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.
‘You weren’t exaggerating when you said that Nationalism was sweeping the country?’ he asked.
‘That’s the simple truth,’ said Meiklejohn earnestly. ‘Of course you’ll find a lot of people who don’t believe in it, but that’s because they don’t believe in anything but sitting still and keeping their bottoms warm. There are bottom-warmers in every country on earth, and there always have been. You needn’t pay any attention to them. But all the people in Scotland who think for themselves are Nationalists, and all the people who feel they’re really different from the English: the men you meet in the Highlands, and the Outer Isles, and in low pubs. Let’s go to a pub in the High Street. There’ll be nothing half-hearted or English or respectable about it. Or shall we look for Hugh Skene? He’s probably in the Cosmopolitan just round the corner.’
Hugh Skene was a poet whose work had excited more controversy than any Scottish author had been flattered by for many years. Those who admired his writing declared him to be a genius of the highest order, and those who disliked it, or could not understand it, said that he was a pretentious versifier who concealed his lack of talent by a ponderous ornamentation of words so archaic that nobody knew their meaning: for Skene’s theory was that the English language, having become devitalized by time, was incapable of sustaining any vigorous or truly poetic meaning, and that the proper material for Scottish writers was Gaelic or the ancient language of Henryson and Dunbar. But whatever his merits he had roused much argument, and Magnus was eager to meet him.
The Cosmopolitan was noisier and more populous than the Café de Bordeaux and Meiklejohn failed to find Skene in the crowd. He made his way with difficulty to the bar and asked the barman if he had seen him.
‘He was here a while back,’ said the barman, ‘but he wasna looking very weel, and he went early. He said the beer had upset his stomach.’
Somewhat saddened by this discovery of frailty in the constitution of a fellow-Scot, Meiklejohn and Magnus left the clamorous bar and walked towards the High Street. The weather had moderated. Having completed its allegro movement, the storm had passed with diminished vigour to an andante of pleasing melancholy. The wind no longer leapt from wall to pavement, lifting with a shout and cold finger protesting skirts, but in the farther purlieus the sky debated with fleeing clouds a serious and more gentle theme. Pale stars came into view, against a lighter background and the old tall houses of the High Street showed in solid darkness. From Holyroodhouse to the Castle the ridge runs, hard and high, like the rough spine of Edinburgh, and the tall houses are its vertebrae, and in its marrow is a wilder life than that which animates the dignified terraces and sedate Georgian crescents below. Those lofty houses are not an aristocracy decayed and subdued, but an aristocracy debauched and ruined, sprawling in rags and dirt where it once flaunted itself in threadbare finery and three-piled pride, and lived in the high perfume of insolence and treachery and blood. As a wounded eagle, scabby and fly-infected, is a nobler and more tragic spectacle than a sick barnyard fowl, so are those houses, once turbulent with all the nobility of Scotland, more tragic and nobler than houses of the solid citizenry abandoned in the dull ebb of fashion. And as an eagle, even in its last hours, will shake from its feathers the buzzing flies, and rise in its excrement to fight, so do those houses seem fiercer than shop-keeping brick and mortar, and those who inhabit them, breathing the spirit of their dead greatness, have more vitality than their more respectable neighbours.
Magnus, who had been unusually quiet, was still disinclined for conversation. He was conscious of opposing arguments in his mind. On the one hand there was a romantic urging to believe all Meiklejohn said and to throw himself into the task of re-fashioning on prouder lines his native country—how splendid, how intoxicating, to assist in the rebirth of a nation!—and on the other hand there was a colder and more rational inclination to discount Meiklejohn’s assertions and to pursue his original plan of securing happiness and fame for himself in the solitude of poetry. He had intended to retreat from life, and now he was tempted to advance into its liveliest activity. He thought with regret of the peace he had contemplated, but the prospect of action grew more and more alluring. He still tried to convince himself of the wisdom of selfishness and regression, but his natural inclinations depreciated his arguments and beckoned him forward.
Meiklejohn, now silent also, was somewhat ill-tempered. The irritation caused by the golfers’ mockery of Nationalist aspirations had been aggravated by disappointment at not finding Hugh Skene, and his pride as a host was hurt by the failure of the evening to achieve the high degree of conviviality that he desired. Down his throat and his guest’s had gone generous draughts of vodka and Chablis, of claret and brandy, and yet both were disappointingly sober. They should have been shouting to the stars. But wine is a fickle thing.
