‘I see.’
‘I’ll be back in the morning. Perhaps with an armed guard.’
‘You’ll find me in this same place.’
‘You’re sure of yourself, aren’t you?’
‘I’m sure of the purpose working in us.’
‘Damn you.’
They said goodnight. Halloran walked away, and lost his patience with the wind palpable in his eye-sockets and in the back of his jaws as a pain. He heard Hearn speak but pretended not to, having heard enough already.
‘Hoy, Phelim,’ called Byrne like a friend, and shamed him into turning.
‘Yes?’
He even walked back part of the way.
‘Everything has worked together in a way that will shock you,’ Hearn said. ‘People who tell you that God is with them are an abomination. But it’s very likely that the true God is with us.’
‘If that’s so, why isn’t there a sign?’
‘It would only fit in with the pattern if there were. I wouldn’t be the man to say an adulterous generation required a sign.’
‘You wouldn’t want to be the man,’ Halloran said, hated his own bluster and turned back into the wind. He felt very like a man who has signed an august contract, and the keeping of it is utterly beyond him.
21
Some optimism of the blood had kept Ann awake half the night. In the small hours, she felt strong and became feverish with expectations of the future. She woke before dawn in a very still morning of tonic cold. No sound came from indoors where Mr and Mrs Blythe would not rise, each from his own unbridal bed, till seven or later. The roof creaked with soft and sudden sleeping noises this morning, noises quite unbidden, quite unintended. She lay and enjoyed the sting of her morning strength untouched in her belly and shoulders and legs. To live on, she thought, it is needed only for a person to keep within her daily strength. It was one of those simple pre-dawn truths which by eight o’clock become not so much untrue as wholly beside the point.
Once she had decided to be canny with strength, she rose to squander some. She took her chamber-pot with its baize cover and walked slowly out of doors. The wet trees had just stopped shivering and looked a little like exiles themselves. The earth was wet and grey and was, surprisingly, tamed. Down her throat went the smooth pink of cock-crow air in mouthfuls. The sleek cold rushed up her nose, nettled her brain until it threatened to crack into chilblains along the bottom. Of course, she found herself capable of believing that she would walk out one morning mistress of her own home. She would see sleeping cattle and listen to the sound of stirring house and husband.
Fifty yards into the morning, however, and already she wished she had slept more. The presentiments of a sweet destiny had turned tight and indigestive at the back of the throat and belly. She went on some way, emptied the pot, seeing herself for what she was, a skinny girl tipping out her slops. Coming back to the kitchen, she stopped at a cassia tree. It had hard winter pods that had taken her interest. She put down the pot and picked a pod and began to strip its shell. There was a man in a military coat lying in the grass only four yards or so away. Nearly flat out, he had his sideways eyes on her and breathed heavily.
‘Don’t call out!’ he said to her. ‘It’s Terry Byrne, but please don’t call out!’ And then, as if it went to prove his good faith, ‘I rushed down here fast as I could soon as they changed the guard.’
Terry Byrne it was, even though all the saggy skin on the earthward side of his face made him look uneven and dangerous.
‘What is it, Terry?’
‘It’s about Halloran. It’s about Halloran’s safety.’
‘Is it?’
‘If you just step into the woods about a hundred yards to the other side of that hut up there, there’s a feller wants to talk to you about it.’
‘I’m sure.’
‘Ann, it’s a man in his forties.’
‘I see. Tell him to come down here.’
‘He can’t.’
‘Why?’
Byrne sighed, lifting his head straight to do it.
‘Have you ever heard of Robert Hearn?’
She squinted or even winced.
‘He was here once – six weeks ago. Doing paper-work for Mr Blythe.’
‘Halloran’s been helping him.’
‘I don’t believe that.’
‘Just this week. Before God . . .’
The urgency of the matter had him on his knees.
‘Lie down, Terry!’ she told him.
He flattened himself back into the grass.
‘I’ll go straight on home from here, you won’t see me again today,’ he said, ‘but you’ve got to talk to this feller.’
‘Is it like the Crescent?’ she asked him savagely. ‘Are you lining me up for some sort of steel in the belly?’
She couldn’t see his eyes amongst the yellow spikes of grass. He must have been very cold there, hiding his face against the lean earth.
‘No,’ he said.
‘Go home now,’ she told him as tenderly as she could afford.
But they couldn’t move off together, and she had to leave him behind her in the grass, his plan being that he’d battle upright after perhaps five minutes, as if he’d been felled hours before and in that very spot by drink or sickness.
So she felt vulnerable at the back and approached the woods sideways, with pauses, having no workable idea of how much was a hundred yards.
‘You’ll have to find me,’ she muttered, and stepped into the forest, all of whose tongues were furred with frost soon to melt to a dribbling olive.
‘Hallo,’ she said conversationally. She walked circumspectly, not wanting to find him with a start. Once or twice she looked over her shoulder. What she expected to see was that she had come maze-deep into the trees. Yet both times the open spaces showed luminously only a short dash behind her.
‘Hallo!’ she said again.
‘Here,’ the man said.
