Free Magnus Merriman by Eric Linklater

and combative gesture, two men were quarrelling. Another, oblivious to them and perhaps to all the world, leaned against the wall with drooping head. From the high remote darkness of the passage came the shrill sound of a woman laughing, and from the tavern whose door the lamp lighted there issued, muffled by the walls, the multifarious sound of talk and argument and rival songs.
    Meiklejohn grew more cheerful as they climbed the steps, and he pushed his way impatiently past the men at the door. One of them turned indignantly and asked him where the hell he thought he was going. Meiklejohn paid no attention, and the man followed him into the crowded bar, his temper ruffled, bent on pursuing this new quarrel.
    â€˜Hey!’ he said, and took Meiklejohn by the shoulder, ‘did you no hear me? Or are you deaf as well as blind?’
    â€˜That’s all right,’ said Meiklejohn.
    â€˜Oh, that’s all right, is it?’ said the man with an offensive parody of Meiklejohn’s voice.
    Magnus spoke soothingly: ‘He hasn’t done you any harm. If he pushed you it was only by accident.’
    â€˜And what the hell’s it got to do with you?’ asked the quarrelsome man. ‘It’s him I’m talking to. Can he no answer for himself?’ He glared fiercely at Magnus. He was a square-shouldered fellow, very shabbily dressed, but nimble and soldierly, and his face was red and bony and truculent. Then, slowly, his expression altered. Pugnacity gave place to surprise, to recognition, and finally to beaming pleasure. ‘Christ!’ he said, ‘it’s Merriman, the beggar that stuck his bayonet up the Captain’s airse at Festubert!’ He turned and called to the companion with whom he had been arguing outside. ‘Here’s a bloke that’ll tell you the truth! I said the war was a bloody picnic in ’15, and so it was. We had a bloody picnic for three weeks at Bécourt.’
    Magnus had now remembered the red-faced man as a former comrade in the Gordon Highlanders. ‘Sergeant Denny,’ he exclaimed, and shook hands with him enthusiastically. Denny introduced his companion. ‘He was a bloody conscript,’ he said, ‘and didn’t come out till ’17. And now he starts telling me what the war was like.’
    The other man, whose name was McRuvie, muttered: ‘It wasna a picnic for the Black Watch, onyway.’
    â€˜It would have been if you’d come out soon enough,’ said Denny. ‘Three bloody weeks at Bécourt and a hot dinner every day, and the officers sleeping in real beds, and every bloody morning I picked a bunch of flowers on the parados and put ’em in a jam-pot on the fire-step!’
    â€˜Ach, to hell! Who shot the cheese?’ said McRuvie.
    Magnus hurriedly ordered three pints of beer, before his reference to an old regimental scandal could aggravate the quarrel to violence: for the Gordons were sensitive about the allegation that they had once opened fire on a ration cheese, mistaking its pallor in the dusk for the pale face of an enemy.
    It was difficult to maintain a conversation in the bar, for there was a great deal of noise and the customers stood so close to each other that a man might easily drink out of his neighbour’s glass did not the latter keep good watch on it. Tobacco, the smell of beer and whisky, and a heavy odour of dirty clothes made the air so thick as almost to be visible. Cigarette smoke floated in thick whorls that were disturbed by the vibration of the floor above, where apparently a reel was being danced. Meiklejohn had fallen into talk with a little old shrivelled man in ragged trousers and more ragged coat whose face, unshaved and grey, wore a look of half-witted cunning. Meiklejohn shouted through the crowd to Magnus.
    â€˜Come and listen to this,’ he said. ‘I’ve found a minstrel, a ballad-singer. He’s got the finest song I’ve heard for