Like a great battlement the north side of the High Street confronted them. From their lower level a long flight of steps led upwards, a narrow passage between black walls whose farther end was invisible, and on whose middle distance a lamp shone dimly. Here and there on the steps, obscurely seen, were vague figures. Under the lamp, with harsh voice and combative gesture, two men were quarrelling. Another, oblivious to them and perhaps to all the world, leaned against the wall with drooping head. From the high remote darkness of the passage came the shrill sound of a woman laughing, and from the tavern whose door the lamp lighted there issued, muffled by the walls, the multifarious sound of talk and argument and rival songs.
Meiklejohn grew more cheerful as they climbed the steps, and he pushed his way impatiently past the men at the door. One of them turned indignantly and asked him where the hell he thought he was going. Meiklejohn paid no attention, and the man followed him into the crowded bar, his temper ruffled, bent on pursuing this new quarrel.
‘Hey!’ he said, and took Meiklejohn by the shoulder, ‘did you no hear me? Or are you deaf as well as blind?’
‘That’s all right,’ said Meiklejohn.
‘Oh, that’s all right, is it?’ said the man with an offensive parody of Meiklejohn’s voice.
Magnus spoke soothingly: ‘He hasn’t done you any harm. If he pushed you it was only by accident.’
‘And what the hell’s it got to do with you?’ asked the quarrelsome man. ‘It’s him I’m talking to. Can he no answer for himself?’ He glared fiercely at Magnus. He was a square-shouldered fellow, very shabbily dressed, but nimble and soldierly, and his face was red and bony and truculent. Then, slowly, his expression altered. Pugnacity gave place to surprise, to recognition, and finally to beaming pleasure. ‘Christ!’ he said, ‘it’s Merriman, the beggar that stuck his bayonet up the Captain’s airse at Festubert!’ He turned and called to the companion with whom he had been arguing outside. ‘Here’s a bloke that’ll tell you the truth! I said the war was a bloody picnic in ’15, and so it was. We had a bloody picnic for three weeks at Bécourt.’
Magnus had now remembered the red-faced man as a former comrade in the Gordon Highlanders. ‘Sergeant Denny,’ he exclaimed, and shook hands with him enthusiastically. Denny introduced his companion. ‘He was a bloody conscript,’ he said, ‘and didn’t come out till ’17. And now he starts telling me what the war was like.’
The other man, whose name was McRuvie, muttered: ‘It wasna a picnic for the Black Watch, onyway.’
‘It would have been if you’d come out soon enough,’ said Denny. ‘Three bloody weeks at Bécourt and a hot dinner every day, and the officers sleeping in real beds, and every bloody morning I picked a bunch of flowers on the parados and put ’em in a jam-pot on the fire-step!’
‘Ach, to hell! Who shot the cheese?’ said McRuvie.
Magnus hurriedly ordered three pints of beer, before his reference to an old regimental scandal could aggravate the quarrel to violence: for the Gordons were sensitive about the allegation that they had once opened fire on a ration cheese, mistaking its pallor in the dusk for the pale face of an enemy.
It was difficult to maintain a conversation in the bar, for there was a great deal of noise and the customers stood so close to each other that a man might easily drink out of his neighbour’s glass did not the latter keep good watch on it. Tobacco, the smell of beer and whisky, and a heavy odour of dirty clothes made the air so thick as almost to be visible. Cigarette smoke floated in thick whorls that were disturbed by the vibration of the floor above, where apparently a reel was being danced. Meiklejohn had fallen into talk with a little old shrivelled man in ragged trousers and more ragged coat whose face, unshaved and grey, wore a look of half-witted cunning. Meiklejohn shouted through the crowd to Magnus.
‘Come and listen to this,’ he said. ‘I’ve found a minstrel, a ballad-singer. He’s got the finest song I’ve heard for years.’
The little man winked lewdly. Each hand held a glass of beer that Meiklejohn had bought for him. In a thin husky voice he began to sing:
O, Jenny she’s ta’en a deep surprise,
And she’s spewed a’ her crowdie,
Her minnie she ran to bring her a dram,
But she stood more need o’ the howdie.
