He closed the lid again and noticed a rolled-up pamphlet of paper stuck into the corner of the cupboard.
McLevy frowned. An interloper.
He pulled the paper out, closed the cupboard door and walked to the small table by the window where he penned his most profound ruminations.
He spread out the paper to read and the words of Poet McGonagall thus thundered in his mind.
Oh, ill-fated bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build
The less chance we have of being killed.
Bathsheba finished up her milk and with natural grace, jumped up to her appointed spot by the fire. She licked her paw, dabbed daintily at her whiskers and looked over where McLevy stood like a statue, paper in hand.
Then she licked again and began to groom behind her ears, a hive of activity compared to the still figure at the window, marooned in the moonlight.
But animals have not time for memory; they live in the present.
The past is a uniquely human predicament.
35
I can endure my own despair,
But not another’s hope.
WILLIAM WALSH,
Song, Of all the torments
Dundee, 28 February 1880
As the crowd filed into the building that housed the Board of Trade Inquiry, they were regaled by a poem, in its own way almost as disastrous as the event itself.
William McGonagall had begun composition the day after the bridge fell, that is the Monday, and ended with a sorrowful sweep of the pen on the following Tuesday evening.
Even by his standards it plumbed the depths, although the poet might offer as excuse the fact that having rescued an officer of the law that fateful night, he had returned to his home and attempted to pacify with the monetary contents of his collection a long-suffering wife.
The poor woman was driven to distraction by the transformation of what she had thought to be an ordinary weaver catapulted into the grinding jaws of the Muse, then chewed up and spat out to emerge as a fully fledged poet before her very eyes.
McGonagall gave her the coins, went to his bed and slept soundly through till morning.
Thus he missed first-hand experience of the searing catastrophe and the howl of collective grief when it finally became known that the train was lodged at the bottom of the river with survival an impossibility, unless a beneficent God reached down his kindly hand.
But, as the Sabbatarian ministers so piously pointed out later, travelling on a Sunday was a profane act of the North British Railway Company and its passengers, transgressing the Law of God and desecrating the day he had lain aside for drawing breath.
So with his mighty right hand He had thrown a storm to punish the sinners for He was, as they never tired of telling you in the bible, a Jealous God who guarded the Sabbath like a roaring lion.
Therefore rather than bringing deliverance, God might well be a number-one suspect.
As the people hurried past, McGonagall offered the sheets of his poetry in vain except for the one woman, Troll Barbara, a squat powerful figure and the only female welder in Dundee, who pressed a coin into his hand, crunched the paper up in one massive paw and disappeared through the door that led to the Inquiry Court.
The poet wondered about starting all over.
Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say, etc. etc.
But somehow this morning he lacked the strength to launch off once more into the epic lay and merely stood with his arm outstretched like a statue in long coat skirts and a wide-brimmed hat; the folk bustling past were content enough to treat him as such, ignoring the still figure in their rush to find a decent seat to view the spectacle, for it was the third day of proceedings and the revelations were coming thick and fast.
A stocky figure approached the poet who perhaps resembled more a scarecrow than a statue. The man also put forward a coin but this was of some value, in McGonagall’s opinion, approaching the worth of the verse inscribed in the pamphlet that he gravely offered forth.
The fellow accepted it equally gravely and stashed it into his pocket.
The light of recognition flashed in the poet’s mind.
‘You are the man from the walnut tree!’ he exclaimed.
‘I am Inspector James McLevy,’ the officer himself replied, ‘and I have to thank you for your labour that night.’
McGonagall struck a proud attitude.
‘As well as a poet,’ he declared, ‘I am also a Tragedian. I have often essayed Othello on stage. It gives a man great strength in crucial predicaments.’
McLevy wasn’t sure how smothering Desdemona with a pillow equated to hauling out a sodden officer of the law from under an ancient nut tree, but he contented himself with bowing solemnly to the poet, who replied in kind, and then without another word, both men went their separate ways.
The inspector to the inquiry, and McGonagall to roam the streets with the beginning of another masterpiece beginning to form in his teeming mentality.
He had suffered much on the stage; eggs are wonderful and yolky to eat but not flying through the air towards you, yet nevertheless the fact that the clergy ranted against the theatre had brought his blood to boiling point.
For did not the best plays see vice punished and virtue rewarded?
Some versical fragments began to run in McGonagall’s mind as the Muse sped round the wide rim of his hat.
We see in Shakespeare’s tragedy of Othello, which is sublime,
Cassio losing his lieutenancy through drinking wine;
And, in delirium and grief, he exclaims – ‘Oh, that men should put
an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains!’
Thus uttering these lines aloud, the last one of which was the best he would ever write, the poet passed out of sight and for this moment left the stage.
At the same time, the inspector stood at the back of the inquiry room behind one of the pillars,
