Mungo's Dream

by J. I. M. Stewart

  They left the office, walked down Hanover Street side by side, and turned into Princes Street. But Edinburgh’s east wind was now blowing so strongly and freezingly that any words they uttered would either have been whirled away in the direction of Glasgow or simply congealed on their lips. Mungo employed the resulting silence in telling himself that he mustn’t be obtuse. A rocky old person like Mackellar S.S.C. was unlikely to be a guileless snob, or to have changed gear simply because the youth from Forres had been hob-nobbing with the nobility. He was merely effecting what might be called a necessary transition in rather an abrupt way. And it was quite possible that this lunch was going to be a valedictory occasion.

  Mr Mackellar’s club was in Princes Street; it appeared to be one of the few remaining islets of dignified repose among the increasingly commonplace shops. Pausing in its portico, and being thus a little sheltered from the blast, Mr Mackellar animadverted unfavourably upon the incursions of modern commerce – controlled, he pointed out, by people in London, who were themselves controlled by people in New York. He named august establishments, all with good Scottish names, now departed from the scene. Could his mother, he declared, be set down at one end of this historic thoroughfare today she would undoubtedly walk to its other extremity without remarking anything that warranted purchase. Mungo, although he judged this to be an exaggerated view of the matter, began to feel there was more to be said for Mr Mackellar than he had hitherto been prepared to admit. Scotland for the Scots was one of the few political persuasions with which he had equipped himself.

  He had never been in a club – except, indeed, for a forlorn and crumbling affair tenuously maintained in Oxford by undergraduates of Ian’s sort. So he prepared to make useful observations. There was, for a start, a man in a glass box, just as in college. He hadn’t a bowler hat, however, and he was dressed in a kind of muted uniform which somehow suggested to Mungo the sort of character who locks and unlocks the gates of a gaol. This effect was enhanced by the fact that he was plainly keeping a vigilant eye on two elderly gentlemen who, although obviously of considerable consequence, were huddled on an uncomfortable bench close to the door. Mungo divined that the wretches were guests who had arrived in advance of their hosts, and must remain under close surveillance until these chose to turn up. Mungo himself, being beneath Mr Mackellar’s wing, was quite in the clear, although Mr Mackellar had to hasten to inscribe his name in an enormous book. It must all be rather like this, Mungo thought, when one visits somebody in a top security prison.

  Apart from these appearances, there was nothing on view that could be at all unexpected to a reader of English novels. The somnolent silence, the enormous leather chairs, the barricades of newspapers and journals behind which sundry members were sheltering from any possibility of social intercourse, etc., etc., – all these were duly on parade. Mungo became aware that he was a good deal less observant than simply hungry. As he stood in a vast bay window overlooking the street and the gardens and the Castle, and consumed a glass of sherry while Mr Mackellar discoursed on the history of the Leith wine trade, he was hoping that all these old men didn’t diet themselves in their club on the same frugal scale that he remembered at Bamberton.

  Two or three drably attired characters – perhaps they were fellow S.S.C.’s – passed the time of day with Mr Mackellar, and Mr Mackellar gravely introduced Mungo to them as a client of his, Mr Lockhart, now at Oxford. But this didn’t exactly start any ball rolling, and Mungo was presently led off to the dining-room. It had never occurred to him that he was a client of Mackellar’s, and he doubted whether it had ever previously occurred to Mackellar either. It was all part of this business of rather sudden promotion. He felt distrustful of it, but that didn’t spoil his lunch. At least as a nosh-house, the club got high marks, and in addition to the eats he was provided with a little decanter holding a third of a bottle of claret. Under the influence of this he talked to Mackellar quite a lot, for his head was still as light as Ian had once discovered it to be. He retained enough sense, however, to decline a glass of port with his cheese and before his coffee. It was just as well, after all, to continue to chalk up a good mark with the old chap every now and then. Moreover he had become aware – perhaps it was a matter of the antennae – that something more was brewing. Mackellar had a surprise up his sleeve – or perhaps to get off his chest. There were several preliminary hums and haws that came to nothing. It was only when the old boy had returned from a desk where he had been signing his bill, and the moment to turn Mungo out had patently arrived, that he uttered.