At Magnus’s other elbow McRuvie had just referred to Sergeant Denny’s regiment as the Kaiser’s Bodyguard.
‘Away and play at Broken Squares!’ replied Denny ferociously.
These twin vilifications—the former a bitter reference to a stain on the Gordons’ honour, the latter recalling an unhappy incident in the history of the Black Watch—brought the argument to a head. McRuvie hit Denny on the nose, and Denny knocked McRuvie down with a right hook to the jaw. The noise increased with this sudden excitement and a great deal of beer was spilled as everyone turned to so violent a centre of interest. Two barmen forced their way through the crowd, and without waste of time seized hold of Denny and flung him out of doors. Then they returned, and finding McRuvie preparing to follow his enemy they sternly warned him of the consequences, and by a timely reference to the police persuaded him to stay where he was.
Meiklejohn was annoyed by this interruption of the little man’s ballad, but when on all sides, awakened by the regimental breeze, reminiscences of the war rose to the surface of men’s memories and into the thick yellow-lighted air fell the names of Givenchy and Sanctuary Wood and Poperinghe—half these ragged fellows, these slouching dole-men, these pot-bellied deformities, had once stood rigid and magnificent on parade, and marched behind the pipes with kilts swinging, and eaten their food under storm-clouds of death—when these memories found tongue Magnus was engaged in conversation by an ill-formed and evil-smelling lump of a man who proudly pulled up his trouser-leg and showed on his grimy skin a long and puckered scar.
High Wood disputed with the Labyrinth, the mud at Louvencourt rivalled as a topic of humour and delight the carnage at Mont St Eloi. In red leather volumes in the Memorial on the Castle Rock were the myriad names of the Scottish dead, and here in the lively squalor of a lousy tavern were their comrades who had survived, and whose names were nowhere written—unless perhaps on the wall of a jakes. But they were alive and, for the moment, rich with their memories. They had marched on foreign soil and killed their country’s enemies. Thin-ribbed with hunger, or gross with civilian fat they might be, shambling in their gait and dismal in their dress they were, but once their buttons had shone bright, and their shoulders were square, and they were Gordons and Seaforths and Camerons. They had worn the Red Hackle, and ridden on jolting limbers, and swallowed with their ration beef the acrid taste of danger. Here, with foul shirts and fouler breath, were Mars’s heroes. Kings had fallen and nations perished, armies had withered and cities been ruined for this and this alone: that poor men in stinking pubs might have great wealth of memory.
Magnus, perceiving this irony, was delighted by it, but Meiklejohn, with no military recollections of his own, was merely upset by the loss of his ballad-singer, who had disappeared in the commotion.
‘What debased pleasure do you find in looking at that filthy sore?’ he asked Magnus, who was examining with interest the wound on the dirty man’s skin.
Magnus answered:
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars
And say: ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day’.
‘Don’t quote that sentimental barbarian to me,’ said Meiklejohn irritably. ‘You miss the chance of hearing a damn fine Scots song and then you recite Shakespeare. This is a pub, not a girls’ school matinée.’
‘What the hell has a girls’ school got to do with Shakespeare?’ asked Magnus.
Meiklejohn ignored him. ‘Let’s go upstairs. Perhaps the little man’s there.’
On the upper floor of the tavern were another bar and a small dingy lounge. Following Meiklejohn up the stairs Magnus quoted, somewhat contentiously:
And many a man there is, even at this present,
Now, while I speak, holds his wife by the arm,
That little thinks she has been sluiced in’s absence
And his pond fished by his next neighbour, by
Sir Smile, his neighbour,
and asked: ‘Is that stuff for girls?’
‘Certainly, if they’re nasty girls,’ said Meiklejohn.
The upper floor was even noisier than the lower one, for on the latter had been nothing but men, but here there were women also. A few were elderly, pouchy-faced, wide in the hips, with over-flowing contours, but most were young. A cocksure strutting little creature with pointed breasts, black eyes, a loose mouth and oiled black hair took Magnus by the coat and said: ‘Hey! are you sleeping with me or am I sleeping with you tonight?’
‘Och! Be a man! I’ll no tell your mother, if that’s what you’re thinking. Gie’s a drink, anyway.’
‘What do you want?’
‘Whisky, and a big one. And you needna bother about soda. There’s no guts in the drink here, and there’s no guts in the men either.’
