Magnus woke with a crapula and spent the morning packing and paying bills. He had rashly signed a year’s lease of the flat, but he hoped, without much reason, to be able to sub-let it, and he made suitable arrangements for watch and ward with the caretaker who sustained a twilit and beetle-haunted existence in the basement. Then he telephoned to Margaret to request a last interview at which, to justify his sonnet, they would both behave with admirable composure, aware of sadness but showing nothing of it unless, perhaps, in the gentleness of their temper or in some phrase of slightest irony. Margaret, however, was not at home. A maid replied that she had been called out to a consultation.
Magnus found it a little strange that she should be able to conduct her life and her profession as though nothing had happened while he, unshaved and queasy, his half-packed belongings scattered in awful confusion on the floor, showed so clearly the effects of disaster. He sat in a muddle of shirts and books; a dispatch-case full of press-cuttings and unanswered letters had spilled its contents upon a table where last night’s glasses stood; a bowl of withered chrysanthemums drooped over a pair of evening trousers that lay limp and awry… And at this same moment Margaret, neat as a packet of pins and smart as new paint, would be discussing with a colleague—her voice calm and cool, her mind single, her knowledge all in trim array—some distemper of the colon, or cardiac lesion, as impersonally and efficiently as though she herself possessed neither heart nor bowels. There was something inhuman about women. They indeed were of the earth and as indomitably pursued the seasons. They, far more than men, were at home in the world, and moved with the cold certainty of a hostess from room to familiar room. Magnus reassured himself that for the future he would live celibate and strong in the inviolable tower of his mind—and busied himself with unimportant tasks until such time as he could again telephone to Margaret.
In the pocket of an old coat he discovered a forgotten letter from Francis Meiklejohn, the man with whom he had journeyed through Persia and the Caucasus on his way home from India. Meiklejohn was now a journalist in Edinburgh. He had written to Magnus: ‘Why the hell do you stay in London when there’s room for you in Edinburgh? Come to Scotland. A renascence is on the way—political and literary—so come and be its midwife. You are, I suppose, a Nationalist? If you are not one already, you will be. There’s a wind in the trees and a muttering in the heather. We talk of liberty when we’re sober, and dream of it when drunk. Come to Scotland, you pestilent renegade.’
Magnus had a large affection for Francis Meiklejohn, who was an amiable talkative man, a great liar, and given to hearty enthusiasms. He now thought it would be a pleasant and convenient thing to spend a few days in Edinburgh before going farther north, for he would be glad to see Meiklejohn again, and it occurred to him that as he had not written to his people in Orkney for some considerable time he would be well-advised to warn them of his intended visit. The reference to a Nationalist movement in Scotland did not interest him, though he was vaguely aware of its existence. There had been so many loud expressions of nationalism in post-war Europe that the muttering in Scottish heather had been almost inaudible. Such people as the Latvians and the Esthonians and the Czechs might well have good cause to fight for independence; but what freedom could Scots imagine that they did not already enjoy? Magnus concluded that the mutterers were simply cranks and oddities and splenetic seceders of the kind that fomented so much obscure disruption in the Church, and finally retired, in self-righteous defeat, to the moors where only whaups and lapwings could contradict them. Nationalism won’t find a recruit in me, he thought; but I should like to see Frank again, and find out how many lies he’s told about his travels abroad.
In the late afternoon he telephoned to Margaret, and again she was out; and in the early evening he was told that she was busy with postponed surgery patients. In a great hurry he turned to finish his packing, and made a feverish effort to catch the night train to Edinburgh. But his taxi was slow and he missed it by several minutes. He returned to Tavistock Square and slept once more in his disillusioned bed. In the morning he coldly refrained from any further attempt to communicate with Margaret, and arrived at King’s Cross in ample time to secure a seat.
As they emerged, with gathering swiftness, from the far-reaching tentacles of London, Magnus felt a growing relief. A damp and sluggish air swathed the shapeless suburbs, and in its chill torpor the train grumbled as though impatient for the freedom of the grass-lands beyond. Then through winter fields, wet underfoot and flagrant with hideous advertisements for linoleum and quack lenitive and soapy purge—but aconite and hemlock were the only remedies for those who so beplastered the world—they ran at speed. Presently they came to more gracious country, and fields whose quietness the thieving metropolis had not yet robbed of dignity. The train rocked and swayed on its bright steel lines, and raced for the approaching north. Elated by speed and the illusion of escape Magnus went to the restaurant car and drank with a new delight to think that Bacardi rum should trickle down his gullet while his gullet was hurled from county to county at seventy splendid miles an hour.
