Magnus Merriman (15 page)

‘We're meeting nobody. I didn't want to dine with your uncle and aunt, so I made a simple excuse to get away.'

Frieda stopped in the street, laughed aloud and, paying no attention to a passer-by, threw her arms round Magnus and kissed him heartily. ‘Well, it was a darned good story,' she said. ‘I believed it myself.'

Mollified by the compliment, Magnus began to outline a theory of lying that depended for success on the addition of circumstantial details to an improbable premiss, and was still talking about it when they sat down to dine. It was with much diminished rancour that presently he recalled his embarrassing entrance into the Wishart family circle, but he was still annoyed and he explained to Frieda, very firmly, that he disliked interference, above all domestic interference, in his personal affairs, and that he had no desire to see the Wisharts again.

‘But everything will be so much easier if you get friendly with them,' said Frieda. ‘You can come in whenever you like, and I won't have to make excuses to get out and see you. Please, Magnus! It's going to be very uncomfortable for me if you won't be agreeable.'

Magnus argued in a contrary direction for some time longer, but Frieda so skilfully attacked his general propositions with personal and specific objection, not disdaining an occasional
ad captandum
plea, a feminine-unfair translation to him of responsibility for her happiness—these round-the-corner appeals, however, she interspersed with jest and good humour, so that compliance should not be squeezed out like a tear, but tickled to emergence like laughter—that Magnus at last consented to behave with due politeness to
Uncle Henry and Aunt Elizabeth, to lunch with them on the following Saturday, and to take advantage of the tickets which Uncle Henry would obtain to escort Frieda to the Rugby match.

But when, late in the evening Magnus was alone—Frieda, tactfully early, had gone home shortly after ten o'clock—he felt ruefully that he had committed himself beyond the frontier of bachelor discretion, and that by accepting the Wishart's hospitality he was regularizing his association with Frieda in a fashion he had never contemplated nor now thought desirable, but that she—an uncomfortable thought—quite clearly approved and most evidently desired. A sticky sensation, as of fly-paper, assailed his misogamous idiosyncrasy.

Meanwhile, in Rothesay Crescent, Uncle Henry and Aunt Elizabeth discussed his eligibility in guarded terms.

‘If Frieda were my daughter,' said Mrs Wishart, ‘I should certainly discourage her friendship with him. I was
not
very favourably impressed by his manner.'

‘Too overbearing,' said Uncle Henry.

‘And, of course, we don't know who he is. His people may be anything. But Frieda—well, we can't overlook the fact that she has lived, on her own admission, in a very curious way in America. I've sometimes wondered if she has told us the whole truth about her wanderings there.'

Uncle Henry cleared his throat. For the sake of his own peace of mind he had always refrained from speculating on Frieda's past, and he greatly disliked any reference to it. In deliberate tones he said: ‘I want to hear no insinuations against Frieda. The girl is your own niece and you have no cause to suspect her of impropriety.'

‘I was suspecting nothing!' said Mrs Wishart indignantly. ‘I was merely wondering. One can't help
wondering
with a girl like that.'

For some minutes she made a pretence of reading. Then she said, apparently at random, ‘I suppose novelists are often quite well-to-do?'

‘I have never known any,' said Uncle Henry.

There was another period of silence. Then Mrs Wishart said, ‘I think I shall write to Mrs So-and-so in Orkney. It
would be interesting to hear if she knew anything of Mr Merriman's people.'

Uncle Henry's eyebrows rose violently and he was evidently about to expostulate when Mrs Wishart hurriedly explained: ‘Her daughter Kitty has been ill—I forget who told me, but I'm sure it was Kitty—and I have intended for several weeks to write and ask how she is. But our trip to London put it out of my mind. There can be no harm in my saying that we have met Mr Merriman, and then she is sure to tell me if she knows anything about him.'

Uncle Henry made no reply. With the air of one who turns his back upon an unpleasing spectacle he turned a page of Lockhart's
Life of Scott
, and the conversation died.