She took the drink and swallowed it at a gulp. ‘Come on,’ she pleaded, ‘it won’t cost you much.’
‘No,’ said Magnus.
‘Oh, well,’ said the slut, ‘there’s a kiss for your drink. It wasna worth more than that.’ And she reached up and kissed Magnus noisily.
‘An honest little whore,’ said Meiklejohn.
Magnus, with wicked intent, answered:
Those milk-paps
That through the window-bars bore at men’s eyes,
Are not within the leaf of pity writ.
‘For God’s sake keep your tongue out of that plate,’ shouted Meiklejohn. ‘I take you to a good Scotch pub and you quote a noisy, dirty-minded, untidy, romantical Englishman to me! I detest Shakespeare, and I’m damned if I’ll listen to him for you or anyone else.’
Meiklejohn was dogmatic in his tastes, and professing a large enthusiasm for Latin poetry of the Augustan age, for classical French literature, for Viennese music, for the bothy ballads and ruder verse of Scotland, he would recognize no merit in what was written outside those areas. Essentially a romantic himself, he hotly denounced all romantic writing, and confessed his passion for Johann Strauss only because those rosy melodies brought to his eyes such fond and copious tears that his weakness was immediately discernible. But to Magnus, as to many other people, depreciation of Shakespeare was dangerously near to blasphemy, and Meiklejohn’s scandalous denigration of England’s most mellifluous and triumphant voice roused in him hot anger and resentment. For his new-come patriotism was not yet exclusive.
‘Forgive me for uttering so naked a commonplace,’ he said offensively, ‘but you drive me to it. Shakespeare is the greatest poet of all time,
‘A fustian, long-winded, turgid, slovenly ranter who never missed the opportunity to make a dirty joke,’ retorted Meiklejohn.
‘Name a better poet,’ said Magnus.
‘Racine,’ said Meiklejohn promptly.
‘That dull, pedantical schoolroom exercise! That prosy, plodding, weary, unimaginative padding for a deserted library! That’s not poetry: that’s route-marching to Parnassus with full pack and a sergeant alongside to see that you keep step.’
Meiklejohn took Magnus by the lapel of his coat and shouted very loudly: ‘Listen to this, you chuff!’
Le ciel de leurs soupirs approuvait l’innocence;
Ils suivaient sans remords leur penchant amoureux;
Tous les jours se levaient clairs et sereins pour eux.
‘Is that poetry, you poor simpleton, you Boeotian, you country slab?’
Magnus shook off the detaining hand, and in his turn shouted: ‘No, it’s costive as you are, and flat as this beer you’ve given me, and colourless as an old hen’s rump blown bare by the wind. Listen to this, you rattle in a tin can, you wind in a sheep’s belly, you varicose puff!—
We two, that with so many thousand sighs
Did buy each other, must poorly sell ourselves
With the rude brevity and discharge of one.
Injurious Time, now with a robber’s haste
Crams his rich thievery up, he knows not how,
And scants us with a single famished kiss,
Distasting with the salt of broken tears.
Meiklejohn interrupted, bellowing a single line:
C’est Vénus toute entière a sa proie attachée!
By this time they had attracted the attention of the whole room. The pianist who had been playing for two or three pairs of dancers fell silent. The dancers came to a standstill. The drinkers took firmer hold of their glasses to keep them safe should trouble arise. An old man with a pendulous red nose and a silver watch-chain across his greasy waistcoat, shocked by the sound of a foreign tongue, shouted: ‘They’re Bolsheviks! Pit them oot!’ His neighbour, a pallid man with red hair and no teeth, gobbled like a turkey and cried: ‘I’m a Bolshie masel! Pit me oot, if you can!’ Two sailors, on leave from a destroyer lying in the Forth, set their girls down from their knees, stood, and hitched up their trousers in preparation for anything that might happen. And a tall barman came threateningly to Meiklejohn and asked: ‘Is that language for a gentleman like you to be using? Are you no ashamed of yourself?’
‘I was quoting a line of pure poetry,’ said Meiklejohn.
‘Pure stite,’ said the old man with the red nose.
‘Shut up!’ said the barman, ‘it’s got damn-all to do with you, anyway.’
‘They’re Bolsheviks!’ said the old man.
