Magnus Merriman (10 page)

Magnus roused himself from these thoughts. They were growing too pretentious. And, on colder consideration, Frieda Forsyth's rhetorical questions also appeared melodramatic; but then the brutalities of life always seemed forced and unreal when brought into personal conjunction with the occupants of a safe and comfortable and friendly room. That this gaily attractive girl should have played the harlot, not from desire but from necessity, was an abominable thought, and to imagine those long legs, so smart in their Jodhpur trousers, running from the terror of rape, was frankly impossible. Had they, in truth, ever run in such fashion, or was she embroidering a fictitious occasion with lurid colours?

As though aware that she committed an indiscretion, and as if anxious to erase it, Frieda Forsyth sat up and returned to her former tone of boisterous amiability.

‘Hell!' she said. ‘What's the use of talking like that? This high-ball of yours must have gone to my head. Say, let me tell you about socking my suitor on the jaw today—or was it yesterday? Well, I fell off my horse. He was shaped like a hen behind—the horse, not the suitor; he'd a fanny like the end of a scow—and when he stood up I just slid. I could ride pretty well in Wyoming, but I'm not too good on a darned English saddle that's no bigger than a pocket handkerchief. I've been taking an odd day
with these blue-blooded fox-hunters of yours, down on the Borders and over in Fife, but I haven't seen a fox yet. I fall off too soon. This is the first time anyone's stopped to pick me up, though. Does fox-hunting make you kind of unfriendly? Anyway, there's been no one dying to make my acquaintance till today, when Sir Edward fell for my girlish charms. That isn't his name, but if you want to identify him go down and look for a guy with a fat white face and a big blue lump on his jaw. I'll say this, that his boots were lovely, and his tailor's a genius, but the rest of him was cheap and ordinary. Well, he stayed alongside, and after the fun was over—and there wasn't any high mortality among the foxes so far as I could see—he said would I go home and have a drink with him? There didn't seem any reason why his wine merchant shouldn't be as good as his tailor, so I said yes. We got rid of our horses and into his car, and I ought to have known by the way his near-hand was straying that I wasn't safe, but hell, I wanted that drink. And we had it, and several more. Then he said he was dining all alone that night, and would I eat? Now food's got an uncommon appeal for me, so again I shrank from wounding his feelings by saying no, and we sat down to the soup and fish. Sir Edward does himself well. But when he started telling the old, old story his style didn't draw me to him, and those feminine responses that he hoped for just wouldn't come. So he fell into a clinch and I picked one off the ground and hung it on his chin, and ran like hell. His car was waiting to take me home, so I climbed into it, meditating on the fate that is worse than death, and drove away at considerable speed.'

‘It's his car that's outside now?' asked Magnus.

‘Sure it is, and what the hell am I going to do with it?'

‘You'd better take it to a garage and write to tell him where it is.'

This recital did something to alleviate the discomfort caused by her previous outburst, but her vivacity was forced and could not wholly delete that oppressive memory. Slowly, however, its quality changed. The feeling of revulsion, as from contagious disaster, that Magnus and Meiklejohn at
first experienced, became in time a contrary impulse, and the revelation of a more pungent flavour in her character attracted them with increasing urgency. She had knowledge to give, as well as gaiety and boisterous charm, and that knowledge was of a seductive kind that may not be acquired in the smooth intercourse of society's conventional traffic. She drew them with the compulsion of a tale of piracy when the recital of honest voyaging but mildly draws. This became evident when, some while later, she looked at the clock and exclaimed with dismay at the lateness of the hour.

‘Why didn't you tell me what time it was?' she demanded. ‘Say, I'm scared to go home. My Aunt Elizabeth and my Uncle Henry have got the darndest ideas about late hours, and they won't give me a key. I guess they don't trust me too much either. I'm here on probation. I'll have to knock someone up, and there'll be hell to pay. I'm real scared.'

‘Why not spend the night here?' said Meiklejohn thoughtfully. ‘Then you can go home in the morning and tell your people that you missed the last train from Selkirk.'

‘Don't be crazy,' said Frieda Forsyth.

‘It's not a bad idea,' said Magnus, ‘but you would be more comfortable in my flat. I have a spare bedroom.'

‘My dear fellow,' exclaimed Meiklejohn, ‘there's no point in her going to your flat when there's a perfectly good bed here.'

‘I was only thinking of Mrs Dolphin,' Magnus explained. ‘She might not be too pleased; but in my flat …'

‘I don't care what Mrs Dolphin says!'

‘No, but Miss Forsyth might. There would be no possible embarrassment if she came home with me.'

‘I can absolutely guarantee that nothing would happen here to make her feel uncomfortable, and if…'

‘But my flat is only a few hundred yards away, and…'

Frieda Forsyth interrupted them. ‘There's no need to get feverish, for I'm going home. I know you're just being big-hearted, but I don't trust any big-hearted man at two o'clock in the morning. I'm going right now. Will either of you look after that stolen automobile for me?'

