‘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 cos
t. 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.’
‘Just as dead either way. I want you to help me, Halloran.’
Now it’s time to go, Halloran thought. He could actually feel his flanks itching as if to turn away.
‘Even if it wasn’t mad,’ he said, ‘I still couldn’t help you.’
‘Your oath?’
‘Yes.’
‘But remember how they gave us that oath?’ Byrne asked suddenly, sounding rational enough to terrify anyone who knew him of old. ‘The oath rushed through by a sergeant and then they lock you in the gunner’s mess, just before they go ashore to get drunk on the bounty of the free recruits. What sort of oath is that?’
‘I can tell who’s been talking to you,’ Halloran told him.
‘I have a vision,’ said Hearn, his irony so tight-reined that you hardly recognized it for irony at all, ‘of God hanging on every gasp of that groggy sergeant’s breath, the unknown God standing by to be bound by what a sergeant says in between drinks on the deck of a little ship in Wexford Bay.’
‘Take no notice, Terry Byrne,’ advised Halloran. ‘He’s after your soul.’
But some distance away, a bough creaked and fell down the tall night, affirming by its purposelessness the large purpose that lies over all things.
‘I’m within a spit of thirty,’ Byrne said, ‘and I have to get started on my atoning.’
‘You silly bugger!’
‘There’s something to atone for, surely,’ Hearn claimed. ‘In the three of us. You, for example, stood in line at the Crescent.’
‘I have an oath to stand in line.’
Hearn waited, to let the words set in the cold air.
‘You have an oath,’ he said at last. ‘Be honest now. You didn’t stand in line because of your oath.’
Halloran wanted to lie of course, but how useless it was in the face of the large purpose.
‘I’m thinking of my oath now.’
‘Then let’s pretend your oath might be one God takes an interest in.’
Hearn did pretend it. Someone had schooled him in the infamy of kings and parliaments. He spoke of Henry Tudor, who took an oath to King Richard and broke it to return and put a sword into Richard’s bowels and pick the crown up out of a bramble bush. How good were the oaths men then made to Henry?
Collecting his breath, he went on to create a riotous picture of oath-taking and -breaking out of the odd-ends of history – King James and his perfidious in-law, the coming of the Germans, the arrogance of the Crown towards the oaths men made to join honourable societies and strive for honourable ends.
‘A stew of bad faith,’ he said finally, ‘and in the middle of it, Corporal Phelim Halloran still believes himself bound.’
While Hearn was being thus fluent with oaths as a species, Halloran reproached himself for being badly prepared to stand by his. Since the day he had met Hearn for the first time, he had known that he would one day need to have ideas on the matter, something more than an emotion of perverse loyalty. He had tried so strenuously to be safely and rationally bound by his oath’s reality as a man is bound by the reality of the earth on which he stands.
As things were, he could no nothing but argue meanly.
‘Terry Byrne, do you really want to be strangled up high bogging yourself in front of multitudes? I don’t believe it.’
Byrne said nothing. Hearn kept a long damning silence.
‘Come on, Terry, you get his legs and I’ll get his arms and we’ll cart him back to the town with us.’
‘Not me,’ Byrne said. ‘I know he’s right.’
‘You’re oak right through, aren’t you, Terry? Head, heart, belly of oak. A hero of your race.’
‘I know he’s right. That’s all.’
Now the prophet was beginning to be in need of his rest. His wheezy breath could be heard, biding their argument.
‘Halloran,’ he said when he was ready, ‘say you sell your pig to a man for five bags of barley, which he’ll pay you at harvest. Harvest comes and he doesn’t pay. Can you take back your pig?’
It would be an indignity to answer. Halloran didn’t.
‘Well, can you?’ eager Terry Byrne asked for the winded seer.
‘My mind keeps choking on this stores business,’ said Halloran.
Byrne called, ‘Back to the pig!’
‘Damn the pig!’
‘You give your oath to a king, but the king is unjust to you,’ Hearn said. ‘Can you take your oath back?’
‘No.’
‘Even though the king swore at his crowning to rule with justice?’
‘That’s his affair.’
‘You know that the king, your king, swore to keep faith even with us?’
‘I had a notion.’
‘This is all the French and Americans have said. If you can take your pig back from an unjust man, you can take your oath back from an unjust king. Now, do you think the French and Americans are all damned for this opinion?’
There was no doubt that they were not all damned. On the other hand, Halloran felt safe in that getting stores was the final impossibility.
‘And you’re going to work through Byrne,’ he said. ‘He can’t be trusted. You’re a fool.’
Byrne coughed. His better side was that he couldn’t bear grudges and that deep-dyed insults embarrassed him. When seen against Halloran as Halloran was at that moment, he seemed a man of considerable dignity.
‘We’re all leaky boats,’ Hearn said. ‘In any case, Terry doesn’t worry you. Because you’re what is known as a man of faith. That means that you know peace with your Ann isn’t had by luck. It’s earned. It’s earned by Halloran joining himself to some divine purpose. A divine purpose uses yourself, Byrne and me with equal ease. Now there is a purpose working in us. Against all odds, it has brought the three of us together here in the dark.’
Halloran raised his arms and stiffened them to show his freedom.
‘No damned purpose has its hands on me. If it has, it can get them off again.’
For a second time, Hearn laughed.
‘I don’t think it hears you,’ he said.
And t
hey held, the three of them, a listening silence to see if Hearn were right. Halloran wanted to go. The ring of cold around his heart and the nag of events had him squirming.
‘I can’t promise I won’t give you up,’ he told Hearn. ‘Not for a price either, I’d like to do it for nothing.’
‘Very well,’ Hearn said. ‘You could tell them I intend taking perhaps three hundred pounds of beef and two hundred and eighty of flour . . .’
‘I don’t want to hear any of that.’
‘Eighty-four gallons of rice, eighty-four of pease. Four firkins of cheese.’
Halloran insisted, ‘I’ll tell them, don’t you worry. I’ll tell them.’
‘He will,’ Byrne said, having become sober and responsible to the point of provocation.
‘I have means to get inside the warehouse,’ Hearn admitted, ‘and I know the place on the inside, having worked there.’
‘Not wise, Mr Hearn,’ Terry kept counselling. ‘Not wise.’
But the man had not finished burdening Halloran yet.
‘Taking the food by night, I’ll load it into a cutter and take it to a place within the bay where a boat from the whaler can take it and myself on.’
‘You’d sink your cutter for one thing,’ Halloran said like a true Marine. Which he wasn’t.
‘It would be well-laden.’
‘It would be twenty fathoms well-laden, that’s how well-laden.’
‘It can be done.’
‘I’m sure. You’ve got a key, you said.’
Somebody’s joints cracked knowingly. Hearn’s or Terry’s.
‘You could say we had,’ said Hearn.
‘I don’t want to know what I can say. Have you got a key?’
‘We can get one. We know a man who has one,’ said Byrne.
‘There was a time when Byrne and myself considered taking a cutter and stores and sailing to the East Indies. Only a week ago we were thinking of it.’
‘Why not?’ Halloran said. He sounded feverish with sarcasm.
‘On the other hand,’ Hearn told him, ‘it can easily be done, this whole thing. I promise you that much.’
‘Whether it’s easy has nothing to do with it.’