The Merry Muse

by Eric Linklater

  Hoyle, his clerk who had been with him for thirty years, had followed Max upstairs, and now, as Max stood for a moment at the door of his room, he waited with a look of disapproval on his old, pale face — but as Max had no more to say, he went slowly and disapprovingly down again.

  ‘I’ve been waiting a hell of a long time for you,’ said Paula, as Max went in. ‘And there aren’t many men I’d wait for: do you realize that?’

  He closed the door, and she, moving quickly, came and kissed him lightly, three or four times, on cheeks and mouth.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she demanded. ‘And what have you been doing? You smell of salt, you taste of salt, like an old pirate — though in those clothes you look more like the undertaker’s man. What have you been doing?’

  Disengaging himself, Max laid his top hat on a table, and took off his thick, dark overcoat. ‘I’ve been burying my brother-in-law,’ he said. ‘He wanted to be buried at sea, so I had to go to sea with him.’

  ‘At heart,’ said Paula, ‘you’re a pure romantic. Burying people at sea! How old are you?’

  ‘Just the right age for you,’ said Max. ‘But in spite of that, I’m a respectable Edinburgh lawyer, and I’ve told you that you’re not to come here.’

  ‘But I had to! That man Bruce you sent me to — you said he was very clever, and the best man for divorce in Scotland … ’

  ‘So he is.’

  ‘But I don’t like him. He won’t believe me. He doesn’t believe a thing I tell him.’

  ‘Who would?’

  ‘Anyone with decent feelings! Oh, what a brute you are!’

  ‘I told you he was the best man for your purpose, but I said you would have to find a convincing story … ’

  ‘I told him the truth!’

  ‘I find it difficult to believe that.’

  With an expression of returning enjoyment on his grim face, Max sat down behind his table. It was a large and ponderous table, adorned with a large and ponderous silver inkstand and a silver cigar-box. His arm-chair, upholstered in green leather, was made for comfort. ‘Very difficult,’ he said, and taking a cigar from the box, began carefully to remove the band. But Paula, in a sudden turbulent advance, knocked the cigar from his fingers, and sat herself on his knee.

  ‘I don’t know why I put up with you,’ she said. ‘You’re cruel — you’re bloody cruel — but if only I’d met you three years ago … ’

  ‘Would your Mr Moberley have been saved a lot of trouble?’

  ‘Don’t talk about him! He isn’t a man, he’s a collector. Like a stamp collector. He looks for nice, new specimens, all in mint condition, and buys them. But after he’s stuck them in his album, he loses interest in them.’

  ‘He shouldn’t have got tired of looking at you.’

  She bent and kissed him again. ‘My God,’ she said, ‘you’re as salt as old seaweed!’

  She stood up, and undoing her coat, swept it back to show her figure tautly displayed in a tightly fitting jersey and a short tweed skirt. ‘It’s worth a little attention, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘More than he gave it, after six months: that American bastard!’

  Max looked at her with a lively approval. She was uncommonly like the beautiful Mrs Moncrieffe whom Raeburn had painted, and he prided himself on having discovered the resemblance. In expression she was bolder, as in temper she was much the harder; but the likeness was indisputable.

  ‘You’re a beauty,’ he said. ‘The first time I saw you, I thought your proper place was on canvas in the National Gallery. But the next time I thought of a better place. Not on canvas, but a sheet.’

  ‘That’s a compliment,’ she said, ‘but what’s it worth? I could fall in love with you — but, oh, hell, there’s no point in that. What I want is my freedom. I’m young yet … ’

  ‘Come here,’ said Max.

  ‘No, I won’t! I’ve admitted too much, and I know what you think. You think it’s the old men — old men like you — who get the best girls nowadays, because young men can’t afford to give them what they want. But you needn’t think I belong to you, just because — well, because of that time in the shooting lodge, and then the other night after dining with Tom and Mona. I’m not your property, and you’d better not think I am.’

  ‘Come here,’ said Max.

  ‘I won’t! Or if I do … ’

  ‘What are you going to ask for now?’

