The Merry Muse

by Eric Linklater

  He was interrupted by the sound of a motor-horn in Hill Street, and Atkinson was quick to say, ‘It’s the boss, Mr Hoyle. It’s the maestro himself.’

  ‘I think I should go and warn him of a situation that he can’t have anticipated,’ said Hoyle, and after another anxious look at the ceiling, went out with an old man’s tottering speed. Atkinson, with no excuse but curiosity, quickly followed.

  ‘Come and help us with this packing-case!’ cried Max, when he saw them. ‘I want it brought inside. There’s a picture in it. I’ve bought a Landseer, a lovely bit of painting, Hoyle, and I want to take it up to my room and see how it looks there.’

  They carried the case into Hoyle’s room, and the picture, tied in a blanket of newspapers, was carefully extracted. Two or three times Hoyle tried to speak of the ladies in the room above — the ceiling was now still and untroubled — but Max, impatient of any topic other than art, put him off and would not listen. The picture was unwrapped, and Max fondly regarded it.

  ‘But I must see it in my own room!’ he said. ‘I think it’s just what I need there. What I’ve needed for a long time. I don’t know how I’ve got on without it. — Take it up, Atkinson, and be careful at the corner of the stairs.’

  ‘Mr Arbuthnot,’ said Hoyle.

  ‘What are you muttering about? You’ve been muttering away ever since I came in.’

  ‘I have something to tell you, Mr Arbuthnot, and you won’t listen to me.’

  ‘What do you think I’m doing? I’m listening now, aren’t I?’

  ‘Mrs Moberley is still here.’

  ‘Damnation!’

  ‘And Mrs Telfer is here too. They’re in your room.’

  ‘God damn it, Hoyle … ’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Arbuthnot, but it isn’t my fault. There was nothing I could do … ’

  But Max did not wait for an explanation. He went upstairs, two at a time, but just across the threshold of his room stopped, and stood in momentary amazement at what he saw.

  Their hair dishevelled, their faces tear-stained and bloody, Jane and Paula were at opposite ends of the room, and Atkinson, sorely embarrassed, was in a neutral corner half-hidden by Landseer’s Highland piper, which was upside down. No more blows had been struck, but in the increasing consciousness of pain and humiliation it seemed, to both Jane and Paula, that they had fought long and desperately. They stood as far from each other as the room allowed, and were still quietly sobbing. When they saw Max, their grief was renewed, and both, with little piteous exclamations, turned towards him. But now he had guessed the cause of their dispute.

  ‘No, no!’ he said. ‘Get back. Go away! —- For God’s sake, Atkinson, turn that picture the right way up! Put it on a chair against the wall. Over there. That’s where I want it.’

  ‘Father,’ said Jane …

  ‘Go and wash your face. You too, Paula. There’s a lavatory round the corner. Atkinson will show you where it is.’

  They went out, dumbly obedient to the harsh authority in his voice, and he closed the door behind them.

  I needn’t pretend, he thought, that I don’t know what made them come to blows. I’m the disputed frontier, there’s little doubt of that. But has Paula been boasting, or Jane playing the private investigator? One or the other — and I’m the bone of contention in the corpus delicti. Well, I’m not going to be bullied by either of them. Jane’s old enough to know the facts of life, and Paula’s got enough experience to know they shouldn’t be talked about. I’m not going to grovel and be contrite! But it’s a damned nuisance, and I’m inclined to blame Paula for it. She’s been boasting …

  Angry, and more worried than he would admit, he was walking to and fro, and as he turned he saw again — but, in its chosen position on the opposite wall, as if for the first time — the strong, shy figure of the young piper whom Landseer had painted, and his imagination was taken captive by the delight of beauty and his possession of it. The picture would satisfy the whole wall and transform his room. The old steel engravings could go into the corridor; he was tired of them. And when he had found the proper frame for it he would give a little sherry-party, here in his room, to let others admire it and applaud his perspicacity in finding a masterpiece painted by an artist whom it was the fashion to despise … He would have to ask his two partners, he supposed. They disapproved of him, he disliked them, and they saw each other as seldom as possible. But if he gave a party in the office — well, that was a small matter, and could take care of itself.

