Magnus Merriman (5 page)

Francis Meiklejohn received Magnus with all the enthusiasm that was his most engaging characteristic. He was dressed, for the moment, only in a shirt, and when Magnus entered he was in the midst of a lively argument with his landlady about the disappearance of a pair of trousers. She, a thickset, dark-haired woman, with animated gestures and a Highland accent, had just declared: ‘I lent them to Mr McVicar last Tuesday, for he has no evening trousers of his own, poor man, and seeing he was a friend of yours I thought you wouldn't mind him taking them for a night. He's a quiet man who wouldn't get them torn or destroyed in any way
like young Buchanan did to your others. And he promised to bring them back, so I hope to God he hasn't pawned them instead.'

‘I swear to God I'll leave this house for ever if you lend so much as a handkerchief to anyone again!' said Meiklejohn warmly.

‘Oh, they can get on well enough without a handkerchief,' said the landlady, ‘but it's hard for a young man who wants to go out and hasn't a pair of trousers to wear. But you're quite right in being firm, Mr Meiklejohn, and Mr McVicar should have brought them back, for it's not as if they had been old ones. It was the new pair that fitted him best, he said.'

At this moment the door opened and Magnus was shown in. Meiklejohn, thrusting his landlady aside, uttered a loud shout of welcome.

‘Magnus Merriman!' he cried, ‘the only poet of our age, and blood-brother with the town-drunkards of Teheran, Tiflis, and Tuscaloosa! Mrs Dolphin, it's a great man who's come to your house, and we're going to make a night of it. There's a bottle of vodka in the cupboard—never mind my trousers: get the vodka—and ring up the Café de Bordeaux and tell them to reserve a table for two.'

Meiklejohn's shirt was long enough to cover his plump body, but his very sturdy legs were quite unconcealed by it. Careless of nakedness, however, he pranced about the room, helped Magnus to remove his overcoat, smacked him on the back, pushed him into a chair and snatched from Mrs Dolphin the bottle she had quickly discovered.

‘Get a glass for yourself,' he said to her.

‘I have one here,' she answered. Her expression was earnest and alert. ‘If there isn't enough vodka to go round, I have some whisky of my own, and I'll drink Mr Merriman's health in that. I've often heard Mr Meiklejohn talking about you,' she told Magnus, ‘and we're always glad to see another Nationalist here. You'll be a member of the Party?'

‘Of course he is,' said Meiklejohn, and poured for his guest a noble dram of vodka. ‘Slainte!' he said, and drank his own tot with back-flung head and a libationary casting away of the scanty drops that remained.

‘Slainte math!' Mrs Dolphin piously responded.

‘Happy days,' said Magnus.

Mrs Dolphin finished her drink with a sigh. ‘I like something that you can taste all the way down. My God! I wouldn't be a teetotaller for anything! You won't be wanting dinner tonight?' she asked Meiklejohn.

‘No, we're going out.'

‘It's just as well,' said Mrs Dolphin, ‘for there's not much in the house, and I think Johnstone and young Buchanan are coming round, and they're always glad of a bite. They're both members of the Party,' she explained to Magnus.

‘I'm going to get dressed now, Mrs Dolphin,' said Meiklejohn, and held open the door for her.

‘And high time, too,' she answered. ‘The only other man I ever knew who'd be going about the house half-naked all the time was Lord Moidart, but he was so thin you hardly noticed it.'

‘What's this Party that she talks about?' asked Magnus when she had gone.

‘The National Party of Scotland, of course.'

‘I never heard of it.'

Meiklejohn was horrified. ‘My dear fellow,' he said earnestly, ‘it's the biggest thing that's happened in Scotland for generations. It means the re-creation of a people, the re-birth of the nation of Scotland. It's the only topic of the day. The whole country's talking about it.'

‘And who belongs to the Party except you and Mrs Dolphin?'

‘You do, for one,' said Meiklejohn promptly.

‘I'm damned if I do,' said Magnus.

‘I sent your name in a week ago, and paid your half-crown for membership. I got a badge for you, too, but I think Mrs Dolphin's wearing it.'

‘But what's the idea of the Party? What is it trying to do?'

