The Empire Trilogy (19 page)

The Major, sunk in a slough of despond, his mind as barren as the frozen snow that lay on the streets, had been awaiting her arrival with indifference, even a vague dread. But Sarah appeared to have left the malicious side of her nature in Kilnalough. She was so affectionate and ingenuous, so excited to be in London, so obviously impressed by the Major's air of authority and distinction in these new surroundings as she clung to his arm (the confidence with which she was walking these days astonished him) that in no time at all he was disarmed. In restaurants she was apprehensive lest she be “noticed.” The Major mustn't let her use the wrong knife and fork or she'd die of mortification. And how did all the diners (how did the Major himself?) look so much at ease in front of these august waiters? It was a mystery to her. And the ladies wore such lovely clothes! Was the Major not ashamed to be seen with such a scarecrow as herself? On the contrary, the Major was delighted to be seen with such a pretty girl.

The splendid shops, the elegant streets...Amused and touched by her enthusiasm, the Major found himself seeing London with new and less world-weary eyes. It was perfectly true, London could be an exciting place if one allowed oneself to notice it. In the evening after dinner they sat and talked in front of a blazing fire. For a while they discussed Kilnalough. The Major had been hoping to hear more of the Majestic, but Sarah had nothing to add to her letters. Ripon and Máire were married now and living in Rathmines, but she knew no more than that. She thought that Edward and Ripon were having no more to do with each other. There'd been some terrible rows but she didn't know the details. She'd hardly seen Edward for ages, she added, gazing into the glowing embers. And then she grimaced and said that she didn't want to talk about Kilnalough, she wanted the Major to tell her about himself. And so the Major, feeling strangely at peace, found himself talking about the war. Little by little, random names and faces began to come back to him. He told Sarah first about one or two curious things that had happened: about a young Tommy who had been found dead in his bunk and the only thing they had been able to find wrong with him was a broken finger; about the shouted friendly conversations with the Germans across No-Man's-Land; about a man in the Major's regiment who had had his leg blown off and had sat in a shell-crater tying up the arteries by himself and had survived...And soon the Major was telling Sarah about incidents that until now had been frozen into a block of ice in his mind. In the warmth of her sympathy he found he could talk about things which until now he had scarcely been able to repeat to himself. A little drunk and tired, sitting there in the flickering firelight, the bubble of bitterness in his mind slowly dissolved and tears at last began to run down his cheeks for all his dead friends.

The following morning Sarah left for France. She would send the Major her address, she said.

The Major had written to Sarah an enormous letter, crammed with confidences, packed with poetic observations on life and love and every other subject under the sun. He had at last found someone to talk to! He had found someone who understood him and shared his view of the workings of the world. Everything which for want of a listener he had been unable to say for the last four or five years came foaming out of his head in a torrent of blue-black ink, all at once. The leaves of writing-paper became so thick that they would no longer fit in an ordinary envelope and, besides, he had still more to say...by the time he had finished he would be obliged to wrap up his letter in a brown-paper parcel. Not that the Major was waiting to finish his letter exactly (because the kind of letter the Major was writing is seldom voluntarily finished before the Grim Reaper bids us lay down our pens); his difficulty was more practical than aesthetic: he was unable to send Sarah his letter in instalments because she had forgotten to send him her address. As time went by, as winter turned into spring, the Major became less and less hopeful that she would remember to rectify this oversight. His flood of confidences declined to a trickle and finally dried up altogether. The Major became gloomy and sensible once more. And the grey world returned to being as grey as it had always been. In due course his aunt died.

Meanwhile, in Ireland, the troubles ebbed and flowed, now better, now worse. He could make no sense of it. It was like putting out to sea in a small boat: with the running of the waves it is impossible to tell how far one has moved over the water; all one can do is to look back to see how far one has moved from land. So in the case of Ireland all one could do was to look back to the peaceful days before the war. And they already seemed a long way away.

