Bring Larks and Heroes (20 page)

The plot ground on in Hearn's mouth.

The officer of the guard that week was a Subaltern from Major Sabian's company and could be relied upon to be slapdash. He would be at the wharf at ten o'clock, one o'clock, and possibly not again. If the cutter, having stranded Hearn, were back at Government Wharf by two o'clock in the morning, they had, so Halloran gathered, God's and Hearn's permission to go on breathing easily for an unlimited toll of years.

Halloran looked at the earth, at the strewn complexities of dead leaves, patterns of dying which must somehow have a designer.

‘If he doesn't come for you,' he said, ‘and the sun rises and there you are, sitting on the sand with three hundred pounds of beef. . . . We'll look the silliest dead ever.'

‘He'll come. You pretend he's as hard to believe in as Michael Archangel.'

‘He is. Very nearly.'

The three of them looked at each other until Byrne went red.

‘It's no use,' Halloran said at last. ‘I'll need that sign.'

‘I'm not dismayed.'

‘You never are. I'll wait on the sign. There are risks, you know. Present company not excepted, as they say.'

So Halloran went away to wait for the sign not
to happen, and Hearn watched the tired young image stepping on the charred shadows of the forest; the unaggressive colour, the unguarded back suddenly dwindled in the chaos of grey and olive.

Byrne whispered in the prophet's ear.

‘I know him. He's for you.'

The sign came to Halloran as he stood easy in the ranks at the start of a Church-parade. Waiting there, he was attuned to expect it. For a grey island of flesh, large as anything that ever foundered a ship, had risen in the bay, and two boatloads, Marines and transports, had been sent chasing it through the mulberry, deep water.

Unlike the transport ranks below them on the slope, Halloran's company, lined up on the edge of the parade-ground, could see all, the entire whale chase, for surely a whale was what, with fantastic appositeness, the hump awaiting the boats was.

The transports and guards were lined facing inland, yet had their mind's-eye at least on the chase. The Rev. Calverley stood isolated by his interest in the deity at the door of the white-washed long church of St Jeremy. Halloran felt sorry for the man, and for the church like a humble beast. With nothing to thrust heavenward, it nuzzled the windy side of the hill, and kept the black, unglazed, Gothic sockets of its windows very much to the ground. Both the priest and his temple seemed to sense, as did everyone else, that whatever of
truth and sacrifice there was in the town that morning was to be revealed on the blue of the bay.

A sergeant, tatty waist-sash and all, went on with the convict roll-call. Half a mile away, one of the cutters had come within throw of a cow-whale, big as a town-house, and her twenty-foot calf. Neither beast moved. The cow hissed without malice. Perhaps exhaustion had visited the walls of those barns of meat fleeing from sharks into a mere thirty fathoms.

No one in the cutter knew much about whales. It was thought wise that the harpoon be thrown into the mother; and so it was thrown. Her pain made the bay seethe in front of her. This clear day, the men on the parade-ground could see for some seconds the classic fountain of red water she snorted into the mid-air. At half a mile, it was a bounty of colour, not the agony-flower it was to the whale, not the unspeakable banner it was to the men in the cutter. She vanished for a moment, but then was solid again athwart the boat which splintered with the leisurely sound of a felled tree.

Her shape and the shape of her calf were gone. Twelve men agonized with no urgency in the grey turmoil of her wake. Across a bay of silence, the slower cutter bore towards them. It was far too slow. The whales came back in white froth, and went again; back and went again. Whenever they went, they thwacked the water with what looked like wrath in such big creatures. Yet perhaps it was horror. Whichever way, men
disappeared amongst the curds of angry water, and the second boat stood clear.

The creatures did not come back the third time. Halloran saw them in the fore of his mind nosing down into those foreign shallows. Behind their pigs' eyes, the brains and foundry hearts groaned busy with dismay, busy with deprivation, busy with pain. The bay healed back to uniform blue as if they had never come.

In the world of men, the remaining cutter hauled up an improbable number of survivors. ‘I can't even swim,' said one of them laughing, settling back intact between an oarsman's legs. ‘Hold on!' they told the only three left in the water. Another cutter had put out from shore. One of the three clutching the gunnels sneezed. ‘Us?' the sneeze said to those who heard it. ‘We were meant to last.' For in the cutter were nine drenched men, and the three in the water made twelve. Not one had been lost.

