‘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 whizze
s 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.’
Halloran walked on but was stiff with fear.
‘Why then . . .?’ he asked.
‘Because there are other reasons.’
And Ewers began to repeat all that Allen had said on hanging as a ceremony. Halloran was aghast, fear becoming absolute, as Ewers said, ‘Were you so cruel to me only because I am the final minister?’
At this, the hanged Scot took from his waistcoat a tiny egg. Halloran, careful from childhood with eggs, extended both hands, yet Ewers didn’t place it there intact. He cracked it open and tipped it across Phelim’s palms. The thick white contained a yolk of scalding brilliance. Halloran, blinded, groaned with joy.
‘I can’t look at it,’ he said, trying to look just the same.
‘Wait a small while. It dies out in the hands within minutes.’
Already its light did not so needle the eye. It was, in fact, seen to be bean-shaped now. Its radiance had become a gloss, intense yet growing less so all the time. Halloran panicked at this responsibility.
‘What . . .?’ he begged Ewers.
‘This,’ Ewers told him, ‘is the seed of your gibbet-tree. As Christ planted his, I planted mine. Now it is your planting time.’
Staring into Ewers’ eyes, Halloran became furious.
‘Do you think I would plant it?’
‘It will certainly not live long in your hands,’ Ewers observed.
And every glimpse of the dying seed compelled Halloran.
He said, ‘In any case, if I did plant it, Hearn would want it for his tree of judgment. Terry Byrne, who is a child, would dig it up for its shine.’
‘You can expect a ready ear and no mercy from me,’ Ewers told him. ‘By all means, make it safe from Hearn and Terry. But by the time you have, it will be dead.’
Coerced to gaze at the bean and, gazing, to plant it, Halloran was free enough to seek Ewers’ face only once more. The artist was strolling off, muttering.
‘Please yourself. It is quite clearly not my seed but yours. No one can do worse for it than you can, holding it in your palm.’
The gusts of dying light worried Phelim’s under-chin. He lowered his eyes the fatal time. The bean of his gibbet-tree spoke to him now with a pitiable glint, to plant it being the only mercy at hand. Still nursing it in both palms, he yet dug with both hands in the black soil. Leaf-mould he turned up, red roots and white worms, and put the seed in the heart of a conical black pit and pulled blankets of earth across it and himself. Just in time.
Happiness seemed to wake him; but if it had not been sufficient, decision formed like a fist at his back and jolted him in the nape. He rose without delay to keep an appointment that same night with Miles.
Miles sat on the ground fingering the split in his ear. Halloran kicked him on the hip. It was dark. Above them, on the hill, the wind and curlews were inconsolable.
‘Now,’ Byrne said, beginning to hold Halloran with both arms. ‘Now, now. You gentle people. You’re the cruellest bastards of all.’
In a voice croaky from excess and not fully returned to itself, Halloran told Miles, ‘Do what you’re told.’
‘He will now,’ Byrne assured him, ‘he will. Stop kicking him.’
They stood above Miles, who was white and extremely interested in the blood from his ear. Byrne was gratified.
‘You went mad with him.’
‘I’ll teach him,’ said Halloran.
‘I wouldn’t have known you,’ Byrne told him.
‘I’ll teach the bastard.’
He began to cry.
‘No tears, Phelim,’ Terry begged of him. ‘It’s all settled now. No tears.’
During the night Hearn moved his home to a forest slope two miles to the east of the boulders he’d hidden amongst. Above him rose the forest in silver bark, luminous at night, mourning the dying of the tribes. Halloran had come near this place in February; now as then it smelt like a jaded cemetery. Each day Hearn buried himself in blanket, earth and bark. By night he made a wind-break of a fallen tree. He ate serenely at dusk, pork, cheese, rice uncooked and swallowed one or two grains at a time. His small store of food was the whaler’s gift, a warranty from an acquisitive, hard-put man that he meant to have profit out of his meeting with Hearn.
Each night he returned to his first sleeping place for a parley. It meant for him a two mile walk over gormless earth that shifted and broke as he walked; no chance of settling in stride and forgetting himself.
Whenever there was argument, he’d say, ‘You are not your own man nor am I mine. We hold each other. The earth holds the trees as we hold each other. We cannot offend each other any more than the earth offends the trees.’
A concept that frightened and induced silence.
After each parley, he returned to the wind-break. With his talent for living in the open, he seemed as always to detect a yellow warren of sleep and to be down in it in seconds.
24
Now Private McHugh turned the key on them. Hearn, Terry, Phelim, Miles shuffled forward into the store-room itself, holding back in the dark from bruising themselves on its hard-edged plenty. This was the room which Halloran had dreamt of for four nights without fail. It had been blue, Arab, sumptuous in the dream, but tonight black and smelling of mould.
Byrne lit the lanthorn.
‘Beef is in two sizes of cask,’ Hearn told them. He showed them where the eighty pound casks were.
Miles and Byrne began to carry one, but dropped it when Hearn and Phelim were out of sight, and packed meat into the canvas loops they had slung from their shoulders and wore under their tunics. A minute or two later, the others were back, carrying the strong-box to the light. It was opened then, and the note taken out.
The forty-two gallon casks were heavy as elephants. Within five minutes though, they had everything they wanted standing, like barrels out of a tall tale, by the door in the hint of light from the lamp.
McHugh opened the door to them and they carried the casks across the road and dropped them where they could find room in the malicious undergrowth. Hearn, once back from locking the store-house door, threw the key into the bay. There was trouble with Miles over this and bullying from Byrne and Halloran, and at last they were humping the casks away, welded to them by the dark; graceless animals and frightened along the scraggy bay-side.
The cutter, guarded tonight by Miles’ friend Barrett, being a cutter made in the town and leaky, rode so low under the load of stores that they boarded it slowly and one at a time. There was such quiet all around them that they worked in the darkness simply as men at work in the dark. Forgetting the gravity of what they did, they were absorbed by its discomforts: cold and the loads they had to carry, push, kick against without seeing.
It made them jovial to find the tide working for them as Hearn had said it would, to find also the town as dark to their sight as they were to its.
They landed Hearn where he told them, perhaps two miles up the bay. Not wanting to be whaler’s crew themselves, they had to leave him straight away.
‘Don’t you feel free?’ Hearn asked Halloran, shaking his hand before they left.
They rowed home and dispersed through the woods. Phelim did not yet feel free. He supposed it was a talent, and would come to him.
25
The winter nights that July were amazingly cold. Friday night was so cold that Halloran slept camp-style, put his legs into his waistcoat sleeves, wrapped his breeches around his shoulders and himself in his coat under two blankets. It rained in the night, and he exulted, thinking, We’re safe, however hard to believe. We’re safe!