The Merry Muse

by Eric Linklater

  That was two years ago: a little more. She had met Simon when she was staying with a school-friend in Hampshire, and married him three months later. Simon, at that time, was second-in-command of the 2nd Carabiniers (The Duke of Rothesay’s Dragoon Guards) and for nearly a year they had lived in Germany, with the regiment. Then, when they were looking forward to a period of home service, they were separated. The regiment came back to England, but Simon went to Cyprus. In the late war in Italy he had served, with distinction, in an irregular force that specialized in working behind the German lines, in collaboration with Italian partisans, and this experience, it was thought, would be useful in the troubled condition of Cyprus. Their separation lasted a twelvemonth, and Simon, when he returned, protested that all his labours had been in vain, and his time wasted. He was rewarded, however, with command of his regiment, which was now in Redford Barracks on the outskirts of Edinburgh.

  Jane welcomed him home with exuberant delight. His return released her from an affair that had not much worried her conscience until it began to bore her; when it worried her persistently. She had hardly troubled to conceal her pleasure when, with a letter from Simon dancing in her handbag, she had told her lover that she could not see him again. He had behaved very well. He had made no complaint, but resuming that look of half-melancholy, half-scornful detachment from the world in which he had first appeared to her, had said good-bye and withdrawn to some far retreat in the western highlands or islands. Rejoicing in her freedom, Jane had met her husband in a mood of April’s innocence and gaiety, and promptly discovered, not only that she loved him more than ever, but had truly loved no one else.

  For a couple of months they were entirely happy, but then came a rumour that the regiment was to go overseas again, and presently rumour was verified. Orders were received to begin draft-leave immediately, and prepare for embarkation. But Malaya was not a destination that brought unhealing misery to the mind, for it was quickly assumed that wives and families would go with the regiment, and the more resilient soon began to talk about the pleasures of life in an easy, tropical climate which Penang and Kuala Lumpur so abundantly offered. Not until Simon, at the breakfast-table, had idly suggested that the huge and savage island of New Brabant might be their ultimate goal had Jane considered her future with real foreboding. Her temper was already unsettled by the letter which the morning post had brought.

  She had it with her, as she walked by Ravelstone Dykes towards the city; and taking it from her bag, she read it again:

  I once told you that I had lived for almost a year on the threshold of suicide, with the door half-open; and there were several voices that asked me in. The voice of reason said there was no one in the world for whom I very much wanted to live, and without someone or something to live for, life was really not worth the effort. The voice of pity (sounding always a little flat) promised me the doubtful comfort of oblivion. And the voice of self-indulgence — to whom I was naturally drawn, though her accent was common — pleaded with me to lie down and sleep.

  Intermittently — Friday was their best day — I listened to these voices for almost a year. But then they grew tired, and the argument sounded trite, the solicitude false, and the cajoling voice repelled me. So I shut the door, and went away.

  But now it is open again, and the voices are fresh in my ear when I wake.

  Will you come and tell me not to listen?

  She read it twice, loitering on the pavement, and then in anger tore it into small pieces and threw them in the gutter. Her anger was pettish and unworthy of her — that she knew — but still she felt it was not the kind of letter that should be inflicted on a girl of her sort. — She was modest enough to refer to herself, quite often, as ‘a girl of my sort’: she knew the conditions and limitations of her life, as well as its advantages, and she had no wish to extend her experience too far, or deepen it too much. Her mother, though wrong in detail, was right in thinking she was too easily contented. — And therefore (her pace grew quicker, more angrily staccato, as she reached her conclusion) it was outrageous to write to her in such a way: to pretend he was in his suicidal mood again, and it was her duty to save him from it!

  His letter had not greeted her — there was no salutation to Dearest Jane or Darling Jane that a man in love would surely have written — but coolly, as it seemed, he resumed a conversation which had been broken off three months before; and expected her to respond. Curtly, arrogantly, he had signed it with the single initial E. E for Eachain, the Gaelic for Hector. And how misleading that was, for the nearest pronunciation that any ordinary person could achieve was Yachin, with a guttural in the middle if the throat would stand it. His Highland friends, those who spoke Gaelic, called him Eachain Dubh — Black Hector, it meant — and as they said it, with the whisper of the Atlantic wind and Atlantic grace in their voices, it was melodious enough; but his hangers-on, the sycophants, the bar-flies who clustered round him when he was drinking, made a mockery of his name and, competing to buy whisky for him, cried, ‘What’ll you have, Yacky Doo?’

