Harvest came and Magnus sold a few animals for little more than the price he had paid for them. His corn was only moderately good and the pessimism he had felt after Jupiter’s death recurred and darkened the coming of winter. Neither he nor Rose had readily recovered from the loss of the bull. He had admitted that the purchase of such an animal was senseless—extravagance—and Rose, in her occasional fits of temper, did not hesitate to accuse him of senseless extravagance—but it was not the loss of two hundred guineas that chiefly afflicted him. Jupiter had represented his loftiest ambitions in farming, and by his gentleness and semblance of benignity he had excited not only pride but, despite the incongruity of such emotion, love. The memory of his death pains was a permanent memory, and his grooved and puzzled forehead, his piteous eyes, were a picture not to be erased from the mind.
In his autumnal unhappiness Magnus did what he seldom had the inclination to do and studied his finances. He found to his dismay that he had spent over £1,250 since the previous December, and made nothing but a boy’s pocket-money. The Great Beasts Walk Alone was still selling slowly, but his receipts from it would rapidly diminish now, and of The Returning Sun a bare five hundred copies had been sold. He had a thousand pounds in War Loan stock, but clearly he must begin to make money out of the farm or that modest capital would quickly vanish. In reaction against the expensive purchase of Jupiter he bought a foal for eight pounds and a shabby-looking cow in calf for ten. And in the comparative idleness of winter he began to think once more of writing.
He had no clear conception of the new book he contemplated, but vaguely he desired to write about Orkney. He filled a note-book with scraps of local description. He remembered the colour and figuration of the sky on a summer morning or at the setting of the sun, and described with care and selection the flocculence of little clouds, the grass-green peninsulas that escaped the fiery splendour of the sun’s descent, and the quiet pallor of the unripened moon. He recalled the minute but lavish wealth of meadows in June, and discussed the flight of mating lapwings, the coming of the terns, the buccaneering of hen-harriers and black-backed gulls. He took notes of Mary Isbister’s conversation, of Peter’s, and of the stories that Johnny Peace the shoemaker and Jock of the Brecks had told him. He read the Orkenyinga Saga. And out of all this he hoped, some day and somehow, to make a story. But the intention, form, and style of the story as yet eluded him.
He re-read familiar books with increasing pleasure. He had a library that to Rose seemed wantonly enormous and was indeed big enough for a whole community of farmers. He had gathered it in various places and at various times. Tod’s Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan and some volumes on Mogul painting recalled his residence in India, and first editions of Ernest Hemingway came from America. His taste was catholic: Jane Austen, Tchehov, and Rabelais stood shoulder to shoulder on his shelves, and Don Quixote was neighbourly with Doughty and Extraordinary Women and Revolt in the Desert. The Thousand and One Nights, in four green volumes, jostled Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy, and several copies of Transition were curiously placed between Webster and Wodehouse. His bookshelves occupied an unfair proportion of the ben-room, and from the bedroom, that opened off it, Magnus could see the sober variegation of their rows and delight in the proximity of so much wisdom and wit, life caught in the act, and poetry, and prejudice, and incongruity. How charming to have the Icelandic sagas next door to Conversations in Ebury Street, and Froissart leaning friendly on Mrs Dalloway!
And he had discovered all his old school-books at Midhouse, and having taken them home he perceived a strange desire to re-educate himself. At one time, apparently, he had been able to read Greek texts of such varying difficulty as the Anabasis and Prometheus Bound. He examined them and found that even Xenophon presented difficulties nowadays. This was regrettable, he thought, and he recalled a poem he had opportunely remembered once before, that was called The Princess of Scotland and contained the lines:
Poverty hath the Gaelic and Greek,
In my land.
In pursuit of this visionary state he decided to relearn the language of Plato and Euripides, and began to study a battered red-covered grammar-book called Greek Rudiments.
The habit of much reading persisted even after the turn of the year, and grew untimely when the days lightened and work became more urgent. Rose was often ill-tongued when he sat indoors with a book on his knees, but having grown more familiar with the routine of farming Magnus discovered that Johnny could do much of it, especially in wet weather, without his help, and continued his studies. In the spring he was greatly cheered by selling for no less than nineteen pounds the foal he had bought for eight. And the ten-pound cow had given birth to a surprisingly handsome calf.
In June Rose followed suit and bore him another son, who was christened Magnus and known as Peerie Mansie. He seemed healthy enough, but he was a noisier child than Peter had been. Peter was now a boy that any parents might be proud of. He was big and strong, he was already trying to walk, and according to Rose already successfully experimenting with speech. Magnus began to transfer his own ambitions to Peter, and found in the child’s high forehead a clear indication of intellectual strength.
