The Merry Muse

by Eric Linklater

  ‘He gave you the wrong one?’

  ‘Either by accident or design.’

  ‘But the genuine copy is still at the Library?’

  ‘If my friend Mr Greenshaw is an honest man.’

  ‘We must go and find him. What’s the time?’

  ‘Half-past four.’

  ‘When does the Library close?’

  ‘Not till five, I think.’

  ‘Then hurry! We must hurry.’

  They found a taxi at the West End of Princes Street, and reached the Library at a quarter to five. Its functions had not been seriously upset by the epidemic which most of Edinburgh had so much enjoyed, though some of the younger members of the staff had been irregular in attendance, and it was said that one of them, a very pretty girl, had been missed for the greater part of a day, and found, just before closing time, in the lowest stack-room with a scholarly but still virile Fellow of the Association of Certified and Corporate Accountants.

  There were only a few people in the main reading room when Hector and Jane arrived, and without any delay they were conducted to Mr Greenshaw in his nest of incunabula.

  He was taken by surprise, and rose with some appearance of nervousness as they went in. Hector said, ‘You met Mrs Telfer in my flat. She is Max Arbuthnot’s daughter,’ he added.

  Tm delighted to see you here,’ said Mr Greenshaw. ‘Here among these dusty relics of a persistent vanity.’ — He gave a little bark of insincere and shallow laughter. — ‘The vain desire for a terrestrial immortality: that’s what they represent, these ponderous books, and how many people look at them now? None of your sort, Mrs Telfer, not one. And what’s the point in achieving immortality, if one’s immortality is ignored by you?’

  He opened his arms in a gesture of futility, smiled in rueful mockery of himself and all the scholars by whom he was surrounded, and resumed his seat.

  ‘We have come here,’ said Hector …

  ‘At a most opportune moment!’ said Mr Greenshaw in a great hurry. ‘I have just been reading — it has, alas, nothing to do with my own period, with my strictly professional interests here, but the fatal charm of a library is that it offers one so much to read, and the temptation to read indiscriminately is, at times, quite irresistible. This is what I picked up an hour ago —a collection of Gauguin’s letters — and here is something which for you, Macrae, must be of particular interest, and I wonder what you will have to say about it. Forgive my halting translation — I make no pretence to a diplomat’s knowledge of French, or even a scholar’s — but this, roughly, is the meaning of it. — Artists, so Gauguin says, have lost their savagery. Their savagery! Mark that. Evidently he considers savagery essential to an artist. And so, being deprived of what was formerly a native instinct, they have gone wandering away in all directions to look for the productive forces which they used to find in themselves. And now, says Gauguin, they can only work in untidy crowds. They feel frightened and lost if they’re left alone. — Well, what do you think of that?’

  ‘It’s interesting, and there’s probably some truth in it. But we’ve come to get your help … ’

  ‘He’s hedging,’ said Mr Greenshaw. ‘He doesn’t want to commit himself. But you, Mrs Telfer: you’re not afraid of the sound of your own opinions, are you? What do you think?’

  ‘I think,’ said Jane, looking for a moment almost as formidable as her father, ‘that you ought to listen to what we’ve come to say. We want you to relieve our anxiety by telling us what you know about this.’

  She took the book from its envelope and handed it to him.

  ‘Oh, that!’ said Mr Greenshaw. ‘Yes, of course. It’s one of our copies, isn’t it?’ Brightly and nervously, he smiled at each of them in turn; and to Hector he said, ‘I thought you would bring it back at once.’

  ‘Did you give me the wrong one deliberately?’ asked Hector.

  ‘Deliberately? My dear Macrae, what a suggestion!’

  ‘Where is the copy I showed you?’

  ‘It’s in my desk. Here, under lock and key. I’ve kept it here in readiness to give it to you as soon as you came for it. As I said before, I’ve been waiting for you to come.’

  From a drawer in his desk he took another copy of The Merry Muses, and patted it with tender fingers. It hurt him to part with it. He held it for a little while, looking reverently at it, before he gave it to Hector. It was the copy that contained the sixteen pages in manuscript.