  She herself had called him that, at the long-delayed end of their first meeting, a year ago. He had been introduced to her, with perfect propriety, as ‘Hector Macrae, whom you know already by reputation, Mrs Telfer, as everyone in Scotland does.’ That was in a highly respectable flat in Moray Place, but the evening had stretched like elastic, it had gone on to a pub in Rose Street — to meet the composer who was writing incidental music for Hector’s play — and then to dinner at the Gargoyle, and to someone else’s flat, she could not remember where, but by that time she had been persuaded to take a small part in the play, which was to be produced by a local repertory company that usually called on a few amateurs to fill the lesser roles. And Hector had driven her home in a rattle-trap car, ten years old at least, and kissed her closely in the staid doorway of the house on Corstorphine Hill. She, having drunk too much, had giggled, kissed again, and said, ‘Yacky Doo! I never thought I’d kiss a man called Yacky Doo!’

  She never did achieve the proper pronunciation of his name. She never really tried to. At their second meeting — he asked her to lunch a few days later — she found herself mustering, instinctively, a resistance to him. She had no objection to the arrogance of his appearance — he was not very tall, he did not appear to be robust, but the darkness of his hair and his eyes, the pallor of his cheeks, were the envelope of a marmoreal composure — but no, that caused her no embarrassment. She had dined and danced a score of times with men as handsome as Hector. What upset her was his cold indifference to the fact that he and she, meeting for the first time a few nights before, had only parted, for the sake of an almost abandoned discretion, after an embrace so passionate as to excite and alarm her well-bred disinclination to passion. And of that, it seemed, he had no memory at all. He never spoke of it, never referred to their drive in the rattle-trap car. And that indifference — or, as she preferred to think of it, that assumption of indifference — deeply offended her. She resolved never to submit to him. She had toyed, however, with the romantic thought of compelling him to submit to her.

  Over the luncheon-table he had spoken mainly of the part she was to take in his play. ‘Don’t try to act,’ he said. ‘If you speak my lines clearly, with a proper respect for their meaning, you’ll do all that’s needed. Actors have been the ruin of the theatre — there’s little really matters in a play beyond what the dramatist says — and actresses, of course, since the daughter of Herodias, have done nothing but use the stage to promenade their hips. Don’t do that.’

  ‘In the part you have given me,’ she said, ‘there is very little chance to use my hips.’

  ‘You will find others,’ he said, and called for his bill. As they parted he said, ‘You should use another shade of lipstick. That doesn’t really suit you, does it? And there’s too much on your lower lip.’

  When she got home, she rang up the manager of the repertory theatre in which Hector Macrae’s play was to be produced, and said she was giving up her
part. The manager was dismayed. He pleaded with her to reconsider her decision — she was exactly the type they needed, she was the only example of the type they knew of — and when she still refused, he asked if he might come and talk to her after dinner. ‘I know your father,’ he said. ‘We are greatly indebted to your father — and I think I am right in saying that he has a very high opinion of Hector Macrae.’

  The manager came out to the house on Corstorphine Hill, and Max Arbuthnot, still at the dinner-table, said, ‘Sit there. Give him a glass. Have you had your dinner? Well, have some port.’

  He let Mrs Arbuthnot retire, but Jane had to stay and listen to what they said; and both were loud in their praise of Hector Macrae and his genius. The manager of the theatre called him Yacky Doo; but Max referred to him more formally.

  ‘Robert Burns,’ said the manager, ‘Hugh MacDiarmid, and Yacky Doo: they are Scotland’s poets — and you can’t deny your service to a true poet, Mrs Telfer.’