The mobility on which Magnus had for long depended for enjoyment and vital interest was now completely lost, and he was settled fast in Orkney. His guerrilla days were over and he did not regret their passing, for he had little time to remember them. He had been used to think that if a man’s life was static then time around him was correspondingly slow; but now he discovered the hours slid by with the easy movement of a rich man’s car. Time no longer rattled past, but like a Rolls-Royce purred sweetly and devoured day after day, swiftly and with no sound of haste. April led to summer, and harvest came, and winter followed. The year—his second as a farmer—was full of interest and devoid of excitement.
He grew somewhat stouter and his clothes were shabbier. His face reddened and he became indifferent to cold winds and muddy roads. He learned a little more about farming and studied with pleasure the Greek texts he had scamped and yawned over and detested at school. He was friendly with all his neighbours and, whenever he remembered, he continued to record in his note-books the racier fragments of their conversation beside his descriptions of the plover’s black bib and the shaking of reeds in the wind. His second harvest was much better than his first, and the bull-calf which the black cow had borne to Jupiter was a dainty model of his great father. He bought Rose a gold bracelet to mark the second anniversary of their wedding, and she rated him soundly for his foolishness.
Magnus had now lived for a long time in soberness and respectability, for not since buying Jupiter had he been really drunk. And now, though the season of joy and drinking was upon them, he behaved with the decorum befitting an honest farmer and the father of a family. Christmas passed and New Year came, when there was meat and ale in every house and every traveller after the fall of darkness had a bottle in his pocket. Yet Magnus conducted himself with virtue, and whenever he was offered whisky in a friendly house took a little cheese with it to mollify its effects, and from his own bottle drank only the merest sip for courtesy’s sake. When he went visiting with Rose he did not forsake her and join company with the wild young men who passed round their little flat bottles in the stable, but sat with her and the other married people and contributed his proper share of the gossip. Christmas passed and New Year followed it: Magnus’s virtue remained unspotted, Rose’s temper woke only to trivial expression even though she found him studying Greek Rudiments when he should have been suppering the horses: and they lived together in happiness and content.
But late in January he fell from grace.
A winter storm broke on the islands and wrought destruction beneath its wings. In the cold light of day it began with a mutter of wind from the north-west, and the wind grew towards night, and in the darkness it came to its strength and roared madly under a maddened sky. The sea in never-ending waves broke on the cliffs and poured its salt cascades on their bald and sodden shoulders. Out of the Atlantic desert came the black battalions of the waves, rearing in the darkness their ruffled hides, shaking their tattered manes, falling in ceaseless fury on the stubborn shore. They broke a trawler and drowned her crew by the Kame of Hoy: they drove another, borne like Mazeppa on a giant horse, hard ashore in a Westray geo. They shook their saltness over the unseen fields, and the noise of their attack—trundling huge boulders up a narrow beach, thundering on the rocks—sounded like gunfire through the yelling chorus of the winds. In the landward parishes chimneys were blown down, ricks fell flat and strawed their broken sheaves about the fields, and wooden sheds were toppled over with wanton buffets. Women lay sleepless in their beds and wondered if their roof would, on a sudden, crack asunder and leap apart and leave them naked under the howling sky. Men, hastily booted and dressed, thrust open resisting doors, and staggered to and fro in the darkness and the wind to make fast all that was loosely founded or frailly built. And shrieking round a gable the wind would fill their throats as though to drown them.
At last, like a black and ragged plaster, the night was torn from the sky and left a grey distress behind it. Now could be seen the ruins of the gale: here were ricks fallen sideways and there, as though clawed by gigantic tigers, were others with their round tops torn off; here a wooden henhouse lay upside down beside a dyke, and where the hens were no one knew; and there, capering across the fields, a large tarpaulin flounced and faltered, and filled its belly with wind, and sailed awhile, and shook a flapping corner, and finally wrapped itself round a telegraph post and flew there like a monstrous grey banner.
Magnus spent most of the night outdoors. At first the wind had daunted him, then it had angered him, and at last it had filled him with joy. As he worked to make fast all that could be made fast he fought with the wind and beat it, and having beaten it he derided it, and like a twopenny Lear shouted his mockery against it.
‘Blow, wind!’ he cried. ‘Smack with a bold robustious hand the broad backside of the buffoon world! Puff and blow, boy! Rip the blankets off the bed and smack the bare dowps you find, you bellowing fool, you winter spasm, you burst balloon!’
