But Magnus was filled with the fury of working, and in the morning he returned to his poem with eagerness undiminished. The excitement of composition made his pulses beat as though, in some street-scuffling, he had been challenged to fight. And by midnight he would be drained of strength and weary to the bone.
He added half a dozen political portraits to the first part of his poem. One was of the Prime Minister:
McMaster, that great Socialist, a Scot:
His creed was fashioned by his boyhood’s lot
Of poverty among the striving poor,
Whose honesty, whose courage to endure,
Whose kindliness, and strength on land or sea,
Made virtue seem to inhere in poverty.
Seeing these merits in poor men, his friends,
Poor men have all the merits, he contends,
Thinking because a man is strong and kind
He must have logic and a prudent mind.
For sixty years McMaster thought like this,
And then behold a metamorphosis!
McMaster grew to power and lived among
The rich whom he’d despised when poor and young:
Whose charm of speech, whose tact and savoir-faire,
Whose butlers, and whose heavy-lidded stare
Convinced him that the virtues in Debrett
Excelled all others he had ever met;
And having found that peers and plutocrats
Now walked in piety as well as spats,
He faced facts boldly, and—memento mori!—
Prepared to seek the Lord—or Lords—a Tory.
The satirical half of The Returning Sun, then, was when finished a fine gallimaufry. The body of it was the dismal and lifeless condition of Scotland, but its limbs stretched out in all directions. Here, resounding as a slap in the face, was a passage on modern love; and there, loud as a guffaw, were twenty lines on modern religion. The League of Nations, armament firms, newspaper advertisements, Soviet Russia, Mr Gandhi, and international tennis tournaments were saluted with a catcall and dismissed with derision. Yet, tempting as these diversions were, they never obscured the principal theme: Magnus’s general iconoclasm was only a frame for his Scottish satire, and his excursions abroad were no more than chapter-headings for his denunciation of Scotland’s insufficiency. He avoided the tone of a Jeremiad by the gusto of his satire, and all his raiding and spoiling he did with unfailing pleasure.
But when he came to write the second half of the poem he found many obstacles: for the latter part was to be constructive, and constructive criticism is regrettably more difficult than detraction and the buffeting of robust disapprobation. He began with an evening vision of the western sea: the poet, standing on a cliff, was watching the great orb of the sun drop down the sky with all its company of roseate clouds and golden mists, draining the firmament of colour like a tyrant’s court that bleeds an empire for its finery; down to a handsbreadth from the stiff horizon came the sun, and the wall of the cold sea was ready to obscure it: but like some aureate bird, fat, and with feathers of flame, the sun perched on top of the wall, its circle flattening somewhat with its weight, and then, rebounding slowly, rose again, and the chorus of pink-breasted clouds and the mists with their golden wings applauded it, and the sky grew bright once more to welcome it. Now that vision was intended to symbolize the returning pride and vigour of Scotland, but how to fulfil the vision and equip it with practical details gave Magnus no little trouble. That renascence should come from the west suggested, of course, a Celtic character for it, and the Celtic ethos was a fine opponent to the decadent commercialism of Scotland and the world at large. But as an Orkney man Magnus did not wholly trust the Celtic spirit, and was resolved that his renascence should be stiffened by certain Norse characteristics. And this cross-breeding, this mixture of the spiritual and the practical, presented several difficulties.
One afternoon the conflict between the two ideas grew so disturbing that he could not sit still, but went walking at a great pace over fields till he came to the main road, and down that with long strides and a scowl on his face, muttering odd lines and half-made phrases, and striving to see consistency in a crowd of inconsistent images. He was interrupted by a voice, intoning its words in a very different fashion from the Orkney style, that asked him what o’clock it was.
He looked round and saw, in an old grass-overgrown quarry by the roadside, a tinker’s camp. The man who had spoken to him, a tall dark-faced fellow, stood beside a little black tent, and at his feet a thin unhappy-looking dog was rubbing its stern on the ground. Magnus told him the time. A buxom woman with rusty-red hair and a child in her arms came out of the tent. ‘It’s a fine day,’ she said in a high-leaping voice. Magnus fell into conversation with them. ‘Do you know anything that will take worms out of a dog?’ said the man. Magnus said there were certain pills for that purpose, but he could not remember the name of them. ‘I’ve heard that if you grind up some broken glass and put it in the dog’s food, that will do good,’ said the woman. Magnus doubted it. The man suggested other remedies, and the dog lay down, and looked mournfully at them. ‘It’s a poor thing of a dog anyway,’ said the woman.
The topic died and Magnus continued his walk. The tinkers were old acquaintances: their name was Macafee. He remembered with sudden delight a conversation in Edinburgh, in Rothesay Crescent, and Mrs Wishart’s asking if he knew the So-and-so’s and the What’s-their-names in Orkney—the eminent So-and-so’s and the very dignified What’s-their-names—and he had countered, in the same tone of social inquisitioning, ‘Do you know the Macafees and the Newlands?’ Tinkers all, and ‘charming people’, he had said. He imagined himself introducing Mrs Wishart to the woman with rusty-red hair. The tinker woman would not be disconcerted, but Mrs Wishart would be sadly ill-at-ease, especially if she had to listen to the description of the worm that had once been driven out of a greyhound—so the tinkers said—by a dose of chopped horsehair.
