Bring Larks and Heroes (11 page)

‘Forgive me, Ewers,' he said. ‘Don't go crying.'

Ewers became even more audibly upset, while Halloran felt sick from the implications of the affair.

‘Now listen to me! Don't go crying! I'll see Sabian. I will. I promise.'

Down below, halved and lepered by light and dark, Ewers was not consoled.

‘I have to go. But I'll see Sabian this very day.'

Four afternoons a week he reported to Sabian's office, to Sabian's orderly sergeant. That much was a start.

‘Don't be upset,' he told Ewers.

He ran downhill.

‘He didn't do it, Terry.'

‘Like all the other fellers who were ever hanged,' said Byrne.

‘Maybe.'

What an immense hatred arose in Halloran when, seconds later, drums and a bugle cawed at whoever was sleeping in that two o'clock town.

‘Anything for me?' Halloran asked the orderly-sergeant through the door.

‘That's not the way to ask.'

Halloran marched in quickly.

‘Anything for me, Sergeant?'

‘No.'

‘Here's the returns from Allen's company.'

Halloran put down a paper on the table. His face had a broiled look.

‘You been running?'

‘I have. I've got sweat all over the returns. Where's Major Sabian?'

‘I don't know. He was here for a second this morning. I think he's at home.'

Home for Major Sabian was on the other side of the bay, across the Brook and past Blythes'.

‘Damn it,' said Halloran. He let his arms go limp. He had already run half a mile to make time for an interview. It was beyond him to find the time to go
across the town and call on Sabian like a brother officer. ‘Don't they do any work, these officers?'

‘Sergeants down do all the work,' said the sergeant.

‘Will he be here at all this afternoon?'

‘Not likely at all.'

Outside, Halloran felt tired and hollow. He sat down in shade, not looking first for spiders and ants. Below him some rusty saplings lived out their harsh youth without a hint of growth or expectations. They did not yield any piece of the useless hill; they grew in tribal obstinacy down to the very lip of the bay.

‘I wish I had an axe,' said Halloran aloud. He ground his teeth in hatred of the place. ‘If I had an axe!'

He would have to speak to Captain Allen about Ewers. Whether Ewers would survive handling by Allen was another question. But a corporal is able to move only through given channels; through given straits they were, rather than channels. Conscience can make outright demands on a man. But human affairs were not carried on in an outright manner.

‘What can I do?' he had asked Ewers.

‘Tell Major Sabian.'

And if you were a Major yourself, you could.

When he was cool again, he moved in numbed peace back towards the hutments. Yet the rancorous afternoon turned on him. Below the road, on the edge
of the parade-ground, some Marines were playing cricket. For some reason, Sabian was on the road and had stopped, in his boredom, to watch the game. His adjutant stood by him. Both rumbled and clapped when the batsman flogged the ball far out across the parade-ground.

Halloran was bound to stand and wait in the corner of their vision. Sabian half looked at him. Pride of place fluttered the eyelids. Yet the man was nearly fifty. Didn't he feel the worm of death at all, that he could flutter his eyes as imperially as that? At last, somebody bowled that entertaining batsman. Sabian, turning towards Halloran, growled his aloof amusement at his adjutant. Halloran saluted. Sabian came up to him.

‘Corporal Halloran, sir. Captain Allen's orderly.'

Sabian nodded.

‘Sir, that Thomas Ewers who was –'

‘I know Ewers.'

Halloran coughed. He could hear his tongue sticking to parts of his mouth as he tried for a second to work up some spit.

‘That Ewers, sir, there was something he failed to tell you in court.'

‘Oh?'

‘Yes. He's a eunuch, sir. Very much a eunuch.'

Sabian laughed.

‘How do you know?'

‘I've seen him, sir.'

‘Oh?' said Sabian piquantly to the adjutant. No one could have told how Halloran hated him; screwing up his hands in hatred of this substantial man and figure and officer.

‘He was afraid that he would be made a mock of, sir.'

‘He has made a mock of you, Corporal. Who injured Mrs Daker, if he didn't?'

‘He has explanations for that, sir. I'd be willing to take an oath, sir –'

Sabian lifted his hand above his head and held it there for some seconds, as if the gesture had come to its natural end there, as if he were hailing Caesar. Then he struck Halloran across the jaw. The forests leapt, and over the hill jumped a liquid arc of sun.

‘You waste my time, Corporal. Every ravisher from ancient times to this has blamed the ravished woman.'

