Magnus Merriman by Eric Linklater Read Free Book Online Page B

told that she was busy with postponed surgery patients. In a great hurry he turned to finish his packing, and made a feverish effort to catch the night train to Edinburgh. But his taxi was slow and he missed it by several minutes. He returned to Tavistock Square and slept once more in his disillusioned bed. In the morning he coldly refrained from any further attempt to communicate with Margaret, and arrived at King’s Cross in ample time to secure a seat.
    As they emerged, with gathering swiftness, from the far-reaching tentacles of London, Magnus felt a growing relief. A damp and sluggish air swathed the shapeless suburbs, and in its chill torpor the train grumbled as though impatient for the freedom of the grass-lands beyond. Then through winter fields, wet underfoot and flagrant with hideous advertisements for linoleum and quack lenitive and soapy purge—but aconite and hemlock were the only remedies for those who so beplastered the world—they ran at speed. Presently they came to more gracious country, and fields whose quietness the thieving metropolis had not yet robbed of dignity. The train rocked and swayed on its bright steel lines, and raced for the approaching north. Elated by speed and the illusionof escape Magnus went to the restaurant car and drank with a new delight to think that Bacardi rum should trickle down his gullet while his gullet was hurled from county to county at seventy splendid miles an hour.
    Two girls sat near him. They were well-groomed, smartly clad, and they spoke of nothing in particular in clear high-pitched confident voices. They looked at Magnus with cool appraisement. For a moment he cast about for some phrase or contrivance with which to enter into conversation with them, but he remembered instead his resolution to have nothing to do with women. He asked for another cocktail and plumed himself on this high indifference. This was freedom. Whereas he had lately thought of woman occupying the world like the mistress of her own house, he now beheld her earth-bound and woefully situated between the horns of an eternal dilemma. He alone, by virtue of the poetry in him, was free of the world. But women were condemned for ever to the wearisome burden of love or to celibate starvation. These girls, uneasily aware of their position, were meanwhile, precarious as a tight-rope walker, balancing between the horns. But he, in the solitude of poetry—doubly safe because most of it was unwritten—was gloriously independent. His mind, exultant, quickened with an idea, with rhythm and a phrase, and he began to write on the back of the menu card.
    â€˜Un peu cabotin,’ said one of the girls.
    The other shrugged her shoulders and lit a cigarette.
    Unaware of these disparaging comments Magnus continued to write, and had presently composed, with buoyant cynicism, some verses which he called Miss Wyatt and Mrs Leggatt :
    Poor Mrs Leggatt with a drunken husband—
    Â Â Â Â Beer was a red-gold snow-capped nectar,
    Â Â Â Â Song-raising, bitter-cool Nepenthe to him—
    Poor Mrs Leggatt with nine pale children—
    Â Â Â Â Gladys was chlorotic and May had goitre,
    Â Â Â Â Others had adenoids and Bright’s disease—
    Poor Mrs Leggatt with her varicose veins
    Hated her neighbour with hatred’s pains,
    Who was poor Miss Wyatt of the corner shop:
    For poor Miss Wyatt had once said: ‘Stop!’
    To the fumbling hot young man who would woo:
    â€˜Stop!’ she had said, and she meant it too.
    Â Â Â 
    For poor Miss Wyatt had shrilly said
    Â Â Â Â To her hoarse young lover, no, no, she wouldn’t;
    And poor Mrs Leggatt had also denied,
    Â Â Â Â But keep to her word the poor thing couldn’t.
    And poor Miss Wyatt was a withered virgin—
    Â Â Â Â Vinegar brewed in that thin bosom,
    Â Â Â Â Acid returns of repression arose—
    Poor Miss Wyatt with none to live