Two girls sat near him. They were well-groomed, smartly clad, and they spoke of nothing in particular in clear high-pitched confident voices. They looked at Magnus with cool appraisement. For a moment he cast about for some phrase or contrivance with which to enter into conversation with them, but he remembered instead his resolution to have nothing to do with women. He asked for another cocktail and plumed himself on this high indifference. This was freedom. Whereas he had lately thought of woman occupying the world like the mistress of her own house, he now beheld her earth-bound and woefully situated between the horns of an eternal dilemma. He alone, by virtue of the poetry in him, was free of the world. But women were condemned for ever to the wearisome burden of love or to celibate starvation. These girls, uneasily aware of their position, were meanwhile, precarious as a tight-rope walker, balancing between the horns. But he, in the solitude of poetry—doubly safe because most of it was unwritten—was gloriously independent. His mind, exultant, quickened with an idea, with rhythm and a phrase, and he began to write on the back of the menu card.
‘Un peu cabotin,’ said one of the girls.
The other shrugged her shoulders and lit a cigarette.
Unaware of these disparaging comments Magnus continued to write, and had presently composed, with buoyant cynicism, some verses which he called Miss Wyatt and Mrs Leggatt:
Poor Mrs Leggatt with a drunken husband—
Beer was a red-gold snow-capped nectar,
Song-raising, bitter-cool Nepenthe to him—
Poor Mrs Leggatt with nine pale children—
Gladys was chlorotic and May had goitre,
Others had adenoids and Bright’s disease—
Poor Mrs Leggatt with her varicose veins
Hated her neighbour with hatred’s pains,
Who was poor Miss Wyatt of the corner shop:
For poor Miss Wyatt had once said: ‘Stop!’
To the fumbling hot young man who would woo:
‘Stop!’ she had said, and she meant it too.
For poor Miss Wyatt had shrilly said
To her hoarse young lover, no, no, she wouldn’t;
And poor Mrs Leggatt had also denied,
But keep to her word the poor thing couldn’t.
And poor Miss Wyatt was a withered virgin—
Vinegar brewed in that thin bosom,
Acid returns of repression arose—
Poor Miss Wyatt with none to live for—
Loneliness frighted her wakeful night-time
Horrible desires took shape in her sleep—
Poor Miss Wyatt with her sunken breast
Hated her neighbour with a dreadful zest,
Who was poor Mrs Leggatt the drunkard’s wife:
For poor Mrs Leggatt knew all about life-
She had learnt on the grass, she had learnt in her bed,
She had learnt and learnt till she wished she was dead.
For poor Mrs Leggatt had weakly denied,
But stick to her word the poor thing couldn’t:
And poor Miss Wyatt had shrilly said: ‘No!’
And though her lover pleaded the silly thing wouldn’t.
The composition of this poem and the enchanted delight that an author may feel in the first flush of creation—but never again—occupied a large part of the journey. Racing against the coming night, the train roared through the northern marches and crossed the bridge at Berwick. Colder air blew through an open window. Scotland lay hidden in the early dusk of winter.
A tearing robustious wind greeted Magnus in Edinburgh. He drove to an hotel in George Street and after a little while went out again to look for Francis Meiklejohn.
The wind hurried him along Princes Street. It blew with a bellow and a buffet on his stern and half-lifted his feet from the pavement. It beat his ears with a fistful of snow, and clasped his ribs with icy fingers. It tore the clouds from the sky, and laid bare, as if beyond the darkness, the cold grey envelope of outer space. Heads bent and shoulder thrusting like Rugby forwards in a scrum, east-bound pedestrians struggled against it, and westward travellers flew before it with prodigious strides. To the left, towering blackly, like iron upon the indomitable rock, was the Castle. To it also the storm seemed to have given movement, for as the clouds fled behind its walls the bulk of its ancient towers and battlements appeared to ride slowly in the wind’s eye, as though meditating a journey down the cavernous channel of the High Street to Holyroodhouse, its deserted sister.
Magnus tingled to the heart with cold and his spirit soared in pride. He was in Scotland again. He had come home after far voyaging, and the ghosts of his own country thronged about him. Out of its bloody history came figures armour-clad and tartan-breeched. Now the wind carried a noise of swords, and now its speed was the naked charging of the clans down a bare hillside. It slackened for a moment to sing a dirge in the chimney-tops, and cry in a stony coign the dolorous rhyme of Flodden and Culloden. It roared against high walls as though against the sails of a great ship. Far to the north and the west the islands of Scotland lay like the lost galleys of the Norsemen, and like them were lashed by the ceaseless waves. Pine-forests bent to the storm, and the mountains divided the blast to shout over frozen corries the wildness of their Gaelic names.
It is no niggard welcome that winter finds in Scotland, but every room is opened to its bitter violence as freely, as generously, as later they are opened to the daedal beauty and soft airs of spring.