‘I knew him better than you did,’ said Jane, ‘and I think you’re being too emotional. I think you’re exaggerating what you feel. His death won’t make all that difference to us.’
‘No,’ said Mrs Arbuthnot. ‘I’m very sorry he’s dead, but it won’t make much difference.’
‘Would you like some brandy?’ asked Jane.
‘Yes,’ said Max, wiping his eyes. ‘Brandy and soda: that’s what I need.’
Jane went out, but not to the pantry. She ran upstairs to a bathroom, and looking at herself in a mirror was shocked to see the pallor of her cheeks. The sight of her distress so increased it that she knelt and was sick. Then she washed in cold water, and to repair the mask of misery that now looked at her from the glass, went to her own room.
She sat down and re-created, from pots and little boxes, a look of composure, and as her appearance improved she admitted to herself, not willingly, but by degrees, that the news of Yacky Doo’s death had brought her relief. At first she resisted the admission. It implied a feeling too callous to be her own; a fact too coarse and sour to swallow. She was glad he was dead…. It was true, and when she acknowledged its truth she felt much better. Her sense of relief became a sensation of freedom. Her consciousness of him had thrown a shadow that followed her wherever she went. But now there was no shadow, and she accepted her release with gratitude…. Within two or three days Simon, whom she loved, was going to the far side of the world, and to Simon she must give herself entirely. Now she could. Now there would be no one beckoning in the wings, no protest from a divided conscience. And now she could forget his last insult. She was single-hearted now. Yes, she thought, let him rest in peace. He’ll never trouble me again.
From her powder-puff she blew a little obscuring cloud against the mirror, and said ‘Forget what you saw.’ She went down to the pantry, and found a tray, glasses, and a bottle of brandy. She drank a glass — bottoms up, as if she were drinking a Russian toast — before returning to the others.
‘I’m sorry I’ve been so long,’ she said. ‘I had to go to the bathroom.’
‘Darling,’ said Simon, ‘it was a horrible shock for you.’
‘It was a shock for us all.’
‘I wish I’d known him better.’
‘We are all the poorer for what has happened this night,’ said Max lugubriously.
‘It’s very odd,’ said Mrs Arbuthnot, ‘that an active young man couldn’t take better care of himself. All of us, every day of our lives, have to cross roads, from one side to another … ’
‘I don’t want to talk about it any more,’ said Jane. ‘Do you mind if Simon and I go to bed now?’
‘Yes,’ said Simon. ‘I must be up early to-morrow.’
‘Take a drink with you,’ said Max.
‘Are you going to stay up much longer?’ asked his wife.
‘I don’t particularly want to. But I don’t want to go to bed either.’
‘I’m going to put on a record.’
‘Then I’ll have to go to bed,’ said Max, and took the brandy with him.
At four o’clock on the following afternoon — Monday afternoon — the manager of the theatre where The Wheel-barrow had been produced came to see Max in his office in Hill Street. He looked as if he had just left a nursing-home after a long illness, and his voice was as tremulous as his movement.
‘I had to go and identify him,’ he said. ‘The police rang me up last night. They knew who he was, of course, but formalities have to be respected, I suppose. And they wanted to know who were his nearest relations. But he has none, has he?’
‘He had a brother in the Navy who was killed on a Russian convoy. His mother died of drink and his father in prison. His father had two brothers who went to live in Vancouver Island, but I know nothing about his mother’s people. I never heard him speak of them.’
‘That has always been my impression: that he was entirely alone. — Well, it was a dreadful shock last night, and having to go and see him was even worse. Though he wasn’t as badly hurt as you might think. I mean visibly hurt. A fractured skull, but the face is unmarked. But to see him lying dead — it was terrible to know Yacky Doo was dead.’
‘Wait,’ said Max. ‘Now wait a moment. We’re both in need of comfort.’
He went to a cupboard and filled two generous, square-cut glasses with whisky and soda.
‘You haven’t heard the whole story yet,’ said the manager, and drank thirstily. ‘Here’s what came by the midday post.’
He gave Max the letter that Hector had written the day before, and drank again.
