‘I thought Dervishes were people who danced.’
‘They had time for other things as well.’
‘I hope their dancing was better than their poetry,’ said Shiona.
‘Perhaps we should walk farther,’ said Hector. ‘Have you seen the Botanic Garden?’
Now they walked faster as well as farther, for the Botanic Garden lay below them, at a considerable distance from the Dean Bridge; and Hector, a little annoyed by Shiona’s failure to appreciate his Persian verses, had decided to make her pay for the privilege of his company. After an hour or two, however, he became aware that she walked as lightly and well as he did — perhaps more lightly, and now with more energy — and on their way back from the Garden he stopped gratefully to show her one of the minor pleasances of the Edinburgh scene. It was a rural view, a village green within a curve of the Water of Leith and a row of modest houses whose inhabitants, enjoying the sunshine, sat on their steps and chattered loudly with their neighbours.
‘This,’ he said, ‘is what lies behind the splendours of Charlotte Square and Moray Place. Every good Scot is a countryman at heart. He can disguise himself as a man of business, and do it very well, but in reality … ’
At this point he saw an empty taxi driving slowly past, and shouted to its driver. ‘Another aspect of reality,’ he said, ‘is that we have walked far enough.’
A few minutes later it occurred to him that he must take Shiona to luncheon. Mere courtesy demanded that. Her father, aboard the Silver Hope, had been kind and hospitable to him. And Shiona, accepting his invitation with composure, said, ‘But I must go home afterwards, for I have work to do.’
He told the driver to go to the North British Hotel, and as they turned from Charlotte Street into Princes Street he said, ‘I suppose you have never been to Port Said?’
‘No, not yet,’ said Shiona.
‘Year by year,’ he said, ‘the shops in Princes Street look more and more like Port Said. This is the bazaar quarter of Edinburgh.’
‘I was disappointed when I first saw them,’ she said. ‘I thought they would be dignified.’
‘I have a friend,’ said Hector, ‘who says the coolies are coming in. That the coolies are invading the world: coolies from all quarters of the world. And when I look at these shops … ’
‘Look at the other side,’ said Shiona. ‘Look at the Castle. The coolies won’t conquer it.’
But Hector, assailed by sudden gloom, was still melancholy when, seated at a table in a Sunday-bare restaurant, they were fanned, as if he were an Oriental eunuch, by a waiter who presented to them, with spacious gesture, two menu-cards as large as evening newspapers. Poor girl, he thought, she won’t know what to ask for, she won’t know the meaning of this great rigmarole of fish and fowl and steaks and kickshaws, and if I tell her, if I have to explain, she’ll be hurt and humiliated. I shouldn’t have brought her here.
But then he was startled from his despondency by a bright and musical, a confident voice that said to the waiter, ‘I’ll have smoked salmon to begin with, and will you see that it’s cut thicker than it usually is? For when it’s cut as thin as a razor-blade — and that’s what often happens — there’s no flavour in it, and it’s just a waste of good money and good fish too.’
She saw Hector’s look of surprise, and explained ‘There’s a big hotel in Gairloch, and for the last two years, in my summer holidays, I’ve worked as a waitress there, and I’ve learnt something about the lies and nonsense that are often used to build up a fine-looking menu. — Tell me,’ she said to the waiter, ‘what is your ris de veau Normand?’
‘Sweetbreads, madame … ’
‘I know it’s sweetbreads, but what sort of beast did they come from, and how are they done? I’m very fond of sweetbreads if they’re good, and properly cooked. And that’s what I want to know.’
Hector looked at her with admiration, and listened to her in a quiet and comforting affirmation of the despair he had long felt and in which he now found relief. She had taken off her duffle-coat, and under it she wore a finely knitted white jersey that closely fitted the seemly contours of her taut young figure. The waiter listened respectfully while she spoke with authority of ris de veau, and perfunctorily took Hector’s order.
She has been made for the world, he thought. She is at home in it. She knows how to deal with it, and takes pleasure in her dealing. But her abilities are those that I’m deficient in, and I have no home here.