Unfortunately from thinking of Mrs Wishart his thoughts took an awkward turn and Frieda stepped into the picture. Ten days after his arrival in Orkney a letter had come from her, addressed to him care of his publishers and forwarded by them. It was an unpleasant letter, full of upbraiding and sorrow. He had torn it up immediately after reading it and sought refuge in work from her wounding phrases and more painful reiteration of affection. He had meant to be brutal and ignore her letters. But his resolution had wavered and weakened when he could find no peace in his work, and that night he had replied to her at great length, offering in his own defence nothing but a distaste for marriage—incurable, he said—and protesting his remorse for the unhappiness he had caused her. He endeavoured to word his letter so that it would minister to her self-esteem and restore her self-respect, and at the same time he contrived to give it a tone of finality. Since then he had not heard from her, and the importunate demands that his poem made upon him gave him little time to think of her. Instead of whipping himself with contrition, as in idleness he would have done, he had been contentedly whipping the abuses of the day with satire. But occasionally unwelcome thoughts penetrated the armour of his preoccupation, and now, with the day so fine about him and the fields so greenly prosperous on either side, he felt the weight of Frieda’s unhappiness, and swore again that he would traffic no more in love, since love always came with unbidden guests to wish it ill, like witches at a christening.
He walked to Dounby, the nearest village, and stayed to talk with the blacksmith, who was shoeing a big white-footed mare. He leaned against the wall of the smithy and watched the paring of the mare’s feet. Presently he saw a cyclist on the road, and when she came near he recognized Rose, and was aware of a little surge of excited pleasure. She smiled as she passed, and a hundred yards further on he saw her dismount at one of the village shops. Ten minutes later she returned, and would have ridden by. But Magnus called to her to stop.
She had a heavy basket on the handlebars of her bicycle. Magnus said good-bye to the blacksmith and walked back with Rose. At first he found it difficult to make her talk, and when her initial reserve was broken down she still spoke shyly, with sidelong glances to see if her conversation was approved. It was family stuff, domestic matters, and country topics she spoke of. She had no wit and only the most elementary appreciation of humour, but her voice was young and her shyness engaging. Magnus, without deliberately intending a comparison, found himself contrasting her with Frieda. He had never reconciled himself, wholly and with comfort, to Frieda’s background of too-lavish experience, and in Rose’s simplicity he found the freedom of relief. The timid bait of innocency attracted him—that May-fly on the stream of time—and the longer he looked at her the more he was convinced that she was uncommonly pretty. In particular his admiration was captured by her complexion, and in a little while he was unwise enough to interrupt her story of what her mother had said to James of Buckquoy’s wife, and tell her so.
Rose fell silent immediately, and charmingly blushed, and Magnus never heard what James Buckquoy’s wife had said in reply.
But having started to talk about her prettiness he found the theme engaging, and enlarged on it till Rose grew patently unhappy and begged him to stop.
‘But I’m only telling you the truth,’ he said.
‘You’re not,’ she answered. ‘It’s nothing but a lot of lies. I think you’d better give me the basket now: you’ve come far enough.’
They had reached the farm-road leading to the Bu. Rose, flushed with embarrassment, reached for the basket that Magnus had been carrying, but Magnus, who was enjoying himself, said, ‘Think of your nose, for example …’
‘I won’t,’ said Rose, and snatched the basket from him.
‘All right,’ said Magnus. ‘If you don’t believe me, look in the mirror and see what it has to say.’
That night he could make nothing of Scotland’s renascence, and added not a line to The Returning Sun. But he thought of Rose, and the more he thought of her the more she excited him, till at last he wrote, quick-fingered, a set of verses that might very well do for an autograph-album, and they gave him even more pleasure than the stabbing couplets of his satire:
Fine yellow flags in the tall green reeds,
Wild white cotton on the heather-brown hill,
Lovely things growing on the moor, in the meads,
And you are lovelier still.
A sorrel foal with a flax-fair mane,
A puff-ball cloud in the noonday blue,
And a great gull sitting on a weather-vane—
Is there nothing lovely as you?
The plover’s black bib has a new renown,
For your sweet blowing hair is the same proud hue,
And the sun’s so glad that your hands are brown—
‘Be quiet!’ said Rose of the Bu:
‘I won’t listen longer and I won’t stay here
If you flatter me like, for your flattery is lies.’—
But I said: Could I flatter the spring of the year
Or the flighting of northern skies?
There’s a trio of things I can truly declare:
That young corn’s green, and the tide will turn,
And you are lovely beyond compare—
Look in your glass and learn!
So early next morning, jumping from bed,
Into the mirror looked Rose of the Bu,
Frowned, and was puzzled, and sulkily said,
‘You must be flattering too!’