It is customary to praise the appearance of Edinburgh, and a custom that has more excuse than some, for in certain aspects the city has indeed a noble countenance, and by some trick of light or situation an illusion of supplementary grandeur, a sublime superfoetation, is not seldom added to that which already possesses a dignity and a beauty of its own. The precipitous small hills that rise about Arthur's Seat, for example, often appear to be of mountainous size and seem to fill the sky with shadowy vastness, so that one thinks of Asian peaks, and a panorama of the world's high tablelands—plastered as if by glaciers with the shining names of Kanchenjunga and Demavend, of Aconcagua and Kilimanjaro—unrolls in the confusion of one's mind. Then from the Castle that slow declivity, criss-crossed with mild grey streets, to the veiled lustre of the Forth and the pale gold lands beyond, may under certain skies be revealed in such kindliness that urbanity puts on a pastoral light and one can almost hear the bleating of sheep, and yet be not moved to cry
Absit omen
. Or, from the Craigs, where the smoke of a thousand chimneys blows like a banner, or flaunts itself like a blue forest, or dances like snakes, or grows like dim tide-waving seaweed to an upper calm, then the roofs below might be the houses in a town that Hans Andersen built, and witches live there, and broomsticks have a moon ward bent, and children go hand-in-hand by the signpost of Three
Wishes to fantastic adventure. And stranger than all else, more haunted by the beauty of the air, is the Castle, that now looks straight of side, severe as a child's castle cut in cardboard, and now recedes from the eye and is draped with mist, so that walls grow beyond walls and the battlements are endless, and a watch-tower, out-thrust, impends not only on the plain beneath but on Time's abyss and caverns of the past. It is a castle of moods, now merely antiquated, now impregnable, now the work of giants and now of dreams; a fairy castle, a haunted castle, a castle in Spain, a castle you may enter with a twopenny guide book in your hand; it has heard the cry of Flodden, the travail of queens, the iron scuffle of armour, and, no more than a handful of years ago, the roaring of forty Australians, seven feet high and drunk enough to rip the stars from heaven, penned in its guardroom; it is Scotland's castle, Queen Mary's castle, and the castle of fifty thousand annual visitors who walk through it with rain on their boots and bewilderment in their hearts. To be final—and, finally, to be brief—it is a good castle, and the people who walk Princes Street below are, as Magnus discovered, not always of a mien that deserves so dignified a neighbour.

But once in alternate years there is a Saturday morning when Edinburgh is filled with men and women who truly may call the Castle their own and in their bearing not shame its ancient walls. It is not devotion to the gods that calls them in, not some blazing heyday of the Trinity that brings them to worship, nor the inception of a crusade, nor memory, like a phoenix feathered and flowered again, of elder glory that comes in every second year to proper ripeness for a festival. It is not to worship they come, nor to exalt themselves, nor in tears of humility to taste the saltness of the earth, but, very sensibly, to be entertained. And the source of their entertainment is a football match between Scotland and England.

On the morning of that day, in bright blustery March weather, Princes Street is full of tall men from the Borders, brave men from the North, and burly men from the West who have made their names famous in school or university, in county and burgh, for prowess in athletic games. It is not
footballers only who come, for on this day all other games do homage to Rugby and admit its headship over them, so that cricketers and tennis players, players of hockey and racquets and fives and golf, boxing men and rowing men and swimmers and cross-country runners, putters of the weight and throwers of the hammer, hurdlers, high and low jumpers, pole vaulters and runners on skis, as well as mountaineers and men who shoot grouse and stalk the red stag and fish for salmon—all these come to see Scotland's team match brawn and wit against the wit and brawn of England. To see them walking in clear spring weather is almost as exhilarating as the game itself, for their shoulders are straight, they are tall and lithe, they are square and strong, their eyes are bright, and their skin is toughened and tanned by the weather.

