The Merry Muse

by Eric Linklater

  There was James Drake, who had fought at Gallipoli and written with grim devotion of the fading glories of the great Clyde shipbuilders; and Charles Boyd-Moncur, expert in vernacular architecture and an amateur historian: an ardent Catholic, it was said that he had once written a history of Edinburgh without ever mentioning the Reformation. But the book (if it existed) was a great rarity, for no one had ever seen it.

  There was Olaf Swanson, the Shetland novelist who lived in a boat. There was Randolph Younger, bearded and immensely tall, who spoke eleven languages and as a writer was handicapped by his recurrent difficulty in deciding whether a meditated lyric would look better in Romansch, the Norwegian landsmal, or demotic Greek.

  There were all the members of the Scottish P.E.N. Club …

  On the other side of the gangway were representatives of the English P.E.N. Club. There was Balfour Beige, neatly and inconspicuously dressed, who stood alone and appeared to be reading a carefully folded copy of the Financial Times; but behind that convenient cover his eyes were alert for all the details of a foreign scene. It was Beige whose genius had brought the detective story into the realm of literature. In the nick of time he had seen the need to save from extinction the tradition of story-telling: police romances were almost the only surviving repositories of story and, with a vivid perception of what had to be done, he introduced the first of his innovations. — Seminal, it was called. — This was to endow his criminal with a sense of guilt; and the effect was immediate, both in sales and critical esteem. But his second innovation was of even greater importance, for in his later novels his detective also was imbued with guilt. Through scenes described with a superb economy, and through intricacies of plot exactly charted, guilt was pursued by hot-foot guilt, and the multitude of his readers, themselves obsessed by comparable emotions, responded with a sympathy that was enthusiastically ambidextrous.

  There was Roland Owl who, with great cleverness, wrote about nothing at all. His characters were non-existent, and for three hundred pages he moved them, quietly and inconspicuously, from one sort of inactivity to another. The critics praised him warmly for ‘a masterly depiction of modern life, unsullied by irony, imagination, or literary grace.’ (That was the quotation most often chosen to advertise his novels.)

  There were three young men, of pleasant appearance and gentle demeanour, who had written comedies set in the provincial environment of the universities of Durham, Leeds and Manchester. To the London critics, who affected a belief that north of Oxford Street the climate deteriorated and the tundra began at Hull, these were intellectual adventures of the greatest daring, and they had greeted their novels, of unexpected merit, with extravagant surprise. But the young men had accepted their success with a seemly modesty.

  There was Anita Arbuckle, young and attractive, who wrote a lively, colloquial prose and always gave her heroines two or three simultaneous lovers. There was Sorley Bain the poet, who in his youth had looked like the youth of Shelley and at eighty would look like Wordsworth at eighty. There was Edward Saint whose habitation was all the pubs in Chelsea, and Robert Ruthven who lived in Timbuctoo, Yarkand, or Mokalla, and wrote of their inhabitants with a sympathy he had never been able to feel for the people of his native Birmingham.

  The English writers were well represented, but the absence of a promised contingent from Ireland was much regretted. The Irish, who were warm admirers of Hector Macrae, had said they would send about twenty of their better-known authors, with two pipers in saffron kilts to play them to the graveside. But no Irishman arrived, and not until a couple of days later was it learnt what had happened to them. He who had organized the pilgrimage had made a simple mistake and taken them, not to Edinburgh, but to Eastbourne; where, by another misapprehension, they had followed a dead policeman to his sepulture….

  And now, from Hector’s flat, the coffin was carried down and slid into the crystal hearse. Following it came Thomson and the three poets who customarily drank together in a pub in Rose Street, and who, in the old Scots habit, had sat with the body through the hours of darkness. It was Thomson who had taken the first watch, and in that solitude he had raised the lid of the coffin — the undertaker’s men would not screw it down till the morning came — and slipped beneath Hector’s pale and cushioned head the immortal improprieties of Robert Burns’s confection. This action, of noble inspiration, so enlivened him, so raised his spirits, that when one of the poets came to relieve him, he said, ‘Let’s all sit up with him! Let’s sit together and make a night of it. Let’s give him a proper wake, for we’ll never have the chance again to sit with a man like this.’

