Bring Larks and Heroes (17 page)

Down the hill, Halloran was thinking,
What about the oath?

Hearn had been fed spirits all day, and had gratefully taken them. In the adjutant's hut now, he moaned to the furore, but didn't wake.

19

‘Thank God for the wind,' Ann said, as it blundered across the kitchen roof and covered their voices.

Halloran muttered, ‘I wonder does the wind come from God?'

‘Of course,' said Ann, happy and blood-warm, cherished, gratified and securer than the stars.

Halloran felt shivery behind the ears, not wanting to insult God by thinking he was behind the wind if he wasn't; not wanting to insult him by thinking he was as remote as Hearn's God if he was close; not wanting to insult him by thinking that a Corporal of Marines could insult him; not wanting to insult him.

‘I'll just do my work from now on,' he said. He was talking about the business at the Crescent again. ‘The buggers will be lucky to get that much from me. God is not mocked.'

He felt shivery again.

Ann was the remedy. Some of her hair lay over the corner of his mouth, tasting clean and fresh as if she'd washed it for his home-coming. It had a smell of bounty, like the smell of grain.

‘I hope I didn't put you in any sort of danger, sidling in here.'

‘Mrs Blythe sleeps like a horse.'

‘You brew some marvellous liquor,' he said, speaking figuratively and kissing her. He could tell from the way she wriggled her shoulders that she understood him. ‘I've got no compunction. I'm not at all sorry I came.'

‘No one's asking you to be.'

The whole kitchen was grating like a ship under sail. It was a miraculous night to be together.

‘After all else,' she added pertly, ‘we're able to have a talk.'

Halloran chuckled lowly like a satyr. She had restored him so fully that he couldn't help but comment, with some attempt at seeming flippant, ‘You seem to believe now that you're my consecrated bride.'

She punched him between the legs.

‘You always have to be the scholar, Halloran, the divine. Is it too hard for a sharp mind to lie down man with his wife and enjoy what crowds of dungy farmers can enjoy?'

He slapped her buttocks. He was aware of the
correctness of her hips and the virgin flatness of her belly, which lay as a bowl between them.

‘It could only happen to a fool like Byrne,' she said.

‘What could?'

‘That trouble with Allen. It could only happen to Byrne. And then, trying to drown himself.'

‘I don't think he did try.'

On the journey back from the Crescent, Byrne had sat in silence, having found, for an hour or two, the flat dignity of despair. In one of the wider stretches of the river, he had thrown a fit and jumped into the water. Yet he had seemed grateful for the oar they offered him, and crawled out of the river with great resignation.

Ann elucidated.

‘When you're dealing with a booby, you lose your temper like a booby. Allen ends in being as big a bumpkin as Byrne. It wouldn't have happened if he'd had a nobody's fool like you to deal with.'

‘A nobody's fool like me, love, is too full up of worldly wisdom to call out in the first place as Byrne did. A nobody's fool like me goes to hell for doing nothing.'

He was not only grateful to her for seeing the matter so clearly. He was full of wonder.

‘Don't talk to me about hell on a night like this,' she said.

The wind swelled until it roared like flood-waters.

‘Oh, be ye lifted up, ye eternal gates!' he said.

She turned half side-on to him. Noses and foreheads were a problem to lovers, and your mattress-side arm was always going numb. Her right thigh settled into the warmth of his belly. She asked him not to die. It was jealousy of death, she said, that made her sound grudging sometimes.

‘Before the roof falls in,' she said, ‘and if we have to go to hell, let us first get in a bit of the gentle art.'

He laughed at her amazing sensuousness.

But within thirty seconds, she was asleep. He uncovered the hair from her ear, and kissed the soft rim.

At the end of May, the meat ration was cut to two pounds. For the first time, Halloran saw starvation as feasible for Ann, who had little fat to withstand a famine.

