Magnus Merriman by Eric Linklater Read Free Book Online

they may be dyed, there’s no more life in their wings, or perception of April and autumn in their bodies. Poets would soon die of exhaustion were their responses not prolific asa spawning salmon is of eggs.—The bravado of the concluding couplet especially was restorative, and Magnus was comparatively cheerful when he went into the bedroom to look for cigarettes. But there he saw something that caused a new discomfiture.
    In the precipitation of her dressing Margaret had forgotten her brassière, and it lay half under a chair like a puppy that has misbehaved. Its shape was vaguely pathetic but unhappily ridiculous. It suggested grape-skins discarded on the rim of a plate. Its wistful abatement produced in Magnus a corresponding collapse, and now he perceived in his defiant sonnet something that resembled, not a soldier’s plume, but a mental brassière, a lace bandage for a sagging mind.
    It is a proud thing to be the undefeated hero of a tragedy, but the victim of farce can find no comfort. That his love for Margaret should be destroyed with dust and tears was not incongruous in a world so thickly peopled with calamity; but it was intolerable that disaster should be mocked by this scrap of silk and ribbon, this cynical revelation of the falsity of women and the nature of their lying beauty. It struck him like a fool’s bladder, and he saw himself again, as he had often seen himself before, the prey of a clowning destiny. Destructive laughter rang in his ears, and fate lay before him treacherous as a banana-skin.
    I’m a buffoon, he thought: ‘I’m Troilus with a cold in his nose, not sighing but sneezing towards the Grecian tents. I’m Romeo under the wrong window, Ajax with a boil in his armpit, Priam with a hundred hare-lipped daughters, Roland with a pair of horns. But before God I’m a poet too, and I’ve weapons to defend myself. I can use words. I can make and mend what I please, I can plait words into whips, and like moles they’ll burrow into the ground. I’m a poet. I can live in my own mind, as if it were a Border keep, and raid where I will. But I’ll have no women in the house. I’ll live alone and write alone till the whole country sees my strength.’
    Like an explorer who travels through mountainous and wooded country with the noise of a giant waterfall in his ears, ever growing louder, and sees at last the featheryprecipitation of a lofty river, and hears that soft and falling whiteness magically make thunder on the rocks below, so Magnus in a vision saw the torrent of the English language flung down before him, with sunlight in its hair and the trapped strength of long centuries in its limbs, and heard alike the liquid melody of its verse and the clatter of its common little words and the sonorous fulmination of its most imperial majesty and Miltonic measure. He longed to throw himself into the stream below and battle in its strongest current and dive in the deepest pools for pearls. To master that river, that language! He would strive like an athlete for perfection, he would learn to be native in that element as a sea-Dyak, as an Eskimo in his frail canoe, as an albatross sleeping in the slow magniloquence of the Atlantic swell. He saw the river out-flood its banks and grow to an ocean that Shakespeare ruled in Neptune’s place, and where, dyed like the dolphin for their death, Marlowe and Keats and Shelley spent their bright strength and sank beneath its waves.
    â€˜By God, I’ll be a poet!’ said Magnus; and, still in his clothes, fell asleep on the tumbled bed from which Margaret had so lately fallen. In the next room the gas-fire poisoned the air, and sluggish wisps of fog crept through the window.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Magnus woke with a crapula and spent the morning packing and paying bills. He had rashly signed a year’s lease of the flat, but he hoped, without much reason, to be able to sub-let it, and he made suitable