‘Why, certainly,' said Meiklejohn. ‘I'll ring up a garage and see that it's taken away at once.'

‘Then I'll get a taxi and take you home,' said Magnus promptly.

Meiklejohn glared fiercely at Magnus, who opened the door with an air of calm authority.

‘Will you have lunch with me tomorrow, Miss Forsyth?' asked Meiklejohn.

‘Hell! No!' she answered, ‘I won't be allowed out for a week after this. But I'll ring you up sometime. And thanks a lot for the drinks.'

Magnus called to a passing taxi, and they left Meiklejohn on the pavement contemplating with obvious ill-pleasure the purloined car.

‘Your people sound rather unreasonable,' said Magnus. ‘Why should they worry you with these nonsensical restrictions and treat you like child? Can't you talk to them and tell them how absurd they are?'

‘I haven't got a nickel except what they give me. They paid my passage from New York, and when I arrived I had just two of everything: two vests, two pairs of pants, two dresses, and two dollars, and only the dollars were fit to be seen by daylight. If I said: “Uncle Henry, I think your way of living is absurd and nonsensical,” he'd answer: “Niece Frieda, on the other side of that wall is the street. If you like the street better than my house, go to it!” But I don't, see? Uncle Henry's house is none too warm, but it's warmer than the sidewalk, and a wardrobe full of clothes, even though they were bought in Scotland, looks better to me than a couple of vests so full of holes that any respectable laundry would think they were fish-nets. So now you know.'

The taxi stopped in Rothesay Crescent, a semi-lune of tall houses, solemn in mien, dignified, wealthy in fact and implication. Here was respectability achieved in such perfection as to be magnificent indeed. Here was dignity wrought by endeavour and most zealously preserved. Here were roofs that covered success, and though that success might seem incomplete to an impartial observer—like a wall-pear that may grow no higher than its wall, nor stretch its branches north and south to contemplate its shadow at afternoon, but must be content to live in two dimensions only—yet the occupants of the houses showed in their bearing
no trace of doubt, and obviously had made of their rich circumscription a cosmos that contented them. But that Frieda should live here seemed unnecessarily incongruous: as though a flying-fish should come to a goldfish bowl, a merlin dwell in the canary's cage, a Barbary sheep consort with a fat flock of Southdowns. Before Magnus could find the exact comparison she was saying good-night.

‘Shall I wait to see that you get in all right?' he asked.

‘Not on your life.'

‘Then when shall I see you again? Will you dine with me sometime soon?'

Frieda looked at him thoughtfully. ‘Come round on Saturday,' she said. ‘Now scram!'

Magnus paid off the taxi and walked to Queen Street. It was not till the following morning that he remembered his solemn decision to concern himself no more with women, but to live in self-sufficiency with poetry for his sole companion. The lure of politics had already made a breach in that delectable isolation, and here he was foolishly offering hospitality to Frieda. But he consoled himself with the thought that poetry must be nourished by experience, and that when he did retreat to his ivory tower his writing would be strengthened by any casual harvest of knowledge he might in the meanwhile reap.

Except in its literal connotation the assertion that no man by taking thought can add a cubit to his stature, is clearly fallacious. Even when interpreted with a most narrow regard for meaning it comes dangerously near contradicting the more optimistic and equally authoritative view that faith will move mountains; while if one regards it as a generalized statement of mankind's inability to alter its mortal size, shape or constitution—and surely that is the meaning intended—it is immediately seen to be as inaccurate as a blind man's idea of Venice by moonlight. Within living memory the shape of civilized humanity has very materially changed: the paunch of middle-age follows to extinction dodo and dinosaur, the opulence of the female bosom has shrunk, and the philanthropic vastitude of the haunches has
become a little thing. The corset that was wont to make of woman's waist an isthmus of Panama—a tropic narrowness between the North America of her breasts, the Argentine, the Braziliance, of her hips—the corset, like the cod-piece, has become a museum piece, for the female continent has dwindled to a tube that has no place for stays. The vanishing of man's tail when he came down from the trees and went into a hole in the ground, is no stranger a miracle than the diminishment of their backsides when women came out of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. And so also, by arcane process, does woman change her tallness according to the seasons of fashion. At one time there is a plenitude of tiny creatures, the height, as they say, of a man's heart; at another time the streets are filled with the daughters of Anak, and the height of a man's heart is his boots. So far from being able to believe that human height, breadth, and thickness are predetermined and unchanging things, it seems more likely they are simply the manifestation of a mass intention to achieve certain measurements in those directions.