  ‘The other night, after we’d dined with Tom and Mona, you told me about that book you had. The book that’s worth — so you said — ten thousand pounds. But do you know where it is now?’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Perhaps I do and perhaps I don’t. And if you want me to tell you … ’

  ‘Where is it?’ demanded Max, rising from his chair and leaning forward on his table with menace in his eyes and posture.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’ said Paula, in a tone of schoolgirl’s disdain.

  ‘You’ll soon tell me,’ he said, and pursued her across the room. She retreated, and deftly avoiding him dodged to the other side. Again he advanced, and she, with a dancing step that mocked his heavy figure and three-score years, let him come close before she dodged him again. But she underestimated him, for now he swerved, moving swiftly and swaying from his knees, as many times in his youth he had swayed to bring down a fast-running, jinking three-quarter — and taking her round the middle brought her down with a crash on to the fine Axminster that covered his floor …

  In the room below his office, Hoyle his clerk, and Atkinson a young accountant, looked up with some anxiety to the ceiling. The houses in Hill Street were old, and many of their upper floors depended on timbers whose original stability had weakened, whose strength dry rot and worms had eaten. The clerks and lesser people who sat on the ground floor were accustomed to the shaking tread of their seniors overhead. But this was a shock beyond all previous experience, and as a few flakes of plaster descended from the ceiling, and fell upon the deed that Hoyle was copying, on the domestic accounts that Atkinson was balancing, the younger man looked up and said, ‘Well, Mr Hoyle, what do you think they’re doing now? Is she teaching him dancing, or all-in wrestling?’

  ‘Mr Arbuthnot,’ said Hoyle, ‘may have dropped a book. There is no need for a more fanciful explanation. And if you want to finish your work before six o’clock — ‘

  ‘All right, all right,’ said the young accountant. ‘I was just wondering — if I were a rich man I’d be doing the same — but don’t take offence, Mr Hoyle, I was only making a joke.’ And brushing from his ledger a flake of plaster, he resumed his work.

  As Max and Paula lay on the floor, wrestling with a fierceness that was half pretence but half the recurrent dawn (that bright perennial miracle) of simple passion, she said to him, ‘If I tell you where it is, and who’s got it… ‘

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, no, you don’t,’ she answered.

  ‘But there’s something else I want to know … ’

  ‘No, no!’

  ‘You want it too. And this — I tell you this — this is what’s in my mind. I want something else, something better, than a day-to-day dullness of life. These dull, damned people that I’ve lived with all my life — I’m sick and tired of them — I want something better, more, than they have ever thought of. Will you come with me if I go? I don’t know where. Jamaica for a start, or the Bahamas. Anywhere you like. If I say, let’s cut and run, will you come too?’

  ‘Yes, if you want me to. But you wouldn’t dare!’

  ‘I would — if you’ll come with me.’

  ‘Now — or any time you like.’

  In the room below, the attention of Hoyle and the junior accountant was again directed to the curious, rhythmic movement of the ceiling. For a little while they stared at it with bewilderment and a wild surmise; and then, as another flake of dislodged plaster fell on his ledger, Atkinson let out a wistful sigh.

  ‘If I know anything,’ he said …

  ‘You know very littl
e,’ said Hoyle, ‘but if your figures agree, I think you can close your ledger and go home. And remember this: that no one who wishes advancement in his profession, ever says anything about what he has seen or heard during office hours.’

  ‘Darling!’ said Paula, on the floor above, and caressing her elderly lover, ran affectionate fingers through his thick crop of silver hair. ‘You darling!’ she said again. And then, ‘My God, what’s this? What the hell is this?’

  Between thumb and forefinger she held a small fragment of some hard, sharp substance that she had discovered in his hair; and sitting up, she invited his inspection of it.

  ‘I found it in your hair,’ she said, and showed him a spicule of bone.

  ‘By God,’ said Max, ‘it’s a bit of poor old Charlie!’

  VII

  A Strange thing had happened — was happening — to Edinburgh. That Edinburgh should be a host to the exotic, the unexpected, was, in fact, entirely congruous with the unruly course of its long history; but those who had only a superficial knowledge of the city were greatly astonished when Edinburgh, or much of it, showed the unmistakable signs of having been infected by a Dionysiac frenzy. ‘We thought,’ they said, ‘that Edinburgh, of all places, was immune from that sort of thing.’