Max read aloud: ‘ “I send it because I, for a reason that you will soon know, must transfer my interest in the play to better hands.” — What does that mean?’
‘It can only mean one thing. But need anyone else know?’
‘I suppose you’re right,’ said Max. ‘But suicide’s no crime. Not in Scotland.’
‘I’m thinking of his reputation.’
‘I don’t see why a man shouldn’t take his own life if he wants to. It is his own life — and I’m on the side of the law.’
‘It isn’t everyone who’ll take so broad a view.’
‘In any case, we don’t know that he did commit suicide. “For a reason that you will soon know” seems to imply the intention of suicide, but was the intention carried out? I don’t think it was. Hector was perfectly sane, and no sane man would throw himself in front of a motor-car in the expectation of being killed outright.’
‘He was on the Dean Bridge.’
‘And perhaps he was going to throw himself over: is that what you’re thinking? But he didn’t. He was knocked down by a motor-car, and that isn’t suicide.’
‘So nothing need be said to harm his good name?’
‘I don’t see why it should. He’s written a will — the letter’s holograph, it’ll be accepted — in which you’re named as a legatee, and if the legacy’s of public interest the newspapers may want to quote it, and we can’t conceal it. But with a little bit of tact we can see that they only print the relevant sentences.’
‘Well, that’s a relief.’
‘But is your legacy going to be of any value, or has he left you a castle in Spain? What’s this letter from his agent that he speaks of?’
‘Here it is,’ said the manager.
‘My God,’ said Max. ‘Ten thousand dollars for an option? Does that make sense?’
‘No, in the ordinary way it wouldn’t. But I’ve just been talking to his agent, on the telephone, and the money has been paid in. What has been happening is this … ’
‘We’d better have another drink,’ said Max. ‘For a different reason this time.’
‘There have been two translations of The Wheelbarrow,’ said the manager. ‘Swedish and German. A week or two age it was produced, almost simultaneously, in Stockholm and Hamburg. — Yacky Doo wouldn’t go to see it, though I did my best to persuade him. I thought it would be so good for him. But no, he said he wasn’t interested. — Well, it was a great success, both in Hamburg and Stockholm. A hundred times more successful than when we did it here! And the Americans got interested at once. Two different agencies. They were bidding against each other for the option, that’s why it went to ten thousand dollars. And Yacky Doo’s agent says there’s no doubt at all that Hodges and Rumpelstein are going to make a musical of it, and you know what that means. It means a fortune.’
‘Would Hector have approved of its being turned into a musical?’
‘No,’ said the manager. ‘If he had lived he would have had nothing to do with it. He would have told his agent to give them back their ten thousand dollars.’
‘But you — now that you’re his legatee — you have a different idea?’
‘An idea that I’ve cherished for twenty years,’ said the manager, ‘is at last beginning to look feasible. The idea of building a National Theatre in Scotland.’
‘Will it give you enough to do that?’
‘No, not with wh
at’s left after taxation. But it will give me a foundation to build on. And I hope you’ll help me to put a roof on it.’
Now the look of a convalescent — the look of a man who had narrowly escaped the dangers of a long illness — which the manager had worn when he came in, had, by a subtle gradation of pallor and the tautening of the long, lean contours of his face, strangely become the ascetic enthusiasm of a visionary or saint, and his voice had lost its tremor, his voice became strong and vibrant as he expounded his great ambition.
‘A National Theatre,’ he said. ‘That’s been my aim for twenty years. And now it’s going to be more than that: it’ll be a national memorial to Yacky Doo! The memorial he deserves. There’s no one — but you know this as well as I do — there was no one of his generation who so proved to us all that a few lines of verse can be a more permanent heritage and a more enduring blessing than any contraptions of the scientists, or acts of Parliament that come from the great incubator at Westminster. A man who can play new tunes on our imagination — if they are good tunes — is the greatest of us all. And Yacky Doo did that. They weren’t revolutionary tunes that he played, but they were new with the newness that birch trees and the fields put on in spring. He was like Robert Burns in that. And like Robert Burns he wrote a lot of commonplace things, with a common but endearing touch in them, that soon became common property, and in the last few days — perhaps I move in more liberal circles than you do, and I’ve heard them — in the last few days his commonplace verses have been quoted as often as Burns’s bawdy rings that someone let loose on us a week ago. He deserves his memorial, Mr Arbuthnot, for he was the fiddler who stroked our dry strings into great music as well as into the little songs they’ve been singing in the streets. A National Theatre is the proper way to commemorate him, and because we don’t want to build it all on American money, I hope you’ll let me put you down for a first contribution of ten thousand pounds.’