  ‘When,’ asked Hector, ‘did you discover the mistake? How long after I left here on Tuesday afternoon ?’

  ‘Quite soon, I think,’ said Mr Greenshaw, tapping his finger-tips together to stimulate memory.

  ‘You came to my flat and had a drink with me. Had you discovered it by then?’

  ‘So difficult, it’s so difficult to pin a memory to its own particular minute in a vanished day,’ said Mr Greenshaw. For a moment or two he seemed lost in thought, and then with the air of a diver coming to the surface with a pearl in his hand — but his pearl was the decision he had reached — he sat up firmly in his chair and in a voice of new confidence, with a sudden assumption of authority, he said, ‘But I will tell you this, and I hope you won’t resent it.

  ‘In my position here, in the National Library of Scotland, I have definite responsibilities and positive duties. One of them is to do what I can to preserve for the future all rare books and manuscripts that may come my way. When you brought, for my opinion, these hitherto unknown poems in Burns’s own writing, I saw two things. One of them — and I do ask your forgiveness for saying this — was that you seemed a little indifferent to the great value of what had been entrusted to you; and the other was my duty to protect the manuscript against your indifference, and all the other dangers that threaten such things. The book was in private possession, and the Library had no claim on it. But I, as a conscientious librarian, had to do what I could to preserve it for the benefit of others and the benefit of our knowledge of Robert Burns. So I called in two of our technical staff, and had the sixteen important pages photographed.’

  Hector was on the point of violent protest but, recognizing its impropriety, silenced it as if it had been an incipient belch at a public dinner. He acknowledged a just rebuke, and remained silent. But Jane said, ‘So that accounts for it. Or for a lot of it.’

  ‘A lot of what, Mrs Telfer?’

  ‘Well, you know what’s happened in the last few days. What’s happened to Edinburgh, I mean. They call it an infection, though no one seems to know the source of infection. But now it’s obvious, isn’t it? Your two photographers kept copies of these poems and gave them to their friends. And that’s how they began to circulate.’

  ‘Mea culpa’ said Mr Greenshaw. ‘Mea maxima culpa. But should I regret it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Jane, ‘and I don’t suppose you’re the only one to blame. I expect Fred, the barman at the Gargoyle, made copies of the verses in the book I left there.’

  ‘You left this copy at the Gargoyle? But why?’

  Jane leaned back in her chair and wondered why. ‘I don’t know,’ she repeated. ‘Perhaps it was inevitable.’

  ‘What comfort there is in that belief! I mean, in submission to inevitability. In my own mind I associate it with the splendid superstition of reincarnation. Do you admit that too?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Jane. ‘I’m feeling too tired to think. I want to go home and lie down.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hector, ‘we must go now.’

  ‘Thank you for looking after the book,’ said Jane.

  ‘Will you tell your father that I took it into my own care — that I was well aware of its unique value, and sedulously protected it — and give him also my warm regards? He’s one of our most distinguished citizens.’

  The library was now deserted, and Mr Greenshaw led them through its empty halls and down its vacant, footfall-echoing staircase. Jane said good-bye to him with open gratitude, but Hector with some reserve.

  ‘Come home,’ said Jane, ‘
and let’s give this to father as a present from both of us.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Hector. ‘It was my fault that it was lost, and I daren’t face him.’

  ‘He’s been getting hell from Aunt Jessie and he’ll be so grateful and so relieved to have it in his hands again that he won’t bother to look for culprits. What I’m going to tell him is that you took it to the Library, and that clever Mr Greenshaw has been looking after it all the time. I like him, and I’m very sorry I was rude to him when I met him in your flat.’

  But Hector would not be persuaded, and when they had walked to the foot of the Mound Jane took a taxi to go home, and Hector went listlessly to the pub in Rose Street that the three poets favoured. He did not find them there, and after an hour or two he returned to his flat and went early to bed. He was twice wakened by the telephone, as twice Max summoned him to Corstorphine Hill to rejoice in the recovery of sixteen pages of immortal bawdry, but firmly he refused the repeated invitation, and then slept heavily till late on Saturday morning.