By shouting such nonsense as this he added to his enjoyment of the storm, and went indoors with a very restless feeling, a feeling of superfluous energy, and a desire to spend it recklessly on any activity that offered. He made love to Rose, who had been frightened by the wind, and got up again, and rebuilt the fire, and set the table for breakfast.
Presently Rose went to the door and very cautiously opened it. But no sooner was it half-open than the wind tore it from her grasp and flung it wide. The household cat had followed her, and, foolishly inquisitive, crept over the doorstep. Immediately the wind bowled it over. Picking itself up the cat turned tail and ran, and once running could not stop.
‘My cat, my cat!’ cried Rose. ‘She’s blown away, Mansie!’
Magnus followed, and past the corner of the house saw the cat turned tail over head, and find its feet again, and leap like a toy kangaroo, all its fur brushed the wrong way, and powerless to halt or turn. It was a big yellow cat and the wind used it like a yellow football. He followed it to the road. It was blown through a barbed-wire fence and somehow succeeded in steering itself between the barbs. Then it fell into a ditch on the other side of the road, and lay there secure. Magnus carried it back to the house, struggling against the wind, and Rose fondled it as though nothing she owned were more precious to her.
The boy Peter wanted to know what had happened, and Magnus, all out of breath but pleased by the second chance to try his strength against the storm, took him on his knee and began to tell a fantastic story of a ginger cat that was blown all round the world, and a giant followed it, and the giant trod cities out of sight as he ran, and tripped over St Paul’s, and fell in the Channel with such a splash that three steamers sank, and got up again and ran through France and Spain. But a mouse came out of the Prado and the wind changed and the cat followed the mouse, that was going to help an African lion but was unsure of the way to Africa, so they ran eastwards along the Mediterranean and crossed the Greek islands like stepping-stones, and came to the desert, and at last after running for a long time—and the wind was changeable—they reached the Equator. And there the ginger cat took a great leap into the sky and became a comet with a ginger tail. But the giant stayed where he was and undid the Equator and used it for a skipping-rope and lived happily ever after.
Peter understood practically nothing of this story, but Magnus thought it an excellent tale and wished he had made the journey more complicated so that it might have lasted longer. He found the routine of farm-life very dull that morning, and impatiently desired that something would happen to engage his attention in a livelier way.
By eleven o’clock the storm had passed, leaving a dead calm behind, and the country, windless and almost breathless it seemed, lay under the still sky with an odd look of dishevelment. It was a cold stillness. The sky was white and cold, and in the afternoon the air held a chill suspense.
Magnus was uneasy and excitable all day, and at tea-time he said he was going to the village with a pair of shoes that needed mending. Rose, who had observed his restlessness, appeared suspicious, but Magnus had found a pair of boots so badly worn that a visit to the cobbler seemed reasonable indeed. He mounted his bicycle and rode away. But when he came to the main road he turned, not towards the village, but to Kirkwall. Having ridden the fifteen miles thither he bought a bottle of whisky and rode back again and took his boots to the cobbler.
Johnny Peace, the village shoemaker, was a witty fellow who could make rhymes and who knew all the gossip of the country. He was a young man and lived alone. His shop was a favourite gathering-place, and rarely an evening passed there without debate of some kind. He was, however, alone when Magnus went in, and readily agreed to have a drink. Johnny Peace already knew everything that had happened during the storm for several miles around, and he himself had had an adventure, for on his way to one of the village shops he had encountered the schoolmistress coming down-wind like a full-rigged ship. ‘If she’d had a bone in her mouth the picture would have been complete,’ he said. ‘But God! she ran aground. She came full-speed against me and flung her arms round my neck. “It’s the wind,” she said, “I can’t help it, Mr Peace, I give you my word I can’t help it!” But from the way she hung there—and she’s no lightly made—I doubt she was just waiting for the opportunity, and the next time there’s a hurricane I’m staying safe at home till she’s safe in the school.’
Jock of the Brecks arrived while they were talking, and after having some of Magnus’s whisky he related his own experiences in the storm, and took another drink. The topic was hardly exhausted when it was found that the bottle was empty, so Johnny Peace shut his shop and they went to the village inn, where they drank beer till closing-time. It was Saturday night and the shops were still busy. Under the gable-end of one of them a little group of men and boys stood sheltering from the snow that now was falling. Before the lighted windows the flakes descended in a thick but gentle flurry. After the inn had closed its doors Magnus and his friends talked awhile with the casual bystanders, and then Johnny Peace proposed they should return to his shop. They added the blacksmith to their number, and Johnny produced another bottle of whisky.