The barman ignored him and spoke sternly to Magnus and Meiklejohn: ‘Don’t let me here another word from you! If there’s any more of that dirty talk, out you go on your bloody dowps, the pair o’ you!’
‘And now, will you give me two pints of beer?’ said Magnus stiffly.
He and Meiklejohn sat together without speaking. Meiklejohn’s drooping eyelid had fallen far down, and his left profile wore a sleepy look, while his right was set in haughty indignation. Magnus maintained an air of remote dignity, impaired though by no means ruined by a convulsive hiccup when he drank his beer.
The other occupants of the room returned to their previous amusements, and as closing time was imminent the barmen were kept busy pouring glasses of whisky and pulling beer-handles to fill those last cups that would sustain, for as long as might be, the Dionysiac euphrasy of the week-end—and would also ensure, when the traditional glory of Saturday had departed, a Sabbath morning queasy and grey and a mood most apt for piety and repentance.
The girls who had been sitting on the sailors’ knees and had now returned to those warm seats, began to sing:
Morning never comes too soon,
I can face the afternoon,
But oh! those lonely nights!
Then the sailors laughed loudly, and tickled the girls till they squealed, and one of them said: ‘There ain’t going to be no lonely night tonight, Jenny.’
‘My name’s no Jenny, it’s Jeannie,’ said the girl.
‘Jenny or Jeannie, Polly or Molly, what the hell do I care?’ said the sailor.
‘Time, gentlemen, please!’ shouted the barmen, and began to hustle those customers who were slow in finishing their drinks and to collect the empty beer-glasses, and to rebuke those ever-thirsty souls who pleaded in vain for a deoch-an-doris, a snifter, a valedictory nip, a homeward cup.
The girls stood up and laid on their captive sailors hands that were compulsive to follow. One of the girls sang in a voice of vulgar but cogent allurement:
If you could care for me
As I could care for you!
Oh, what a place this world would be,
A paradise for two!
Her voice rose and fell on the rhyming diphthongs with the exaggerated undulation of an Alpine yodel, and the cacology of the streets informed her pronunciation. But her voice was melodious.
‘Is that another Scotch song?’ asked Magnus with urbane malice.
Meiklejohn made no reply, but took snuff with a gesture that seemed to dissociate him from the pervading Englishness that could corrupt even a tavern in the High Street. Reluctantly the crowd staggered from the bar, and down the rickety stairs met those emerging from the lower rooms. The sailors, firmly clipping their girls, marched purposefully away. A decrepit old man with dirty white hair and a drop at his nose stood in a corner mournfully contemplating a halfpenny that lay in the palm of his hand. It was worn smooth and bright, and he had thought for one blessed moment it was a shilling. Now, discovering its insignificance, he cursed it slowly and carefully, dropping on its smooth surface abominable words that yet seemed, in his quavering tones, to lose their foulness and become the reasoned criticism of Job-in-the-gutter.
Magnus, still combatively inclined, saw the opportunity for another quotation, and aptly remarked:
You taught me language, and my profit on’t
Is, I know how to curse.
‘Who said that?’ asked Meiklejohn suspiciously.
‘The greatest poet of all time.’
Meiklejohn, with a temperate and judicious air, said: ‘It’s better than most of his stuff.’
Magnus grew earnest. ‘My dear fellow,’ he said, and paused to summon words so forceful and conclusive that his friend would of necessity repent his aesthetic blasphemy. Being now somewhat drunk—but solemnly, not riotously drunk—it seemed to him imperative and important beyond all else that Meiklejohn should confess the poetic supremacy of Shakespeare, and he strove with the fuddled resources of his memory for phrase and argument that would compel the admission from him. They were now on the dark corridor of steps outside the pub, and the crowd was fast disappearing, up or down, except for some in whom desire to journey anywhere had become inoperative; and they, idle as Stylites, leaned against the walls and contemplated in a puddle at their feet the black reflexion of the sky, and, in that dim mirror, the minute starring of tiny water-drops. For the rain had gone, and the clouds had settled lower, and small rain fell silently.
‘My dear fellow,’ Magnus repeated, ‘think of the profundity of Shakespeare, and the enormity of his invention. The range of his understanding …’
Meiklejohn, equally in earnest and stammering in the speed of his desire to refute Magnus’s assertions, said: ‘But think of Racine!’