At this time, Hearn was much talked about throughout the town. He had survived, and had been praised and pardoned, and had resented the survival and the praise, and cursed the pardon. For his safety he was kept in the Marine infirmary, and Halloran was wary of seeing him. But Byrne had spoken to him. Byrne himself had a charge pending against him of attempted suicide, for which he could be adequately chastened but still remain on the company's strength. So that his mutiny in the field was forgotten by all but
Byrne himself and Captain Allen. He knew that he was going to be punished, and now that he was damned, had lost the final remedy of being able to identify his punishment with that of the suffering Christ.

The May mornings were like promises, impossible to be kept on five ounces of meat. At seven o'clock the light would be full and level, barred like a tiger with the long shadows of trees. On such a morning, Halloran was called to the Judge-Advocate's, Major Sabian's place, where the roses had begun to bud. Major Sabian sat in the front parlour, side-on to the door, with meaty arms oppressing a very feminine French writing-table.

Halloran saluted.

‘Take a seat, Corporal!'

Sabian dipped his pen and wrote across the top of a page.

‘Can you spell me your name?'

Halloran spelt it.

‘That's a pleasant change for an Irish,' said Sabian, as if all Irishmen had had a chance of going to a grammar school and had wilfully neglected it.

‘I believe you're of the Papist persuasion, Corporal?'

Halloran felt somehow that he was safe to play the yokel.

‘There was no persuasion about it, sir. I was born that way.'

‘No need to explain terms to me, Corporal. You are a Papist. Very well. What do you think of oaths taken in
my court upon the Bible? Would you consider yourself free to break an oath taken in a Protestant court?'

Thinking
damn oaths
,
Halloran said, devious as a Jesuit, ‘I would be bound to tell the truth in your court, sir.'

It sounded like rugged virtue though, and Sabian was gratified. Halloran cringed to see the Major swell with approval for his rustic innocence.

‘I ask all this because you are delicately placed as regards this charge of attempted suicide against Private Byrne. The charge is brought by Captain Allen, you see. I could understand your wondering what to say in such a case. You were in the boat. Could you tell from what he did that he meant to drown himself?'

‘He was very quiet, and then he took a fit and fell overboard.'

Sabian kept his pen poised stagily over the sheet of paper.

‘He fell overboard? He didn't throw himself?'

‘I couldn't tell if he fell or threw himself, sir.'

Sabian was pleased.

‘Did he stand up before he threw himself?'

‘He just toppled sideways, sir.'

Not that Byrne ever did a thing any other way than sideways.

‘You see, Halloran, you couldn't very well swear that Byrne threw himself over the side.'

‘I wouldn't know whether he did or not, sir,' said Halloran, entering into the game.

‘You've answered me with great forthrightness, Corporal,' said the Major. He coughed throatily into a handkerchief, and took the interest in the result which people over forty seem to think themselves entitled to. Then he packed the thing away up his sleeve and looked with a sort of flemmy speculativeness at the rafters and the black tails of the shingles.

Halloran wondered why such demigods as Sabian and Allen bothered to envy each other under such lonely stars and on a handful of daily meat.

‘Captain Allen trusts you, Halloran?'

‘Not much, sir.'

‘Oh!'

Major Sabian was not so pleased.

‘He's a man very much to himself, sir,' Halloran explained.

‘Yes. He always has been. Dismissed!'

Out in the sunlight, Halloran felt weak as he saw that he'd come out of no small danger indoors.

One night, Hearn, while still weak, walked away from the infirmary to die in the forest. He followed the very track which Marines with assignations in the town often took at night. He had become humbler since his flogging, and he didn't offer his death as anything of importance to God. He kept a large stake in it himself,
in this death which was redemptive of nothing. Against the mercy of the system, it was the only protest that was within his making.

The next day, after a cursory search of the fringes of the town, the administration wrote him off. Amongst the larger fish that Government House had that day to fry was that when the sun came up, it showed an American whaler in the bay. This was a prodigy, a manifestation, and made His Excellency nervous. The Captain was allowed ashore, but a heavy Marine guard lined Government Wharf in silence above the whaleboat and its crew – guarding against a word, any incendiary, radical, American word. The men at the battery could be seen at action stations. They had all come a long way, Marines and whalers, to keep silence with each other in a remote haven.