Byrne made a prodigy out of all this, a clumsy parable. To Halloran though, it was merely a sign, a sign in the strict sense, an indication. The indication was that no man could plot his course away from moments so extreme, so drunken with terror and uproar that, emerging breathing by accident from them, he might as well have died in them. It was meant that man should weather a number of these occasions with a whole skin, and so go home to dinner.

If a man was meant, and if he knew he was meant to chance himself three hours on a given Thursday night, under a whale of a different complexion – he might as well. That was all that could be said. He might as well. He thought on the other hand, and immediately, that there was nothing mystical about whales, that they were as seasonal as turnips.

So, agonizing, he saw the town, the woods and the bay. The wind splashed their thick insensitive colours across his eyes. Ann and he could pretend to be a universe to each other, and all the rest of it. He could pretend that he was able to hold her safe from the extremes of her destiny. But the ironstone world was always there, it said that one day it would penetrate the avid heart and make it meat.

He shut his eyes and remained there, hating the enemy world.

23

Mrs Blythe's silver-ware had seen too much salt air these last three years. There was a salver which rode the muslin table-cover in the back parlour and two cruets on the sideboard, all of them badly tarnished. Ann took them to the kitchen that Sunday afternoon to remedy them before Halloran came. She sat in the door, in the sun, her lap vulgarly wide just for comfort.

She had the salver covered with paste when Mr Blythe came in. His entry took time. With a grimace of pleasure, he let himself down the two steps from the house as cumbersomely as a man walking on his hands. He was in shirt-sleeves, bearing a glass and, perilously, a decanter of brandy. Once he had the steps behind him, he saw Ann.

‘The last,' he said, holding up the decanter. ‘The very last.'

‘It must be, sir.'

She frowned and turned back to the salver.

He came across the room carrying his shoulders shrugged, as if actually pulling the nimbus of the liquor about him.

‘It's no better out here,' he said, however. ‘It's just as cold. Or nearly.'

‘Wouldn't your own room be warmer at this time of year, sir? It's got a window facing north.'

He had put the decanter down on the table.

‘No!' he said. ‘I'm sick of the view. I'm sick of that clay road and I'm sick of the same bits of bay you see through the same trees. I'm so sick of it that I can see it all by closing my eyes. Look, I'll just show you.'

His eyes snapped shut and the muscles of his cheeks strained to keep them shut. Ann felt forced to ask herself, is this Mr Blythe, this friendly man who does not prefer clay roads? Sober, he looked to be blank of preferences, and when his sober lids closed they never gave any hint of not closing on darkness.

‘There,' he said, blind. ‘Myrtles of a kind. They seem to be dying, but I think they've seemed to be dying for two thousand damned years. And one of them has a wasp's nest wrapped around its fork like a poultice.' The eyes opened. ‘You see, Ann, there's very little profit in looking out that window.'

Watching him with the broad furtiveness which cannot be used on the completely sober, Ann wiped a
thumbful of paste off the flange of the salver and had a glimpse in the exposed silver of the day gone molten, ruled by her own face jowly and pompous there. She had no time to hunt for a glimmer of Mr Blythe in the fragment of shadow, though he would have been there, even in that thumb-nail world.

‘It's not very comfortable for you out here though, Mr Blythe,' Ann said, more capable with him when he was humanized by drink.

‘I know better,' he told her genially while hitching himself onto the table, ‘than to expect to be comfortable in my own house.'

So perched, his right arm, glass and all, was prodigal with gestures of reassurance.

‘No, you mustn't worry about Mrs Blythe. At the moment she's asleep in the front parlour. The condition isn't permanent or eternal, although a man could do worse than drink to that merry possibility.'

He held his glass up.

‘To that merry possibility!' he said, drinking too long a toast and recovering as an athlete recovers from his excesses, huffing.

‘To the passer-by,' he went on, ‘she presents a picture of deep maidenly repose. Her nose is blocked and her mouth is open.'

He showed Ann how, even making noises with his nose.

‘There's a blow-fly on her forehead too. But that's
his business. No, Mrs Blythe's well asleep. Don't you worry!'

So Ann didn't worry, and there was silence.

After some seconds, Blythe said, ‘Ann, you are so lovely. You're an agony of loveliness. No cancer ever scalded a man as –'

‘No, Mr Blythe,' Ann told him, no longer unsure now the situation had broken, ‘don't get carried away with words. It's not wise and it gives you short breath.'

‘My God,' said Blythe, ‘short breath. Did Thisbe speak to Pyramus about short breath?'