  He woke, still listless, and could not escape the feeling that his proper course was to run away, like the wee Jock from La Bassée. It was by no virtue of his that the manuscript had been recovered; it was clearly by his ineptitude that the manuscript had been lost. He could not share in the celebrations that were now proceeding. Max rang up to ask him to lunch, and flatly he refused. Max rang again, to ask him to dinner, and again he said no. Then Thomson arrived, with a letter from Jane, and Jane had written:

  Do please dine with Father to-night. After the torment he has suffered in the last few days, from that bitch Paula — she told me something about it — and then from my Aunt Jessie, who’s a much stronger character than he is, he’s in a heaven of delight and he ought to be allowed to enjoy it. He wants to have a really good male dinner-party at his club. Simon came home this afternoon, and because I love Father — hateful though he can be —I’m letting him go. He has asked Tom Murdoch and Hugh Burnett, who never say no to him, and he dearly wants you and Mr Greenshaw to be there too, because he’s got it into his head that you two are the people who really took care of his dirty poems. So please go, not only for Father’s sake, but for mine.

  He read the letter and said to Thomson, ‘Mr Arbuthnot has asked me to dine with him to-night, and I don’t want to go. But Mrs Telfer says I should. What do you say?’

  ‘He’s a holy terror,’ said Thomson. ‘Mind you, I like him, but he’s stuffed full of wrong ideas. All his ideas are wrong! But he’s got quality, and quality’s a thing you’ve got to respect, even if you don’t approve of it. I’d say yes, Mr Macrae.’

  ‘All right,’ said Hector, ‘on your recommendation I will.’ And he sat down to write in three lines his acceptance of the invitation.

  ‘Did you read that story I brought?’ asked Thomson.

  ‘I did, and it’s good. But not nearly good enough. Knock your head against the wall, make up your mind what you want to say — and why, and how — and write it again.’

  ‘I will, Mr Macrae. Oh, if I could write like you … ’

  ‘If you had written as I’ve done, you’d have said by now all you have to say, and there’d be nothing else for you to do. Go and thank God you’ve got something still to learn.’

  ‘I’ll do that too, Mr Macrae. And look here! I’ll be driving Mr Arbuthnot to the club. Would you like me to come round here and pick you up?’

  ‘No, Thomson, I’d rather walk.’

  ‘Well, just as you please, but I’d like to do something for you.’

  ‘Write that story again.’

  The United Universities Club was a massive building that looked across Princes Street, over the gardens and the ravine beyond them, at the Castle on its towering height. But the social level of the United Universities was such as to let it regard the eminence of its royal neighbour without any consciousness of inferiority. In the matter of comfort, or splendour of decoration, the castle on the Rock had never come within a hundred leagues of the club in Princes Street, and very few of the courtiers who attended the Stuart kings would have passed the scrutiny of its Election Committee. Its two principal rooms, on the ground floor and the first floor, could have accommodated a durbar for the King-Emperor, in the spacious days when the Crown enclosed an Empire, and the main staircase was broad enough, not only for maharajahs, but for their elephants. At the top of the staircase was the entrance to a private dining-room; and it was here that Max Arbuthnot gave his party.

  It was a small party. He had invited his partners, Mr Warrant and Mr Belford, and with them Hugh Burnett, Tom Murdoch, Simon Telfer, Mr Greenshaw and Hector Macrae. But before they went upstairs they assembled at the bar, and from the fine square room of which the bar occupied a convivial side a short corridor led to a blind end on which hung, handsomely lighted, a large portrait of King Edward VII in the full-dress uniform of a Highland regiment. Max made a point of directing their attention to it — ‘An outrageously bad picture,’ he said, ‘but a damned good man’ — and to-night, he promised, they would dine, not in the meagre fashion of the contemporary world, but in the lavish custom of Edwardian times.