Meiklejohn gave Magnus some more vodka. ‘We're going to re-create Scotland as an independent sovereign state. We want self-government, a Scottish parliament with complete control of Scottish affairs, and no more English domination. Don't you realize that the status of Scotland today is hardly greater than that of an English county? We've got no national
life. We're ruled from Westminster by a lot of constipated Saxons. Scottish industries are being ruined, rural life is becoming extinct, and the very idea of Scotland is going to fade out of existence unless we preserve and re-fashion it.'

Magnus drank his vodka thoughtfully. The room was dimly lighted, and from the window-seat he could distinguish, against the moving darkness of the sky, the dark shape of the Castle. He felt in his blood a rippling sensation, as when a catspaw of wind blows contrary to the quiet current of a stream. Quickened by the patriotism that his return to Scotland had evoked, he perceived, though faintly as yet, the possibility of taking an active part in the affairs of his country, and exhilarated by vodka he considered with growing interest the intoxication of politics, that alluring perversion of patriotism.

Meiklejohn brought an armful of garments from an adjoining bedroom and began to dress himself. He continued to talk about the grievances and aims of young Scotland.

‘It wouldn't be easy to cut ourselves adrift from England,' said Magnus.

‘Norway cut herself adrift from Sweden,' answered Meiklejohn.

‘But how many people in Scotland want self-government?'

‘The whole land's seething with discontent, and the Party's growing every day. It's sweeping the country. It's a youth movement, and practically all the younger men you'll meet believe in it. But they can't do much till they find a leader. That's why I told you to come back to Scotland, because you can speak, and write, and you have the proper ideas—or you had when you wrote
The Great Beasts Walk
Alone
.'

‘I think a certain amount of reaction throughout the world would be a good thing,' said Magnus.

‘Of course you do! No one but a fool wants more progress when progress means only standardization and sterility.'

‘London's a dull town,' said Magnus, diverging from the main line of the conversation with a sudden recollection of his recent unhappiness with Margaret. His new-found delight in Scotland encouraged him to take a pessimistic view of the metropolis, and he felt some righteous anger against
the city that had witnessed so deplorable a collapse of his romantic love. Misanthropy assailed him when he thought of those too-many millions who apparently found life tolerable and even agreeable in an atmosphere that had been so hostile to him, and he stretched southwards a denunciatory finger in the attitude of one confronting the cities of the plain. ‘It's easy to live in,' he said, ‘but the air's flat and stale and the people are half-hearted. There's nothing to do there. You can make love without trouble or meaning, or get mildly drunk, or extract second-hand emotions from the cinema, or put your mind to sleep on a dance-floor, or play bridge, or throw yourself in front of a train on the Underground. There are forty ways of escaping from consciousness. But I want something more exciting than that.'

‘You want something to believe in,' said Meiklejohn earnestly. ‘There's nothing more exciting than belief. And as you're a Scot you should believe in Scotland first.'

Meiklejohn had now finished dressing. He tied round his throat a red scarf with white spots, put on a thick dark overcoat, and a black hat that he pulled down on his forehead. He had a round ingenuous countenance, a right eye wide open and dancing with life, and a left one partially occluded by a drooping lid that gave half his face an expression of engaging debauchery. Politics was no burden to him, and revolutionary conversation of the most alarming kind filled him with glee and encouraged him to celebrate with generous potations his possession of such noble aspirations.

‘We're going to make a night of it, my boy,' he promised and, calling to his landlady, whispered with muted enthusiasm, ‘I may be drunk tonight, Mrs Dolphin.'

‘Well, you're only young once,' she answered, ‘and there's old sheets on the bed, so there won't be much damage done though you forget to take your shoes off. Good-night, Mr Merriman. We'll be seeing a lot of you, I suppose, and Mr Meiklejohn will be glad of your company, for there's too many gentlemen nowadays who think of nothing but dancing and golf, and haven't a head for politics or drinking.'