She had not seen him stepping out of any shadow. He was revealed whole to her in a long cowled smock made of seal-skin. He tried to produce a smile of buoyant leniency, of the type that priests use who pretend they know of the special agonies of being a woman. It was from the plentiful grey coils of his hair, bard’s, scholar’s hair, avuncular, that she took most of her hope.
‘Do you remember me?’ he asked. ‘I did some work once at Mr Blythe’s.’
‘Everybody expects you to be dead.’
‘I hope I haven’t disappointed you.’
He grinned. He couldn’t deal easily with women. Mrs Hearn, whoever she was, must have felt she was living with a monument.
‘I think you have,’ she told him. ‘What’s this about Halloran?’
‘You know that strong box the Blythes have? It’s usually in the front parlour. It’s iron, it has brass bands across its top and leather-work on the front.’
‘I can’t remember it.’
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Anyhow, its twin is in the warehouse. The same key opens both of them, the one you must have seen and the one in the store.’
‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘It’s the truth. I wouldn’t mislead you. I need an imprint of the key.’
‘Not from me,’ she said. ‘How much do you need it?’
‘Halloran and myself want something out of that box. We have reasons.’
Though, across the valley in the hutments, Halloran had not been told of them yet. For Halloran needed to believe that the plan had dropped whole and mandatory from heaven, that it was woven all of a piece. He could not be permitted to see the thing customarily put together out of oddments.
‘Halloran didn’t tell me.’
‘You don’t see him often. In any case, he wants to save you anguish.’
>
A sudden wind alighted in the tree-tops and shook beads of frost all over Hearn’s unaware shoulders.
‘You have to understand this,’ he said, leniency going. ‘We have an enterprise on hand. There’s no danger. We are able to get inside the store and out without leaving a trace. With the key to the strong-box, all will be by stealth. Again, not a sign left behind us. The other course, not having a key and breaking the lock, that is dangerous. I told Terry Byrne to say that I wanted to speak of Halloran’s safety. It is just that. Halloran’s safety.’
He coughed.
‘Let me show you how to take an imprint in soap.’
‘Is Terry Byrne in the enterprise too?’
‘He’s my messenger.’
‘Sweet heaven!’ she laughed.
‘Terry doesn’t know about the strong-box. No one does, except the two of us. Certainly not Byrne. Certainly not Halloran. Though for different reasons.’
Again she laughed. ‘Byrne,’ she said.
‘Why laugh?’ he asked her. ‘We are all leaky boats. But this is a matter of conscience with Halloran and Byrne and myself alone. A matter of conscience and atonement. You must have the imprint this evening if a key is to be made in time.’
She stood in silence and at her ease for some seconds. Rods of light shone in the wet tree-tops, saying, ‘Nearly half-past six.’
‘You made a mistake telling me, Mr Hearn. You don’t have me. After I see Halloran, you won’t have him either.’
He began to smile at her, not with an assumed smile as before. It was so evenly triumphant and so long that Ann became afraid, worse than when she had first entered the forest.
‘If you wanted to put him on the rack,’ he explained, ‘or pull him into three pieces, if that’s your purpose, then of course you’ll tell him all about what I’ve asked. But before you do tell him everything, say that you’ve seen me. Pretend you got a glimpse of me by accident, but that you’re sure it was the notorious Hearn. Ask him what you should do. Judge by his answer whether you should give me what I’m after. But, as I say, don’t tell him that I asked you for it. He’d rather break the lid off the thing than have you as a part to the plan. That is, he’d rather be caught.’
He spoke to her quickly, dominantly, presuming that she had nothing cogent to put into the dialogue.
‘Suppose that you tell him how I’ve asked you for the imprint. What does he do then? If he takes no more part with us, he has already conspired. He’s already guilty, he’s in as much danger as we are. What does he do then? Does he go to those in power and kill Byrne and myself? Of course not. Does he merely keep his silence, having stood out of an enterprise of conscience and atonement? And does he let the others be caught for lack of him? Does that sound like him?’
She said, ‘I don’t know. We seem to be talking about a different man.’
But he cleared this idea away with the heel of his hand.
‘He’ll stay with the enterprise, you know he will. How much of the lover’s talk between the two of you has been made up of Ewers and Quinn and the slaughter at the Crescent?’
She wouldn’t say.
‘Begin by telling him you’ve had a glimpse of me,’ he said again, ‘that you were sure it was me. And then judge.’
And he went through his whole argument again, more gradually, schooling her in the alternatives and saying in the end that there was no choice for her.
She said, ‘There’s always a choice.’
‘If there is, how did you end in this town?’ he asked her, off-handedly spiteful, like the very sunlight which put a false youth on his briary hair. ‘Let me tell you how an imprint is taken.’
22
The north wind set in later in the morning. Halloran woke with a light fever and a cough, but had no time to indulge them. He came to Byrne’s but just in time to see the boyo, dressed for church-parade, vanishing downhill through the Marine hutments. Halloran stumbled after him. There was a terrible lack of harmony between the wide blue of the bay and the fig-trees exercising in the wind on one side, and on the other, his own undigested fear and shallow breathing and spongey ankles.
Byrne heard the scrabbling of feet on the shaley hillside, recognized Halloran and waited for him in peace. And peace was rare in Byrne.