‘I wouldn't know, Mr Blythe. All I know is that you worked yourself into a state with words last time you started along this line of talk. We had to get a Marine in to put you to bed, if you remember.'

He giggled like a school-boy.

‘That
was
a dry argument,' he said. Then he raised his voice. ‘No cancer ever scalded,' he began.

‘Thank God,' said Ann, because Halloran was coming down through the garden.

‘I beg your pardon,' Mr Blythe told her.

‘It's Corporal Halloran.'

‘Oh.'

Halloran came on doubtfully when he heard Blythe, and his eyes peered and his eyebrows were arched and interrogative.

‘It's only Blythe,' Ann hissed at him. ‘He's been drinking.'

‘Come in, come in, you lucky boy!' sang Blythe.

The lucky boy stood stooped in the doorway, sniffling and wary.

‘Aren't you well?' said Ann.

‘Just a fit of the shivers,' Halloran admitted.

‘Come in, come in, you lucky boy!' Blythe intoned once more. ‘Ann, get him a cup!'

Eyeing him for signs of illness and, more still, signs of Hearn's enterprise, she got up from her chair and found a cup in the old dresser by her bed.

‘It's a marvellous thing to be young,' Blythe told Halloran, who had come in but looked haggard and still disquieted.

‘If your nose isn't dripping, sir. If you don't mind me putting it that way.'

‘You put it any way you like, boy. Come and get a nip, just the thing for dripping noses.'

He went to Blythe with the cup Ann had put in his hands. Blythe poured him a large dosage.

‘Your best health, sir,' he said, and took a mouthful. He felt less feverish then.

‘What did you think of the whales?' he said, grinning into the cup.

‘Yes,' said Ann, helping him make talk.

‘I didn't want to smoke whale-meat all next week,' Blythe told them. ‘I'm glad they got away.'

‘I suppose so,' said Halloran. He had some more brandy.

‘But not a man lost,' he said after drinking.

‘That'll teach that Government House crowd to go playing with whales.'

Blythe nodded his head and was not able to stop nodding then. The glass in his hand began to tilt and Halloran tried to take it from him. He woke for a small time saying, ‘No cancer ever scalded a man as you . . .' Halloran helped him into a chair and he went to sleep, his head on the table, his pink mouth crushed open.

‘You're flushed,' Ann said.

‘Only a small bit.' He pointed at Blythe and laughed. ‘Just imagine, the old fellow.'

But even if the man was asleep, they were still constrained. They kissed well but quickly. Halloran turned his head away sneezing.

‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘I'd tell you how homesick I've been to see you all the week, yesterday and today worse than anything. You don't believe me though.'

‘I've seen that fellow Hearn in the forest,' she told him.

‘Oh no. He's run away. He's dead.'

By way of obsequies, he closed his eyes.

‘I know Hearn,' she said. ‘It was Hearn.'

‘What did he say?'

‘It was only a glimpse. I went out to find cassia pods for a tonic for Mrs Blythe. There he was.'

‘A meeting by accident?'

‘Yes. He had on a grey coat, very big, with a hood. What am I going to do?'

He coughed and took her hand.

‘How do you mean?'

‘Who ought I tell?'

The corners of his eyes craved pity from someone or other. Then he looked at the floor.

‘He didn't say anything?'

‘No.'

‘Say it
was
Hearn. Probably, he'd be helped by some poor beggar. Say he is. If you tell anyone, that's the end of them, Hearn and the poor beggar. You couldn't do that.'

‘But isn't he dangerous?'

Halloran scratched his neck.

‘In a better world he'd probably be something in the nature of a leader.'

‘Let him run wild then?'

‘
Wild
isn't the way he runs.'

‘You wouldn't help him would you?' she asked without any warning.

‘Ann,' he said, looking at the floor still, ‘if I asked you or begged you to drop the subject, would you drop it? I feel so sick.'

She stiffened herself.

‘I see,' she said.

He led her back to her silver-ware and her seat in the sun.

Having to poke her, more or less, into her seat, he said, ‘What is it?'

‘What if I asked you, just to be certain, not to have a thing to do with Hearn?'

‘Please,' he said and wagged his head, ‘please drop the subject. Sweet peace, sweet repose, just a bit of that, eh?'

His voice was small, dry, close to rage. He found himself a chair, sneezed and sat beside her. Ann treated the salver brutally with a cloth.

‘I'm sorry,' he said. He blew his nose. He did, as he said, feel so sick. ‘Sweet repose,' he murmured.

