The Merry Muse

by Eric Linklater

  Now with a dubious pride, now with a half-afraid exuberance in her mind, she crossed Queensferry Street — a little rash, a little impatient of the traffic — and passing Randolph Crescent turned down the short street that led to what once had been the stable-yards behind St George’s Church. But now the colony of grooms and coachmen had become a small and smart Bohemia for young accountants and their wives, a barrister or two, a doctor, a brace of artists, a maiden lady, and two smart widows. The artist who had lent his flat to Hector Macrae had gone to Majorca — Majorca or Jamaica? Somewhere under the uninhibited sun, to paint in a thicker impasto his heliotropic vision — and Hector, with the casual acceptance of one who gave as casually, had lived there, off and on, for eighteen months or more. It had a pale blue door and a ship’s bell to summon him.

  She rang the bell — she now felt taut and confident — and presently Hector came out into the stable-yard and took her hands. He was wearing a white shirt with a red silk muffler, fawn-coloured trousers of cavalry twill, and red leather slippers. He has dressed for a scene, she thought.

  But, for the prelude, he was smiling. On the pallor of his face — exaggerated by his coarse, blue-black hair and very dark eyes — there was a scribble of amusement. Lightly his expression mocked her, but his hands, that were almost as thin and eloquent as an Indian dancer’s, were gently caressive. He seemed taller than her memory of him. He had a look of lank and bony strength, and Max Arbuthnot liked to say of him, ‘There’s a picture in Siena of John the Baptist as a young man. A picture by Sassetta, if you know who I mean. Well, take away the beard, and that’s Hector to the life.’

  For a moment he held her at arm’s length, and looked at her, quizzing her.

  ‘I have almost, but not quite, opened a bottle of champagne,’ he said. ‘I took the wire off, and the cork was visibly relieved. Come and see what has happened to it.’

  The stairs were steep, and the corridor above was lined with small, repulsive paintings. ‘If only he would use his fingers!’ said Hector. ‘But no, he paints with his thumbs. It’s three years since he abandoned brushes.’

  ‘Why don’t you take them down, and put up pictures of your own?’

  ‘Why does your mother listen to jazz music? So that a little pain may shut out a larger pain.’

  They went into his sitting-room and found the bottle open with froth pouring from its mouth and creeping down its neck. ‘It’s cheap champagne,’ he said, ‘don’t try to appreciate it.’

  ‘You’re looking very well,’ said Jane.

  ‘It’s three months — three and seven days — since I left you.’

  ‘Is that the reason?’

  ‘You haven’t seen my hands,’ he said, and showed them. His long fingers were scarred and calloused, scored with black lines. ‘I’ve been going out with the fishermen,’ he said, ‘in the seine-net boats. I thought the sea would put my mind to sleep; but it woke again. — Do I stink of herring?’

  His question, put abruptly, was apparently a serious enquiry, and Jane, responsive to a practical demand, thrust the white tip of her nose close to him and sniffed obediently. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, really you don’t.’

  ‘Or of despair? When I woke this morning, I smelt an air of decay: but whether of fish or me, I couldn’t tell. Would you recognize the odour of despair?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t. So don’t ask me to smell you again.’

  ‘Then tell me about yourself.’

  ‘Where shall I start?’

  ‘Have you been happy?’

  ‘Intensely happy.’

  ‘I’m glad of that. I’m very glad. You can’t get much out of unhappy people. Unless, of course, they’re poets, artists, creatures of that sort: the cripples who climb inaccessible alps, the consumptives who live for ever: unhappiness is beef and beer to them. But not you. If unhappiness touched you, you’d curl up like a hedgehog when a dog puts a paw on it.’

  ‘That’s quite untrue; and it shows, once again, that you know very little about me. Why, do you suppose, I’ve come to see you now?’

  ‘Not out of curiosity. That’s a vulgar motive of which I’d never suspect you. But when you arrived you were wearing such a determined, respectable, “Edinburgh” look that I wondered if you were district-visiting, slumming — if it was only a sense of responsibility that had brought you here.’