  The manager wore always the managerial uniform of black coat and waistcoat, striped trousers, a white collar and a grey silk tie with an artificial pearl in it. He was a pale-faced, pale-eyed, rather haggard-looking man of indeterminate age: of no apparent distinction except when he was arguing the cause of his beloved theatre; and then the light of a passionate conviction so elevated and ennobled him that his city clothes, with a little dandruff on the shoulders of the coat, looked like the uniform of some dedicated corps of Death’s Head Hussars. In such a mood he had taken a thousand pounds from Max Arbuthnot when simultaneously he had had to renew the lease of his theatre and rebuild its roof. And when he spoke of his poetic trinity, there was a reverence in his voice that seemed to shake with the tumult of psalms the good, complacent, middle-class air above the table.

  Her father joined the attack. ‘I don’t speak Gaelic myself,’ he said. ‘I wish I did. It’s a splendid language; a poet’s tongue, with a fine capacity for being bawdy, if that’s your mood. And Hector Macrae, I’m told, is the best Gaelic poet since — what’s he called? — Duncan Ban — and that other fellow…’

  ‘Alexander Macdonald?’ suggested the manager.

  ‘Yes; or some such name. Anyway, since the eighteenth century. Well, now, you can’t disappoint a man of that calibre. And, of course, I knew his father: remember that.’

  ‘I don’t suppose Hector would thank me for remembering him,’ said Jane.

  ‘Why not? He was a first-class shot and a damned good golfer. Damned good soldier too. He got a double D.S.O. in the first war.’

  ‘But he rather spoilt his record by dying in prison,’ said Jane.

  ‘He knew nothing about money: that was his trouble. His clients lost a lot — I admit that — but he lost everything. It was his partner you should blame; well, mainly. Anyhow, he died of chronic constipation and a broken heart, poor chap — couldn’t stand being locked-up, and those shocking privies they have in gaol — so whatever wrong he did, he paid for it.’

  ‘In any case,’ said the manager gently, ‘it’s Yacky Doo we’re concerned with, not his father.’

  ‘Hector has a good war-record too.’

  ‘And judging by the way he behaves, he may continue to follow his father’s example,’ said Jane.

  ‘What you’re referring to happened several years ago,’ said the manager, ‘when he was in a state of great depression.’

  ‘He tried to commit suicide,’ said Jane, ‘and that’s a crime; or should be.’

  ‘Not in Scotland,’ said her father. ‘No, not in Scotland. We’ve a better appreciation of the rights of the individual than they have in England on that subject. And that’s how Hector got away with it.’

  ‘The verse he made,’ said the manager, ‘became popular overnight. Everyone knows it.’

  ‘I’ve heard it twenty times,’ said Jane, ‘and I don’t want to hear it again.’

  ‘I don’t pretend it’s great poetry,’ said her father, ‘but in the circumstances … ’

  ‘It was spontaneous,’ said the manager. ‘First in Gaelic, then in English.’

  ‘He was found sitting on a bridge, somewhere in Wester Ross, with an old-fashioned razor in his hand,’ said Jane. ‘A man who was fishing there, an Englishman, stopped and asked him what he was doing, and Hector said he was going to commit suicide. So the Englishman grabbed him, twisted his arm and took the razor from him, and threw it in the river.’

  ‘And then,’ said her father, ‘Hector took the Englishman to the village police station, and charged him with assault. Now then … ’

  ‘If you call that a creditable story, I don’t!’

  ‘But when the case was heard,’ said the manager, ‘when it came before the Sheriff, then, you’ll admit, Yacky Doo was brilliant. Quite brilliant.’

  ‘The Sheriff was very hard on him to begin with.’

  ‘He wanted to know something about him. What he had done in the war, and so on. And about his marriage — he was very sympathetic over that — and why, after living half his life in England, he had come back to Scotland.’

  Carefully Max Arbuthnot refilled his glass, and passed the decanter. ‘I was there,’ he said. ‘I went to help him, if I could — the son of an old friend — but he didn’t need me. He could look after himself. He didn’t hesitate a moment when the Sheriff said, “And what was your reason for coming back to Scotland?” It came out as naturally as tipping a bottle. In Gaelic first, and then, when the Sheriff said, “There may be some here who haven’t your advantages, Mr Macrae. Perhaps you could give me your reply in English” — he just thought a moment, and answered:

  “There are no beauties in England

  As tall as The Girls of Kintail,1

  And little respect for property

  Where a man can’t pour out his own ale.”