While they sat still, the afternoon lay in their laps like a tawny cat, and sparrows came to roll themselves in the dust of Mr Blythe's garden, and twitched with delight as the wind nudged the corners of the house with sleepy regularity. If anyone had, from a distance, seen these two people side by side, so young yet like penates in the doorway, he would have thought, ‘My bet is those two have found peace.'

Leaving Ann, he kept halting on the way back to the hutments. He would lean against tree-trunks and nurse with both hands the ache behind his jaws, groaning theatrically, as he would never have done had people been present. The edges of his mind began to melt under the warm suggestion of sleep. At one time, for half a minute or more, he slept on his feet.

Back in the hut, he wrapped himself in two blankets, taking great, mean care over it. Sleep came instantly, and his fever produced a dream laborious though clear.

It opened upon a courtroom. Hearn was judge behind a high brown bench, Allen prosecuted. The defendant was largely, but not entirely, the man whom Halloran had butted in the stomach at the Crescent shambles. He himself was the fourth party in the chamber. There was a strange flavour about the situation, in that Hearn said nothing, Allen seemed awkward and apologetic, the defendant privileged and above the argument. Halloran too was privileged – he knew that he was present as a privilege and had liberty to move about the open part of the court and comment on anything Allen might say. Yet this freedom had not given him any happiness. The roof pressed low on the courtroom, a fug of death grasped the mind. Halloran knew both that he was the most afraid of the four, and that the others did not know it.

Not so much by words as by attitudes, the dream proceeded; Hearn becoming increasingly aloof, though his existence increasingly weighed the mind; Allen becoming more tentative; the man growing hides of dignity; Halloran tasting more and more the prisoner's coming death. The legal arguments in favour of condemnation were regretfully advanced by Allen, who stood at the foot of the bench and frowned. Since everybody seemed anxious for his opinions, Halloran strode to
and from the back of the room, concentrating on Allen. The defendant sat on a table in the corner.

Allen had been speaking for a long time. Begging approval, his eyes constantly referred to Halloran. Halloran remained grave, interrupting at last to snatch a word Allen had uttered – ‘reasonable.'

‘Reasonable? But you'll never be reasonable at your own last choke, Captain,' Phelim said. ‘Remembering that for the sake of a House that to God is only a house, you made this man's last choke. When your own breath whizzes out, you'll see you're hanging with him. Hanging him, you hang yourself. How does that strike you for reason?'

Professional and human hurt spread over Allen's face and transfixed him.

‘Aye, mate?' Halloran asked the man in the corner. The man said yes, while Allen turned his back and limped towards Hearn. At liberty, with Allen distracted, Halloran began to wink and grimace at the defendant. Unskilfully grinning and cajoling, he knew that he must look insane. Yet if Allen wanted Halloran's favour, Halloran wanted the defendant's.

‘What you don't understand,' Allen called to him, ‘is that hanging is not a subject for argument. Why do you think the judge has been so silent?'

‘Judge?' Knowing it to be perilous, Halloran said with some irony, ‘What judge?'

Allen winced. ‘
What judge?
Don't you see that this is a court of conscience?'

‘Conscience?'

‘You should know,' said Allen.

Then Hearn spoke, patience short, in a voice one didn't raise one's eyes to.

‘You have the freedom of the court, yes, but only because so much is expected of you.'

Halloran could not prevent himself from saying, ‘You mean concerning the whales?'

‘I mean,' Hearn began, but grunted and abandoned explanations to Allen.

‘As I said, the judge has been silent because he knows what hanging is. It is a ceremony which begins in the cradle and grows from the cradle. Its ministers are the mother and petting father, the priest, the boys a boy fights, the girls he desires. Cooks advance the ceremony by cooking his meat, tap-boys by pouring his ale. Horses advance it by flying him over stiles, ships by buoying him across the seas. Must you be so cruel to us only because we are its last ministers?'

Hearn nodded at this. His chin descended like sledge-blows. Then Allen nodded and the room shook. Halloran realized that the building would shatter if the defendant's iron chin assented. He saw it begin to fall and ran outside into the dusk.

Here Ewers waited for him. The two of them fell into step beside each other. They strode away through
the stuff of which the dusk was made, an overcast of charred orange out of which the forest grew downwards, as if leaf preceded root.

‘Do you think he should hang?' Halloran asked.

‘There are reasons why no man should hang. Within the noose you have the worst madness. Within the noose a man commits the sin against the Holy Spirit, uttering without a voice the screaming lust to poison God at his eternal wellsprings.'