  ‘I see nothing to be ashamed of in a sense of responsibility.’

  ‘No, of course not. But it’s not always the most amiable of qualities. I had hoped for a warmer motive.’

  ‘That’s quite impossible.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Surely I don’t have to explain that. Even you … ’

  ‘It’s when you talk like that I love you most incomprehensibly. — Have some champagne. — Though you had had a hundred husbands home from the wars, there’s a part of you that would still be virginal. Cold, white, shining, and impenetrable: a perpetual challenge. For what’s behind it? A secret knowledge of self-sufficiency — or of nothing at all?’

  A candle-flame of anger touched her — as if she had scorched her little finger in a flame — and roughened her voice. Now he had that narrow, prying, Highland look in his eyes, and immediately it brought memories of former quarrelling. There was old tinder for the flame.

  ‘Oh, not again!’ she cried. ‘For God’s sake don’t start asking me what I really think, what I really feel, what I really mean when I say something that’s of no consequence at all! That’s one of the things — no, that’s the single, absolute thing — that used to make me sure I never wanted to see you again. You would make love to me — you would talk about love — and praise me, and pamper me, and say my chin, held such-and-such a way, was pure Bellini, or Cellini, or someone of that sort, and my eyes — do you remember when my eyes reminded you of an ocelot? An ocelot, my God! And then you’d turn sour and sullen and want to know, exactly and precisely, what I meant when I said I hated being discussed. Or something just as obvious. You always tried to make me feel like a fool.’

  ‘If I could be sure you were … ’

  ‘Well, I’m not! And now I’m going.’

  ‘No, please! Oh, please come here!’

  ‘No.’

  Had she used her strength — trained and developed on the lacrosse-field and the golf-links — Jane could certainly have repelled and avoided him: but a cloud of sudden misery in his eyes, a note of despair in his voice, that sounded true, found in her an inward weakness that partially disabled her, and after a perfunctory struggle she let herself be pulled down on to the sofa and embraced with a passion which, to her surprise and a rather grudging sense of relief, apparently exhausted itself in a declaration of remorse: a prolonged kiss.

  She recovered her aplomb, she put away his hands, and said firmly, ‘I didn’t come here in the expectation of making love. I came because you wrote a letter that deeply worried me. That made me (I admit) feel responsible … ’

  ‘I hoped it would.’

  ‘But now I realize that you weren’t serious … ’

  ‘I wanted to see you: so much was serious. But for the rest, I made no pretence at all.’

  ‘You said — you threatened … ’

  ‘I said I was thinking of committing suicide.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But that’s not being serious. Serious people want to live, to strive, to fight and contend with the world and their neighbours: the irrational world and their nonsensical neighbours. To think of suicide is an indication of pure flippancy; and to commit suicide an act of sheer irresponsibility. Do you know anything about the Jains?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Jains: a Hindu sect, very respectable. Devoted to commerce, architecture, and ascetic practices. They’re so reverent of life that when their priests walk abroad, boys sweep the road before them, to save them from the sin of treading on a passing ant. To a Jain all life is sacred — except his own. Because a Jain, if he is a well-instructed Jain, believes what Mahavira taught a long time ago
: that to do good is good, but to do nothing is better; and therefore the best of all actions is suicide. Now there is logic begetting sheer frivolity — and if I kill myself to-morrow, I shall be equally logical and just as frivolous. I shan’t, for one moment, delude myself with the belief that I’m making a momentous gesture; far less a tragic one.’

  ‘But why do you want to commit suicide?’

  ‘I don’t. My trouble is that I don’t want to go on living. Not enough, that is, to persuade myself that it’s worth the effort. I’ve lost the will to live. I’m bored by life. I’ve fed on ennui and drunk disillusion to the bottom of the glass. — Some champagne?’

  ‘No. I’ve had enough.’