‘They gain authority from Joseph and Potiphar's wife,' the adjutant muttered.

‘Exactly,' said Sabian. ‘I suppose he says that Mrs Daker injured herself.'

The cricketers below had begun to watch.

‘That she got the blood of an animal,' Halloran amended quietly. ‘Sir, couldn't you –'

The Major barely managed to hold his anger in shaking hamfists.

‘No I couldn't, Corporal. You had better go.'

Before he had gone far though, feeling damned
because he had not said all that might have been said, feeling in a panic of damnation, Sabian called him back.

‘Corporal,' he said leniently, ‘Ewers, if he is a eunuch, would not be the first eunuch to give his master a nasty shock.'

On the morning of the second day, Ewers was ceremonially hanged; but by then Halloran had begun to see that he himself had done what he could, given the circumstances. Like all men of rigid conscience, he tended to discount any tragedy if he had done all that conscience demanded to prevent it. But he could not, despite this, discount the tragedy and the pity of Ewers. It disaffected him in part, it took all the starch out of his soldierliness.

He was able to stay away from the hanging, but Terry Byrne saw it. As Byrne told it, it was the worst of hangings, a long stifling, when, in the muscular agony, the ravaged animal spills dirt and water down its legs.

10

One Sunday, Ann seemed feverish and possessed by a type of haunted gaiety. Her face looked a little sere, somehow, despite her breeziness, making one aware of the odds against fruition. They spent their afternoon on a narrow beach well within the bay. Autumn had begun. They sat on the sand, facing into an amenable sun.

There was no conversation to speak of, until Ann said unrelatedly,

‘I think I have a child.'

She did not glance at him, she looked straight ahead, mildly frowning. Halloran watched her straight, brittle neck, and the brittle joy, against all reason, sustaining her mouth and the corner of the eye that he could see.

‘How do you know, Ann love? How could you know?'

‘Don't you know how, Halloran? Are you really that unschooled?'

‘Something to do with bleeding, isn't it?' he asked softly. ‘The bleeding stops.'

‘Yes.'

‘But I don't like to think of you bleeding.'

‘It's the way of things.'

‘You weren't made for the way of things. You're a queen amongst women.'

‘Queens and all bleed. It's you who wasn't made for the way of things, Halloran darling.'

‘There are some things I get the way of very quick,' he said as gaily as she could have hoped. He took a rowdy bite of her neck and slapped her on the bottom.

‘It would be your child.'

‘Of course it would. Whose else? Terry Byrne's?'

She laughed.

‘Mr Blythe's?'

She pulled a face.

‘You don't seem to mind,' she said.

‘Of course I don't mind. He'll be the star of the south end of the world.'

‘He wouldn't be up against much,' said Ann.

Halloran put his hand on her stomach and leant down.

‘You'll
be onto some pretty fine nipples in this
household, lad,' he told the maybe-child loudly. ‘Take your father's word for it.'

He did not know with what manner of hope the child grew in the womb, but his thin girl would not have the milk for it afterwards. At the back of his throat lay tears for the bud of flesh, bud of man.

Ann hit him on the shoulder and laughed at him and proudly said that he was an evil man.

Yet Halloran's gaiety too was coming unstrung now. He retold the difficulties to himself. They could not marry before Mr Calverley without damning themselves before God. They could not omit to marry before Mr Calverley without damning themselves before the colony. Every society, however rotten, has members whom it considers the arbiters, the standard-makers of its morality. Halloran and his secret bride were unlucky enough to be the moral paragons of their community. If they fell, they became stumbling-blocks, even to the most errant feet, even to such feet as Byrne's. And the question was, how would Mrs Blythe jump, as the saying is? Would she cast Ann out of the house to live with the other women and be pestered by every woman-fancier in the garrison? Or would she lock Ann up and undertake her salvation? And the old agony recurred of how, if he married Ann publicly, the Governor would no doubt pardon her in time and send her home with him, free passage, when the garrison was relieved.

Grinning at Ann, he said privately to Herod's wife,
You
'
re a lucky old crone, suffering many things in a dream only on account of him. In a dream only.

‘We must cherish him very much,' he said, meaning the child.

‘Of course we must. Of course, I couldn't swear he was there.'

‘When would you be certain?'

‘I'd be almost certain in a week. I'd be terribly certain in two weeks.'

‘Son and heir,' said Halloran, but mourned the thing already.