  Well, that left the onus on the Sheriff: he had to show the superiority of Scots law, and admit that Hector had a valid title to his own gullet. So the Englishman was found guilty of assault, and bound over for a year.’

  ‘And now, for the sake of a scrap of doggerel that became popular,’ said Jane, ‘you call Hector a great poet.’

  ‘No, no!’ said the manager earnestly. ‘Yacky Doo’s reputation is soundly established. Three volumes of poetry, with translations into French, German and Norwegian, as well as English, and now this play, The Wheelbarrow. Some people call him the Gaelic Lorca … ’

  ‘I only read him in English,’ said Max, ‘and what strikes me is his classical quality. I’m thinking of the epigrams, of course. To get a proper comparison with them you’ve got to go back to the Greek Anthology.’ He sipped his port, and harvested his diminishing memories of the Greek Anthology. ‘Simonides,’ he said at last. ‘He reminds me of Simonides.’

  ‘Whatever the precise nature of his poetic gifts,’ said the manager, ‘you must admit that he has quality. And this play of his … ’

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ said Max, ‘but it’s damned good. And you’re a bigger fool than I think if you give up your part in it.’

  ‘It may be a good play,’ said Jane, ‘but I don’t like him.’

  ‘Does he expect you to?’ asked her father.

  ‘Of course not!’

  ‘Then I don’t see what you’ve got to grumble about. So stop making a nuisance of yourself and I’ll buy you a new frock. And now go and talk to your mother, or she’ll think we’re teaching you bad habits.’

  She had found her mother listening to a very noisy record by Bix Beiderbecke, and it was hard to explain her difficulty against the pulse of savage melancholy. Nor was her mother much inclined to listen to her. She had been for many years a devoted wife and a devoted mother, but now her devotion survived only in form: its spirit was exhausted. Within the last year or so she had found herself subject to the mild hallucinations of loneliness — of being lost in an unknown town, or marooned on a large and featureless island — and against these unpleasant sensations (they were not disabling) she had found the multitudinous noise and plural violence
of jazz, contained within a sedulously ordered house, a simple and effective remedy. She was still not sure that she liked it, and sometimes thought that in using it to exorcize her fear she was treading on the outer fringe of voodoo worship; but it was certainly preferable to domestic conversation which, by repetition over a quarter of a century, had lost all its meaning.

  She listened perfunctorily to Jane, and said, ‘Yes, my dear. I expect your father’s right. And you need a new frock, don’t you?’

  They, thought Jane — now in Belford Road, nearing the bridge over the Water of Leith — they are really responsible for all this. Father and Mother. If they had sympathized, if they had said, ‘Well, if you don’t want to play in The Wheelbarrow, don’t. Give up your part now’ — if they had said that, nothing would have happened. They’re to blame. Oh, damn Yacky Doo! I wish I’d never met him.

  And yet, and yet… The Wheelbarrow had been a success, a partial success, and she in her small part had been commended for natural grace and the natural emotion — as they said — with which she had given life to a character that (she admitted it only to herself) she had never understood. Nor was it the Scotch critics who chiefly praised the play: they, so warm in private discussion of Hector Macrae, had been cautious — lukewarm at best — in public recognition. It was the London men, Hobson and Tynan, who had written, almost unequivocally in the deep centre of their differently involuted patterns of criticism, ‘Here is genius.’ — And she, by her parents’ fault, had shared in the exposition of genius. Her name had been mentioned in the Sunday newspapers, and all her simple friends had been deeply impressed.

  But she could, of course, have enjoyed that small triumph without this burden of a forgotten emotion, now dropped on her like a dog from the sky, if, after that first meeting, Hector had not kissed her so fiercely — and if she, having drunk too much, had not answered so closely. It was her fault, after all.

  My fault, my fault, she repeated to herself, in time to her indignant footfall, as she walked past the village of Dean to Queensferry Street. My fault, my fault — and suddenly, as if the rhythm of her feet had released in her mind such a comfort as her mother found in African shouting, she felt as a resurgent beat the assurance of her importance. I, and only I, she thought, can save him from committing suicide. That’s why he wrote to me — he wrote to me, and therefore I’m essential. I’m important, I’m unique — and he’s a genius, everybody says so, and I can save his life. It can’t be wrong to do that.