  They had all, as it happened, brought a bottle to comfort themselves against the dark, and their pious watch became a solemn revelry. There was no impropriety in that, but the continuance of old tradition. In Scotland it had always been the habit to see in a neighbour’s death the sunrise of a holiday, and Thomson and the three poets followed faithfully an old custom.

  When daylight came they slept awhile, and then used Hector’s bath and razor to make themselves presentable for the funeral. They found, by good fortune, an unopened bottle of Glen Grant in a kitchen cupboard, and on this, and a packet of cigarettes, they breakfasted. Thomson, who rarely drank, but when he did, liked to drink without restraint, saved the last of the bottle to sustain him in his self-appointed task of driving the hearse.

  When they came down the stairs, following the coffin, they had the solemn look of men who were carrying a burden of responsibility that strained their strength to the utmost limit of its endurance; but Thomson, who wore a navy-blue suit and a bowler hat, climbed steadily into the driver’s seat, and the poets, rather clumsily, helped the undertaker’s men to fill the transparent hearse with flowers.

  There was a little confusion and some argument before the cortège moved off. The manager of the theatre had planned to follow in the first car with Hugh Burnett — as Max Arbuthnot’s representative — and after them were to come Sir Beaumont Macready and Sir Edward Avalanche. But now the Scottish Nationalists, who were all on foot, insisted on taking the lead, and for justification pointed to their brightly patterned kilts. On such an occasion, they declared, the tartan must have pride of place. They were vociferous as well as resolute, and rather than provoke an unseemly squabble the manager gave way.

  In the ebb and flurry that ensued — in the surge for position and the re-arrangement of the procession — Hugh Burnett was separated from the manager, and on the fringe of the crowd saw a young and very pretty girl who seemed all alone. She wore a dark blue duffle-coat, a black muffler and long black stockings; and with an innocence of grief, without effort or pretence of concealing her sorrow, she was crying.

  For a moment Burnett hesitated, then asked her, ‘Is there anyone to look after you? Anyone you’re going with?’

  ‘No,’ she said, and looked at him with tear-wet eyes. ‘I don’t know anyone.’

  He hesitated no longer, but said, ‘Then you had better come with me. I was supposed to go with someone else, but what does that matter? Let’s go and look for my car.’

  So the manager rode alone, and within a few minutes he had left the marching Nationalists behind and was following the hearse at a speed which he thought excessive for a funeral. This was entirely due to the fact that Thomson’s temper had been ruffled.

  His long night of drinking, and the last noggin of whisky he had saved to brace himself for the seemly discharge of a public duty, had been too much for Thomson. His normal sense of responsibility had been dissolved, and run down to sea. His equable and steady temper had been invaded by strange currents of resentment, by the floodwaters of impatience, and a renewing tide of sorrow that left him contemptuous of the living world. The argument before they started had annoyed him, and then he was exasperated by the undertaker’s man who sat beside him and, very properly, reminded him that he could not take the direct road to Greyfriars Churchyard, but must follow the route prescribed by municipal authority.

  He was c
ompelled to drive in a ridiculously roundabout fashion. In the first stage, along Queensferry Street to the West End of Princes Street. Then, absurdly, a re-entrant turn, almost turning rightabout, and north along Hope Street and the west side of Charlotte Square. Round Charlotte Square — he went faster and faster past the classic dignities of Robert Adam’s building — and southward again to cross Princes Street almost two hundred yards east of where he could have crossed it. Round three sides of a square because the edicts of a petty bureaucracy compelled a dead poet to crawl through the spider-webs of urban traffic! ‘Be damned to them!’ said Thomson.

  Before they were out of Queensferry Street he had left the marching Nationalists far behind, and car after car of the cortège had swung round them to keep in touch with him. At the West End he had seen an uncommonly large number of people, waiting shoulder to shoulder on the pavement, but they had not impeded him: they stood on the far side, or were clustered at the near corner of Princes Street. He paid no attention to them, but drove round Charlotte Square as if he were in the last stages of the Monte Carlo rally. As he approached Princes Street, to cross it and turn to the right, he slowed a little, for on either side, and on the opposite pavement, he saw again a close-packed horde of spectators, and he might have taken the corner with some care had not a policeman turned and held up a warning hand to stop him.

