‘You mean the Burns manuscript? No, I haven’t got it.’
‘Then who the devil has? I tell you, I’ve lost it!’
‘Did you leave it in your car?’
‘Thomson says no. I asked him first of all. Then I enquired at the club.’
‘But there’s nowhere else you could have left it!’
‘That’s the damned thing about it! It’s vanished without reason!’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’ve notified the police, and I’m going to Muirfield to play golf.’
‘That’s probably the best thing you can do.’
‘Yes. Yes, I think it is. But tell me this, Hector: you haven’t got it, but what about that fellow Greenshaw? He’s a librarian, and librarians are very fond of books. Do you think he pinched it?’
‘He may have done.’
‘Do you think I should put the police on to him?’
‘If he’s innocent, it can do him no harm.’
‘Good! Good for you, Hector. You know him better than I do, and if you think he’s a thief … ’
‘But I don’t! I only said … ’
‘You’ve said enough to let me give the police a very useful line to pursue. Thank you, Hector. I’m very grateful to you. And I hope you’re feeling well this morning?’
‘Very well indeed.’
‘So am I, and now I’m off to Muirfield. Good-bye, Hector, and I’ll give you a ring to-morrow.’
Hector put down the receiver and thought: If I were like Max, I could live in this world. Max doesn’t believe in misfortune — not in the sort of misfortune that can touch him — and it’s true, of course, that there are some people who are prone to misfortune, and others who are immune. Some are prone to accident, and others aren’t. Is it all a matter of temperament? Is it a matter of will, or confidence? Or faith? But what right has he, that old ruffian, to have faith in the goodwill of providence?
It’s a mystery, he thought, that I may solve before long; and resumed the sorting and arrangement of his neglected correspondence.
He opened a long envelope and read a letter from his literary agent.
Dear Hector, [it said] I think you will be glad to know that I have sold an option on your play The Wheelbarrow to my associates in New York for the sum of 10,000 dollars. My associates are confident that they have the interest of that superlative team of Hodges and Rumpelstein, who, they say, are more than eager to turn your play into a musical of the sort they have made famous. If this eventuates, you will, of course, make a fortune, and in my own mind I have no doubt whatever that the deal will be finalized. I was speaking to New York this morning …
The letter fell from his hands, and he sat in a trance of dismay. He had, until now, avoided what was called ‘success’, though he had established a local and particular fame. He was known and revered throughout Scotland, and in the literary circles of several of the world’s capital cities — in Oslo and Copenhagen, in London and Dublin, in a diminishing quarter of Paris — there were those who knew and respected his war-time poems; but he had never come within visible range of that sort of achievement which is attended by notoriety and the enormous reward of riches, and swallows its victim alive. Until now the cannibal world had not noticed him. But now, as if the vast mouth of a hippopotamus were opening to engulf him, he saw the menace of absorption in the huge confinement and ever-pulsing greed of its great belly. He heard, in the ears of imagination, the clamour of vulgar acclaim, and the shadow of the upper mandible of that Nilotic beast darkened the morning. The hungry eyes of the world had found him out, and he felt its breath upon him.
He stood up, intent on escape, and his chair fell noisily. That shock of sound gave him comfort and broke the spell; and in the salutary effect of movement he remembered he had nothing to fear. His escape was already planned, and death would save him from that living tomb.
But he shuddered and was afraid when he thought how narrow was the margin between safety and destruction. Had he, when he woke, committed himself to life, he would have been lost…
How innocent he had been when he sent off his first book of poems, hoping wildly for their publication! They were poems that proclaimed the splendour of his love and his delight in battle, and in his innocence he had thought the reality of all he felt would be enlarged and substantiated — given a visible proof and be made more real — by publishing what he had written. But when he was a publisher himself, he discovered that his poems, with all the other poems of the time, had become counters in a parlour game called Literary Reputations. Sometimes this set of counters was worth more than that, and then a new set appeared which, for a little while, was worth more than either. No one knew the rules of the game, but it was widely played, and there were self-appointed umpires who made money out of it.
