for the police—but the police were remonstrating with a pugnaciously drunken farmer—and they shot with untrue rifles at spotty targets for the glittering prize of a clock. Then they consulted Madame Vanda, the palmist. Rose came out of her tent laughing and blushing and would not say what she had been told. Magnus went in, and Madame Vanda, in a perfunctory way, said there were two women in his life, a fair one and a dark one; he must beware of the tall fair one, but the dark was trusty and true and would make a good wife for him. She looked at the signs of labour on his hands, and possibly smelt a little smell of horses on them. She said, ‘You'll be going a journey soon, but only a short one, for your life will mainly be spent in the country, and you'll be successful at farming or some such occupation. March is your lucky month, and you should think twice before starting any new kind of business on a Thursday…'

Magnus went out and said that Madame Vanda had talked a lot of rubbish, but secretly he was gratified by her prediction that his métier was farming. He asked Rose to go to the dance with him that night. Shyly she answered that she would love to, and they went home for supper and to change their clothes.

The dance began about ten o'clock. An hour later the village hall was full of a lusty, perspiring crowd, and the walls resounded to a magnificent tumult of noise. Here was no listless ambling to a drawling orchestra, here was no walking of the spineless two-backed beast to a melody deep-drowned in sweetness: but the fiddles kept racing time, and the dancers trod lightly, and girls were whirled off their feet. Slouching
lads who followed the plough were neat and nimble in their dancing shoes, and fat red-faced girls kept easy time with them. Now the whole company made a score of arm-linked circles, and the circles became swift-turning wheels, and the floor shook to a wild quadrille. Then, man and girl, they jigged arid lifted their knees and turned most deftly in a schottische. Now with a roar an eightsome reel began, fast-weaving, high-stepping, and loud with the skirling cries of the dancers. Nobly the fiddlers led them, sweat on their brows and their bows like arrows flashing. The air was furnace-hot and the lamps were yellow and small like the sun in a winter fog. The dancers were stout and strong, the music was fast and fierce. ‘Be God,' said the dancers, ‘that was fine.' And the fiddlers wiped the sweat from their foreheads and reached for the ale-mugs that stood beside them.

Magnus led Rose through the crowd at the door and took her outside to breathe cool air. The night was moonlit and serene. A few clouds like soft old sails, loosely furled, floated in the sky and the full moon was lambent silver. Behind them they heard the parley of the dancers and the fiddlers re-tuning for a waltz. But Magnus said, ‘We've had enough dancing. Come and do pooja to the moon, and I'll tell you stories about moon-nymphs and goblins and lunacy and love.'

They found their bicycles by the doctor's wall, and rode away. ‘Come out and be rich with the moon,' he said again. ‘I'll make a poem for you, Rose, by God, I'll make a poem, and a damned fine poem, before we get to the loch.

There's the first couple of lines. What shall we do with the penny? Get rich with it. What shall we do with the pound? Throw it away. There's lots of them. For there's many a day in the year—there's another line, or something like it. For the sun has a common ground, a daily round, a milkman's round, anything you like. So squander the day without fear: that rhymes with many a day in the year. But damn the days, I want to get on with the moon, the silver penny, the wishing
moon, the kissing moon, luckpenny moon, lovepenny, what the devil shall I call it? Wait a minute, I've got it now.'

Magnus rode on muttering to himself, pedalling hard. Then he sat upright, let the bicycle run free, and declaimed loudly:

‘There now: that's the last verse. What do you think of it?'

‘I think it's lovely,' said Rose.

The road was white and hard beneath them, the sky was a vast enclosing dome. They were in a moonlit and finite world. Their movement was swift and silent. A glowing pallor transformed the fields, and before them lay the quick-silver loch.

They came to the shore and walked over lush meadow-grass towards the ruins of an ancient broch. The pallor of the moonlight now discoloured Magnus's thoughts, and his excitement turned the corner from exhilaration into a hushed expectancy. The shining surface of the loch dazzled him, and when he turned away from it the mild darkness seemed to recede and return more dark. A delicate trepidation assailed him, as though the lunar virus had coldly touched his nerves.

The ruined broch rose before them, a little steep knoll thrust into the water. A hundred yards beyond it the moonlight rippled on a shoal, and in the shivering gleam lithe bodies, touched with argent, slipped out to play and slid again beneath the surface.

