‘That’s right. Here, St Terentius, take my plate back.’
With grunts of comfort bound to be disillusioned once the damp came up from the earth, the camp was settling to sleep. Byrne left Phelim without saying another word.
For the first three days, Byrne spoke of nothing but salvation. Halloran, burdened with his numbness or with nostalgia for Ann, did not seem to be able to insult him away from the question.
There were with the party two transports. Of them it could broadly be said that, though reliable, they were, after their manner, lovers. Byrne became interested in the younger of them and shelved his study of the last things.
By then, they had passed from the plain of grass through downlands into the dusty forests of a miserable tableland. By the fifth day, the plateau became more massive and broken with shadowy clefts down which the tributaries flowed.
One afternoon, they camped well down in one of these fissures, close to water and safe from a furious north wind rioting on the other side of their valley. The two officers had climbed the ridge to take their position. Halloran had the others collecting wood and bearing water.
Byrne got back to the proposed fireplace with what could be called two armfuls of kindling. He sat and began to build a fire. As he waited there, sluggishly breaking twigs, the two transports arrived lumping full waterskins. They drove iron hooks into the trunks of trees and hung the water from them. Then the elder transport marched up to the fire and kicked Byrne in the jaw.
Halloran rushed up and held the man. Byrne got up from the ground with his mouth bleeding. Two more Marines arrived, and Halloran ordered them to hold the boyo.
‘He’s been messing with my Arthur,’ the transport said.
‘He’s been messing with your Arthur, has he?’ asked Halloran. ‘Right. You’ll carry my gear for the rest of the jaunt. That’ll keep your feet on the ground.’
He let go of the man and advanced on Byrne.
‘You’ve been half-way down my ear for days about salvation, haven’t you? Nothing like a bit of the old sodomy between martyrdoms. Keeps the old man in trim. Captain Allen had men flogged for sodomy, did you know?’
At that moment, came the noise of the two officers, slipping in the leaf-mould of the steep forests and chuckling to each other.
‘Not a word,’ said Halloran. And there was not a word.
The gorges became so vertical that Allen turned home after the eighth day. Three days’ rations were left. Halloran felt an immense joy. He felt God’s blessing smile on him aslant through the trees each morning. He was going back to Ann.
17
They slept the last night at the Crescent, Allen meaning to row home in the morning. Halloran and two Marines found a quiet billet on the outskirts of the hutments. Here they cooked their own rations, for Allen had told them they could not draw from the garrison stores, not that night anyhow. ‘Perhaps in the morning,’ he had promised, pretending for a second that they could depend on him to see to it. With hardly a word, they lay down an hour after sunset and slept.
Byrne found a noisier bed in the hut of a sergeant who was the camp’s notorious gamer. The wife, whom Byrne had with some success coveted in the Indian Ocean, had died the previous December. But her spirit did not lay heavily under that roof; the sergeant was gay and had constant visitors, and in his corner, Byrne slept and roused pleasantly throughout the evening and the small hours, always waking to light and warmth.
At least three men, at various hours, told him the news of the village when their laughter woke him and they found his dazed eyes on them. It was vivid news, told to him as a recompense.
What had, in fact, happened in the Crescent while Byrne and Halloran had been pushing theology up and down Allen’s bitter gorges, was that His Excellency had been persuaded to despatch a Court of Enquiry to the Crescent. Somehow it had become known that a rebel committee was operating in the village, and Major Sabian and four other officers were told to winkle it out. His Excellency advised them to be sensible but firm. Firm they were.
They heard first Captain Howard’s evidence, fervently given. There had been, said the Captain, an increase in illicit gatherings of Irish, taking place in sight of officers and guards. They had flaunted before the authorities the secrecy of their old, barbaric tongue. A female transport had come to him with a story of pikes prepared and hidden away. Surgeon Daker had attempted to uncover these pikes, but had been unsuccessful. A young Irishman questioned had been unbearably contumaceous, and had had to be flogged for contempt. He himself, Howard, had suffered something he called ‘insolence of bearing’ from a transport named Robert Hearn, who performed clerical duties at Government House. He had refrained from punishing the man in the hope that, given some latitude, Hearn might betray something of importance about the rebel committee.