As a publisher, he had encountered many authors. Professional authors, and amateurs. Both sorts, he found, were eager to be told that they were better than other authors who plied their trade in the same street. They wanted, naturally enough, to be rewarded for their efforts, but he thought it strange that they should be competitive and seek the recognition of critics who themselves were all agog for the same thing, and usually contradicted each other. How ignoble! he had thought. How paltry, to demand attention and be dependent for one’s happiness on the opinion of others! He had not liked what he saw of literary life. — But his judgment should not be overrated, for he had not much liked any sort of life.
When the publishing firm in which he was a partner went bankrupt, he thankfully retreated to the solitude and white beaches of Wester Ross, where his more modest neighbours competed only for pensions and government grants, subsidies, and allowances of one sort or another; and as he settled down to write detective stories for a living, he devised a nom de guerre that would give him shelter from the world’s attention. He could not be accused of competing for fame while he masqueraded as Fay Lafarge. Or so he thought, until one of his police novels was outstandingly successful and his publishers noisily announced, ‘But the best of them all is Fay Lafarge!’ Then he felt shame discolour his nom de guerre, and Miss Lafarge competed no more.
He wrote his play called The Wheelbarrow, that was set in pre-historic China. In China before Confucius. His hero invented the wheel, and constructed a wheelbarrow. There was great excitement in the province of Shantung. Revolution! cried his neighbours. This has changed the whole course of history, and set in the sky the dawn of a new hope for mankind! Only his sweetheart and her grandfather had doubted the value of his invention. His sweetheart because her breasts, in which he had seen the outline of his wheel, no longer commanded all his loving attention, for now he preferred wooden circles; and her grandfather because he was given no good answer to some questions that he asked. ‘What will you carry, in your wheelbarrows, that is of more value than the burdens our coolies carry on their backs?’ asked the grandfather. ‘And if their cargo is of greater worth, where are the buyers who will know how to put it to a better purpose? You may travel farther, and go more easily, but will your journeys be more useful, even if you go as far as the moon?’
It was not a play for which he anticipated popular favour. Certainly it was not a play tailored for the commercial theatre. But now, from the ebulliently united and ever unpredictable States of America came this fantastic and overwhelming promise of success — this menace of success — and if he had chosen to live, as he had not, he would assuredly have been scoffed and swallowed without hope of escape….
He read again the letter from his agent, and thought of the black-coated manager of the small theatre in which The Wheelbarrow had been produced: that dedicated man, always dressed in the sable and pin-striped uniform of his office, had no fear of success, but passionately desired it — not indeed for himself, but for his beloved theatre. Well, let him have it, thought Hector. Let this be my legacy to him.
He sat down again, and wrote:
I enclose a letter from my agent, and you, I imagine, will be bette
r able than I to assess its value: I mean the value of its apparent promise. I send it because I, for a reason that you will soon know, must transfer my interest in the play to better hands; and I can think of none better than yours. Formally, then, I give and bequeath to you my play called The Wheelbarrow, and all rights inherent in it. And I hope — but this I need not stress — that if the musical version of it by the Messrs Hodges and Rumpelstein is as profitable as my agent expects, you will use the accumulated royalties and any sum you may get from selling it in Hollywood to endow a Scottish theatre of the sort you have always wanted; and you, for your lifetime, will be its director.
He added a few lines, of less importance but affectionate in tenor, and signed the letter firmly and legibly. He found an envelope and addressed it, and then, on impulse added a postscript.
P.S. I hope you can persuade Max Arbuthnot to be one of your fellow-directors. He has great influence in Edinburgh, and I should like him to be associated with you — and with what’s left of me.
And now, he decided, it’s time to conclude these trivialities. The church bells had begun to ring, filling his flat with their clamour.