Magnus, bewildered, stopped stock-still, and Rose, with a little gasp of fright, stood still beside him. The lithe bodies in the water, moonlight flowing on their shoulders, swam to and fro, and lay, moonbright and slender, on the shoal. They played a shimmering game of touch and go, and smoothly dived between the ripples. They made no louder sound than
the lapping of the water on the shore, and the leaping of their slender bodies seemed to be without effort, like the ruffling of the water on the rippled path of the moon. The water on the shore made a little tune of three soft notes, and the swimmers played in time. Their silver sides were ruffled with shadow when they turned, but sometimes they shone more brightly than the moon, and the water was dusky beside their quicksilver leaping.

Gently, so as not to frighten them, Magnus went a little nearer. ‘I almost thought they were mermaids come in from the sea,' he said.

‘I didn't know what they were,' Rose whispered. ‘But they're otters, aren't they?'

The fallen stones of the broch were thickly overgrown with grass, and grassy banks buttressed the walls and like a broken basin closed in a central space of turf. For another minute or two Magnus and Rose, leaning on the soft wall, watched the otters at their play. It seemed to be a family party, for two were larger than the others. Then something frightened them. With a last bright-shining dive they vanished, and the shoal, untenanted, lay more darkly in the ripples.

With that silver picture lingering in their minds Magnus and Rose made no movement for a little while. Then they turned, and lightly, tentatively kissing, appetite grew by what it fed on, and they held more closely.

Rose said softly, ‘It's lovely being here with you.'

Magnus told himself that it was time to go home, but he lay too warm and comfortable to move. Some time later he thought again that they had better go before it was too late: but the music of the fiddles had not left his memory, and the moonlight was a white foe to resolution, and Rose clung so close that still he stayed.

Now Rose sat up, and stared awhile at the bright loch, and then, troubled and ashamed, said, ‘Mansie, I want you so much.'

The sky grew darker, and presently they walked back to the road and found their bicycles. Magnus took Rose home to the Bu. She kissed him good-night, and lingered awhile, unwilling to go in.

Clouds had come up when the moon went down, and now a drizzle of rain was falling. Magnus rode back to Midhouse feeling too tired to think clearly, but unpleasantly aware that a certain trepidation was displacing the pleasure in his mind; as when the tide runs out and leaves behind it a shore of uneasy sand.

The weather had been fine for so long that Magnus had forgotten the abominable ugliness that could descend on Orkney when the skies pressed close and through a dirty light the rain fell sullenly on sodden fields. But on the morning after the Cattle Show the country was dismally transformed. The fields had lost their brightness, grey mist obscured the firm contours of the land, and cold damp air filled every house. Willy and Janet came in with wet clothes and made the dark kitchen comfortless. The chimney would not draw, and the dog, its coat drenched with rain, stank miserably. Runnels from the midden overflowed the farmyard, and the cattle trod the wet earth into mud. August had come with its usual freight of broken weather. Janet said philosophically, ‘It's the Lammas spoots: what other can you expect?' But Magnus found this seasonable philosophy insufficient to console him for discomfort and the spoiling of his fine pastoral picture.

For three weeks there was nothing but transitory relief. A northerly gale drove off the rain and the heavy clouds, swung round to the south-east, and blew them back again. A patch of blue sky would show itself, and flee before the stormy rain a west wind brought from the Atlantic. Iceland exported southward-driving gales, and the clouds sucked their skins full of moisture from the abundant sea and discharged it on the darkened islands. The lochs rose to winter level, the burns, dark brown, ran bank-high, and every low-lying meadow became a marsh. The cattle huddled together in the fields, hens fluttered their discomfited feathers at the house-doors, and the ducks quacked joyfully in over-flowing ditches.

Magnus's farming enthusiasm waned in this weather. Willy and Janet and the others possessed a happy
indifference to the rain, and would go all day in wet clothes without a sign of discomfort. But Magnus grew ill-tempered when the skies wept down his neck while he sat in a slow-moving cart or scythed a load of sodden grass, and he took no pleasure in tramping through the farmyard mire. He returned to his poem and laboriously reconstructed, in verse, a Scotland untroubled by its present discontents and even by its present climate.