  ‘Gangway for Hector, and to hell with you!’ he shouted, and trod on the accelerator.

  Several times, in their progress from Redford Barracks, the Carabiniers had been compelled to change formation where a street narrowed, but as they turned eastward from the Lothian Road into Princes Street they were again three abreast, each troop in line. Simon Telfer in his scout-car rode ahead, and behind him his adjutant. Then a squadron-leader in his tank, and behind him, troop after troop, the mass of armour that brought with it a shrill roar of engine noise and the tread of the tracks to echo from the shops on one side and slowly reverberate in distant thunder from the Castle Rock.

  Their turrets were open, and the tank commanders, perched high, showed head and shoulders like living busts above encircling steel; but of the drivers down in front, more deeply seated, little but a beret, a pair of eyes, and a nose could be seen.

  The left-hand tank of the leading troop was commanded by Sergeant Robertson, an Edinburgh man. Closely in front of him — almost between his knees, but on a lower level — sat his invisible gunner, and beside him, separated by the savagely recoiling breech, the signaller-loader on his foundation of 20-pounder shells. The driver — Trooper Lennox, also of Edinburgh — was isolated in his own small compartment. He had a wide, uninterrupted forward view, but only a partial view to the side; and he did not see the hearse until he hit it.

  Sergeant Robertson, who for a fraction of a second had looked to the right to make sure that his dressing was correct, saw the hearse only when, at high speed, it passed the policeman on his left and came into Princes Street. Thomson, his perception dulled by drink, saw the tank too late, but pulled his wheel hard to the left to try and avoid a collision by running ahead of it. He failed, and the tank struck him on the off-side near the rear wheel.

  No one in the heavy tank felt any impact, but the hearse was toppled over and fell on its side with such a multitudinous, treble-voiced tinkling of broken glass as if a score of chandeliers had dropped from the skies. The tank was immediately halted, and Sergeant Robertson signalled to the tank behind him to move on. He and the driver climbed quickly out, and while the Sergeant pulled Thomson and the undertaker’s man from the wreckage — neither was badly hurt — Trooper Lennox took a fire-extinguisher that was clipped to the turret and shot a stream of milky, smoky liquid at the engine of the hearse. There was no apparent danger of fire, but the evil-smelling fumes helped the police, who had quickly arrived, to keep back the crowd.

  The coffin had been thrown out, and like a fishing-boat split on the rocks, amid a soft foliage of breaking surf, it lay open among tossed-up wreaths and scattered flowers. Treading noisily in the splintered glass — in a choir-boys’ twittering or birdsong of broken glass — Sergeant Robertson carefully and reverently resettled dead Hector in his cerements and straightened the little pillow beneath his head. Under the pillow he felt a square, stiff object, and pulled out a book.

  The police — a sergeant and two constables — had all they could do to control the crowd, whom the foremost of the Scottish Nationalists (taking a shorter route) had now joined. Trooper Lennox, with the first-aid kit that was kept at the rear-end of the tank, was patching a long cut on Thomson’s forehead, and the gunner and his loader, using crowbars that were lodged on deck, were shifting wreckage. For a moment no one was watching him, and Sergeant Robertson was an Edinburgh man, well-educated and brought-up in a proper knowledge of the works of Robert Burns. A moment was all he needed to recognize The Merry Muses — though he did not immediately discover the treasure in manuscript — and without wasting time on wondering why such a book should lie beneath a dead man’s head, but with a good soldier’s instinct for the exploitation of unexpected advantage, he slipped The Merry Muses into his battle-blouse, and tenderly — tenderly and reverently — replaced the lid of the coffin.

  An ambulance and a police-car, waiting in Charlotte Square to deal with emergencies, had both been summoned, and Thomson and the undertaker’s man — who, because of a broken bottle in the hearse, was unjustly suspected of being as drunk as his companion — were taken to the nearest police-station. The coffin, and what remained of the flowers, were placed in the ambulance, and sadly the funeral cortège was re-formed and, now moving very slowly, resumed its journey to Greyfriars Churchyard.