  He went to his big table, to sit and look at the picture from another angle, and on his table saw a large, square, manila envelope. In the excitement engendered by Landseer, he had forgotten all about it, but now he picked it up, opened it and saw the book was there, and felt suddenly a vast relief, a profound gratitude. He unlocked a drawer, put the book in, and re-locked it. Now at last it was safe.

  He stood up, and was conscious of an extraordinary sense of well-being. The picture had brought him luck, and he was out of the wood at last. — There was something in the young piper, so shyly playing his chanter, that moved him extremely. His youth, of course — but something more specific than that. And as he stared intently at the painted figure, Max realized that the boy looked very like himself, when he was that age. Not like enough to be a portrait, but perhaps the portrait of a cousin.

  This discovery increased his pleasure, and again he felt full of gratitude. But gratitude to whom, or to what? He had the picture on his wall and the book in a locked drawer — but who had brought the book to his office? His disbelief, his stubborn disbelief, in Paula’s story was revived, and it occurred to him that Jane might have discovered where Yacky Doo had gone, and got the book from him. Perhaps Jane had brought it, and that, perhaps, was why they had been fighting. Not about him, but for possession of the book.

  Well, if that were true, it would save him some embarrassment. But he felt slightly disappointed at the thought. It was deeply unpleasant, of course, to have been the cause of a physical tussle between two comely and well brought-up young women — but it was an uncommon experience for a man of sixty, and he was not sure that he wanted to be cheated of it, even for the sake of comfort.

  He sat down behind his table, and to help clear his thoughts lighted a cigar. Then the door opened, and Jane and Paula returned. They looked pale and subdued and a little puffy. They had washed, and tidied their hair, and made-up their faces with manifest discretion: there was no gaiety in their aspect, but the pallor of contrition. And pity for them ran into Max’s heart like the sudden, smooth-lipped flow of clear salt water on a shallow beach when the tide has turned. He would say nothing about the book — not yet —nor remind them of their shame and anger by asking for an explanation. He would, instead, let them share his own sense of well-being.

  ‘I’m very glad you’re both here,’ he said. ‘You’re going to have the privilege of being the first, except Thomson and myself, to see my new picture. There it is, and isn’t it a beauty? Come over here. You can see it better from here.’

  Obediently they stood, and looked at the Highland piper. But neither spoke. They had not Max’s gift of swift forgetfulness, his faculty of swinging quickly out of gloom and anger into a bright serenity, and they could not, in a moment, summon their critical faculties and bring an apposite, aesthetic judgment to their tongues. They looked, without comment, and Max, with a shade of impatience in his voice, was beginning to demonstrate some of the picture’s finer qualities when a tap at the door announced new visitors.

  Hoyle came in to say, ‘Mrs Youghal to see you, sir.’

  Jessie in full mourning, blackly gloved and hatted, marched firmly in, and said, ‘I’m a few minutes early for my appointment, Max, but I wasn’t going to give you the chance of complaining I was late — and perhaps going off to your club if I didn’t come in till three minutes past five.’

  Max abandoned his lecture on the painterly virtues of Landseer — he knew enough to say nothing about picture dealing in Jessie’s presen
ce — and introduced Paula.

  ‘She and Jane were at school together. Old friends. And her father’s an old friend of mine. Lord Ochiltree, a judge of the Court of Session.’

  Stiffly, and at maximum distance, Jessie shook hands with Paula, and said, ‘I came here for a simple purpose, and you know what it is. If you have other engagements, I shan’t take up more of your time than is necessary. If you give me the book, I’ll go at once.’

  ‘But there’s no hurry,’ said Max. ‘No hurry at all. Indeed there isn’t! Do you think I can’t spare a few minutes for my own sister?’

  ‘You were very good to me in the matter of the funeral,’ said Jessie, ‘and for that I’ll be grateful to the end of my days. But you haven’t always been so considerate.’

  ‘Now, now,’ said Max … ’

  ‘Don’t let’s start an argument,’ said Jessie. ‘Just give me the book and I’ll go.’