But he could not recapture the gusto with which he had attacked so much of the world's evil and folly, nor could he devise a really convincing method of reform for industrial conditions and the distasteful appearance of Glasgow, Motherwell, Dundee, and other important cities. He suggested rebuilding them in a style between the modern Viennese and the American, and pictured the Clyde displaying on one side a facade that resembled the lake-front of Chicago, while on the other public playgrounds smiled and tuneful fountains murmured. But the economic complications of this transition were not unravelled, and though poetry is ill-adapted for economic exposition and poets may be excused a ledger-like calculation of their theories, Magnus was uneasily aware that his new Scotland was borrowing the unsubstantial foundations of Utopia. His rural improvements were outlined with more firmness though perhaps with scarcely more practicability, for he proposed a return to the odal laws of the Norsemen, and described a community of sturdy odallers each in his own township dispensing household justice and reaping in peace that which he had sowed. But even here Magnus was not quite satisfied with his writing, for he detected in it that faint wistfulness which is so hard to keep out of any picture of
le beau temps de jadis
, and wistfulness, he knew, was a poor basis for reform. He endeavoured to correct it by the insertion of some good hearty passages, and imagined his odallers drinking, as had their Orkney forebears, the starkest ale in Albion: but he could not stress too much this favouring glimpse, for the brewing of much stark ale is an economic flaw in the structure even of Utopias. But he did what he could with the beneficent rays of his returning sun, and was conscientious about the structure of his verse.

The bad weather gave him an excuse for staying away from the Bu. He had intended to go and see Rose on the day following their misadventure in the moonlight, but the weather had been so bad that he postponed his visit. The next day and the day after that had been equally unpleasant, and the situation was complicated by the fact that except in fine weather he had little chance of speaking to Rose alone: there was no hope of finding privacy in the farmhouse. If the skies were propitious they might saunter out of doors and converse with a field between them and their nearest neighbours, but to ask Rose to go for a walk while the heavens discharged abundant rain and the wind howled in anger was to invite general suspicion of the most pointed kind. So Magnus argued—and most reasonably argued—and stayed at home till the weather should mend. But the weather did not mend, and as day after day intervened between the misadventure and his resolve to discuss, frankly and honourably, its possible consequences, his resolve weakened and he felt a growing embarrassment at the thought of meeting Rose again. He pacified his conscience by arduous work on his poem, and by thinking that the misadventure might very well have no consequences. He remembered that an old friend of his, a medical student in Inverdoon, had often remarked upon the infrequency with which effects resulted from the initial or, as it were, the exploratory cause. It was absurd, thought Magnus, to take too sentimental a view of the occasion: for though he had day-dreamed of settling back in Orkneys with Rose in his kitchen and fine black cattle in his fields, he felt curiously indisposed to accept such responsibilities when it seemed possible that he had actually incurred at least one of them: and the weather was still abominable.

But one day sentiment or conscience got the better of him, and he went to the Bu. It was still raining, and the Bu was as damp and uncomfortable as Midhouse. The blue flagstone floor of the kitchen was sullied with muddy footprints, and the air was heavy with the smell of wet clothes. For two or three minutes Magnus and Rose were left alone together, and Magnus anxiously considered several ways in which to introduce the topic that was uppermost in both their
thoughts, but before he could decide on one Mary Isbister came in with a long story of a hen that had laid far afield and hatched a misbegotten brood, and now brought them home to be cared for, and the chance was gone. But Rose gave no signs of uneasiness. She was quiet as usual and shy as usual, and there was no new warmth in her voice when she spoke to Magnus, no indication in her manner of the significant possessiveness that on other occasions he had unhappily observed in other young women. He went home persuaded, or almost persuaded, that he had no cause to fear an embarrassing sequel to his indiscretion.

Nothing happened to revive his agricultural ambitions. The corn grew higher for harvest, but to Magnus it seemed unlikely that it would ever ripen, and even the handsomest cattle were so bedaubed with mire that he could feel no affection for them nor desire to own their like. His poem approached completion, and a restless desire for change of scene grew in him. He considered the possibilities of going abroad again, and spent an hour in debate with an atlas, turning its coloured leaves to find a winter home with some melodious name and the promise of a blue sky.

But one day towards the end of the month he received a letter, forwarded by his publishers, from a wholly unexpected source, and almost immediately he abandoned his questing thoughts of South America, Ragusa, and the Malay Archipelago. His correspondent was Nelly Bly, the gifted special reporter of the
Morning Call
, and one of the most favoured members of Lady Mercy Cotton's staff. Magnus had met her several times during the election in Kinluce, and despite her cynical opinions and the flagrant dishonesty of her reporting he had conceived a liking for her: she was pretty, clever, and full of vitality. She wrote now to say that the post of dramatic critic on the
Morning Call
was vacant, and would Magnus care to accept it on probation? It was she herself, she explained, who had suggested his name to Lady Mercy, and though Lady Mercy had held the lowest opinion of him during his Nationalist candidature, she had read
The Great Beasts Walk Alone
since then and had come to the conclusion that he was a very clever young man in spite of his political opinions. ‘I don't suppose you know
anything about dramatic criticism,' said Miss Bly, ‘but that, of course, will be no hindrance to you. The
Morning Call
doesn't want learned disquisition: three jokes are better than the three unities any day, and a little butter will make up for no bread. I think you would find the job amusing, so you had better come along and try it. If we don't like you we shall say so fast enough, and if you don't like us you won't be unique.'