  The three poets who drank stout together in a pub in Rose Street had no difficulty in diagnosing the ailment — if such it could be called — or in deducing the source of infection.

  ‘It’s the repetition of an old story,’ said the tallest of them. ‘After too much rationalism, too long and insistent a course of rationalism, there is always a revulsion, and nature comes into her own again. Dionysus was the god of nature — festive nature, all unbuttoned — and the rationalism he’s now upsetting is the dislocated, civic sort under which we live. It isn’t reasons of our own that form it, but the reasoning of those who rule us. We’ve sacrificed our liberty to make an entity that compels us, on the one hand, to carry its burdens, and, on the other, to accept its benefactions. We have created, almost voluntarily, a state that is both intolerant and benign, and the rulers we have elected, having realized and rationalized their necessary function, have wrapt us in a cocoon of by-laws, edicts, statutes, schedules, and final demands — and not content with that, have caught us like herring in a net. It is against the minute reticulations of a cloying tyranny that the ghost of Dionysus is now struggling.’

  ‘The ghost of Dionysus disguised as the ghost of Robert Burns,’ said the shortest of the poets.

  ‘Burns was a village incarnation of the god. As lawless as the climate of Scotland permitted. It was a Dionysiac quality, in his poetry as in his person, that gave him his influence and has kept his memory alive. But much of his poetry is overrated.’

  ‘Where, do you think,’ asked the smaller of his friends, ‘have these new pieces come from? Here’s a set of verses I’ve never seen before — I was given it to-day: copies are going from hand to hand, all over the town — and compared with those dreary bits of bawdry in The Merry Muses, in the edition we all know, it’s daybreak to a traffic light. And what a day it proposes!’

  ‘I have another,’ said the tallest of them. ‘Look at this: it’s quite unknown and only Burns could have written it. I showed it to Celia last night. She had seen it an hour or two before, and was waiting for me. Ready. Till then she had been as chaste as Britomart, or, in a lower assessment, stubborn. She told me that copies were flying through the gloaming like starlings coming home to roost. And they, quite certainly, are the carriers of the — what did we call it?’

  ‘The Dionysiac infection.’

  ‘The Dionysiac infection. — But where they come from, no one knows. Someone has unearthed a new manuscript: that’s obvious. But why have we not been told who he is? Why have we not seen it?’

  ‘The old ones, the dreary old ones from The Merry Muses, they’re circulating too. And though we know them, and deride them, there are many to whom they’re a revelation. The young, the illiterate — the newly hatched illiterates of modern schools — they, I suppose, are swallowing those old whimsies from the stable and the byre like catnip.’

  ‘And carrying the infection farther?’

  ‘I found it impossible to buy a stamp at the General Post Office to-day.’

  The poet of middle size, who as yet had not spoken, now interrupted to say, ‘Late this afternoon I walked down from Newington. Down Newington Road and Clerk Street, down Nicolson Street and across the Bridges. And never in my life have I seen so strange a spectacle. Though there was no need for it, at that hour, the shops were all lighted up — and, as you know, nearly the whole length of that long tedious thoroughfare is walled with shops: shops of every sort, selling underclothes and bicycle tyres, ironmongery and cheap furniture, bird-cages and ready made suits and tea-pots — oh, everything — and though they were all lighted, as if for festival, there was no one in them! Neither shop-keepers nor shop-assistants nor customers! Everyone was out on the street, some dancing, or singing, some already paired off and sliding away down lanes and closes, alley-ways, secret passages to darkness and isolation. Trade, business, commerce, had come to a stop: the people were enjoying themselves, old and young, striplings and ancient waddlers. Indecently fondling, patting and doting, sucking long kisses from withered or milk-soft lips, and crooning a hill-billy’s yearning or a Jacobite’s forsaking love against the bright windows of an empty grocery or desolated emporium. There is, opposite Chambers Street, a large book-shop: it only was crowded, with people clamouring for poetry-books — not of the modern sort, but the old-fashioned kind that did not fear to speak of love, beauty, and kindliness beneath a hedgerow bright with roses. What a trade that shop was doing! But no other took a penny, so far as I could see.’