‘What about the cord?' he felt justified in asking gently.

‘I don't know. You have to put your faith in something, but nothing brings what you want all the time.'

‘Yes, you're right about that.' He couldn't refrain from saying, ‘I thought it put matters beyond doubt.'

‘Nothing puts things beyond a doubt,' said Ann. ‘Perhaps I didn't wear it in the right frame of mind. If that's so, I'm sorry, Halloran.'

The sun was low and strawberry. Streaks of cloud fumed before its face; the west had gone smoky, the water like mercury. He could no longer pretend to levity.

‘Right frame of mind or otherwise, what does it matter?' he told her. ‘It must be meant. You'll start to think I'll leave you, nothing surer. You'll have to
remember I have no home except you. You'll have to remember I'd be in a desert.'

‘I will get fat and splotchy beyond bearing.'

‘Beyond whose bearing?'

‘Yours, Phelim.'

‘Ann, Ann,' he said. ‘You wouldn't be fat and splotchy ever, as far as my eyes go. Not even if you were fat and splotchy.'

They laughed together.

‘We must just be strong, Ann,' said Halloran, grieving prodigiously for the child.

As much of the situation as they could, they organized. If by Friday Ann still believed herself with child, she was to send him a creamy pebble from Mr Blythe's garden. If she knew she was without child, she would send him two. She would send these signs by the hand of the Blythes' male servant, who would deliver them to him on the garrison side of Collett's Brook, just beyond the bridge.

On Friday, the servant came and tipped one cream pebble into Phelim's cupped hands, who sighed and received the iron into his soul.

‘The girl give me two,' said the servant then, ‘but I dropped one of them.'

‘You're sure?'

‘I'm sure. Anyway, pebbles is cheap.'

Valley, bridge, departing servant, all spun, Halloran being a mite in a twirled saucer. And though he had
become drunk with release, he felt deprived of the child for whom, all the week, he had been practising his valour.

11

Easter rain came down like flint-arrows on the Tuesday of Holy Week, and people, unaccustomed to its vehemence because of the dry weather, stood under eaves and grimaced at it. Suddenly, the clay- and saw-pits gurgled and filled with a stew. Some alien earth was in the stew, but it was almost possible to believe, standing above these places with idle tools in your hands, that each pit was coloured the peculiar colour of the pain of the men who had filled it summer-full of blisters, heartburn, gut-cramp, god-hate. Men blinded at the shipyards and brickfields by tropic gobs of water on their lashes, groped for gear, blinking the improbable colours of the prism out of their eyeballs, until once more they could see an adze for an adze, which was the only safe way of seeing anything.

Rev. Mr Calverley, lucky under hardwood shingles
this thatch-reaving weather, went to his desk and wrote down, ‘The rain has come, and bounty has lit up again the weary land'. It was a suitable Easter theme. But towards dinner, he remembered the heartless way long rain dealt with churchyards and went out with a lantern to see if his son's grave had sunk in the outline of a coffin, threatening the resurrection.

In Halloran's hut, the rain spouted through many weaknesses in the roof. Halloran himself pulled up the flooring of cabbage tree mats and planking and dug a ditch with his bayonet, incorporating many puddles into one, guiding the one out of doors.

He would have liked to repeat his achievement for Ann. It was close to six o'clock. Soon she would be alone in the equinoctial gloom of her kitchen, hauling her mattress here and there, seeking a warm place away from the wet, dabbing at her cold with an apron corner. About nine, she would try to brew miserable tea from the Blythes' used leaves.

He was duty-corporal in the cook-house that night; hard work. Every man's plate of meat was weighed, and
he
had to supervise the weighing. He went out of doors barefoot, carrying his shoes in his hand, to attend to this duty. It was blue dark. Sheathed in the rain, he had a rare privacy. Here was good thinking weather, yet he didn't exactly think. First he stood slack-shouldered in the drench, making pledges to Ann and himself. Times when he felt brash enough to spit in the eye of
the weather and make pledges to his future were rare, but tonight was such a time. He had confidence, and the confidence came from his having written a verse about the ants. It was such a savoury thing to be a poet. It side-stepped mortality so deftly that you could hug yourself.

The ants of whom his poem was made had known about the rain some days before it had begun. They had come hustling indoors, and Halloran saw them now as having carried in the sunlight on their backs to store it in the wall cavities and under the flooring for the day when it would be, once more, the cosmic fashion. Which seemed at present to be going to be a long time.