* * *

INDIAN UNREST
Lord Hunter's Inquiry

The Indian newspapers received by the Indian mail, says Reuter, contain further reports of the proceedings of the Hunter Commission which is inquiring into the Indian disorders of last year. On December 3rd Captain Doveton, who administered martial law at Kasur, in his evidence, while admitting that he did invent some minor punishments during the martial-law administration, punishments less severe in form than the usual martial-law sentences, denied that he ordered any persons to be whitewashed, or made people write on the ground with their noses...

Sir Chiman Lal Setalvad turned to the feeling of the people regarding martial law. “You say the people liked martial law?” he suggested.

“Very much so,” was the witness's reply.

Sir C. Setalvad: “You say the people would have liked it to become practically permanent?” “That was the impression that was given.”

“Did the people actually tell you this—that the summary courts were things they liked?” “They liked people being tried by martial law, without any right of appeal. They preferred that to spending money on appeals.”

Questioned in regard to the story of women of loose character having been compelled to witness flogging sentences, witness said that it was a misrepresentation, although not a deliberate one...

Continuing, Captain Doveton said that as regards his order requiring convicted persons to touch the ground with their foreheads, he had heard of this being done before. He did not mean it to be debasing.

At this stage General Barrow, addressing Lord Hunter, suggested that witness was a young officer doing his duty to the best of his ability under rather trying conditions, but that he was not a criminal.

* * *

The Major returned to Kilnalough in the middle of May, expecting the worst. Since early in the year the number of violent incidents had steadily increased. An official return of “outrages” attributed to Sinn Fein had just been published and the Major had read it with apprehension: it listed the total number of murders for the first quarter of the year as thirty-six; of “firing at persons” eighty-one; three hundred and eighty-nine raids for arms had taken place, and there had been forty-seven incendiary fires. Tired from his journey and nervous in spite of the peaceful and familiar aspect of Kilnalough station, the Major started violently when a hand was put on his shoulder. He turned sharply to find the grinning and friendly face of the station-master, who wanted to inform him that Dr Ryan was waiting outside in his motor car and would give him a lift to the Majestic.

With Dr Ryan there was a youth of sixteen or seventeen with black hair and a pale, beautiful face. The doctor, his face almost totally obscured by a muffler and a wide-brimmed black hat, muttered an introduction. This was his grandson Padraig. They were going to tea at the Majestic, he added disagreeably, and Edward had asked them to...In short: “Get in, man, there's plenty of room. We've been waiting long enough already.”

Soon the long, unkempt hedges of the Majestic were unreeling beside them; beyond lay the dense, damp woods. There was an air of desolation on this side of the road, a contrast with the loose stone walls and neatly ploughed fields on the other side. But a little farther on even the open fields degenerated; unploughed, the meadows empty of cattle, the potato fields abandoned to the weeds that devour the soil so voraciously in the damp climate of Ireland. By a gate leading into one of these fields a man wearing a ragged coat stood, motionless as a rock, his eyes on the ground. As they passed he did not even raise his eyes. What was the fellow doing standing motionless in an empty field, staring at the ground? the Major wondered.

Edward must have been watching for them, because hardly had they turned in a sweep of gravel and come to a halt by the statue of Queen Victoria before he was hastening down the steps to greet them. The Major was the first to alight. Edward gripped his hand tightly and pumped it vigorously, his mouth working but unable to utter a word except “My dear chap!” Then he turned away to the others.

Only as he greeted the doctor and his grandson did the Major have a chance to notice how much Edward had changed since their last meeting. His face had become much thinner and the contours of his skull more pronounced; in manner too he appeared strangely on edge, exaggeratedly cheerful and voluble now that the initial greetings were over, and yet at the same time weary and apprehensive as he set about extricating the old man from the front seat of the motor (Dr Ryan was tired also, it seemed, but his grandson proved as nimble as a gazelle). Edward, shoving and pulling with energy at the doctor's feebly struggling limbs, cried that he had something to show his visitors, something that they couldn't help but find delightful, something that was really outside the normal orbit of the Majestic, something that was, in fact, a new departure for himself as well as for the hotel and might, who knew?, turn out from a commercial point of view to be the foundation of something big...in a word, they should all come while it was still fine (if they didn't mind waiting a few minutes before taking their tea) they should all come, before it started to rain, and see...his pigs.