‘You have to take me to Hearn.’
‘Yes.’ Byrne frowned in an uncharacteristic way, like a man of affairs. ‘Yes. I’ve been looking for you. There’s so much to get done.’
‘Never mind that. Take me to him.’
‘You’re in a rush. Anger and all.’
‘Anger? I’ll say anger!’
‘Why?’
‘Brother Hearn’s lying, that’s why. I’ll give him brother!’
‘You might give him away too.’
‘Never mind. Take me just the same.’
Closing his eyes gently, Byrne stood for a while with his mouth open in thought, intelligently poised on a sentence. But he grunted down whatever it was he had intended to say and led Halloran away. From the back, he did look depressingly like a new man. He walked as if he were illustrating what Hearn had said, ‘There is a purpose working in us.’
It was a mild day to the eyes although the wind was up. Winter had somehow softened the lines of the forest which still seemed a place of self-contained and ancient ease. Halloran felt free since it made no claims on him, not soliciting his admiration as forests elsewhere did, and weakened his sense of moving on a path plotted by somebody else.
Today, not being in fact as angry as he would have wished, he was able to follow in his mind the way they went. They veered to the west slightly and after half a mile, came to marshy land and beyond it, the boulders where Hearn was hidden. Once more the ornate, Biblical pass-word was traded.
Hearn rose out of the stones. Phelim was astounded at his vigour, for he seemed to have succeeded in rebuilding himself – on a lean scale, perhaps; yet very nearly completely a new man. And he’d been warm last night. He was wearing a dark, hooded coat made from the pelt of some Antarctic creature. The whaler had been Christian indeed to Hearn.
‘You’ve been a pharisee with me,’ Halloran said.
Hearn lifted an ear but not his eyes.
‘I beg your pardon.’
‘Don’t bother begging my pardon. You haven’t told me the whole story. Three hundred pounds of meat, you say. See how I trust you, you say. I tell you every thing to the nearest ounce. Like hell you do!’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Three hundred pounds of beef won’t feed you halfway to America, let alone any of the others. So it seems your whaler is getting no profit out of you at all. A rare man he must be!’
‘There are rare men.’
‘Yes. Most of them aren’t whalers,’ Halloran contended, although he’d never met any whalers and was prejudging them.
Hearn stood waiting. He could afford to play with his breath and, amazingly, he had breath to play with today. His grey face seemed made to dominate in pulpits; it had been harrowed but now owned an irrefutable repose, as if it had survived immensities, as if the worst had been.
‘But you hardly understand the captain’s problem,’ he said. ‘His need is stores.’ Hearn coughed then, not from his illness, but like any mere temporizing windbag. ‘Stores, you see.’ Then over his eyes which had been momentarily vulnerable, a thick skin of infallibility took only a second to grow. ‘Stores, not profit. Now he’ll be able to take in stores at Valparaiso, which is straight over there.’ He pointed eastwards at the unintelligible warp of forest. ‘Seven thousand miles certainly. But between here and Valparaiso, what we have taken from the store will keep three or four men alive.’
‘I still don’t believe it. I still don’t believe he’ll come. It isn’t worth his trouble. There’s no profit in it and it’s not like him
not to want profit.’
After all, Halloran thought, cats want milk and whalers, like all men of business, want profit. It is a law of nature.
‘Profit isn’t all things to all men, you know,’ Hearn told him.
‘I’m not going to risk my life on that proposition.’
And certainly within Halloran, life ran pale and prone to argument but not to tranquil faith.
‘Has he told you everything, Terry?’ he asked. ‘Has honest brother Hearn who wants your soul told you all the story?’
‘Terry knows more of it than you. That’s to be expected.’
It may have been Halloran’s mistake then to stare at Byrne. Yet he believed that if Byrne could be dislodged, Hearn’s purpose would be beaten. Behind Phelim’s back, the seer frowned and made a sealed-lips gesture at Terry. So that only the traditional Byrne was visible, a creature of dish-eyed unenlightenment.
‘Does he know more?’ said Halloran, as Byrne’s face became even more bluntly and conscientiously ignorant. ‘You don’t look much to me like a man who knows things.’
‘He’ll tell us everything in the end,’ Byrne said. ‘Your nose is starting to run.’
It made Halloran furious to have his nose so thoroughly betray his mortality. He became noticeably taut. Hearn could tell that he might stamp away at any second.
Hearn said levelly, ‘The captain is a man with his eye to profit, yes.’ All things were level to Hearn. All valleys had already been exalted, every hill already laid low. ‘If it’s any comfort to you, he spent a great part of the time ranting against his brother-in-law. He’d got some water-casks from his brother-in-law, you see, bought them on trust. He didn’t know they’d been used to hold vinegar and were full of mould. The first one broached killed four of his crew. Now he’s out to ruin his brother-in-law, take him to court, destroy his name. So, there you are! He’s what you’d call a normal man.’
‘Thank God for that much,’ said Halloran.
And he was grateful to find that most men were dishonest in the traditional way, conventionally vengeful, and could be trusted to be corrupt for the sane and long-established reason of personal greed.