  ‘That’s my condition. You put it very clearly.’

  ‘But you can’t really be bored with life when you still have the energy and imagination to write poetry … ’

  ‘Verses, verses. There is no poetry, there are no poets in the world to-day. Acrobats and petits maîtres, a few minor craftsmen, ghosts and zombies — that’s all.’

  ‘But all those young men who buy whisky for you in the pubs in Rose Street — they think you’re a great writer. So does my father, when he’s had too much to drink.’

  ‘Your father drinks much too much; and young men want to believe in something. It’s a measure of our common poverty that some of them believe in me.’

  Jane for a moment hesitated; then, as though kilting her skirts to cross a rushing stream, hoping to find stepping stones beneath the flood, plunged bravely into explanation. ‘I never felt,’ she said, ‘that you were really a great writer — not in comparison with — oh, people who lived a long time ago — but I do know, instinctively I mean, that you’re very good … ’

  ‘Against the present standards of the world,’ said Hector, ‘I am very good indeed. I am a silversmith, still working in his own metal, in the chromium age. I am a craftsman, and some of the things I have said have been worth listening to for their meaning as well as for their manner. That alone sets me above my contemporaries; but it’s no source of pride when most of my contemporaries are not only midgets, but very short lived.’

  ‘When you persuaded me — when you bullied me — into taking a part in The Wheelbarrow you said it was a play that would ring like a ship’s bell, to bring the watch on deck.’

  ‘Perhaps I was a little drunk when I said that. Though it might have done, if the watch below had had the ears to hear it. But nowadays listeners listen only to African drums of complaint, and the nursery chatter of the very young.’

  ‘And your next play, you said, was going to be better still.’

  ‘That time I must have been drunk, for I had nothing to go on but the good title I had thought of: The Revolving Oyster. The world’s my oyster, so the adventurers said, when there were adventurers, and as everyone knows, the oyster changes its sex. But so does the world — great gobbets, cantles, continents of the world barter their gonads for a pair of ovaries every half-millennium or so … ’

  And now, Jane thought, he is behaving just as he did when he took me to lunch for the first time and talked about The Wheelbarrow. I am his audience, his captive audience, and that’s all I mean to him.

  But I’ve tried to listen to what he was saying, and tried to weigh it against some scale of judgment…. She wished most urgently that she had a recognized scale of judgment and was skilled in weighing. For what had always worried her was the nagging question of his real value. She could disregard exaggerated opinion; but did he really deserve respect on the level he claimed for himself, as a good artificer, a craftsman of the Silver Age — or was he only a posturer, bijouterie en faux, a literary trickster, a confidence man?

  She had, ingrained in her, a Scotch respect for merit; and she had the lamentable inability, of her age, to recognize it and reject its imitations. As Hector walked to and fro, his feet resounding on the hollow floor, she thought he looked handsome, theatrical and false; as she listened to him she heard in the fervour and determination of his voice the echo, as it seemed, of his sincerity. But what he said still sounded pretentious — if she could trust her judgment? Or was her judgment too small to measure him?

  ‘We in Europe and they in America,’ he was saying, ‘have been developing female characteristics since — oh, since when? Since Rousseau took off his trousers and shook his tambourine for public sympathy? Perhaps that was the start of it, and since then we’ve all been growing indiscriminate great bubs of compassion and tidying ourselves for prostitution. But in the hinterlands, in the backyards of Muscovy and the howling waste of Central Asia, the opposite and contrary development has been going on. All that gross and simple womb has shrunk and shrivelled — it’s tucked up now under a chest as flat as a board — and the male gonads have come down, a male principle has sprouted. The old cow-behemoth has turned into a bull. The whole world’s tainted with its rut, it’s breeding fast. And the first seed it sowed was a story that people could believe. That’s the true seed of history — a story — the true male seed, and if we could find a new story to drop into the ancient, corroded, colonnaded womb of Europe, we might save her yet by getting a bull-calf out of her.’