  ‘Well, if that’s your decision … ’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Then I hope you’ll be well advised, and as careful as I’ve been, in what you do with it next. Now where did I put it?’

  He took out his keys, and opening a drawer in his table pretended to search among the papers there. Jessie, small and upright in her chair, watched him intently, and Jane and Paula, neither of whom had spoken, waited like children at a Christmas party for the conjurer to produce a chicken or the Union Jack from his empty hand.

  ‘No, not there,’ said Max, and opened a drawer on the other side. His voice was complacent. ‘Ah, yes, here it is. Here is your property, Jessie, and take good care of it.’

  Jane came forward, and gave the envelope to her aunt.

  Jessie, with a cold, slow patience, took off her gloves and opened it. She took out the book, and carefully turned the leaves. She came to the last, and with a movement of sudden anger showed it, wide open, to Max.

  ‘Where are the hand-written pages?’ she demanded. ‘There were sixteen hand-written pages in the book I gave you, and they’re not here! This isn’t the book that Charlie had. It isn’t the book I entrusted to you!’

  IX

  On Friday morning Hector returned unwillingly to Edinburgh. The innkeeper at Longformacus was a sensible man, and when he had heard Hector’s story — or as much of it as Hector chose to tell him — he said at once, ‘Go back and tell Mr Arbuthnot exactly what happened. You had the book in your flat, you had several visitors, and after they had all gone you found the book had gone too. It’s not surprising. There’s only a small minority of the civilized world that’s honest, and a minimum of those few that won’t steal a book. A book of the sort you’ve lost would have tempted a saint; of the more broad-minded sort, you understand. So back you go, and tell Mr Arbuthnot who they were that came to see you, and let the police do the rest. You can solve nothing by running away.’

  It was good advice, but Hector took it ungratefully. Easy enough, he thought, to say ‘Tell Mr Arbuthnot. Tell him you’ve been a fool and lost his property’ — but a different thing, and by no means easy, to go and do it. Max was a formidable man, easily roused to anger, and very frightening in his anger. To Hector it still seemed that, for him, flight was the more appropriate action. Flight had been his immediate impulse when he discovered his loss. That was late on Tuesday night.

  To the visitors who came after Jane left him he had been a dull, indifferent host. The ash-tray that she threw at him had cut his forehead, and his head was aching. But physical pain was only a small part of his sorrow. He had wounded her more deeply than she had wounded him, but it was still impossible to think how else he could have behaved. She had called him a prig, a male prig, and that was yet another admission of the gulf between them: a gulf across which they vainly signalled with flags of a different code, and were angry because they could not read each other’s messages. Anger and sorrow and frustration bridged the gulf; there was no other crossing.

  And then his later visitors began to arrive. The three poets who drank together in Rose Street came to see him. Thomson, Max Arbuthnot’s chauffeur, brought a short story he had written, and bashfully asked if he would read it: Thomson sat on a wooden stool and wagged his tail whenever Hector spoke to him. Then an old friend from Wester Ross arrived, and the Lecturer in Gaelic Poetry at the University. A friendly policeman looked in, just for a moment, but a moment long enough to swallow a dram; and after him a divinity student too drunk to know why he had come.

  It was past midnight when the last of them went, and then, belatedly, Hector remembered the book, and looked for it, to put it in a safe place. But he could not find it.

  He made a more thorough search in the morning, after an almost sleepless night; and when he still could not find it, he fled in panic.

  Once before, escaping from the too-much noise and companionship of Edinburgh, he had found refuge in the lonely little hamlet on the southern slope of the Lammermuirs, and the innkeeper remembered him. The innkeeper was sympathetic when Hector told him he wanted to remain anonymous, and promised to rebuff enquiry. A certain newspaper, said Hector, lying prodigiously, had scented a mystery in his long association with Italian partisans during the war, and was pestering him to tell the full story. He appealed, successfully, to the innkeeper’s chivalry; but now, when he had confessed the true reason for his flight, the innkeeper sent him back to Edinburgh.

  On Friday morning he drove Hector to Duns, and put him on a bus to Galashiels. At Galashiels Hector had lunch, and just after two o’clock took train to Edinburgh. It was nearly four o’clock when his taxi from the station reached the mews behind St George’s Church, and as it stopped, but before he had opened the door to get out, Jane was beating on the window.