  It was indeed a noble meal he had ordered, and Mr Warrant, who took a serious interest in his food, told Simon Telfer that Max deserved much praise for giving them a rich, clear soup after their Whitstable oysters and before their langoustes au porto. ‘Many people,’ he said, ‘ordering what is obviously intended to be a good dinner, would have given us turtle soup. And that would have been a sad mistake, to let us have three successive courses all marine in origin. But a clear soup such as this — translucent as a Highland stream, with the very essence of beef and beef-bone in it, and just enough sherry — this is the perfect earth-born element to come between our oysters and the langouste, to which I am already looking forward.’

  There were some who thought that an exceptionally fine saddle of mutton took the edge off their appetite for canetons farcis àl’estragon, but that was because the saddle was so good they had asked for a second helping. The others, who had shown a decent self-restraint, found the ducklings stuffed with foie gras and tarragon entirely to their liking.

  Not everyone took the bombe glacée — it was well flavoured with Kirsch and prettily decorated with crystallized fruits — as well as the crêpes Suzette; but most did, and no one refused a superlative savoury consisting, in the main, of noisettes of ham, stewed in brandy, and embedded in sour cream. The fruit, however, was generally neglected in favour of the more easily ingested port; which was Max’s own favourite vintage of 1927. The port came at the end of a well-chosen procession of Chablis, an Amontillado sherry, a good but undistinguished hock, Château Margaux of 1945, and a still champagne.

  The conversation which accompanied the dinner was, however, less notable than the menu, and for its failure, or relative failure, Mr Warrant and Mr Belford were blamed. Mr Warrant was too exclusively interested in food, and talked excessively of a restaurant in Dijon to which he made an annual pilgrimage; while Mr Belford, though eating heartily, contrived to do so with an air of disapproval. Simon Telfer, exhausted by interminable discussion at the War Office and his efforts to appreciate a situation about which no one could give him any information, had little to offer; and Mr Greenshaw made a tactical error and his neighbours uncomfortable by quoting Propertius, Dante and Verlaine before the crayfish had gone. Hector tried to repair his fault by telling again the story of the little Scotch soldier who ran away from La Bassée, and was snubbed for his pains by Mr Belford, who said, ‘I was a Staff officer in 1917, and in my opinion the Staff did a magnificent job, and have never been properly thanked for it.’

  When the port came round for the second time Mr Greenshaw made an effort to recover lost ground. Hector’s story had been well received, except by Mr Belford, and now Mr Greenshaw thought he could remember another old military anecdote, and enquired in too earnest a voice for the occasion, ‘Have you heard of the soldier who didn’t know the meaning of metempsychosis?’

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nbsp; Hugh Burnett and Tom Murdoch looked at him with unwilling and strained attention, and Mr Greenshaw said, ‘It’s a theory that has always fascinated me. Reincarnation, transmigration of the soul, call it what you will: it’s a subject for endless speculation.’

  He fell, for a little while, into silent speculation. He had drunk more than he was used to drinking, and he now experienced some difficulty in remembering the story in sufficient detail. ‘It happened in Mesopotamia,’ he said.

  At this point in his narrative, when even the most gifted of story-tellers might not quite have captured the attention of his audience, Mr Greenshaw was interrupted. Filled with his private sense of well-being, Max had enjoyed his dinner in spite of his guests’ failure to match their conversation to its excellence, but he felt now that he had sat long enough; and he had more entertainment to offer.

  ‘I think,’ he said — paying no attention to Mr Greenshaw — ‘we ought to move into the big room. It’s Saturday night, and there won’t be many people there. We’ll have it to ourselves, or very nearly. And I’ve something to show you that deserves better surroundings than we have here.’

  Obediently they rose, and in a haze of cigar-smoke crossed the great landing at the top of the staircase to the vast room through whose tall, uncurtained windows they could see — floodlit for some unknown occasion — the spectral enormity of the castle on its silver Rock. As Max had foretold, there were few members present — two or three half-hidden in large arm-chairs, one or two silently reading in the library that opened off the main room — and they gathered in a companionable group before the central fireplace.

  ‘And this,’ said Max, ‘is what I’ve brought to show you!’

  From a manila envelope he took a square and slender book, and with malice for his motive gave it first to Mr Belford. ‘Sixteen poems, all unknown till now, in Robert Burns’s own handwriting,’ he said. ‘Sit down and read them.’