She talked to him about her fellow-students, but instead of listening he thought: She’s uncommonly pretty, and prettiness of her sort, at eighteen, is the prelude of beauty. I can see no physical fault in her, except in her wrists: they’re too strong and thick. But her voice is the voice of lyric poetry, and her eyes are blue-sea-bright with intelligence. The little white lobes of her ears would be at home to square-cut emeralds, and if I were a living man I would be falling in love with her, and weaving sentences to trap her attention and turn her thoughts to the magnetic north of love. I would be planning this, and plotting that. I would be near melting point myself, and devising a furnace to bring her to melting point. But I feel nothing. I see her through a transparency of ice, and so, to all intents, I am dead already. There will be no regret on the Dean Bridge.
She paused, at the conclusion of an anecdote he had not heard, and Hector, moved only by politeness, asked her, ‘Are there any young men at the University who’ve attracted you? Have you fallen in love yet?’
‘No, no,’ she said. ‘Not in love! But there’s this young man I’ve been telling you about, and it’s difficult to know what to think of him. He is very good looking, and he has a nice way of speaking. He is English, and his accent is almost as good as our own. But he is very dull! He is studying science. He is going to be a chemist, an organic chemist, and he knows nothing about anything at all except the molecular structure of carbon and alcohol and things like that. And he will talk about what he knows, and though I like to look at him, it is very boring to have to listen to him.’
‘You are not very old yet,’ he said. ‘You will meet other young men.’
‘Oh, I hope so. I do hope so! And now I ought to go, for I have work to do.’
‘On a Sunday afternoon?’
‘I promised I would go out with him this evening — though it will only be to talk about molecules, I suppose — and if I’m to be out to-night I must do some work this afternoon. I told my father I would be conscientious and work every day, for in spite of the scholarship and the bursary I won he has to make great sacrifices to let me live comfortably and dress decently while I’m here. And I’m very grateful for the good lunch you’ve given me.’
He said good-bye to her — scornfully she refused a taxi — and for a moment or two he watched her walking strongly and quickly along the southern pavement of Princes Street, her red stockings scissoring to-and-fro as if, through a yielding fabric, she were shearing her chosen path in life. He, more slowly, returned to his flat, and undressing to his shirt lay down beneath a quilt to sleep.
When he woke it was quite dark, but early evening still. A quarter past eight. A decent hour for dining, but he, thank God, had no need to dine. He dressed again, as scrupulously as in the morning, and filled a long glass with whisky and soda.
The letter he had written to the manager of the theatre, to whom he had bequeathed The Wheelbarrow, he stamped and put in his pocket. After a little thought he found copies of his first volume of poems and on the fly-leaf of one wrote Jane Telfer: to whom I owe much and wish I owed more; on the flyleaf of the other, To Shiona MacLeod with my blessing that she does not need. These he placed on his mantelpiece, and drank his last whisky and soda. He found an old and faded, thickly woven plaid, and leaving his flat posted his letter, and walked in a mild and contented mood to the Dean Bridge.
There was more traffic than there had been in the morning. There was an almost continuous procession of motor-cars coming back to the city from Cramond or Dalmeny or Queensferry and the nort
h; and on the far side of the road an intermittent progress of cars going away from Edinburgh. For a minute or two he stood in the middle of the bridge, on the east pavement, and then thought it would be more congruent with his mood to meet the Water of Lethe up-stream; and went to the pavement-edge to wait his opportunity to cross the road.
From Cramond or Dalmeny the motor-cars kept coming in, one after another, and while he waited two people afoot approached him with a quick and angry movement. One was a tall and handsome young man, the other a dark-haired girl who wore a navy-blue duffle-coat and long red stockings.
Shiona had spent a fruitless hour in the terraced gardens on the far side of the gorge. Her young man, the incipient chemist, had lain beside her on the dark and secret turf, and spoken, not of her, but of hydrocyanic acid, dynamic isomers, and isomeric change. She had been patient, and offered him tentative caresses. He had kissed her once or twice, but casually, in an off-hand way — cobweb-dry, abstract kisses — and then, with enthusiasm, resumed a lecture on mutually interconvertible isomers.
