Two days later there was an unpleasant scene in his flat in Queen Street. Frieda, who had a key of her own, arrived with a bleak expression and the barely concealed intention of creating a row. She found Magnus still in a dressing-gown, though it was three o’clock in the afternoon. He had neither shaved nor washed. He had abandoned his recently-acquired habit of snuff-taking—its virtues now seemed illusory, it appeared to be unlucky, and in his disgust with the world he despised it as an affectation—and he had returned to the pernicious practice of smoking: as if by some grey fungus his dressing-gown was discoloured with tobacco-ash, and the charred ends of many cigarettes lay in the fireplace. A suit-case, half-unpacked, filled the sofa. A large tumbler of whisky and soda stood on the floor by his side, and he was reading an American detective-novel.
Frieda stood and looked at him. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you’re a fine politician, aren’t you?’
‘Sit down and have a drink,’ said Magnus.
She pushed the suit-case off the sofa. Falling, it emptied its remaining contents on the floor.
‘Be careful,’ said Magnus. ‘There’s a flask in there, and a couple of rather valuable books.’
‘So you’re in a bad temper, are you? Well, I don’t wonder, after the exhibition you’ve made of yourself.’
‘I’m not in a bad temper,’ said Magnus. ‘I merely asked you to avoid, if possible, breaking my flask and so spoiling my books.’
‘Well, you ought to have unpacked your suit-case and put your things away. My God, you look like a hobo, sitting there!’
‘If you came only with the idea of making yourself unpleasant …’
‘Oh, that’s your line, is it? And I thought you said you weren’t in a bad temper! There doesn’t just seem to be honey dripping off your tongue now, does there? But I suppose you want to work off your spite on me: I’m to suffer because Kinluce wouldn’t vote for you. Is that the idea?’
‘What do you want me to say?’ asked Magnus wearily.
‘What do I want you to say?’ Frieda repeated. ‘I want you to say what you’re going to do to get me out of the mess I’m in. I can’t go on living in Rothesay Crescent. I told them I was engaged to you, and they raised hell. Hell’s been simmering ever since, and now it’s burst again. Aunt Elizabeth says you’re a gaol-bird, and Uncle Henry says you’re an unsuccessful mountebank.’
‘I don’t give a damn what your Uncle Henry says,’ said Magnus indignantly.
‘No? But it’s true! You just made a fool of yourself in Kinluce. You let that guy Smellie levant with your hundred and fifty pounds, you make everybody laugh at you, and then you lose your second deposit. Didn’t I tell you from the beginning there was nothing to this damned Nationalism of yours? How d’you expect people to vote for a crazy notion like that? Uncle Henry says…’
‘I’ve no desire whatever to listen to your Uncle Henry’s opinions.’
‘Well, I’ve got to listen to them, so I don’t see why you shouldn’t. I got to listen to them till I’m sick to death of them, even though I know that half of them are true. And I’ve got to stay in his God-damned house because there’s nowhere else for me to go, unless I go on the streets—even then I couldn’t keep myself in coffee and decent stockings in this darned tight-wad country of yours.’
Magnus said, ‘I suppose you want me, first of all, to take the blame for seducing you. Then …’
‘Go on!’ Frieda interrupted. ‘Now say that I seduced you!’
‘I wasn’t going to say …’
‘Well, I did! And you fell mighty easy and you fell mighty hard. But that’s all right. Then I fell in love with you, and that wasn’t all right. Oh, God, I wouldn’t mind what Uncle Henry says if only you hadn’t made such a God-awful fool of yourself! He could have told me to break off my engagement and I’d have told him to go chase himself round the block. But how can I say that now? Don’t you see what you’ve done? I can’t even trust you myself now. You made such a mess of things in this darned election that you may go on and make a mess of everything you ever do all through your life.’
‘Yes,’ said Magnus, getting up and facing her in a towering rage. ‘That’s probably the case. I’ll make a mess of things, but a handsome mess and a lively mess. I’m going to be a grandiose, multiple, and consistent failure. And I don’t care! I don’t want to be successful and damned for success by smugness, impercipience, spiritual arthritis, and jaded appetite. You’d like me to put on success as though it were a coffin, and write Respectable over my life for an epitaph to show I’m done with life. Well, I’m not going to! I’d rather have my ambitions ripped up every year, as if by a plough, and then they’ll sprout again, and grow again, and be green through time. I’m going to be a failure, am I? But I’ll be alive, really alive, able to make a fool of myself and get drunk as I please, when your successful men are limping around three-parts dead under the weight of their success. A failure, by God! Failure can’t kill me: simply what I am will keep me alive.’