The Café de Bordeaux, where Meiklejohn took Magnus to dine, was in essence an oyster-bar. It had established its
reputation on excellent fare and sound vintages, and in a city where only railway hotels disputed with unimaginative restaurants for the privilege of catering to impercipient palates it had acquired a certain Bohemian flavour. Meiklejohn and his guest dined simply but well on oysters and a cold grouse, and having drunk some Chablis with the former, shared a bottle of claret with the latter. Their conversation ranged the world from India to America. Meiklejohn spoke with gusto about the indignities of editing, without proper authority, an evening paper in Edinburgh, and Magnus mentioned the more picturesque aspects of journalism in Philadelphia. Meiklejohn made some apt and generous comments on
The
Great Beasts Walk Alone
, and Magnus listened with pleasure vitiated only in the smallest degree by embarrassment. Then they reverted to their adventures on the road from Meshed to Constantinople, and Magnus found that Meiklejohn had introduced some very interesting and romantic additions to the tale of their travels.

‘You're a variegated liar, aren't you, Frank?' he said thoughtfully.

‘On the contrary, I'm frequently and spaciously truthful,' said Meiklejohn, and taking a large pinch of snuff he wiped the surplus from his nose with a grandiloquent flourish of his bright yellow handkerchief. He offered his box to Magnus. ‘It's better for you than tobacco. Smoking impairs virility, but snuff clears the brain without ill-effects lower down.' His drooping eyelid dropped lower in a significant wink. ‘When did women start to assert themselves? When did they begin to stick their heads out of the blankets and lay down the law? Not till men took to smoking and lost the power to keep their wives and wenches quiet. The Mormons weren't allowed to smoke because Brigham Young knew that pipes and polygamy couldn't exist together. Every woman doctor, every woman lawyer, every woman in Parliament absolutely owes her position to tobacco. But snuff won't do you any harm. Try this.'

Magnus took a pinch, sniffed vigorously, and felt throughout his head a profound disturbance, as though innumerable springs were about to gush forth and unknown fiery chambers of air were all at bursting point. He gasped for breath,
his head nodded helplessly to and fro, and then, in successive explosions, he loudly sneezed. A wine-glass was blown from the table and a thin silver flower-vase fell before the storm. Attracted by this genial noise four young men who sat at a neighbouring table joined in the conversation for some minutes. They knew Meiklejohn, and as at one time or another they had all fallen victims to his snuff-box they viewed Merriman's discomfiture with sympathy. They were tall well-built young men of prosperous appearance and notably athletic in their bearing.

When the interchange of civilities had terminated, Magnus asked, confidentially, ‘Are they members of the Party?'

‘What party?' said Meiklejohn.

‘The National Party.'

Meiklejohn took snuff again with an elaborately casual air. ‘No,' he said, ‘they're not members.'

‘Why not? You said the younger men were all in it.'

‘Oh, yes, but not people like that. Two of them play for the Academicals or some such team and the others have been golfing. You can't expect a revolution or a renascence to start among footballers and golfers. They'll come in later, of course, but it's very difficult to get people who play games seriously to be serious about anything else.'

As though guessing at the nature of this dialogue—for it was muted and had an air of conspiracy—one of the golfers called to Meiklejohn: ‘How many recruits have you found this week, Frank?'

‘When are you going to declare war?' asked another.

‘As soon as you join, and others who'll do for cannon-fodder and for nothing else,' said Meiklejohn. His voice was good-humoured though his words were not, but his face grew pale and his mouth tightened with hidden anger. He drank his brandy without regard for its quality.

‘No more wars for me,' said one of the golfers. ‘Think of getting up at five o'clock on a winter morning to go out and be shot to hell! I'm neutral from now till the cows come home.'

Meiklejohn called impatiently for his bill. ‘Neutral,' he
muttered. ‘They're neuter as well as neutral. Half the country's sitting on the fence like a gib-cat howling in the rain for a female he couldn't match though he caught her. They make me angry! Let's go somewhere else.'

Magnus was impressed by this display of temper and the sincerity of feeling that it indicated, but the attitude towards Nationalism of their athletic acquaintances led him to wonder if Meiklejohn's conception of the general situation were not more imaginative than actual. While they were in Bombay, he remembered, Frank had become a supporter of Indian Nationalism, and had once declared that Mahatma Gandi was making many converts even in the Yacht Club. This assertion was subsequently disproved to the satisfaction of everyone but its author.