  ‘I,’ said the shortest poet, ‘came another way. By Eglinton Crescent, and Chester Street, and Drumsheugh Gardens — and there, I need not tell you, are the fine tall houses of our Victorian prosperity, now transformed, for the most part, into nursing homes and insurance offices. — What do they insure against? Infidelity and loss of faith, loss of love and decay of youth? No, nothing like that, I suppose. But against something, probably of little moment, and people pay them for it, and their windows are always uncurtained so that passers-by can see how strenuously their clerks and their accountants, male and female, juggle with figures and like acrobats on invisible wires balance their great, unwieldy ledgers. But not to-night! Oh no! To-night those lighted windows disclosed sweet scenes that Watteau might have painted — Watteau or Boucher — the office-tables, the typewriters, filing-cabinets, adding-machines and blotting-paper were but the background for many a fête galante, and the little typists were all exposing their adorable breasts to the passionate, unpractised and maladroit address of the ardent but unsophisticated graduates of business schools, who, having shared their toil, are now enjoying their caresses. Ah, those translucent windows!’

  For some little time, while they drank more stout, the poets maintained a thoughtful silence. Then the tallest said, ‘As I was coming down the Mound, I was overtaken by a squad of policemen, walking smartly with cape on shoulder, and at the foot of the Mound they met a group of girls, singing Gaelic songs, who promptly surrounded them. In the crowd that quickly gathered, an old man told me that some were members of a Gaelic choir from the island of Lewis — that stark and combative land — and the others lived in Morningside: a most respectable part of our city. They were about to compete, in song, for a silver cup presented by some well-meaning busybody, but in the excitement of the day they had forgotten their antagonism and decided they were all of the Dionysiac party. And now, as they encircled the embarrassed posse of constables, they began to sing, with enticing voices and irresistible gestures, a verse of the Bard’s most engaging ditty:

  “Wha will crack to me my lane?

  Wha will mak me fidgin fain?

  Wha will kiss me o’er again?

  The rantin dog, the daddie o’t!”

  ‘The consequence was that within a
few minutes the posse dissolved, and so did the choirs from Morningside and the long island. For the constables, each blossoming into a nosegay of exultant girls, retired to the darkening slopes of Princes Street Gardens, and left the traffic to look after itself. And presently from the Gardens came a chorus of gentle rapture like the moan of doves in immemorial elms. — Yes, Tennyson said it first, but it came so immediately to my ears that I felt it truly mine.’

  Again they drank some stout; and the poet of middle size remarked, ‘Praise God for love and barley liquors. Both bring release. The release we need, not only from the net and the cocoon — from the reticulations of a cloying tyranny — but from fear. Two fears, both simple and both repressed. We are frightened that chaos will come again. We do not speak of it — not often do we admit it to ourselves — but the fear is there, of fission and fusion and Hiroshima written across the map of Europe. Praise God for the umbrella called love, that shuts out the prospect. — Are Celia and Sylvia coming to-night?’

  ‘They said they would come, but they may have been waylaid and already laid. Such is the temper of the town. — But what is your other fear?’

  ‘Your other fear! Our common fear. The fear instinctive in all slaves. For we’re the slaves of the new economy and the new luxury of life. Slaves to a motor-car and a television set, a washing-machine and an electric iron, none of which is paid for, but each of which tyrannically cuts with the overseer’s whip a quivering slice of pounds-shillings-and-pence from the monthly haunch of our livelihood. All the world’s in debt, and fearful of its inability to pay the next instalment. But love, for a little while, releases us from that fear too, and on a bed of which one leg only belongs to us — to the soft music of a gramophone that will hold us in bondage for eleven months — warmed by an electric heater that may be truly ours next April — and blissfully clean from immersion in a tiled bath on which we have paid one fourteenth of its eventual price, we lose ourselves in that perennial and eternally improbable bliss — we turn our back on life and die in ecstasy a little death,’