‘Damn them to hell,’ she said at last, and indignantly stood up.
‘Damn what?’
‘Your bloody isomers!’
‘But what do you want?’
‘Nothing you can give me,’ she answered, and running from the gardens, strode resolutely towards the bridge with her disconcerted and protesting escort following half a pace behind.
She was within a yard or two of Hector, on the east side of the bridge, when he saw a chance of crossing. Three, four, and five cars had gone by in close procession, and behind them was a lapse in the stream; an interval, as it seemed, of slack water. In a loud and cheerful voice he exclaimed, ’Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore? and confidently stepping forward, close behind the last of the incoming cars, was violently hurled back to where he came from. The car that hit him, driven too fast and going in the opposite direction, swerved and slewed, and with Hector’s plaid draped across its bonnet hit the western parapet of the bridge.
Shiona screamed, and her dull young man said, ‘Don’t look. You mustn’t look. You can’t do him any good. Come along, and I’ll take you home.’
‘Eachain Dubh!’ she cried. ‘Not till I know! Not till I know if Eachain Dubh’s alive or dead.’
‘He’s dead,’ said an unknown voice.
Traffic had jammed and coagulated on the bridge, and in one of the out-going motor-cars there was a doctor. ‘Killed on the instant,’ he said.
Then, weeping beyond restraint, Shiona had let her young man lead her away.
‘But what did he mean?’ he asked. ‘Just as he was going to cross the road, he said something — something in a foreign language.’
‘Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore,’ she said between her sobs.
‘And what does that mean?’
‘ “They held out their hands in longing for the farther shore.” ‘
‘He wanted to cross the road: well, that was obvious. But why couldn’t he say it in English?’
He had spoken of death in the morning: spoken lightly of death. And now she knew that he had been speaking seriously as well as lightly. ‘It’s an old-fashioned habit to write epitaphs in Latin,’ she said, and turning her face into a dull, misunderstanding bosom, howled in her misery.
In the gardens below the bridge, on a dark bank above the stream, a waitress employed at the Gargoyle Restaurant sat and fondled a trooper of the 2nd Carabiniers who lay with his head in her lap. Softly she sang to him:
‘I’m backit like the salmon,
I’m breisted like the swan,
My wame it is a down cod,1
My middle you may span.
From my heid intil my taes, John,
I’m like the new fa’n snow,
And a’ for your conveniency,
John Anderson, my jo.’
Not far away, but hidden in the darkness and talking quietly to the river tune, lay several hundred other loving couples. Intent upon each other and their mutual happiness, they seemed remote from the world and immune from its contagion. But from the road above, and into the false security of their darkness, came a growing whisper of voices. It fluttered the air as if a flock of wood-pigeon had taken fright and were wheeling and swooping in search of a safer roosting place. Words became audible, and the singing waitress said to her trooper, ‘Sit up, sit up. Something terrible has happened. — What are you saying?’ she cried into the darkness.
A voice replied, ‘Yacky Doo’s dead.’
‘Yacky Doo? And I’ve brought him drink enough to float in! Oh, Yacky Doo!’
Now the stillness of the evening was broken, and what, to all the lovers lying there, had seemed a solitude, was crowded suddenly with moving figures. Out of the shadows they came, rising with hoarse enquiry from the peace of the sweet-smelling grass; and moving, ever more quickly, under an intolerable impulse to share in disaster by visiting the scene of it, they hurried from the waterside, up the steep slope of the gardens, and on to the road where death had stopped the traffic.
The news of fatality spread through the town as if, on the bridge, a drummer were beating a muffled drum that sent out his tidings on great waves of sad astonishment. Within an hour the news had spread from Comely Bank to Merchiston, from Murrayfield to London Road; and voices, shocked and sorrowful, were telling their neighbours, ‘Yacky Doo’s dead,’ by Jordan Burn and Drylaw Green.
‘Yacky Doo’s dead.’ They said it in the Canongate and The Meadows, in Newington and Leith Walk. ‘Yacky Doo’s dead.’ In Picardy Place and Heriot Row, in the High Street and the Grassmarket.