  ‘I was just going away when I saw you,’ she said. ‘It’s the second time I’ve been here to-day, and God knows how many times since Tuesday.’

  ‘It’s all right, you needn’t worry any longer,’ he said. ‘I have come to surrender, to give myself up. I took to flight, but the flight wasn’t successful. I didn’t go far enough.’

  He paid the driver, and opened the pale blue door of his flat. ‘Do you know the story,’ he said, ‘of the little Scotch soldier who ran away from La Bassée? It’s a story of the first war.’

  Jane didn’t reply, but as they went into his stalely smelling sitting-room she exclaimed, ‘For heaven’s sake open a window.’

  ‘It’s a charming story,’ he said. ‘The little man, the wee Jock, had been in the trenches for months and months, and felt at last that he had had enough of them. So he decided to run away, and off he pelted. Down a communication trench to the support line, and past that, by another communication trench to the reserve line, and past that, in open country now, till he came to a crossroads, and there he saw a group of Staff Officers, beautifully dressed and bright with gleaming brass and scarlet tabs. The tallest of them stopped him and said, “Who are you?”

  ‘ “No. 97632 Pte. Hamilton, J., Sir.”

  ‘ “And what are you doing here?”

  ‘ “I’m running away, Sir.”

  ‘ “Running away! Do you know who you’re talking to?”

  ‘ “No, Sir.”

  ‘ “I’m your Divisional General!”

  ‘ “Oh, Christ!” said the wee Jock. “I didna think I’d got as far back as that!” — But it wasn’t far enough, and I, like him, was stopped too soon.’

  Jane, without comment on the story, threw on his table the envelope she had been holding behind her back. ‘Do you recognize that?’ she asked.

  ‘Where did you find it?’

  ‘I stole it from you,’ she said. ‘You were abominably rude to me, the last time I saw you. Unforgivably rude! So I stole it to shame and humiliate you.’

  ‘And you succeeded. You punished me, and I took it badly. I’ve been very unhappy for the last few days. Are you satisfied?’

  ‘Unfortunately, no.’

  ‘How many more strokes have I to suffer?’

  ‘I stole the wrong thing,’ said Jane. �
��That isn’t the book my father gave you. That isn’t worth ten thousand pounds.’

  Hector took the book from its envelope, looked for its latter leaves, and failed to find the pages in manuscript. ‘No,’ he said, ‘indeed it isn’t. And that means you’re not telling the truth. You may have stolen this, but you didn’t steal it from me.’

  ‘But I did!’

  As hurried as a stream in spate —facts floating on the current of her words like fragments of half-melted ice — Jane told her story, and Hector, though there were parts of it he could not quite understand, forbore to stop and question her, but waited patiently till it had run its course. For a minute or two he sat and thought.

  Then he said: ‘There are parts that aren’t quite clear, but let’s ignore them. I think I have followed you, in the main, and if so, there are three possible explanations. The first is that your friend Mrs Moberley substituted this copy for the original.’

  ‘No, I’m sure she didn’t. When Aunt Jessie said this wasn’t the book — not her book — Paula was just as surprised as I was.’

  ‘Well, that brings us to the next possibility. Was it done at the Gargoyle? The envelope you took lay there overnight. If Fred the barman, or anyone else who was there, had the critical knowledge to recognize an original Burns manuscript, and if he, or one of his colleagues, was so fortunate as to have in his possession this common copy of The Merry Muses, he could easily have taken one and substituted the other.’

  ‘Do you think that likely?’

  ‘No,’ said Hector sadly. ‘It’s most unlikely. I lack even elementary intelligence.’ ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know why, but here’s proof of it.’ And he showed her, on the fly-leaf of the book, the blue impression of a rubber stamp. ‘I have just seen it,’ he said.

  ‘What does it signify?’

  ‘That this copy belongs to the National Library of Scotland — and therefore the nigger in the woodpile is my friend Mr Greenshaw. I went to see him last Monday, and showed him the copy your father gave me. He found several other copies, and we compared them. And when I was going … ’