‘When is the funeral?’ asked Max.
‘Haven’t you seen the papers? To-morrow at twelve o’clock.’
‘Wednesday?’
‘Yes. I felt sure you would know.’
‘But to-morrow the Carabiniers are marching to Leith.’
‘Is that important?’ asked the manager.
‘They’re going overseas! Our own regiment: Edinburgh’s regiment. They’re probably going to that monstrous and pestilential island of New Brabant, where war can break out at any moment —war between us and all the Communist forces of the Far East, and the Carabiniers are the only armoured troops we’ll have there. Half of them may never come back. None of them may ever come back!’
‘I’m sorry for asking such a stupid question! But I’m afraid I don’t read the political news very often. Anything that affects the theatre, or modern literature, and modern art — that I read, but the political news is so boring; it’s all so very like what happened in the nineteen thirties, and before that in the nineteen twenties, that I can’t really take it seriously. As news, I mean. It seems to me more like regurgitation.’
‘This is a matter,’ said Max, ‘that I take very seriously. Lieutenant-Colonel Simon Telfer, who commands the 2nd Carabiniers, is married to my daughter Jane.’
‘Oh, dear,’ said the manager. ‘I’ve hardly seen her since she played in The Wheelbarrow. Not a very good actress, but what a nice girl.’
‘And on Wednesday at noon,’ said Max, ‘her husband is leading his regiment into the farthest parts of the world, on our behalf and in our cause, and when we shall ever see him again, God knows. They’ll march to Leith, where they embark, and at the Mound the Lord Provost of Edinburgh and the General Officer Commanding-in-Chief in Scotland will take their salute. There’ll be a distinguished party — a very distinguished party — at the saluting base, and I have been honoured by an invitation to join it.’
‘So you can’t come to the funeral?’
‘On this occasion,’ said Max, ‘a living regiment must take precedence before a dead poet. Even such a poet as Hector Macrae, who was my friend.’
‘It’s a great disappointment,’ said the manager.
‘But I’ll send a wreath,’ said Max.
The manager let his head oscillate slowly with a sad acquiescence in what was inevitable, and then said, tentatively, ‘There’s a minor request I also have to make. You have a chauffeur called Thomson … ’
‘A young man of high character.’
‘He’s a Scottish Nationalist,’ said the manager, ‘and apparently of some standing in the Party. He is also ambitious of becoming a writer. He offered me a play last year, and though it wasn’t good … ’
‘Thomson a writer?’ said Max. ‘I don’t like that at all. I don’t mind him being a Nationalist. Every young man ought to be a Nationalist, if only for the experience, but how can I depend on him as a driver when he’s thinking about plays and poetry and stuff of that sort?’
‘He isn’t a good writer,’ said the manager.
‘Well, let me know if he improves — and I’ll sack him.’
‘He was,’ said the manager, after a little pause, ‘a great admirer of Yacky Doo, and Yacky Doo, he has told me, was extremely kind to him. Well, last night he came to see me, and made what you may think a rather strange request. He wants to drive the hearse to-morrow. It’s his idea of doing a last service to one who, as he claims, was his benefactor.’
‘What will the undertakers have to say about that?’
‘They’re quite willing! They know he drives for you, and that’s sufficient guarantee that he’s trustworthy. And the Nationalists — who will, of course, attend in what you may call an official capacity, though Yacky Doo was never a member of the Party — they are strongly in favour of Thomson’s proposal. He is (I think I’m right) a vice-president of the Edinburgh branch.’
For a moment or two Max frowned and muttered, but then he declared, ‘All right, I won’t stand in his way. As a matter of fact, I think all the better of him for entertaining such an idea. It shows imagination. Probably he will become a good writer — and then I’ll have to look for a new driver.’
‘That’s very kind of you, Mr Arbuthnot.’
‘I’ll tell him he can have the day off. And I tell you what else I’ll do! There’s a friend of mine called Hugh Burnett — a fine fellow in every way, and a great friend though he’s twenty years younger than I am — and I’ll ask him to go to the funeral as my representative. Well, I can’t do more than that, can I?’