After an hour or so the blacksmith went home. Half an hour later Jock of the Brecks went home. But Magnus stayed where he was, for Johnny Peace was a fine congenial soul, and by now Magnus had reached that state of mind in which talk seems infinite and infinitely desirable. He wanted to tell Johnny about the War and about India and about America; about the books he had written and the book he was going to write; about love and death; about women he had known and about his plans and hopes for Peter and Peerie Mansie. And Johnny, though a gifted talker himself, was sympathetic and a patient listener. Long after the bottle was empty Magnus talked on, and Johnny agreed when agreement was required, and deprecated that which it was politic to deprecate. At last he fell asleep, and Magnus bore him no ill-will, for the load of speech was almost off his mind and he felt free of a great burden.
He went out, and saw that the world had turned white. A virgin landscape lay before him, starlit and placid. The air was clear and the fallen snow was faintly luminous. It had raised the dykes to a new level and smoothed the rough ground with gentle undulations. Magnus beheld that blanched serenity with drunken ecstasy.
The cobbler’s shop was a little distance from the road and a little higher than the road. Sheltered by a wall the down-hill path from its door Was but thinly covered with snow, and Magnus mounted his bicycle. At the corner he ran into a drift and fell heavily, striking his chest on the upturned grip of the handle-bar. When he got up he felt sick and there was a dull pain under his heart. He stood for a moment or two, swaying slightly, and the odd determination of drunkenness took him: he had started to go home and he would continue to go home. But the snow lay deep on the road, it was nearly a foot deep, so he left his bicycle where it had fallen and began to walk. He moved slowly, for his feet sank at every step and the pain in his side made it difficult for him to breathe. He walked on, head down and half-dazed. Presently, despite the pain, he felt curiously happy. His heavy plodding walk became a slow rhythm and he took a childish joy in crunching through the snow. A part of his brain was sleepy and inactive, but another part was intensely alive to a multitude of small impressions. He perceived the shape of the snow-filled ditches with singular delight, and the lurching rhythm of his own walk seemed enchanting. He looked at his feet, rising and falling, sinking and reappearing, with great amusement, and the dark gable of a cottage, neatly roofed in white, held him for a minute of exquisite pleasure. The countryside appeared to fall away from the road in endless folds, and the suave and simple lines were delicious to see.
In time—he did not know how long—he came to the farm-road to Mossetter, and slowly climbed uphill. He stopped to rest awhile, and turned and saw beneath him a starlit maiden land, stained with the star-twinkling darkness of the great loch, spreading in dusky whiteness to the white round breasts of Hoy. Twin hills they stood, snow-clad, round as the buxom breasts of a girl, and flatly before them lay the white map of Orkney. And now a new drunkenness came to Magnus, but whether of his belly or his soul he did not know. Tears sprang to his eyes to see such loveliness, and perception like a bird in his breast sang that this land was his and he was one with it. As though his tears had flooded it his mind was filled with knowledge and he knew that his life was kin to all the life around him, even to the beasts that grazed in the fields, and to the very fields themselves. Live was the flowering of a single land, and love of country was no virtue but stark necessity. Patriotism and the waving of flags was an empty pride, but love of one’s own country, of the little acres of one’s birth, was the navel-string to life. His life, as the life about him, was the vigour of his blood, and life could not be whole save in its own place. Now he knew why, in far parts of the world, he had often felt the unreality of all he saw and descried a foolish artifice in his own business there. The far parts of the world were fine roving for pirates who had a secret island whither they might bring back their booty, but to roam the world without a haven or a home was to be lost as a star that fell to nothingness through the ordered ranks of heaven. Now he knew why, in late months, time had passed so simply and untroubled. This soil was his own flesh and time passed over him and it like a stream that ran in one bed. Here indeed he was immortal, for death would but take him back to his other self, and this other self was so lovely a thing, in its cloak of snow, in the bright hues of spring, in the dyes of the westering sun, that to lie in it was surely beatitude.
His thoughts grew feebler and more diffuse. He shivered, and felt the cold. The pain in his side was a dull aching. He turned homewards and wearily climbed the hill.
Rose was waiting for him. She had sat by a dying fire, anxious and angry. She came to the door, and her voice was hard enough to shatter any dream less firmly set and safely guarded than Magnus’s. But Magnus’s dream of knowledge was now like a bubble of pearl in the depths of his mind, and girded round with sleep.
‘Do you know what time it is?’ she demanded. ‘What have you been doing till now?’
‘Talking,’ said Magnus. ‘Talking and seeing the world.’
Rose came nearer him and sniffed. ‘You’re drunk!’ she said.
‘Not drunk, but sleeping,’ said Magnus, and stumbled indoors.