  ‘My dear Mungo, this is the moment to say a further word about your affairs. I have to inform you that, upon the occasion of your coming of age, I shall have a communication to make to you.’

  ‘A communication?’ It was pretty blankly that Mungo repeated this.

  ‘Precisely. A communication. You must understand, however, that nothing more is to be said about it now.’

  ‘But I have come of age. There’s a new law, isn’t there? And I’m over eighteen.’

  ‘Ah, yes. And you are undoubtedly of mature years.’ As he said this, Mackellar smiled – and in a way that Mungo quite liked. ‘But I have expressed myself loosely. The instructions I hold explicitly designate the twenty-first anniversary of your birth – unless, indeed, a certain event, which I am not at liberty to explain to you, should take place before that date. In that event, and in that event only, I should be at liberty to use my discretion. And there we must let the matter rest at present.’ Mackellar made a weighty pause; he seemed absolutely to enjoy this idiotic mystery-mongering. ‘Although I think I may go so far as to say that there is nothing portentous about it, or that will effect any marked change in your circumstances. So, for the present, you may dismiss it from your mind. Shall I have them call a taxi to get you to the station?’

  ‘No, thank you. I’ve time to walk. But I don’t see—’ Something obscure but powerful in Mungo made him break off. Conceivably it was pride. ‘Thank you very much,’ he said – formally and in what might have been called his most Stradlings manner. ‘It was a splendid lunch. Should you ever be in Oxford, I hope you’ll allow me to show you round. Good-bye.’

  Mungo shook hands with Mackellar S.S.C. – this rather than let Mackellar S.S.C. shake hands with him – and tumbled himself out of the club and into Princes Street. A howling gale from somewhere off Norway assisted his progress towards the railway station.

  Chapter Ten

  Without much difficulty, Mungo found himself a corner seat in one of the refrigerated chambers which, on this particular wintry afternoon, the Scottish Region was passing off as a railway train. Warmth would begin to seep in somewhere in the neighbourhood of Pitlochry or Blair Atholl. Before that, one’s only hope lay in a fug, and it didn’t look as if there were going to be enough passengers to generate one. The Scots don’t do much travelling at Christmas. Their family get-togethers happen at the New Year. Mungo saw not much prospect of cheer during his journey, except from the mere names of the places he would be passing through. Dunkeld, Killiecrankie, Dalnaspidal, Kingussie, Aviemore: these decidedly had the edge on Chipping Sodbury and Goole and Stoke and Jump. It was true that in Caithness there was a Slickly, and also what appeared to be a gent’s residence called Glutt Lodge. These rather let down the side. But could it any longer be called his side? Wasn’t he just another scuttling Scot – as much so, in his small way, as all those well-heeled Cardowers who had beaten it to their Bambertons and Stradlings?

  Being told that he was beginning to speak Oxford English, or whatever it was to be called, had a good deal shaken him – much more, he told himself energetically, than had Mackellar’s solemn talk of a communication to be made to him when he was twenty-one. The notion of sophisticating his native tongue, whether by design or not, was obscurely disconcerting – perhaps, he thought, as seeing to ally him with those pitifully timid of God’s creatures, like the ptarmigan or Alpine hare, who change their colour with the seasons. You could write a short st
ory called ‘The Turncoat’ about a chap who—

  Mungo was distracted from this creative thought by the train’s starting to clatter its way through the alarmingly archaic cantilevers of the Forth Bridge. He looked up the Firth, where the contrasting elegance of the road bridge was silhouetted against the declining sun. The old order changeth, yielding place to new. He might be destined to live until the road bridge was as much a collector’s piece as the railway bridge was now. What made this an appalling thought was the extent to which each of these future decades would be almost totally unplanned and undirected affairs. How far ahead had he looked when he’d let himself be booked in for Oxford? Hardly as far, even, as this first return home. For instance, there was his closest school-friend, Roderick McLeod. We twa hae run about the braes and pu’d the gowans fine. Roddy, now articled to a lawyer in Eglin, would certainly be disconcerted by somebody who had taken to saying ‘awf’ when he meant ‘off’. (Not, Mungo was sure, that he had come to that) And how could he tell Roddy that he’d rapidly made an equally close friend of the son of a Lord?