Like a weathercock swinging from south-east to southwest in April’s changing weather, Thomson’s young and ardent mind pointed now to a hard, bright exaltation, now to a cloud-hung boisterous grief. No one in Edinburgh mourned more deeply for Hector: Hector was the only man Thomson had ever met who could plausibly be called ‘great’ — a great poet, in the opinion of many, and great in the minds of more because by some strange alchemy his name had stirred imagination — and one night, for a couple of hours, Hector had been kind to him. Kind and friendly. Talked to him as an equal, but talked in such a way as none of his other equals talked. Talked of things and people that Thomson had never heard discussed at familiar, table-top level. After a couple of hours in Hector’s flat, Thomson, who had long admired him, became his devotee, and mourned his death with furious tears.
But Thomson had discovered the perfect tribute to pay his dead hero. This was not the simple and mechanical act of driving his body to its grave: that was a sentimental indulgence, a gesture to proclaim his devotion. The tribute was hidden between his clean shirts in a chest-of-drawers in the comfortable room he occupied in Max’s house on Corstorphine Hill.
He had found it after driving Max and his friends home from the United Universities Club on the night when Max was trapped in a lift. It had fallen to the floor of the car, and Max, not yet recovered from his unnerving experience, had gone off, stumbling a little, and forgetful of the treasure he had so lately recovered.
Thomson had no intention of stealing. He recognized the book, and took it to his room to read it. There he found the sixteen pages in manuscript, and quickly assessed the value of his find. Realized, too, that this was the book about which, for some days past, he had heard fragments of enquiry, fractions of guarded reference. But still he had no thought of stealing it. He decided, with an excited but firm determination, to keep it until he had taken a copy of the manuscript verses, and then he would return it to Max and pretend to have found it under the rhododendrons that grew between the house and the garage. He would sprinkle a little water on the cover of the book to give it the appearance of exposure to the dew.
Then, late on Sunday night, he heard the dark tidings, and when the first shock had passed — when the air about him, as if it were an atmosphere shattered by a vast explosion, settled again to a troubled calm above the rubble and the tinkling glass — then he saw clearly what the book must do, and what must become of it.
It must go with Hector to his grave. It would be a pillow for his head. These pages, in Robert Burns’s own writing, would cushion Hector in his tomb. The impermissible, the wild and reprehensible genius of his great predecessor would lie with him through time’s consumption. It was for this the poems had been preserved — for this that he had found them — and to Eachain Dubh they would be his proper tribute.
There are those, with much experience of military affairs, in whose memory all ceremonial occasions — birthday parades, a General Officer’s inspection, the presentation of new colours —were an enervating confusion of raucous ill temper, bellowing sergeants, worried officers, last-minute re-arrangement, and the subsequent appointment of a new adjutant. But no such discomforts were ever experienced by the 2nd Carabiniers, partly because they respected no one more than themselves and were therefore unimpressed by the importance of their visitors and the implications of ceremony; and partly because the apparent ease of their discipline masked a rigid conformity to undeviating principles, and th
eir innate (or, at the least, ingrained) efficiency allowed them more freedom than many regiments were permitted.
It was discipline of this sort that had let them enjoy, without disturbance of the sort which the War Office had feared, the late relaxation of manners in Edinburgh; and on Wednesday morning, within a few hours of embarkation, the scene at Redford Barracks was calm and dignified. An almost placid order reigned, and on the long parade-ground the great Centurion tanks of the regiment stood in a precise diagram of power and pointed their long guns in parallel lines and the multiple promise of unswerving accuracy. They were dull green in colour — but polished to the dark lustre of hard holly-leaves under the fleeting, pale blue sky of a late September day — and their guns thrust forward, stiff but alert, as though snuffing the currents of the air.