He had prepared a list of names for the court’s perusal. . . .
Daker’s torpid evidence, on the same model as Howard’s, was then taken.
After two days, the Court of Enquiry drew up a list of men to be flogged – preventively. Amongst them, Hearn, five hundred.
The punishment had been dealt on the Saturday that Allen’s party had turned back from the tableland.
The three men who told their version of these facts to Byrne all said with passion, ‘I hope they try their tricks now. I hope to God they do. We’ve got plenty of powder up here, and after that there’s the bayonet.’ They wanted by these means to make clear what they themselves were not sure of – that they were not the prisoners, and the felons were.
When Byrne woke again, the hut was dark and the door stood open, full of a sea-blue half light. It might have been half past four. By the table in the centre, the sergeant and some intruder were talking as if it were midday.
‘What’s the matter?’ Byrne asked.
‘They’ve gone,’ the sergeant said.
‘Who’s gone?’
‘The prisoners, the Pats. The ones from the timber-parties and the government farm.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Terry,’ the sergeant said, ‘you’d better get back to your friends.’
‘But tell me first.’
They told him, and he dressed and went to find Halloran.
Phelim was woken by the shoulder and saw suspended above him Byrne’s yokel head, in shadow.
‘Hoy Corporal,’ Byrne kept saying, sounding a swamp of catarrh.
Halloran sat up. He was a poor riser, and one side of his face seemed to have subsided from the other.
‘They’ve bolted, they’ve gone,’ Byrne announced. ‘I almost wish Dennis Byrne’s small boy Terry was with them.’ So he repeated the stories which had broken his sleep that pleasant night. ‘Last night then,’ he kept repeating, having to go through the preamble for the three other Marines awaking one by one in the hut.
‘Last night then, some of them broke into the warehouse here. They squashed the guard’s head, a Marine from Howard’s company. Eternal rest grant.’
Byrne was so feverish with the story that Halloran thought how one man’s squashed skull is another man’s renewal. But to Phelim too, at this time of morning the murdered soldier did not reek of damnation. Death was a quick pain in the head and a cool sleep. Halloran countenanced it, and breathed easily.
‘Straight after, they stole two cutters and a jolly-boat and shipped the goods from the warehouse to their friends along the river. Do you know who their friends would be? More than a hundred from the timber parties and the Government farm!’
‘Oh dear God,’ said Halloran, for their cause which hadn’t a Chinaman’s chance.
Byrne frowned. Reverence was a distraction in any good anecdote.
‘And you know,’ he went on, ‘it makes a man far from ashamed that not one life did those fellows take at the pits or the farm. But they chained up guards and ov
erseers and told them to watch out for the next time they’d meet, and to think of what merciless bastards they’d been to their brother-men, and how the Almighty must hold in His hands a few colliers full of coals to heap on their heads. Then they left with some nobility, you could say.’
‘No doubt they’re sidling up to the hogsheads somewhere across in the woods and thinking the same as you. And they’re all dead, between those who’ll be shot and those who’ll be hanged.’
‘You’re a long-nosed moping bugger, Halloran,’ said Byrne. ‘Your darling officers have to find them yet.’
‘Poor lost souls,’ Halloran was muttering. He remained sitting on his blanket, kneading his ruined feet. He could feel in them the sharp edges of the land they had brought him over. They were wrapped in an old pair of black worsted stockings, formerly Ann’s, and evoked nostalgia for the low coast of Wexford, and even for his lost brothers in the woods.
‘You wouldn’t know a great day if it took you by the horns,’ said Byrne.
Inevitably, the Navy reveille blew, singing Charlie, Charlie, lace up and go all over the hillside, hacking the morning down to regimental size.