‘God Almighty!’ exclaimed Max. ‘Ten thousand pounds!’
‘This isn’t a time to think in small sums. This is a great opportunity, and we can only use it if our imagination is generous. You’ve read what Yacky Doo wrote in his last letter: that he wanted you to be associated with his memory. He wanted you to take charge of the great enterprise that his genius has made possible. And if you will, then his memorial will be your memorial too. We all look for immortality in one way or another, and here’s your chance of it. A chance to live in the memory of men with your friend Yacky Doo.’
‘Yes,’ said Max, ‘he was my friend.’
He wiped a tear from his eye, and for the manager and himself poured another drink.
‘By God, I will!’ he said. ‘It’s immortality, and immortality at ten thousand pounds … ’
‘It’s a bargain,’ said the manager.
‘It’s a damned stiff price,’ said Max, ‘but I’ll pay it.’
From a drawer in his table he took a cheque-book, heavily bound in thick cardboard, and wrote the date. ‘Must I make it payable to you?’ he asked.
‘No,’ said the manager. ‘To the Hector Macrae National Theatre Memorial Fund.’
Max inscribed the cheque, and signed it. He turned it round and crossed it. But he did not tear it from the book.
‘With that in hand,’ said the manager, ‘I’ll write to the papers, and tell them of your munificent gift and the prospect of large sums from America. That’ll be a good beginning, and what’s well begun is half done. Now who’s the architect we should engage?’
‘I’ll think about that,’ said Max.
‘And a committee: we must have a committee.’
‘A very small one,’ said Max. ‘You and I and someone else.’
‘But it should be representative.’
‘Of what?’
‘Yes,’ said the manager, ‘of what? Of the best minds in the country, one would instinctively reply — but how do we know what the best minds in the country are thinking? Perhaps they’re not thinking about the theatre at all.’
The manager, by temperament and habit an abstemious man, had seldom drunk three large whiskies and soda between four and five o’clock in the afternoon. He had arrived in a state of emotional exhaustion, he had spent the last remnant of his strength in a moving appeal for his memorial theatre, and now his mind was lapsing into a not unhappy state of vacancy.
He leaned forward across Max’s broad table, and said, ‘Have you noticed that everyone’s at work again to-day? We’re back to normal. The fever’s vanished. The Dionysiac fever’s gone, and the temperature of Edinburgh is what it used to be. Normal. How do you account for that?’
‘In our latitude,’ said Max, ‘we live too far north to support enthusiasm of that sort for more than a few days. You need a warmer sun than we have to keep it up. I don’t know what started it, but I know what stopped it, and that’s climate and constitution. And if you ask me, everyone’s profoundly relieved that the fever has gone from us. It didn’t suit Edinburgh at all.’
‘It was the death of Yacky Doo that did it,’ said the manager. ‘The song of love turned into a great lament.’
He stood up, slightly unbalanced, and said, ‘My own bank is the National, and I’ll open a new account there with your most generous cheque.’
‘I think,’ said Max, ‘it would be sounder policy to keep it here. It will do you no good — no practical good — until you get the promise and assurance of another twenty thousand at least. But when you have twenty thousand pounds in promise or in hand, you let me know, and my cheque will be paid to your account. But till then it’s as safe here as it can be anywhere.’
‘Yes,’ said the manager, a little doubtfully. ‘Yes, I see that. But can I write a letter to the papers and say you have given us ten thousand pounds?’
‘You can say that I have promised ten thousand,’ said Max, ‘if the people of Scotland are prepared to contribute to a National Theatre, and a memorial to Yacky Doo, with comparable generosity.’