In his mood of rural disillusion this proposal appealed very strongly to Magnus. It was true that he had castigated newspapers such as the
Morning Call
with the utmost severity in his poem, and that he had supposed they were among the most pernicious phenomena of the day. But now he began to wonder if they were really so pernicious as he had thought. They were at least amusing. They were clever and lively. And even if they had a pernicious influence, what of it? If civilization was in truth rotten, then pernicious influences were surely laudable in so much as they would help destroy it. In any case, in a world so crazy and out of joint as this, the sanest mood was cynicism, and if Nelly Bly could be cynical, so could he. Magnus grinned a dog-tooth grin at the mirror in front of him and contemplated the twisted image with satisfaction. He would be a cynic, not a farmer, and in more parlous individualism than ever he would navigate alone the chaos of the time, believing in nothing but the rectitude of making hay—not real hay, thank God, but hay metaphorical—while a metaphorical sun was shining. He would pick apples when they were ripe, take the tide at the flood, and wear a set sardonic smile. He remembered Autolycus and quoted aloud: ‘How blest are we that are not simple men!'

He sent a telegram to Nelly Bly saying he would arrive in London in a few days' time and was prepared to accept Lady Mercy's offer. But on his way back from the post-office he temporarily forgot his cynicism and determined to become the foremost dramatic critic in London. It was a pity that Walkley was dead, he thought. He would have only Agate and Brown to compete with. And how absurd of Nelly Bly to suppose that he knew nothing of criticism! Had he not read the whole corpus of it from Aristotle to Burke? Coleridge,
Hazlitt, Morgann, Boileau: he knew them all, and upon that base of erudition he would erect the liveliest of new structures for the delectation of the registered readers of the
Morning Call
. He began to compose an imaginary
cri
tique
, on no particular drama, in which he made fine play with modern instances and wise saws from Longinus and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. He was going to be a dramatic critic of no mean order.

He finished his poem on the following day with a twinge of conscience for such hasty work: but the returning sun was in partial eclipse and would soon darken altogether, he feared. Then he made known his new plans to Janet and Willy. The latter was sorry to hear of his departure. ‘You've been a real help,' he said. ‘Man, could you no bide with us till harvest's over? You'd do fine at forking sheaves after your practice with the hay.' But Janet said, ‘I thought you'd soon be tired of farmer's talk and pleitering in the gutter all day. You'll be better off in London, for there's bound to be more there to write about than you'll find in Orkney. But there's a home for you here when you want it: I'm not sorry to see you go, but I'll be blide to see you back.'

Magnus went to say good-bye at the Bu, and Peter was regretful as Willy had been to hear that he was leaving. ‘I fairly thought you were going to settle down here,' he said. ‘There's a good farm over by Stromness that'll be coming into the market, with entry at Martinmas, and it would suit you fine.'

But Magnus was unmoved by Peter's enthusiastic description of the Stromness farm. He was going to be a dramatic critic, and as the theatre, as well as Scotland, was degenerate, there lay before him not only the goal of a magnificent reputation, but the arduous and shining task of reformation. He was, moreover, going to combine reformation and the search for fame with a cynical philosophy: his mind was well occupied, and farming had small hope of entering now.

Rose did not appear to understand the nature of his new occupation nor to realize that he was finally turning his back on Orkney. She seemed to think that he was going away for a little while only, for she said, when he shook hands with her, ‘You'll be coming back soon, Mansie, won't you?'

There was nothing in her voice to give her question more significance than ordinary friendship, but Magnus's conscience suddenly made a coward of him, and he answered cheerfully, ‘Yes, I'll be back before long, Rose.'

The balloon-like exuberance of his mood was pricked, however, and for the rest of the evening his spirits drooped. Even cynicism would not come to his aid: it was useless as a crowbar to a drowning man.

But he felt better in the morning, for at last the weather had mended and the sun shone brightly on grass all pearled with dew. He sailed from Scapa on the
St Ola
. The morning was windless and the air was crystal-clear after the rain. The islands lay like jewels in a blue sea, a circlet of entrancing colour. No one could be sad on such a day, but Magnus felt like a fool to leave such loveliness behind him.