But not the men only walk proudly, for the women with them are also swimmers and hockey players, golfers and moorland striders, and they are often as tall as the men, and their complexions are lovelier and their bearing is free. Here is Diana, here is Atalanta, there, with gay scarf and a blackcock's feather in her cap, goes Hippolyte with a troop of Amazons—God be praised, not mutilated for the bow but supple and whole for the more lenient brassy—and there is one who, wrestling with Spartan youths, might bring to earth twelve at a time. It is no muslin prettiness that walks here with the fleet-limbed barrel-chested youth of Scotland, but strong loveliness that can face the wind and keep its colour in the rain. They would not allure the delicate mind, the feeble-luxurious mind, the petty sensual mind that desires soft flesh, provocative warmth, and the titter of prurience; they would frighten the epicene, the pallid tribe of catamites and ingles and lisping nancies; but raiding Vikings would roar with joy and straightway seize them and carry them, scratching like tigers, to their ships.

Now in the morning the crowd goes to and fro on Princes Street, but in the early afternoon it heads westward, all one way, to the football ground. And on this particular afternoon it was joined by a second crowd, different in appearance, manner and speech, that was also bent on seeing a football match. But this match was another kind of football, played by professional players, and the spectators hurrying to it,
though far more excited and livelier in their conversation than those who were going to the international game, had not the athletic look of the latter. They were another order, socially inferior to the devotees of Rugby, and they had not been seen on Princes Street in the morning sunlight because they had been at work. To look at them it seemed obvious that work was a perversion, for it had not given them the upright bearing and the swinging stride that play had bestowed on the others, but rather it had kept their faces pale, and though it had toughened them it had not given them grace. But also it seemed that they had a larger gift of enthusiasm, for already they were hotly arguing about the prospects of the game—the Rugby people discussed their afternoon's entertainment in tones of calmness and with easy comment—though the professional match had not the spur of international rivalry, but was merely a competition between two Edinburgh clubs known as the Hibernians and the Heart of Midlothian.

While the fore-runners of these crowds were already marching westward—or being conveyed thither in tramcar or motor bus—Magnus sat at lunch with Henry Wishart. There were also present, besides Mrs Wishart and Frieda, Miss Mary Wishart, an aunt of Uncle Henry's who had arrived on a visit of some duration; Mr Simon Anstruther, a Writer to the Signet; a thin colourless lady who lived with Miss Mary and seldom contributed to the conversation; Colonel Gowrie-Blair, late of the Indian Army, and Mrs Gowrie-Blair, who was Mrs Wishart's sister; their son, who was about to enter Sandhurst; and a Miss Barleycorn, who, despite her name and the high colour of her cheeks, was interested in the cause of Temperance as well as in country dancing and the Women Citizens' Movement.

Of this company Magnus and Frieda, the Gowrie-Blairs, Mr Anstruther and Miss Barleycorn were all going to the football match, and the Colonel, Mr Anstruther, and Miss Barleycorn had some unfavourable comments to make on the Selection Committee that had chosen Scotland's team. Observing, however, that his host was not particularly interested in this topic, the Colonel, who like many soldiers was a disciplined church-goer, made some remark on the
threatened
rapprochement
between the Episcopalian Church and the Established Church of Scotland. Uncle Henry and Mr Anstruther were both members of one of the most respectable congregations in Edinburgh—Uncle Henry was an elder—and the subject bore fruit for some ten minutes. It was not doctrine or creed they discussed, but management and ecclesiastical politics. From their conversation indeed it was not apparent that any difference in faith or dogma existed between the Anglican and the Scottish foundations, but the question of control was evidently of great importance, and there were some contemptuous references to Canterbury and a very telling gibe at Rome that showed the continued existence of the old Covenanting spirit—though neither Mr Anstruther nor Uncle Henry would have fared very well on the moors on a diet of heather-tops and whaups' eggs.

Then the conversation turned to music, for Mr Anstruther was a member of the Bach Society, and his funereal aspect—he closely resembled an undertaker's assistant—suggested that in his care the fugue would preserve a solemnity sufficient to attract none but grave and even moribund audiences. It seemed to Magnus, who listened attentively, that it was the politics of the Bach Society, not the music, that concerned the party, even as in the previous discussion it was the politics of religion, not the ideology of the Athanasian Creed or the virtuosity of the Sermon on the Mount, that had excited their interest. And he was about to comment, very unwisely, on this apperception when Aunt Mary leaned over the table and said loudly: ‘You wrote
The Great Beasts Walk Alone
, didn't you, Mr Merriman?'

‘I did,' said Magnus.