  There the body was solemnly interred, and Sir Beaumont Macready, standing at the head of the grave, delivered a moving oration. A piper played a lament, and many of the mourners wept openly. But no one felt happy about the way in which the funeral had been conducted. There was grave dissatisfaction with the manager of the theatre — who, they said, had taken too much on himself — and angry criticism of the police, not only for their failure to give right of way to the cortège, but more particularly for their having arrested Thomson, who had only been trying to assert for Yacky Doo the precedence to which he was entitled.

  The Scottish Nationalists took up a collection for Thomson’s legal defence, and Hugh Burnett, after he had given them ten shillings, said to Shiona MacLeod, ‘We’ve paid him all the respect we can, for the present, and now we owe a little respect to ourselves. Come to the Gargoyle, and let me give you luncheon.’

  Neither the distinguished party at the saluting base, nor the crowds who so thickly lined Princes Street farther down the route, heard anything about the collision with Yacky Doo’s hearse until some considerable time after the regiment had passed. — Many, indeed, remained ignorant of it until they read their evening papers. — The tank immediately behind Sergeant Robertson had found room to pass him, those in rear had duly followed, and few of the spectators were worried by the fact that there were only two tanks in the leading troop.

  At The Mound they saw Simon Telfer in his scout-car, a hundred and fifty yards in front of his regiment, who saluted as he passed, then quickly turned and dismounted to join the General’s party.

  The thundrous procession approached, the cheering from the pavements was drowned in the clamour of the march, and a daffodil weft of sun gleamed on the sleek green surface of the armour. The long guns pointed straight ahead — steel nostrils questing the air — and as they drew level with the General and the Lord Provost, with the top-hatted, uniformed, or fur-coated party that flanked them, the tank commanders gave the order: ‘Traverse right — steady — on! Dip!’

  Round swung the menacing long muzzles of the guns till they pointed straight at the grandees and their guests on their beflagged platform, and as in most gracious mockery they dipped in salute, the troop-leaders standing in their turrets swung their hands proudly to the soft edge of their berets and curiously scanned their spectators to count how many
of them they knew.

  West of The Mound were the massed bands of three Highland regiments, but even the cloud-piercing tune of the pipers was drowned by the high-pitched thunder of the tanks. East of The Mound was a stand fluttering with handkerchiefs and loud with the shouting and the loving cries of the wives and sweethearts, the mothers, the fathers and the children of nearly four hundred troopers: but even that heart-swollen chorus was overwhelmed by the pulse and roar of the march.

  Down the broad road they went, past the dead statues to forgotten poets and unremembered benefactors of their kind — down the dull breadth of Leith Walk to the waiting ships and the light that glinted on the leaping waters of the Forth.

  Night had fallen before they put to sea, cheering as their ships went slowly past the dense throng that filled the long West Pier.

  XII

  ‘Don’t talk to me about abstract art!’ said Max. ‘It doesn’t exist. At best it’s only a substitute for art. If an artist’s working in a state of abstraction from what he can see, he’s cut himself off from his only source of real experience. So what can he do but doodle? Well, let him doodle if he wants to, but it’s damned nonsense to put a frame round it.’

  ‘Those two little pictures that Milton sent me: they’re masterpieces,’ said Paula, ‘and if you can see nothing in them — nothing but doodling — it’s because you’re getting old.’

  ‘One of them is called Equinox on Tuesday, and the other Peradventure Squared’, can you tell me why?’

  ‘You’re called Max,’ said Paula. ‘Does that mean anything?’

  He was untouched by her impertinence, as she by his pretended truculence. They were both in unusually high humour — the glass of temper was firm at Set Fair — for Max had just been asked to accept a directorship on the board of Cockcroft and Sandeburn, the wine-shippers, and Paula’s husband, Milton Moberley, had written long and movingly to say that he now realized how deeply he had wronged her, and would she come back to him. ‘I feel it’s never too late to make a fresh start,’ he wrote; and, as if to ask forgiveness for the platitude as well as for his other misdemeanours, he had sent her two small canvases brightly painted by Paul Klee.