Late in the morning, back came the Captain, sullen in the company of His Excellency and Rowley. He had been told that his crew were not to be allowed to land, and that no matter how much bad food his victuallers had sold him, he would not be able to buy stores from the colony, not even with cash, let alone promissory notes.

At midday, the American sailed out. He did not dip his flag and, with the peril over, His Excellency did not particularly resent it.

20

Two or three days later, in the afternoon, Halloran was coming back from Major Sabian's orderly office with Allen's orderly book, when he was vigorously waylaid by Byrne. Byrne was a great elbow-clutcher when in full flight, as he seemed to be now for the first time since Captain Allen's triumph. He rose from the ditch by Government Farm, which had been sown with wheat at the beginning of May. He gave two tight little jerks of his left thumb (doing its best to be wary) at his left shoulder.

‘I have that Hearn feller over there, in the trees,' he said. There was a wooded slope behind and to one side of the farm. ‘He wants to see the both of us together. He has some news. I was with him when I saw you go by with the orderly book earlier. I've been waiting for you all that time, without a peep.'

He marvelled at himself.

Halloran groaned. He'd been sick in the morning and his bowels were still queered. And now portentous Hearn was up there in the timber.

‘I'll go with you and help you get him back to the infirmary,' said Halloran neutrally.

‘To the infirmary? He has news, Halloran, news foretold in the Bible and all the old books. You wouldn't take him back. I'd kill you with my own hands, much as I love you.'

‘You would?'

‘I'd have a try, darling Corporal. What do you owe to
them
any more,' said Byrne indicating the valley, ‘that you'd want to give him up to them?'

‘You're on duty at the shipyards tonight, Private Byrne?'

‘That's right.'

‘I'll meet you here at seven. I won't tell anyone, but I mean to bring him back to the infirmary. Tell him that much. Tell him I won't listen to his lies and schemes.'

‘It's not a lie and it may be a scheme,' said Byrne quietly, ‘but if it is, it's God's scheme.'

‘Yes,' Halloran said, ‘I can imagine the Almighty dodging up and down this part of the world, grinding his axe with a Wicklow Protestant and gallant Terry Byrne.'

In fact, he was terrified that there might be something
on the divine agenda to cut straight across the cramped sphere of tenderness where he and Ann lived, lasting the distance. He detested prophets, prophets were a great danger. This prophet had had two raw nights to succumb to, but here he was, voluble with prophecy, muttering omens in the bushes.

They don't feed you enough to take these shocks, Halloran told himself, getting on his way. His hand was very tight and spinsterish around Captain Allen's orderly book.

‘Happy shall he be,' Byrne intoned, and the trees waved their arms like ecstatics, and Halloran shivered. There was a phoenix nest of moon in a large tree straight ahead of him, beyond the clutter of boulders. Amidst the wind, he heard a voice wheezing.

‘That taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.'

Trust, thought Halloran, a man barely able to breathe to choose a watch-word long as your arm. There was Hearn, wrapped in blankets, without a fire, in a cold crevice.

‘I'll take you back to the infirmary,' called Halloran. ‘We'll say you wandered off in a fever.'

‘Fever nothing!' said Byrne. ‘Listen to his news.'

‘Damn his news! I have news for him. The two of us are risking our hides moping round the forest with him.'

Hearn coughed tightly in his crevice. He had worked himself to his feet, and waited for them, too oracular for a squabble.

‘Talk up then, Hearn. Don't stand there like a phantom with quinsy. Come on, take my poor damned breath away!'

The uncertain shadow that Hearn was, wavered; the man was only a presence, a rustle of breathing. He had no outline. He made the night seem thick with portents.

‘Halloran,' he began by sighing, ‘don't be afraid.'

‘I'm not afraid.'

‘I don't mean afraid of the dark or death. First and foremost, I mean don't be afraid of me.'

‘I said I wasn't afraid.'

There came a pause long enough for Hearn to shrug and look as ironic as he might allow himself. Probably he did neither. There was no chance of telling in the dark. But he could be heard handling something paper that crackled as much as the treasure-maps of boyhood or the wicked astrologies of old women. Halloran thought with a sort of hopeful spleen that it might be something just as silly.