  This extremely self-conscious meditation lasted Mungo quite some time. A man came along the corridor, banging the doors open and shut, bellowing into empty compartments that afternoon tea was now being served. Mungo almost took refuge in it. But it would cost the moon, and he’d had that big lunch. So he dug out his next Great Novel, which was The Idiot. Dostoyevsky, it seemed, had produced eight versions of the story. In one of them the idiot was to be like Christ, and in another he was to be like Iago; and in the face of the fantastic confusion thus created the novelist had pretty well gone mad. Gloomily, Mungo plunged into this desperate but accredited masterpiece.

  The Grampians were under snow; there was snow in great drifts against the snow-screens; beyond the dark forest of Dail-na-Mine the summit of Beinn Dearg – the red mountain – was flushed to rose. Snow was falling as the train toiled up the Pass of Drumochter; the great diesel brute dragging it still had untaxed energies stacked in its guts, but you couldn’t help feeling it was about to expire. Dusk deepened. The snow-flakes, although falling faster, faded slowly into invisibility, as if in some vast theatre at the turn of a rheostat. But they still sploshed wetly on the window close to Mungo’s nose; they even formed small snowdrifts in the window-corners. Mungo was alone in the compartment, and beset by a great melancholy. But at least the temperature was mounting rapidly. The engine’s note, its rhythm, suddenly changed; at this moment it was the most exalted engine in the British Isles; it gave a cry, a wail of triumph and agony, like an athlete going through the pain barrier; and then it was lolloping on its downward course. Uninformed travellers would feel that it was spurting for the tape, and that in no time their journey would be over. Mungo knew better: there were still a couple of hours to go. He became drowsy. For a brief space he heard things not possible to hear from the interior of this chunking and rattling monster: the sound of mountain torrents, of peewits high in air, of wind in dry heather. He fell asleep.

  He was walking endlessly through the corridors and enormous intercommunicating apartments of Bamberton Court. It was an exhausting occupation, and as he walked he explained to himself why this was so. The house was not really Bamberton Court. It was the Deserted Palace, infinite in extension, which is familiar to drug-addicts, and which gained symbolic status – although he couldn’t think what symbolic status- – in the period which somebody – but he couldn’t think who – had named the Romantic Agony. Yet it was Bamberton Court, and he was its owner – or rather it owned him. And this was so because he was the Marquis of Auldearn, obscurely compelled thus to perambulate forever and ever in carpet slippers.

  Ian was walking beside him. He explained to Ian how reasonable all this was. He strove to dissipate in Ian’s mind the notion that there was anything illogical in Mungo being the Marquis of Auldearn, and the Marquis of Auldearn being Mungo. That it was impossible was merely the popular view of the matter. Persons of superior intelligence, of up-to-date scientific knowledge, would see no difficulty whatever. Mungo-Auldearn’s measured arguments had their weight with Ian. Ian nevertheless advanced some objections which Mungo-Auldearn was able to refute. But Ian’s attention was now being distracted from this grave and consequential matter. The endless corridors, the concatenated state apartments, were lined with pictures crammed with naked goddesses, nymphs, stripling youths. Ian was taking a great deal of interest in these – particularly as all the thronging nudities were beginning to cavort in a lively manner within their frames. Mungo-Auldearn didn’t understand this phenomenon, and didn’t care for it either. It was now Ian’s turn to adduce reasoned argument. The Lord High Chamberlain, a relation of Ian’s—or was it of Mungo-Auldearn’s?—had been obliged to shut up shop. Nudes no longer had to stay immobile in order to remain officially decent. They could now wriggle as they chose. Like that one, Ian said – and came to a sudden, a transfixed halt.