Considering, then, humanity's gross ability to change its appearance—especially marked, as it is, in the female of the species—there was little cause for surprise in the metamorphosis of Frieda Forsyth when she dined with Magnus in the grill-room of the Albyn Hotel. She was admirably dressed in laurel-green velvet, and her manner had undergone a change corresponding to that from breeches to a dark evening gown. Her demeanour was composed—there was even a touch of haughtiness in it—and her American accent was muted to the smallest intonation. She brushed aside a casual reference to the evening spent in Meiklejohn's flat, and talked with polite disinterest of Edinburgh's shops, of current events, and contemporary newspaper topics. But Magnus chose a dinner of beneficent variety and discovered a Burgundy of supernacular virtue, and presently, in that warm current, her reserve melted away and the conversation grew more cordial.

‘I've just read your book,' she said, ‘and I like it tremendously. It's a wonderful idea, and you certainly can write.'

Magnus was on the point of complaining that he had
written more than one book, and of asking to which she referred, but the generosity of her commendation changed his mind, and he wisely accepted her tribute to
The Great
Beasts Walk Alone
without pretending dubiety as to the object of her praise. He began to explain the inner meaning of his novel, but she interrupted him with the assurance that she had fully understood it.

Magnus said: ‘It was, in its way, an argument for reaction, and now I'm translating my views into practice. I've become a Scottish Nationalist. I've believed, as a general idea, in small nationalism for a long time, of course, but I've only recently joined the Party. I suppose Nationalism is discussed a good deal in your uncle's house?'

‘They've never so much as mentioned it, to my knowledge,' said Frieda. ‘What's it all about?'

Magnus briefly outlined the case for the independent sovereignty of Scotland, while Frieda listened without any remarkable interest.

‘It sounds crazy to me,' she said. ‘Why, your whole country's only the size of a game reserve, and why you should want to split it into two I just can't understand.'

‘It would make life more interesting,' said Magnus. ‘The world is getting monotonous, people are bored by the sameness of things, and the best tonic for boredom is variety. From a therapeutic point of view two countries are certainly better than one.'

‘Then perhaps you would like to see the United States split up, and each of the forty-eight become independent with a president of its own?'

‘I think that is a very good idea,' said Magnus.

‘Why, now you
are
being crazy! What would happen to big business if that happened? All the corporations and newspapers and national banks and railways would go bankrupt, the dollar would slump, and life would be just impossible.'

With the zeal of a new-made reformer Magnus demanded: ‘What do you mean by life?'

‘I'll tell you right away. I once had a beau who came from Iowa, and he'd done some tall thinking and come to some handsome conclusions. He knew darned little about it in practice, but he was strong in theories of life, and he said it
was a name for the physico-chemical qualities of protoplasm, and protoplasm was a kind of formaldehyde generated by lightning in wet weather, such as you generally get in this country. Now does that help you any?'

‘No,' said Magnus. ‘But just tell me again, will you? I'd like to remember your definition.'

The subject of politics was not further pursued. It seemed unlikely to foster that accordant spirit which is the principal objective in dining
à deux
, and Magnus abandoned it in favour of personal topics.

‘What were you doing in America immediately before you left it?' he asked, and divided the remaining Burgundy fairly between his glass and Frieda's.

‘Do you want me to go into the confessional? I suppose I was talking rather freely the other night, and I may have said more than I intended and more than was strictly accurate.'

‘Then start again and tell me the true history of your life. Autobiography is fashionable.'

‘You want a lot for the price of your dinner, don't you?'

‘I'm frankly curious. You arrive from nowhere in the middle of the night, most unsuitably dressed, and your conversation is full of allusions to an exciting and, I must say, improbable career: the natural effect of that is curiosity, and curiosity is the mother of questions. And if you inspire curiosity it's only fair to answer the questions.'

‘I'm not proud of everything I've done. I've been down on my luck for the last three years, and a girl can't be master of her fate in New York City when she hasn't the price of a Club sandwich in her bag. But I've lived! Oh, I'm not talking of protoplasm now, but of adult men and women, and I've learned more than you'll find in the text-books. Some of it was god-awful, but some of it was lovely, and there's times when I don't regret anything. But I'm not going back. I've had enough of the rough stuff, and now I'm Miss Forsyth of Rothesay Crescent, Edinburgh, and my life is ordered and comfortable and generally dull as ditchwater. And I like it.'

‘Go on,' said Magnus. ‘I want to hear more.'

‘I'll bet you do!'

Magnus regarded her calmly. ‘When did your father die?' he asked.