Farther off were the taut and jaunty scout-cars, and the fifty or sixty unarmoured vehicles of ‘B’ echelon. They would leave the barracks a little while after the tanks, but move faster and take a different route to the docks. Here and there stood, or slowly walked to-and-fro, a little group of officers or N.C.Os. — Simon and the Quartermaster talking to a couple of officers from Scottish Command — a pair of sergeants in lively conversation — but had it not been for the menacing purpose of the tanks they would have looked like the last guests at a garden party, not reluctant to leave, but unhurried and a little dilatory.
But then, precisely at eleven o’clock, the parade-ground filled with a shuddering roar as the engines were started in forty-eight holly-green, steel-flanked, ponderous vehicles, and a moment or two later Simon Telfer in his scout-car in the forefront of the regiment gave the order to move. There was nothing dramatic in his order. It was laconic, codified, almost impersonal as the radio-telephone sent it to listening earphones: ‘Hullo, all stations: Charlie. Move now. Out.’
He led them through the broad gateway, and as the regiment followed him the roar of the engines blended in a deafening chorus with the deep whine of rolling tracks. On the road outside they formed into column three abreast, troop by troop, troop-leaders on the right flank; squadron followed squadron, with squadron-leaders three lengths ahead; and under its canopy of thunder the march began to Princes Street and the distinguished party waiting at The Mound to take the salute.
By half-past eleven several hundred people had already gathered in the mews behind St George’s Church, and more were still arriving. Before the pale blue door of Hector’s borrowed flat stood the great crystal shell of a hearse, and motor-cars of many sorts and sizes waited at the far end of the mews and in the nearby street. Despite the melancholy occasion there was a liveliness of conversation in the throng — packed closely in a narrow space — that suggested market-day in a country town rather than a funeral. In one part, indeed, where the Scottish Nationalists stood, a stranger might have been misled into thinking he was attending a Highland Gathering; for all the men were bravely kilted and the kaleidoscope of tartans was irrepressibly gay. Mackenzie, Mackay and MacLeod — Chisholm, Buchanan and Stewart — Matheson and McGregor, Macintosh and Cameron, they all were there: a muster-roll of the clans, or to be more accurate, a company of lively young men and women who proudly asserted their nationality by wearing tartans to which some of them were fully entitled.
A few top hats and morning-coats could be seen — Max Arbuthnot’s representative, Hugh Burnett, was impeccably attired — but the majority were informally dressed. Many, of course, were novelists or poets — painters or composers — historians, critics, essayists and dramatists: people who despised the conventions, or had not heard of them, or who (the lonely poor in a richly industrialized welfare state) possessed only one suit of clothes. To the credit of literature, however, its two leading representatives were as handsomely and appropriately clad as even a press-photographer could desire.
They were Sir Beaumont Macready and Sir Edward Avalanche; and for a minute the whole crowd was hushed and observant while seven photographers focussed their cameras on them as they stood together. Then the photographers transferred their attention to the Scottish Nationalists, and Sir Beaumont and Sir Edward resumed their conversation. A little space, like an open gangway, had been left for them, and slowly they walked to and fro.
Sir Beaumont, the doyen of Scottish authors, looked more like an ambassador — but an Edwardian ambassador — than a novelist; and for a stormy lustrum he had indeed been a diplomat. In his early years as a writer he had cultivated an elaborate literary style, and in his maturity he had become a stylist in the habit of his life. He had grown steadily more popular as he flouted critical esteem, and as a man he had become a national possession. He had the great talent of survival, and at seventy-five his zest for life was unimpaired. He had celebrated his seventieth birthday with an evening party for two hundred people, and on the following day he led a deputation to the Chancellor of the Exchequer to plead for leniency in the taxation of authors on the ground of their widely known and incurable poverty. He had, moreover, substantiated his plea with the admission that to pay for his party he had had to sell all his remaining manuscripts and an intimate letter from Prince Charles Edward Stuart to a lady from whom he was distantly descended. ‘I have my obligations,’ he had said, ‘and I meet them as I can. Of course there was champagne.’