Not one in ten thousand had read his poems, but they knew his name, they knew a poet had died, and many knew by heart some of his doggerel verses. In each of his first two volumes there was an appendix called The Rude Antiphony. He had added these pages, he explained, for the sake of honesty. In his poems he had expressed his own emotions; but, as he wrote, not all who share the same occasion share the same thoughts — and he had thought it only fair to include some comments he had heard from ‘other ranks’. ‘My readers,’ he said, ‘may find it interesting, as I have found it, to compare my feelings, as they are exposed on page 17 or page 28, with those of Trooper Shaw and Gunner Raikes as I have transcribed them on pages 93 and 101.’
The verses in the latter pages of the two volumes were doggerel: usually sardonic, sometimes ironic, and a few of them barrack-room bawdy. Spread by word of mouth, they had become widely known, and were often quoted at meetings of the British Legion or Regimental Associations. Within an hour of Hector’s death a dock labourer who had served with the Desert Rats was reciting — tears running down his cheek — to a cluster of his friends under the Burns statue in Leith:
‘It isn’t for England I’m doing my duty,
But for you chaps here, and Nell Godden;
For all that I’ve known of Home and Beauty,
I learnt it from Nell and “F” Squadron.’
And under the wall of Greyfriars Churchyard a melancholy window-cleaner (late of the First of Foot) was declaiming to a sympathetic policeman:
‘Here’s a health to the King, and a health to the Queen,
And to Sergeant-major MacCarthy;
And for Private Grief in the Wet Canteen
Sweet Jesus is giving a party.’
On such trivialities had Hector’s wider fame been built, but wide it was, and it had been deepened by the curious mood which had prevailed in Edinburgh for the last few days. The infection spread by Robert Burns’s poems had been a poetical infection — many had deplored that sort of poetry, but no one had denied its influence — and because it had so vastly increased their enjoyment of life, the people of Edinburgh had found a new respect for the makers of poetry. For Robert Burns, of course, they had always professed a reverent admiration; but of late they had felt it. Burns with a few deftly indecent verses had inspired them to a far livelier pleasure in life than all the well-meant, elaborate paraphernalia of Welfare Demo
cracy, and in the overplus of their thankfulness to him they were eager to admit all poets to their gratitude. But, of recent years, so few poets had written in a way they could understand, in words they could remember and sing (if that was their mood) to a familiar tune. So Hector, whose lesser verses were of this sort, had been welcomed and accepted into the cousinry of Burns; and his death was truly lamented.
‘In Euston Road I lived lang syne,
To be a painter my incline,
And all I reaped was scorning;
But now I’ve got my sights in line
On the spawn of a world that let me dwine,1
At Hellfire Pass in the morning!’
That was a verse some students of the College of Art sang loudly and repeatedly — to the distress of their neighbours — in their lodging in Warrender Park Terrace….
At about ten o’clock Hugh Burnett telephoned to Max Arbuthnot and gave him the news. In his house on Corstorphine Hill Max had sat at a solemn dinner-table. Simon and his regiment were to sail for the Far East in three days’ time, and still there was no certain knowledge of the situation in New Brabant. It was said that order had been restored in Namua, but in both The Times and the Manchester Guardian there had been articles, written with manifest authority, that described the alarming concentration of Communist forces in the western part of the island, and the Dutch Government had asked for the assistance of the United Nations. At Max’s dinner-table only Simon had been so bold as to pretend optimism.
Max, after being told of Hector’s death, came into the drawing-room with shameless tears furrowing his cheeks, and said with gulping sorrow, ‘I would rather it had been my own son.’
‘Oh, no!’ cried Jane. ‘You mustn’t say such a thing! It isn’t that sort of loss. He was no kin to us.’
‘I hardly knew him,’ said Simon, ‘but I’d have been glad to claim kinship with him.’
‘I have two sons,’ said Max — stubborn now, and glaring through his tears — ‘and I’d let either of them die rather than Hector.’
The Merry Muse Page 22