‘That’s a lot of hooey,’ said Frieda.
‘It’s the soundest sense you ever listened to,’ said Magnus.
‘Anyway, it doesn’t help me.’
‘It wasn’t meant to. I don’t see what you have to grumble at. Apparently you want comfort, security, and a settled home. Well, you’ve got them so long as you stay with your uncle. What else are you looking for?’
‘I want you too! Didn’t I tell you I was in love with you? Do you want me to go on saying it again and again?’ Frieda’s voice was shrill. Her loveliness was stormy: the clouds threatened rain: and Magnus grew acutely uncomfortable to think there might soon be tears. He answered her in a mild and pleasant tone.
‘As a politician I’m obviously a failure,’ he said. ‘As a poet I shall probably be a failure too, because for the life of me I can’t remember how I was going to handle The Returning Sun, and for weeks I haven’t felt a single metrical impulse in me. But I don’t feel disheartened. I feel curiously confident, partly, perhaps, because cigarettes are much more satisfying than snuff, but also because I’ve got rid of some more serious affectations. Now if you care to link your life with mine on an unofficial and possibly immoral basis—in a word, to be my mistress—I shall be delighted indeed, so long as you behave in a reasonable manner and try to keep your temper. We shall see the cabbage-stumps and the ash-bins and the broken bottles of failure gilded by the self-same glorious sun that gilds…’
‘Oh, can that,’ said Frieda viciously.
‘I take it, then, that you have fallen out of love with me?’
‘I don’t want to marry a guy that’s going to make a mess of his whole life and mine too.’
‘I wasn’t talking about marriage,’ said Magnus. ‘However, have it your own way.’
There was silence for a minute or two, and they heard a newsboy calling loudly in the street below. Magnus leaned out of the window and shouted to him.
‘I’m going down to get a paper,’ he said, and left her. He returned with a copy of the Evening Sun and looked carefully through it.
‘They haven’t caught Smellie yet,’ he said.
‘I guess he was the only guy in your whole darned Party who’d grey matter between his ears. He got something out of the election.’
‘He won’t get very fat on a hundred and fifty pounds,’ said Magnus.
‘Neither will you on your cock-eyed philosophy of failure.’ Frieda rose abruptly. ‘Well, I’m going,’ she said. ‘I guess I’ll be back some time or other, though God knows what’s the use of coming.’
A great weariness descended on Magnus when she had gone, for the election had exhausted his strength and he felt his nerves like worn fiddle-strings. Such large pity for himself afflicted him that it overspread its original object and included Frieda too. For all his brave contempt of success he could not yet, except in the heat of excitement, contemplate his political failure without unhappiness, and the loss of his three hundred pounds was the heaviest grief of all. But seeing himself as Fortune’s waif, he saw Frieda as another. He forgave her rudeness and her violence, beholding, in the tearful mirror of his mind, the bitter disappointment which had inspired them. He drank some more whisky, and was moved by such sympathy for her, such a vivid picture of her beauty, that his thoughts considered and his eyes dwelt upon the telephone. Then he heard footsteps on the stairs outside. Someone was coming to the flat, and in half-panic he wondered if Frieda had returned. He waited in miserable anticipation.
The bell rang, and he heard something fall into the letterbox. The footsteps retreated. It was only the postman who had called.
Then he realized how strongly disinclined he was from seeing Frieda again. Another quarrel was more than he cared to endure, and a sly infant fear assailed him that, should Frieda grow reconciled to his capacity for failure and again want to marry him, he might even submit to being married rather than face more brawling and its aftermath of pity and remorse. At that he fell into a half-panic, and finished his whisky at a gulp.
Then a blissful thought occurred to him. He picked up the evening paper he had bought, and turning to the shipping advertisements discovered that the steamer St Giles would sail from Leith, at eleven o’clock that night, for Kirkwall in the Orkneys. He immediately decided to follow Captain Smellie’s example and levant.
He was aboard with all his belongings by half past ten, and as the St Giles faced the strong easterly wind that blew up the Forth he found an exhilarating illusion of escape, and strode about the dark and lonely deck with such contentment that he began to sing the metrical version of the Twenty-third Psalm in its ranting tune of Covenanters.
But presently the sea turned rough, and for most of the voyage he lay in his bunk and was either actively or passively sick.