He was an author of Goethe’s kind — he had lived capaciously, ink had not stained him — and almost the only fault his innumerable friends could find in him was his ardent and restless interest in the politics of Greece. It was in Athens that he had served as a diplomat — an amateur diplomat during the first Great War — and being romantic by nature and by education a Hellenist, he had ever since maintained friendly relations with all the more progressive Greek statesmen. It was of Greece and its problems that he was now talking — or trying to talk — to Sir Edward Avalanche.
But Sir Edward had his own ideas of conversation. Sir Edward, who had come to the funeral as the representative of English literature, had an appearance of rosy benignity and the strength of mind to be aware of his own importance. He stood for tradition in the modern world, and for the modern world (as if it were a lately discovered island) in the broad stream of tradition. For many years he had been engaged in writing a series of novels that would, when completed, tell the inner story of the second Great War: the part played, behind the scenes, by Civil Servants. He had won widespread admiration by his first seven volumes, but so scrupulous was his regard for truth that in seven books he had only reached the evacuation from Dunkirk, and while all his characters were still young, he, under the burden of creation, was beginning to put on the ponderous look of some rubicund old giant of letters. His friends were already wondering if he could maintain his necessary sympathy with dramatis personae who, when the time came for the invasion of Normandy, would still be in their early thirties, while he — at the rate of a novel every second year, and an estimated fourteen to fill the gap between Dunkirk and June, 1944 — would be as venerable as Michelangelo’s Moses, and majestically above the common walk of life. Sir Edward himself was unperturbed by this possibility, and he was now explaining to Sir Beaumont — or trying to — his belief in the necessity for thematic development in a novel.
‘Like Trollope,’ he said. ‘Trollope and I both discovered … ’
‘Yes, I realize that. And how admirably you have both done it,’ Sir Beaumont interrupted. ‘But, as I was saying, the real obstacle was the pig-headed prejudice and the stark ignorance of the Foreign Office. I don’t say I was the ideal choice for the first President of Cyprus … ’
‘I can’t think of a better, my dear Monty. But what we now have to do is to re-assert some traditional principles. And Trollope and I … ’
‘I had the necessary backing, you see. I’m not talking without knowledge of the situation, my dear Ned.’
‘A story has no significance unless it sustains a theme … ’
‘And that you have proved. Proved to the hilt! Now the interesting thing is that the Archbishop himself was ready to compromise �
�� ’
‘Archbishops invariably are. But, as I was saying, Tolstoy and I…’
‘What’s that?’
‘Trollope, I mean. Trollope and I … ’
‘Ah, yes, you know a lot about the reality of politics, and so did he. But reality in Greece has many different faces … ’
Lining the gangway on which they walked were many other luminaries of literature in England and Scotland. There was the poet Hugh Skene, avant-garde of the ‘twenties, who had discovered a new dictionary for poets in the works of Henryson and Dunbar, and later had stirred into the ever richer broth of his writing the terminologies of Communism, geology, aerodynamics, semantics, and a dozen other theories or systems of knowledge. Thirty years ago he had looked something like a well-bred Border terrier, brisk and fierce and brushed for Cruft’s, but now his eyes were as kind as a spaniel’s — and like a spaniel he had a nose that was still alert to every passing air.
There was Tom Dunn, tall and bleak of aspect, who wore his solitude like the cloak of some great order of knighthood. He no longer wrote very much, but as if weary of mere words, that so imperfectly trapped sensation, had taken to the more precise and useful art of fishing; and now caught salmon with a grave and dedicated skill. Talking to him was Francis Meiklejohn, once a gay and raffish figure in Edinburgh, but grown a little sadder with the years. His upper lip was stained with snuff, and that gave him a lugubrious look; but his inward melancholy was the consequence of success. He too had been a passionate fisherman, but he had made the mistake of writing about what he loved; and so popular had his essays become — on little trout-streams in the Borders, great Highland rivers, and the bird-haunted waters of Myvatn — that for many years he had had no time to cast a fly on either stream or lake. His pen was never idle, but his rods hung untouched in their cupboard.
The Merry Muse Page 24