The boy Padraig, who had allowed himself to look faintly interested at this extravagant preamble, pursed his lips gloomily and appeared to be unexcited by the prospect of viewing some pigs. As for Dr Ryan, he seemed positively annoyed (or perhaps he had not yet had time to recover from the indignity of being dragged out of his seat by the lapels). “Ah, pigs,” he muttered testily. “To be sure.” His heavy, wrinkled eyelids drooped.

The old spaniel, Rover, came up and sniffed the Major's trouser-leg.

“See, he recognizes you,” exclaimed Edward cheerfully. “You recognize your old friend Brendan, don't you, boy?”

The dog wagged its tail weakly and, as they set off, plodded after them, the long hairs of its stomach matted with dried mud.

As they turned the corner of the house a long bloodcurdling shriek ripped through the silence.

“What on earth...?”

“The peacocks,” explained Edward. “Normally they only cry at dusk or after nightfall. I wonder what's got into them.”

Dr Ryan said querulously: “It's going to pour again any minute.”

“And where are they, the peacocks?” Padraig wanted to know. “Could I have some feathers off of them?”

“Of course. Remind me after tea.”

The Major looked out over the sea to where a black, massive cloud-formation was swelling towards them from over the invisible Welsh coast. It was going to pour. “They have beautiful feathers, those birds,” he mused aloud. “Why should they shriek like that?”

The land on this side of the hotel, Edward was explaining to Padraig with the old man limping along morosely a few paces behind them, was where the guests had diverted themselves in the old days. Was it not splendidly suited for the purpose? Look at the way it dropped in a series of wide terraces towards the sea. Each terrace had been reserved for a different recreation. This flat green meadow through which they were now passing had been reserved for clock-golf and bowls; the one below for lawn tennis, a dozen separate courts, each one of fine quality and, like the hard courts round by the garages, angled so that the westering sun would never shine into the eyes of the server...and it worked, assuming, of course, that none of the guests were stricken by an irrational craving to get up and take some exercise before, say, half eleven in the morning (but few, if any of them, Edward added with a sour chuckle, had ever been greatly discomfited by the rising sun, or so he understood). The soil for these courts, the draining system and the grass lawn itself had been imported from England, installed specially and with enormous care in order to emulate the heavenly growth that cloaked the courts at Wimbledon. Edward might have gone on with his explanation but at this moment Padraig spotted a peacock sitting on the broken wall that snaked down from one terrace to another, protecting them from the north wind. As he skipped over to investigate, Edward muttered: “A fine lad, Doctor, a fine lad.” But the surly old doctor merely grunted disagreeably, refusing to be mollified.

Padraig returned and together they descended a wide and imposing flight of stone steps lined at intervals with cracked urns bearing coats of arms but containing nothing more regal than a few tufts of grass, thistles, and in one of them what appeared to be a potato plant. Between the stone steps green whiskers sprouted unchecked in every crack and crevice. On the next terrace a young man stood smiling cheerfully out to sea. At the sound of footsteps he turned and, smiling down at the earth, went through the motions of digging with the spade he was holding.

“Ah there, Seán,” Edward called to him.

“Good day, sor.”

The Major noted with surprise that the foot which had come to rest, after one or two token digging motions, on the shoulder of the spade was shod in a gleaming shoe, the trouser-leg above it was neatly creased, and thrown over the young man's shoulders and knotted round his neck was what looked like a Trinity cricket sweater.

“I say, Edward, you have a very well-turned-out gardener.”

But Edward was busy telling Padraig (who showed no sign of being interested) that the land here was ill-suited to the growing of potatoes: the soil contained a good deal of clay and held the moisture so that if it rained too copiously the potatoes would rot in the ground, likely as not, before they could be dug up and eaten. Taking this fact into account it would appear to have been a mistake to dig up the tennis courts (for, in an effort to make the land pay, one or two had been dug up). True, the ones that had been left had forgotten their aristocratic origins and “gone Irish,” the delicate grass becoming thick and succulent in the damp climate, more suitable for feeding cows than hitting forehand drives off. Not that it mattered very much since the twins (“my two little girls... about your age”) didn't seem to care very much for the game.