XI
The book — ‘That damned book!’ said Max — had not been found, and Mr Greenshaw was extremely angry. He had been questioned by the police. ‘In the Library!’ he exclaimed. ‘They came to see me in the Library!’ So loud and indignant was his voice that Max laid the telephone on his table and listened to it from a distance.
‘They called it a routine enquiry,’ Mr Greenshaw continued, ‘but it was absolutely clear — patently manifest and luminously obvious —that someone had accused me of stealing it. What they anticipated — what they looked forward to with their pale, dead eyes — was a shivering confession of white-faced guilt, recovery of the book, and a Roman triumph in which I, manacled I suppose, would be led through my own Library to the confinement of a noisome cell and exposure to ineffaceable shame and obloquy. Now who told them — this is what I insist on knowing — who told them I had stolen it?’
Max, in astonishment, picked up the telephone and said, ‘Are you admitting that you stole it?’ Then hurriedly put the instrument down again as it spoke with the fury of a trumpet.
‘I did not steal it! And I will not be pursued and pestered by maladroit detectives who come and look at me with eyes like dead mackerel.’
‘Someone has stolen it,’ said Max, ‘and the police were only doing their duty.’
‘Did you tell them to come and harass and hector me?’
‘No! I said nothing of the sort. All I said was that you came to my house the other night … ’
‘For the first time,’ said Mr Greenshaw, ‘and for the last!’
But in the circumstances of that week neither the loss of the book nor Mr Greenshaw’s displeasure could be given the full and serious attention they deserved. Simon and his regiment were on the eve of their departure for the perilous and distant island of New Brabant, and Max found himself moved, far beyond expectation, by a sentiment almost as old as humanity. He could hear in imagination the orderly tread of soldiers marching down an echoing wharf, and taste like tears the estranging sea. At breakf
ast on Tuesday morning Jane came to the table with a look of cold and disciplined sadness, that ill-fitted her young face, and for a superstitious moment it had seemed to him a widowed look. Simon had left her an hour before to go to the barracks at Redford. Max had never held emotion at arm’s length, but always let it come close, and at the breakfast-table it was he who had pulled a handkerchief and wiped his reddening eyes while his wife and his daughter looked at him with disapproval, and looked away, pretending to have seen nothing amiss.
Now in his office he thought again of soldiers through the centuries venturing out to foreign shores, and felt already a pricking in his eyeballs, when Hoyle his clerk came in and laid a visiting-card on his table.
‘He hasn’t an appointment,’ said Hoyle, ‘but he’s very anxious to see you if he can, and says he won’t keep you more than five minutes.’
‘That always means half an hour at least,’ said Max. ‘But I’ll see him.’
The manager of the theatre, melancholy but business-like in his black coat and striped trousers, came in and said, ‘I thought if I arrived early you might be able to spare me a few minutes. Only a very few minutes.’
‘Sit down,’ said Max. ‘I’ve lost one friend this morning. I don’t want to lose another.’
‘It’s about the funeral,’ said the manager. ‘All the arrangements are made, and there’s going to be a big turn-out. A really big turn-out! I’m sure of that. I’ve had to do everything in a great hurry, but the response has been truly remarkable. It’s a national occasion, and that is generally recognized. There will be an oration at the graveside, perhaps two, one by Sir Beaumont Macready, and the other by Sir Edward Avalanche, representing English literature. And, as you’ve probably seen in the Scotsman, we’ve been granted a special dispensation to have the interment in Greyfriars Churchyard. There hasn’t been a burial in Grey-friars for many years, as you know, but this is in recognition of Yacky Doo’s unique position in Scotland. It is, after all, no more than his due — but still, as you’ll be the first to admit, it’s an outstanding privilege, and because of that the cortège has to be organized with great care and propriety. Now, as you’re aware, there are no near relatives. No relatives at all, as a matter of fact. And what I very much hope is that you will consent to come in the first carriage with me. Sir Beaumont Macready and Sir Edward Avalanche will be in the second … ’
The Merry Muse Page 23