He put off his dressing-gown, he bathed, shaved, and dressed with unusual care. He seldom wore the kilt in Edinburgh, but now he put on the clothes he would wear for a Highland occasion at Oban, or Perth, or Inverness: a kilt of the closely patterned, dark red Macrae tartan, straw coloured hose, red garters, and black brogues that laced above the ankle; an otter’s skin sporran that had belonged to his grandfather, a buff waistcoat with garnet buttons, and a short jacket of blue-and-grey Harris tweed with leather buttons. He pushed a skean-dhu into a stocking top and stood up to look at himself in a mirror. A little overdressed, he wondered? No, not for the occasion, he decided.
But where, he thought, and how, would he go to his death? There was difficulty in obtaining a good, quick-acting poison, and he disliked the thought of poison, which was rather a woman’s weapon. He had a shotgun, but a shotgun made an unseemly mess of its victim, and he had, in any case, lent it to a friend in Ullapool. He could go to North Berwick, and swim out towards the Bass Rock and let himself drown; but in October it would be uncomfortable and a little too ostentatious, a little too theatrically deliberate. If he had an old-fashioned razor — but he hadn’t, and he didn’t trust a tissue-thin safety blade. There was the gas oven — he had a gas oven — but how deplorably suburban that habit was! No, he could not die in a gas oven.
And then he thought of the Dean Bridge.
Telford built it — in 1830? About then — and how nobly its four arches spanned the broad, high-wooded gorge down which the little Water of Leith so modestly chattered on its journey to the sea! It was a gorge that looked as if it had been carved from the rock by the insistent current of a mountainfed, tempestuous stream, but darkly twinkling a hundred feet below the bridge there was only a little piddle of water in which small boys occasionally caught a trout or two. An ideal site for the termination of a life which, in earlier years, had had its views of grandeur, but now was only a runnel talking itself out of existence: talking quietly and in good temper, but with a settled purpose. Telford’s bridge, moreover, had the advantage of propinquity: it was only a few minutes’ walk from where he lived.
He said aloud, ‘I must make a little reconnaissance,’ and decided to go and look at it; for though he had crossed it a hundred times, he had never examined its advantages for suicide as closely — he now perceived — as they deserved. He was already half-way down his stairs when the loud bell at his front door was boldly rung, and a breeze of annoyance darkened his smooth good humour.
He opened the door, and saw in the mews a young girl dressed in what he recognized as a fashion popular among students at the University. She wore a short, navy-blue duffle-coat, fastened by white cords and wooden toggles, and a brief, dark blue skirt, below which her legs were encased in long scarlet stockings that were matched by a scarlet muffler tied neatly about her throat. She was bare-headed, and her raven-dark hair had been carefully cut to present a wilful disorder. She was very young and very pretty — blue eyes between black lashes — and she was smiling in the way of one who expects recognition. But until she told him where she came from, he did not recognize her.
‘Eachain Dubh!’ she said. ‘Oh, I am glad to see you again! Did my father not write and tell you I was in Edinburgh?’
‘He must have forgotten.’
‘He is not much of a hand at letter writing, and that’s the truth of it. But he promised he would, and I’ll have a hard word for him when I go home at Christmas. Do you remember what he said, that morning you came in, after a bad night at sea? You had to come in to Gairloch, for shelter … ’
‘Gairloch, of course,’ said Hector.
‘And he said, “You should be with us at Christmas or the New Year if you want to know how the sea talks when it’s truly out of temper.” — And that’s how I’ll talk to him, when I go home.’
Shiona, thought Hector. Shiona MacLeod, and her father’s the skipper of the drifter called Silver Hope. That’s who she is — and he said to her, ‘You’re looking a lot smarter than when we last met.’
‘There’s no one to see you in Gairloch,’ she said, ‘but you’ve got to dress up when you come to Edinburgh.’
‘You’re at the University?’
‘I am indeed, and that’s what my father should have told you. I got a County Scholarship as well as the MacLeod Bursary … ’
‘Are you very clever?’
‘I don’t think so,’ she said seriously. ‘But I’m clever enough, as things are to-day.’
‘Let’s go for a little walk,’ said Hector. ‘The day’s too fine to stay indoors, and my flat isn’t looking its best this morning. I’ve been tidying up.’