Gradually certain facts emerged, but parts of her story remained obscure; there were allusions that she did not stay to explain, and a tangle of times and places that she would not unravel. Her father, her Aunt Elizabeth's brother, had at one time been prosperous and a successful speculator in real estate in Florida and California. But he left very little money when he died, and shortly afterwards his widow fell in love and went to live with an aeroplane-pilot who had made some reputation by long-distance and endurance flights. Frieda disliked him—he was apparently a vulgar man, and, moreover, already married—and refused to join her mother's air-minded ménage. After learning shorthand and typewriting she discovered that her legs would earn more money than her fingers, and she obtained a place in the chorus-ranks of a Broadway theatre. But her engagement there terminated for some reason that she did not explain, and thereafter her fortunes declined. In bewildering succession she had been a stenographer, a school-teacher in some awful sun-shocked hamlet on the Mexican border, an artist's model, and a pedlar of subscription forms for a popular magazine. Some of these occupations had been forced upon her by the necessity to earn a living, but others she had wilfully entered through a restless desire to explore strange places and encounter unfamiliar people. For three months she had starved and washed dishes in a cheap restaurant in a North Carolina mill-town, hoping to obtain material for magazine or newspaper articles. But she had no aptitude for journalism, and her experience had been productive of little more than nausea and swollen hands. She said little of any personal connections she had formed, but now and again she mentioned a man's name with admiration, now and again spoke of one with strong distaste. It was fairly obvious that her Odyssey had not been virginal, but she said nothing to confirm her experience of those unhappy depths to which she had referred in Meiklejohn's flat. Nor was her recital always chronological, for she travelled to and fro in time as erratically as she had done in place. But presently she spoke of her last weeks in New York, when apparently she had lived in almost complete destitution in the vicinity of Sheridan Square, dependent for most of her meals on the
charity of strange casual acquaintances, and driven at last to claim help from her relations in Scotland. She heard of her mother's death some weeks before she wrote, and her appeal had been strengthened by this bereavement, though she was really too old to complain of being orphaned.

‘How old are you?' Magnus asked.

‘Twenty-six. Well, twenty-seven—just.'

Her aunt and uncle had responded generously and treated her with much kindness, though she found their domestic discipline irksome and was constrained to modify her language and devitalize her criticism to ensure a favourable reception for them in her new home. Her uncle, Henry Wishart, was a Writer to the Signet and senior partner in the old-established, wealthy and dignified firm of Graham, Coldstream, & Wishart, Writers to the Signet. His profession, however, had not brought him into contact with anything sordid in life—conveyancing was more profitable than crime—and he and his wife were protected by pachydermatous innocence from too suspicious inquiry into their niece's antecedents. She had satisfied their unimaginative curiosity by a very simple story of hard luck, she said.

‘It would only make them unhappy if they knew all I've told you,' she continued, ‘and if they heard the full story of my life, unexpurgated and with notes, they'd throw fits all over the house and me out of it. So I thought discretion was the better part and told them the children's version of my travel-tale.'

Magnus had listened to Frieda's narrative with attention, diverted only by the recurrent thought that, interesting though it was, he would rather be her present lover than gather allusions to his predecessors. He had been immediately attracted to her—as indeed had Meiklejohn—and now he was also aware of a certain jealousy, a competitive male instinct, that urged him to erase from her memory these antecedent bed-fellows by implanting himself in full possession of her consciousness. She was eminently desirable. She was long-limbed, quick in movement, fleet in appearance. Her throat was white and round, her eyes were bright with abundant vitality, and there was in her face such evidence of strength that
she would never yield from folly or feebleness. She was worth conquering, and in a dozen ways her manner was provocative of conquest. But Magnus hesitated to say what was in his mind lest she should think he had offered her dinner merely as a bribe for going to bed. He did not want to seduce, and he had still less desire to appear as a seducer. He had a vanity that inclined him to value love only when it was an offering in freewill, when it appeared to be unearned increment, and how to achieve it in this guise, without the manifest arts of seduction, had often set him a pretty problem.

‘What's on your mind?' said Frieda.

Magnus was tempted to speak the truth, but he remembered in time how people were offended by the spectacle of nakedness, and he decided on guile instead.

‘I was thinking how much I would dislike going to bed with you,' he said.

‘You needn't worry, you won't get the chance.'

Magnus waited. In a moment or two Frieda asked: ‘What's wrong with me? You're the first man I ever met who went backwards if I gave him a chance to come forward.'

‘I should be miserably jealous of all the others who had preceded me.'

Frieda, her elbows on the table, leaned forward and asked indignantly, ‘Are you trying to insult me, or is that your ham-handed idea of a compliment? Because if so, I don't like it.'

‘It was something between a critical observation and a confession.'

‘Well, I'm not interested in your confessions. Anyway, it's time we were moving. You said you were going to take me to a music-hall, didn't you?'

They arrived at the theatre in time to see some part of a variety performance, and then returned to Rothesay Crescent. As the taxi drew to a standstill Magnus put his arm round Frieda's shoulders and kissed her. She drew back, grimacing, looked at him for a moment in the dusk, and suddenly returned his kiss.

‘Now that's enough,' she said, and with no more delay, no backward looks, got out of the taxi and went indoors.