‘Racine is a bore,’ said Magnus.
‘Shakespeare’s a periphrastic, platitudinous peacock,’ said Meiklejohn.
Magnus began to recite Clarence’s dream from Richard III, and Meiklejohn attempted to over-shout him with the passage from Roxane beginning: ‘Ah! je respire enfin, et ma joie est extrême,’ but unfortunately, owing to the disorder of their minds, neither could remember more than a line or two, and their quotations expired in a common silence of defeat. They tried new pastures.
‘Quoi! pour noyer les Grecs et leurs mille vaisseaux,’ Meiklejohn began, with less assurance than before.
Then of thy beauty do I question make
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
said Magnus fiercely.
‘L’Aulide aura vomi leur flotte criminelle,’ shouted Meiklejohn.
‘Will you listen to me?’ said Magnus, and took Meiklejohn by the throat.
‘I’m damned if I will,’ said Meiklejohn, and struck Magnus on the side of the head. It was a clumsy blow, but sufficient to unbalance him, and falling, he fell down several steps before he could recover himself.
In the meanwhile Meiklejohn had taken off his coat and hat and given them to one of the several nearby loafers, who happened to be Private McRuvie, late of the Black Watch. He had found Sergeant Denny waiting for him in a pacific mood and they were now on friendly terms.
Magnus, stripping in turn, gave his coat to the Sergeant, who encouraged him to go in and win. Meiklejohn, though somewhat unsteadily, stood in an attitude of defence, but Magnus hesitated to begin the fight.
‘I’ll give you a last chance,’ he said, ‘if you admit that Shakespeare’s a better poet than Racine …’
‘Merde!’ answered Meiklejohn rudely. Whereupon Magnus hit him lightly on the face, and Meiklejohn countered heavily to the body. Then they sparred for another opening.
‘Up the Gordons!’ cried Sergeant Denny, and officiously thrust back the several spectators.
‘Mind where you’re going,’ said Private McRuvie, whose toes had been trodden on.
‘Away and take a running jump at yourself,’ said the Sergeant.
‘There’s no bloody Gordon with a white strip in his kilt can tell me to take a running jump,’ answered McRuvie indignantly.
Then by common accord McRuvie and the Sergeant threw down the coats they carried for the other combatants and began, with great gusto, to punch and pummel for themselves.
The yellow lamp outside the tavern grotesquely lighted the swaying figures of Magnus and Meiklejohn. They had drunk too much to be either strong or accurate in their hitting, and for some time they fought without inflicting much damage. Presently for lack of wind they fell into a clinch, and Magnus, with no regard for orthodoxy, seized Meiklejohn by the hair and pulled back his head till, panting, he gaped at the lamplight like a dying fish.
Magnus, himself almost breathless, had just enough strength and animosity to gasp—as though setting his flag on a conquered town—
Leading him prisoner in a red-rose chain!
At this moment two tall and robust figures, helmeted, dark, a glisten of rain on their black capes, silent and portentous, ponderous but alert, came into the lamplight, and seeing them the spectators fled, one turning as he ran to say: ‘Look out, boys, it’s the polis!’
But Magnus, still regardless, though a heavy hand fell on his shoulder, continued to recite:
The moon’s an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun;
The sea’s a thief whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears; the earth’s a thief
That feeds and breeds by a composture stolen
From general excrement.
Now Meiklejohn, with a last effort, kicked his opponent’s legs from under him, and they fell together, breaking the policeman’s grip, and rolled down some dozen steps, locked in each other’s arms till they came to a flat landing. Bruised and bewildered, Magnus rose, and immediately a policeman had him by the neck and arm, and a moment later his wrists were handcuffed. But Meiklejohn lay where he had fallen.
‘Now stand there quietly, if you don’t want to get hurt,’ said the policeman, and knelt to examine Meiklejohn.
‘Ay,’ he said, ‘this’ll be a bad night’s work for you, my man. Your pal’s clean knocked out, and maybe worse. We’ll need to get the ambulance.’
But Meiklejohn, not yet defeated, opened his eyes and struggled to get up. Leaning on one elbow he said, very slowly and distinctly:
C’était pendant l’horreur d’une profonde nuit.
Then, with the quotation of this ample and sonorous line for a last defiance, he collapsed and fell backwards on the stone.