By seven o’clock, the garrison had been fed on wheat-meal cake cooked in ashes and given a half-pint of spirits each. Men had gone shuffling through the open-air bakery, and nudged each other over the murder stains on the doorstep of the warehouse, and scooped cartridges and balls in the armoury. Captain Howard had risen with dysentery, and collapsed in the midst of preparations. Now he passed the command to Allen. Patrols had already been sent out, one into the hills, one down the river by fishing-boat, and had seen nobody. But the patrol by river had found the wreckage of the stolen boats in a place where she-oaks and gums and monoliths crowded right down to the water.
Allen strode downhill from Government House to receive a report on what boats were left for use. On both sides of the street stood a file of Marines in whom the morning sang. This was the hour of level tedium on most days, the hour when the day presented itself as intolerable before the day’s work had been more than sniffed at. After long training in boredom and hunger, men turned their faces with an effortless goodwill to watch Allen past. Their faces all affirmed, ‘Yes, I am a soldier born to stand up firing lead pellets at my King’s enemies, and here I am, arrived at my hour.’
Fallen in by the river were two ranks of men who affirmed nothing; sick men resurrected from the garrison infirmary. A subaltern addressed them. Behind the fulgurating youth’s back, some half-dozen fat birds fed, white hoods, black inquisitors’ faces. They pecked the earth with an authentic mastery, and suffered the boy.
Halloran came jogging uphill to meet Allen.
‘The adjutant says, sir, no cutters and five little fishing-boats, but only three of them half-way safe.’
Allen grunted. No doubt he had it in mind to do smart, soldierly things with the boats, feints and sweeps down the river. For want of a few small craft, it would all have to be forgone.
He was still considering, and Halloran stood by him politely, when up from the hospital came Daker and a shambling man with a blanket over head and shoulders. Daker stopped continually to allow the man to catch up, and was absorbed for seconds on end by the black and white crow-shrikes (gymnorrhina) pecking the earth. He conveyed to Allen and Halloran the sense that for him, the morning was salient only in these.
The man, like a ruined friar, came on with his head back in a capuche of blanket. There was no jacket or shirt under the blanket, he wore only canvas pants clutched at the front. The sun was on the man’s falcon nose.
‘It’s Hearn,’ said Phelim. He thought, he used Mealey as a case in point, Ewers as a case in point, Quinn likewise. Now they have given him a case in point in his own flesh. He noticed the perse under each lid, and the blue, death-struck lips. In this altered face, Halloran was aware of the life flowing in the eyes. He was reminded there and then (not later, or as a result of thinking artfully upon Hearn) of the rivers one gets glints of from fissures in limestone country.
‘He insisted on seeing you in person, Captain,’ said Daker, arriving. Hearn still grunted on the slope, a very rheumatic prophet Samuel. ‘His name is Hearn and he’s suffered at the hands of the Court of Enquiry. He heaped such intemperate abuse on the men detailed to carry him that I let him walk himself. He says he has information for you on this Irish affair.’
Hearn’s rowdy breathing obtruded itself. From consideration for his back, he held his head arrogantly tilted. Now that he was all death except for his eyes, he had a new defiance, had lost his old satanic air. Seen close, he seemed far too warlike to be compared even to Samuel; but Elisha, who called forth bears to tear the two and forty mocking boys, might have had eyes like Hearn’s.
If all my people were like me, said the unquenched eyes, and all your people like you, we would grow our grain in your ribcage, we would plough your shinbone into lime.
‘How much credence you give what he says is your matter,’ Daker observed, ‘a military matter. But I have never found any reason to trust him. Perhaps you’ll excuse me.’
Excused or not, he was going, and allowed himself to be delayed purely as a concession.
‘Perhaps you could send a litter for this fellow,’ Allen suggested. ‘I’m sure he won’t be able to return to the hospital by his own powers.’
Daker screwed up doubt in a corner of his mouth.
‘I’ll manage it if possible. If I cannot, perhaps you could detail some of your men to carry him.’
On the narrow back of the last word, the Surgeon escaped. His serenity carried him on downhill as Allen called,
‘We have other things to do, Surgeon. You are to bring a litter when I tell you!’