  Perhaps, thought Jane, he was drinking before I came. Or is there any sense in what he says? It sounds — it sounds, oh, too high-flown for what we recognize as sense, but does that mean he’s a mountebank, or I am merely dull? Oh, where’s the truth? I just don’t know, her conscience cried. — But if I despise what’s true I shall be making a great mistake, and if I believe what’s false I shall be very silly. Now what, she thought, can I say to show that I am sympathetic — but still judicious and well-balanced?

  ‘But how,’ she said —thought wrinkling her brow, her mind, in pain, wrestling with heavy-weight ideas — ‘how could you show all that, in three acts, on a stage?’

  ‘I couldn’t,’ he answered. ‘We’ve lost the old, myth-making faculty, the story-telling faculty. We can invent characters, and psycho-analyse them, and show a profound understanding of our inventions. We can synthesize, and dissect our syntheses, and be deeply sympathetic with our dissections. But we can’t make stories, of the proper force and content and significance — and therefore I can’t write the play I want to write, and Europe still lies inert and empty, waiting for the male seed to quicken her.’

  Carefully, as if feeling her way, Jane said, ‘I don’t quite understand. I mean, what sort of a story … ’

  ‘Oh, let’s finish the bottle,’ he said. ‘Two glasses of wine left in the butt-end of a bottle are like two plain sisters that no one has asked to dance. Let’s save them from that.’

  ‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘I have never understood you.’

  ‘I should lose you if you did.’

  ‘But I want to.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘I have understood a fragment, an aspect, or perhaps only a passing fiction of you: and sometimes I disliked what I understood. But then, in some other fragment, or aspect, I’ve seen a whole image — but only a glimpse of it, like a goldfinch dodging among thistles — and then, even if I don’t believe in it, I’m after it like a merlin.’

  ‘Is that why you wrote to me? Because of the image?’

  ‘There’s a beauty in you, there’s a congruence of your parts, of mind and body. There’s a conformity, a wholeness — and if I could see it whole, if I could draw it and measure it, it might be the precise and awful answer that I’m looking for. But you won’t help me. You won’t tell me what you are!’

  ‘How can I when I don’t know myself? When I don’t know what you want.’

  ‘Sometimes I want too much. I want, in you, an assurance that God didn’t make us for a laughing-stock. And sometimes I want too little: only the more palpable conformities.’

  ‘And when you get that, you despise me.’

  ‘Not now,’ he said. ‘Now, when I’m defeated, I have no right to despise any part of you, who are all undefeated.’

  ‘It isn’t right to say that. You mustn’t … ’
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  ‘The image, the goldfinch that the merlin chases in a field of thistles, is one of the things I want, and can’t have. And the other is to write a play which would contain the male seed of a fertile story; and that I can’t do. I’m tired of silversmith’s work, I want to work in gold because — let’s change the metaphor — it’s only a golden voice that can shake the deaf walls of Jericho. But my voice isn’t of that sort — nowhere near that sort — and therefore, on two fronts, I’ve been defeated. And I can’t see any purpose in living longer.’

  He stood before her, again with a smile of wry amusement scrawled on his face; but now his eyes, wide open, were magnified by unshed tears. They were brim-full of tears, dark pools that did not spill their tears. Twice or three times before she had seen him weeping in this curiously self-contained and static way; and once she had thought it a mere trick or pretence of emotion. But it had never failed to move her extremely, and now, rising and going quickly towards him, she took him in her arms and with her lips about his cheeks made little, soothing, comforting noises. ‘Yacky Doo, dear Yacky Doo,’ she whispered; her sympathy unflawed by the absurdity of his name.

  Some short while later they sat comfortably together on the sofa. Her jacket lay on the floor, her primly laundered blouse on a nearby chair, and Hector was playing happily with her breasts.

  ‘Cats’ heads,’ he said. ‘White Persians, leaning over the edge of their basket. Their eyes shut, fast asleep, all white. But just showing the tips of their tongues.’

  III