‘Read this,' said Hearn.

‘In this dark? What is it?'

‘It's a booklet from Boston in what was the colony of Massachusetts. In North America. It's written by an American. But not any American. One of the signers of
the American constitution, no less. It tells of what has come to pass in France.'

Now, a substantial shadow breathing hard, he pressed the pamphlet, crisp and lethal, into Halloran's hands, and though Halloran gave it back after merely feeling it all over, it had somehow added its authority to the scene.

‘Well, what has
come to pass
in France?'

In Halloran's mouth the premonitory phrase got short respect.

‘You've told me,' Hearn said, ‘that you were put into prison for being at a land committee meeting. Did you ever think there'd come a world in which you could meet to talk about land ownership if you wanted? Meet with the men you wished to meet with, speak and act your mind as you've never spoken it or acted it in this town or any town you've ever lived in?'

‘No,' said Halloran, sardonic as he could manage on the spot, ‘you're talking about this side of paradise, I suppose?'

Hearn coughed, a chain of coughs which stopped on an instant. And in the very
next
instant,

‘Yes,' he said, ‘did you never foresee a world in which men would speak and act their
minds
and not their
fears
?
Because they could freely say and freely do. And because whatever they freely said or did would be judged as good or bad under one law, the same for every man.'

‘I never foresaw any such world. Tell me about France, anyhow.'

But it was possible to see Hearn's white hand extended, patting the dark air, as people do who are trying to say, ‘Let me get my breath back!'

‘Don't rush yourself,' said Halloran, quite kindly.

In fact, Hearn was able to begin almost at once.

‘The French nation has forced its king to accept a parliament which is in full charge of affairs,' he said, a little declamatorily.

‘To get the story over quickly, they've made a law out of the rights of man, of every man. Notice, a
law!
'

‘I see,' said Halloran, casually enough to kill most fervours.

‘The courts of Europe are boiling with the news. Or quaking, better still. It's the common people who are boiling. They smell a new world coming. A new order.'

Halloran grunted. He had learnt when young, in Wexford and elsewhere, to be off-handed towards seers, to greet the apocalypse with a shrug. He did feel that the rights of man being made law should mean much to him. But he had had such success convincing himself that Ann and he were mirrors to each other, imposing each other's image on the other, that whatever obtruded itself between them, even a new age, was, like anything caught between mirrors, shown up as suspect and illusory.

‘It's likely, Halloran, very likely that God who never spoke for kings and captains has begun to speak for His people and won't cease till He has said His fill.
Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God. That you may eat the flesh of kings, the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men.
'

‘And here's,' said Terry Byrne, after being quiet and temperate for so long, ‘one poor beggar who's going to get a good mouthful of that dinner, who's going to eat deep of that supper, who's going to eat up some captains he's got in mind until there's nothing but arse left.'

‘How do you know this?' Halloran asked Hearn, who was so full of profound hope. ‘Where did you get that book?'

‘Mm,' said Hearn.

‘You couldn't have met that whaler.'

‘What whaler is that?' Hearn asked.

‘A whaler that was here Thursday and warned off from here. And a good thing too.'

‘Why a good thing?'

Halloran said nothing.

‘You see now what I mean by speaking your fears,' said Hearn at last.

Halloran detested him for being so unshakably decretal.

‘Why don't you tell me in one gulp?' he suggested. ‘Why don't you tell me straight? No texts, not one. Just tell me friend to friend, if you can.'

Yet Hearn wouldn't of course, until there had been another mantic pause. During which, Halloran had to go on shivering. He stamped the ground.

‘My God, it's easy for you to stand here all damned night getting cold. You've made up your mind to die. I don't happen to be in that same happy position.'

‘That's true,' said Hearn. ‘That's very true. My mind
was
made up to die. I was reconciled to death, as they say.'

‘And you're not reconciled any longer?'

‘No.'

He told them that he had walked all that Wednesday night, reconciled to death, trying to travel far enough from the town to be assured of dying by himself and in peace.