Miss Mary Wishart was a very old lady who sat perfectly upright in her chair and ate with a hearty appetite. Her hair was white, and the aged pallor of her face was dominated by a high-ridged imperious nose. She spoke slowly and deliberately, like her nephew, but her intonation was more noticeably Scottish than his. There was complete silence after she had spoken, partly out of respect for her years, partly due to a slight uneasiness, for none of the others except young Harry Gowrie-Blair had read the
novel and most of them doubted the propriety of literary discussion.

Miss Mary continued, ‘I thought it was clever but coarse. I read a great deal, and all you young men are coarse nowadays, and the young women who write are worse still.'

Harry Gowrie-Blair said, ‘I've read it, and I thought it was fearfully good.' His father and mother from their several positions darted twin glances of reproof at him, and he relapsed into silence.

‘If you shrink from occasional coarseness you are forced to leave out a great deal that is important and significant in life,' said Magnus. ‘You can't make a steak and kidney pie without kidneys.'

‘I'm not very interested in pies until they are cooked,' said Aunt Mary, ‘and what I complain of is that you young authors don't cook your kidneys sufficiently. You serve them up half-raw, and I don't like them raw.'

‘I seldom read modern novels myself,' said Uncle Henry, and there was a general murmur of assent.

‘You never do anything, Henry,' said Aunt Mary sharply, ‘so your statement's not worth much.'

Mrs Wishart, bridling, said, ‘Henry has just won a very important case before the House of Lords, so you can hardly say he does
nothing
.'

Aunt Mary snorted. ‘The House of Lords, indeed! Fiddle-faddle! Nothing but Socialists and Pacifists. I don't call
them
Lords!'

There was a medley of comments on this assertion, and the Colonel was heard to say that Melvin McMaster, the Prime Minister, was ruining the country; Miss Barleycorn briskly remarked that the world would be a better place if everybody signed the pledge, renounced war, and learned to dance
The
Dashing White Sergeant
; and Mrs Gowrie-Blair plaintively asked, ‘What will become of poor Harry's profession if you all turn pacifist?'

Magnus said, ‘It's absurd to be an absolute pacifist, but to be a pacifist about wars like the last one is reasonable enough. The solution lies in small nationalism, which would reduce wars to decent proportions. Are you a Nationalist, Miss Wishart?'

‘I'm a Jacobite,' she said, ‘and always have been.'

Mr Anstruther leaned forward and very gravely asked: ‘Can you tell me anything about Scottish Nationalism, Mr Merriman? I hear it mentioned now and then, but none of my friends seem to know much about it, and I'm rather at a loss to discover who are the Nationalists and what they want to do.'

‘The fundamental idea is to obtain independent sovereignty for Scotland,' said Magnus.

Again there was a confused chorus of protest. Mr Anstruther said ‘Oh!' with a slow sound like a groan, and sat with slowly nodding head, pondering the whole import of this explanation. Uncle Henry said ‘Nonsense!' Mrs Wishart sniffed loudly and told a table-maid to offer some more cauliflower to Miss Wishart. Miss Wishart said, ‘There are too many Socialists and silly young women in the country to do anything of that sort nowadays,' and her silent companion looked round the table with a vaguely happy smile. Frieda said to Harry, ‘Will you wear a kilt at Sandhurst?' and he answered, ‘No, not till I get to my regiment.' The Colonel said, ‘And I suppose you're going to break up the Empire to get your confounded independence?' His wife said, ‘Hush, my dear, hush!' and Miss Barleycorn said, ‘Would you be in favour of closing the public-houses if we were to get Home Rule, Mr Merriman?'

‘No,' said Magnus.

‘Then I shall have nothing to do with Nationalism. I don't believe in it, anyhow. How on earth could we get on without England? It's absurd to think of it.'

Miss Mary asked, ‘Would you be prepared to fight for independence, Mr Merriman?'

‘I don't think there's any need for that,' said Magnus. ‘If Scotland were united in its demand we could get all we want by constitutional means.'

‘But Scotland isn't united,' said Uncle Henry, ‘and it never will be united for any foolhardy nonsensical project like that.'