They walked slowly past Randolph Crescent towards the bridge, and Shiona talked happily of her friends in Gairloch, often assuming that Hector knew and remembered more about them than in fact he did; but he listened with a familiar pleasure to the dancing, Hebridean tune of her voice — a singing voice with laughter at one end of the scale and a lament not far from the other — and looking sideways at her, admired the soft texture of her cheeks, the firm drawing of her mouth and chin. She was almost as tall as he was, and carried herself as gaily as a dancer. He did not like her clothes, but probably, he thought, her companions at the University approved of them. And they showed self-confidence. Though she came from a small and far-off village in the west, she was not afraid of Edinburgh. She had not gone into hiding behind some drably inconspicuous costume, but dressed for the occasion. She’s a fine girl, thought Hector, and in the middle of the long bridge took her by the arm and said, ‘Look down there.’
They had to stand tip-toe to look over the parapet, and Hector told her that when the bridge was newly built its dizzy height above the stream had tempted too many tired or unhappy people to leap into its oblivion. So the City fathers had raised the height of the wall, and topped it with a miniature chevaux de frise: a necklace of short but sharp iron spikes.
‘A knowledge of the ancient world was fairly common then,’ he said, ‘and perhaps they identified it with the Water of Lethe.’
‘ ,’ said Shiona complacently. ‘I’ve been doing Greek for three years now, that’s how I got my bursary.’
‘Are you going to be a teacher?’
‘Yes, and I’m going to teach classics. That’s the best thing to teach, isn’t it?’
‘It’s necessary.’
‘But I shan’t teach anyone the way to Lethe. I can’t bear to think of dying.’
‘Why not?’
She turned to him in innocent amazement and asked, “How could anyone bear to leave all this? Isn’t it beautiful, here in Edinburgh? Not as beautiful as Gairloch, but in its own way very beautiful?’
‘It’s strange,’ he said, ‘to think that the builders of the New Town couldn’t avoid a romantic prospect. They turned their backs on the murderous old Gothic mile of filthy battleme
nts that reached from the Castle to Holyroodhouse — the scarred and crumbling spine of Edinburgh — and set out to build, cleanly and openly, a town of classical respectability — nothing emotional, nothing with a Scotch thought in it or a bloody memory — but as the town-planners moved north they had to accept this great ravine, this Highland gorge, and make it part of their tidy, decent city.’
‘It’s very beautiful,’ she insisted.
The summer had been fine, and autumn under calm blue skies was marching confidently to a still distant winter. The forest of trees that clothed the gorge held all their leaves, but the burnish of the turning year had coloured them with bronze and saffron and the hues of a fine evening. Beyond the trees lay the blue mist of the Forth.
‘Very beautiful indeed,’ said Hector, and measuring the height of the parapet — it was level with his shoulder — thought the miniature chevaux de frise was no great obstacle. He could throw a coat across it: a travelling rug, or a plaid.
‘Then surely it’s very wicked to talk lightly about death,’ said Shiona, ‘when there is so much to live for. And I,’ she went on, ‘will never think about it till I have to, because I’m afraid of dying.’
‘There’s no need to be afraid,’ said Hector, and leaning against the parapet looked at her standing, straight and indignant, on the edge of the pavement. At that hour of the day there was little traffic on the bridge. Occasionally a motor-car went past, on its way to Cramond or Dalmeny or Queensferry and the north, but at that moment they were the only people afoot.
‘Listen to this,’ he said, and recited:
‘I was the soil, and blossomed into grass;
The grass was grazed, and fed a wether lamb;
The wether lamb was killed, and filled a man —
Then why should I fear death, when death
Has always bettered that which lies beneath?’
‘Is it one of your own poems?’ asked Shiona.
‘No, it was written a long time ago — perhaps a thousand years ago, I can’t remember — by a Persian called Rumi. I made a rough translation of it. Rumi was a Dervish,’ he added.
The Merry Muse Page 21