Byrne laughed.

‘I was not joking in fact, brother Byrne,' Hearn said gently.

He travelled on the heights behind the beaches. This was the easiest way. He felt very little discomfort, he said, except thirst and some shortness of breath. At first light though, he had a turn. He felt that he was falling out of his own body. A second later, so it seemed, he woke to find himself installed once more between and behind his eyes. He was still on the ridge, trudging, but the sun was high in the corner of his eye. This was the choice he had: had hours passed while he walked on asleep, or was the high sun unreal? He felt
so sodden that he voted for the sun being unreal and, therefore, for the daylight and the ocean and his own progress and pain being likewise unreal.

In this state, he came to a small pocket of water in the rock and was happy to come to it. It gave strength to the vote he had taken of himself, in so far as an impossible spider, evilly coloured in black and yellow and blue, had spun a web across it. He did not fear the spider, but scooped the yellow scum from the water and drank. The water was so cool that it gave him doubt. He fell asleep. When he woke and got on his way, he had a ship in the corner of his right eye, and the sun had gone over to his left. The ship put the whole affair past belief. In the end, he went downhill and fell down on a sand-spit, a sheltered place, no waves on the shore. He did not care if the tide covered him.

‘
And in those days
,'
he said, regardless of Halloran's warning against texts, ‘
men shall seek death and not find it –
'

‘He thinks he's prefigured now,' Halloran muttered.

‘Once I would have thought it, the same as you do now.'

‘Me?'

‘You think you're prefigured. You think you're prefigured to long and easy love.'

‘Don't talk rubbish,' said Halloran.

‘All I know is that being nothing wrapped up in
flesh, still I couldn't die. Even for a place like this, even for men like us, there is a plan.'

Ah. That took Halloran's breath. There
is
a plan, he thought in terror, Hearn having said it with such mortal certainty. There is a plan. Outside of us, not having regard for us, never to be distracted. It hovered over the cold forests. Its claws were aimed at him, at his soft sides.

‘While I was asleep there,' Hearn went on, unaware of having scored, ‘the ship, the whaler, came into that bay, the very ship that I thought was part of my sickness. Anyhow, it came sailing up out of my sickness and saw me without delay. They were very Christian to me, as it turned out. I ate and slept well there two nights and a day. And I spoke with the captain.'

‘Now that you're back, come down to the town with me,' said Halloran. ‘Please.' He was polite. Awareness of the plan had taken all the starch out of him.

‘Not the town, Halloran. I'm going to France.'

‘By whaler?'

‘Yes.'

‘You'll have more chance walking. He'll sell you to the Fiji natives. He'll give you to them without cost. Some little black heathen will play peek-a-boo with your hip-bone.'

Hearn considered this.

‘I can't imagine it,' he said. ‘Of course, I have to find my own way from America.'

‘He'll push you overboard before New Zealand.'

‘He's lost too many crew.'

‘Fine crew you'd make! Whales wouldn't wait for you to get your breath, you know. And you don't know whether this miracle of a parliament is still in charge of things.'

‘That is one of the small doubts that are met with in all human affairs,' said Hearn.

‘Oh,' Halloran said, ‘just one of the small ones.'

‘The men on the whaler think that all of Europe will become a republic. The parliament will still be there. It's the old that's under threat, not the new.'

Halloran struck his pockets to show they didn't jingle.

‘No money. I'm sorry. You'll have to pay your own passage.'

Laughter came as a stranger into their debate. Byrne and Halloran looked up and saw that, yes, it was Hearn's unexpected laughter.

‘You wish it was a money matter, don't you? In fact, the captain needs stores. I promised him stores.'

Halloran merely shook his head. Disbelief took such an effort of expression and gesture, most of it wasted in the dark. He knew, besides, that people had been voicing for centuries their rank disbelief in this and that mad, prophetic scheme, without being saved from one of them.

‘Why not promise him Dublin Castle?' he asked.

‘Luckily he didn't want Dublin Castle.'

‘You get hanged just as dead for stores.'