‘Jumped-up Surgeon’s mate,’ muttered Allen as well.
Hearn’s laughter at this frightened Halloran, probably frightened the officer more than offended him. It stirred like an animal in the grass and seemed to come, in fact, from the ground. Allen struck Hearn with a clenched fist, but against all reason, the man avoided falling.
‘You, Halloran,’ Allen called out, turning his back, walking away, ‘you talk to him! You’re of the same damned race.’
Then Hearn spoke up, loudly, plying the cyanose lips, the sense coming out clotted, two or three words at a time on the brunt of each breath.
‘If that Captain of Marines listens to me, he will have His Excellency singing Hosanna to him. He will be a conqueror and have a few honours to take to his pillow of a night. And he may grow up to become a Major-General.’
‘Sit him down!’ Allen commanded over his shoulder.
‘No, thank you Captain. The cat licked me very low.’
‘Listen to him, Halloran!’
‘You listen, Captain of Marines, or lose your chance, now!’
Allen seemed calm, sensibly taking account of the fact that a man punished to his limit is beyond authority.
‘Do you know something of this rebel affair then?’ he asked quietly.
‘Yes, for your face, Captain!’
‘My hearing’s passable, front or back. But let us humour the dying.’
Indolently, he about-turned.
‘Well, Hearn?’
But the man’s deathliness shocked him. Beneath the brow and cheeks and nose, the skeleton had asserted itself, had risen like a tide.
‘Quickly,’ said Allen, aware of the shortage of time.
The adjutant came up. That made the Captain, the adjutant and Halloran who could hear Hearn. To the soldiers further up the street, it must have all looked something like the Ides of March.
‘Your people were right,’ Hearn said. ‘There was a committee, a committee of five, of whom I was one. A man called Benedict Cavanagh was chairman. He’s away in the wilds with them now.’
‘I know,’ said Allen.
‘They had ho
pes of me, poor souls. The committee was a pike-in-the-belly business to them, though.’
‘And it wasn’t to you?’
‘No, it wasn’t to me. It was a committee of reform to me.’
‘Reform? Who were you going to reform?’
‘The administration,’ said Hearn. ‘Keep it inside just bounds.’
‘What do you mean?’
Allen was very ready to take insult.
‘Daker, for example,’ said Hearn. ‘Dear God, let me lie down, will you? On my belly.’
Two men were sent running for a litter.
‘Give him some spirits, Halloran,’ said Allen.
Hearn was on his hands and knees, the blanket askew, showing the backside out of his trousers, real flogging breeches kept on with thongs round the top of each leg, and kept up in front by hand. The back was healing, one or two places still moist. Hearn had suffered a seizure after only a part of his punishment had been given. The system of which Hearn spoke so often, would, long live its stroke-counting soul, keep the rest in store for him.
Halloran could remember that Hearn had once tried to get liquid into Mealey’s downward mouth. Now he was doing the same for Hearn. He hoped he wouldn’t catch their condition. An amount of the spirits spilt into the man’s hoar-frost stubble. Three yards away stood two men with the litter. One of them was Byrne, knapsacked, with wonderstruck eyes.
‘Give him your blanket, Byrne!’ cried Allen. ‘With your permission, Mr Garside, I’ll put him in the adjutant’s hut.’
They carried him up through the company lined either side of the street. These men were still exhilarated and anxious to know the what and wherefore of Hearn. They lived in the flush of the morning, the dew not yet dry on the grass. Their weapons were propped in a variety of off-hand positions which hinted at the brave possibilities of the day.
Hearn was let down before the adjutant’s hearth, and Phelim took off his coat and made a pillow for him.
‘Set the fire, Byrne,’ Allen said, bending over Hearn’s stertorous rest and scanning the blue features squashed nose-first in Halloran’s coat. ‘Mr Garside, send a runner, will you, to the outposts. Give him more spirits, Corporal. I promise it’ll be made up to you.’