  Mungo woke up. The train had jerked to a standstill, and through the window there was a blaze of lights. But such an appearance was impossible in the middle of the Cairngorms. He must be on the wrong train, and have arrived he didn’t know where – Blackpool, perhaps, or a place like that. Before this vexatious mistake he felt a panic so disproportionately deep as to puzzle him, and he had a fleeting sense that it must have accompanied him out of his dream. Then he saw that this was all nonsense. The train had simply stopped at Aviemore, which had been a decent little straggle of a village only a few years before, and now had been turned into a glittering winter sports centre. Mungo stared at the lit-up posh hotels and whatever in a glum and unreasoning resentment. He’d never gone to sleep on a train before, and supposed it to be a sign of advancing years. Moreover – what was a very odd thing – his dream had frightened him.

  The train drew out of Aviemore, and Mungo had another go at his novel. Prince Leo Nikolayevich Myshkin – the idiot, that was – was making an uncomfortable railway journey too. The Warsaw train was approaching Petersburg.

  At Forres (which was not at all like Petersburg, except in being colder than was agreeable) Mungo was met by his aunt. Miss Guthrie’s car, which he was accustomed to think of as about the same age as himself, had a fabric hood and uncertainly fitting side-screens of discoloured celluloid. It couldn’t have been called made for comfort. But it did seem to be made to last, since nothing ever went wrong with it. It took Miss Guthrie – Aunt Elspeth – in and out of Forres every day of her school term. Mungo piled his possessions into the back (from which an antediluvian contraption called a dicky-seat had been removed), and they drove off into the darkness. Only a very light snow was falling. The climate of Forres is officially ‘mild’, and Mungo had remembered just in time not to commit the solecism of commenting unfavourably upon the temperature.

  ‘And you saw Mr Mackellar,’ Aunt Elspeth said interrogatively. When this question elicited only a simple affirmative she added, ‘And what did he have to say to you?’

  ‘He said I could buy any books I reasonably needed, and that he’d pay up.’

  ‘You should have written ahead about it. Books take time to obtain in Elgin or Inverness. And here’s a good part of your holiday gone, Mungo.’

  ‘That’s just what Mackellar said. He did some heavy in loco parentis stuff.’ Mungo retained a naïve faith in employing a little elegant Latinity when addressing those who had been responsible for his education. ‘But it’s all right about the books. I took a chance, and bought them anyway.’

  ‘You’re a rash laddie. Where would you have been if Mr Mackellar hadn’t agreed to pay?’

  ‘Not ruined – only furious. I’ve more than eighty pounds in the post office.’

  ‘And a credit to you it is.’ Aunt Elspeth was a just woman. ‘But how do you find the other students, Mungo? Your letters are good ones of their kind, but too full of your fancies to be relied upon.’

  ‘I find them very nice. Some of the freshmen from small places say nobody bothers or takes up with them. But I haven’t found that at
all.’

  ‘I can believe that.’ Aunt Elspeth didn’t offer this comment in any distinguishably approbatory tone. ‘But are they serious, the ones you take up with? This Ian Cardower, you’ve been staying with – what about him? He comes from a very frivolous class of society, it seems.’

  ‘Ian is quite as serious as I am.’ Mungo had resigned himself to the prospect of stiff inquisition. Being very fond of his aunt, he didn’t resent it in the least. But there was quite a lot that he wasn’t likely to make clear to her, since he was far from any comprehensive clarity himself. ‘Ian has been a great thing for me,’ he said firmly. ‘Far more than I can be for him.’

  ‘He’s certainly taken you among grand people.’

  ‘He’s taken me among very civilised people.’

  ‘And you’ve felt at home with them at once?’ The note of curiosity in which she had asked this seemed to strike Miss Guthrie as contrary to her principles, for she answered her own question without a pause. ‘And no great wonder if you have. For you’ll be a man of solid cultivation one day, Mungo Lockhart. And you’re a braw lad now.’

  Mungo was silent – and glad that he was able to scowl into the darkness unseen. Aunt Elspeth made him uncomfortable when she was taking pride in him. He liked her best in her most astringent mood. Possibly a consciousness of this informed her next remarks.