He made patterns in the mud by dabbing at the track with one foot or the other. He scarcely cared if he was seen, because a man could be doing any extravagant thing to save himself from whatever of malice there was in the blinding wet. Each time he laid his foot down in the mud, he uttered a foot of the verse. The joy of words and rain, the joy of capering legs. He took the blanket off his head and whirled it once. But it was a bit sodden for abandonment.

‘My ant of the red earth,' he said and sang,

‘My harvester small,

Bears sheafs of the sunlight

To his barn in my wall.

‘From his pit beneath tap-roots,

Once drawn its claws,

He carries the soft corpse

Of summer indoors.

‘My little, black friar,

A speck of my bread

Will not be begrudged you,

While summer is dead.

‘A steak from the lizard

Who died by my door,

Is his by just stipend,

Who scours my floor.'

Halloran, who had none the less crushed with his canvas shoe a flock of ants feeding in blind ellipse round a lizard's tail.

‘Very fine, but what about Ewers?' asked someone just behind him.

There, improbably, was Hearn, very close, on the edge of the embankment. He had a blanket on his shoulders, but his big grey face got a drenching. The copious briars of grey hair seemed just as briary despite the rain.

‘Ewers? Don't talk to me about Ewers, Mr Hearn. Ewers was unjustly destroyed, I give you that. But not by me.'

He thought how uncivilized it was to allow a man to dance through four quatrains believing himself alone, and then to spring flummoxing questions on him.

‘By the system you serve,' said Hearn.

No
How are you
,
isn't it wet?
about Hearn's conversation. Headfirst into questions of eternity, questions of guilt!

‘Not by any system I serve,' said Halloran. ‘It was the Dakers again.'

‘The system is all the Dakers from here to Ulster.'

Halloran threw one of his shoes five yards. Petulance.

‘What are you at? What are you after?
I
know my conscience. Damn you!'

His shoe had capsized in a puddle.

‘Christ!' he said flicking it up. ‘There you are, Mr Hearn. You have me taking the Holy Name.'

‘That stings your conscience,' observed Hearn, mocking in his peculiarly level way of speech.

‘Yes it does, if you want to know. How do you come to be here, instead of the Crescent?'

‘I've come to help Long, His Excellency's secretary. His Excellency believes that even if the last storeship was taken by enemies of the King – whoever they might be – another one should be with us inside four months. Long and myself are doing estimates for the office-hacks in the Admiralty and at the Home Secretary's.'

‘I suppose this is not called serving the system,' Halloran muttered.

‘Only on paper. Only by shuffling numbers.'

‘If you didn't shuffle the numbers, someone else would have to. They're dirty Hanover numbers, Mr Hearn. You'll catch the pox of damnation from them quick as I will from this old coat. Did you know, by the way, that you're not supposed to be on this hill?'

Hearn tried to shake the water out of his locks.

‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘I was never at this place long enough to learn the out-of-bounds for
my
class. Working at Government House, I have a freedom of movement which mightn't always be for the best.'

There was nothing to say to that.

Hearn stroked down his bard's locks.

‘What would you have done, Corporal, if you'd had others with you and found me here? Would you have found that your chances of riding the tempest would be bettered if you had me flogged? Then you would have had me flogged, and you'd say to yourself . . .'

Halloran cast up his blanket-shrouded arms.

‘I'd say the angel Gabriel could be flogged for being on this hill, unless he's a member of the garrison. Which I've never seen any sign of. I wouldn't go off my singing if he
was
flogged, because he's damned well not supposed to be here at all. I don't have to
forswear life and shoot the Governor because you come creeping through the rain like a Redemptorist, booming out omens. I told Ewers when I took him to the Dakers.
You
'
ll get a big hearing and little mercy from Mrs Daker
.
I couldn't do any more.'

It grated to see Hearn's head remaining upright and uncovered, heedless of the rain.

‘Now, go home!' cried Halloran, like a whooping farmer to a cow in the barley. ‘Go on! Go home! You're a troublemaker and seditious as hell. I've got nothing to say to you.'

There were ten seconds. Nothing happened, but the peacemaking rain soothed their shoulders.

‘I'm disappointed, Corporal.'

‘Thank God for that much. The surest way to be disappointed is to live long enough. Besides, I wasn't put here to satisfy you, even if you were Wicklow's Alnegar.'

Though Hearn shook his head, he did not seem any more seriously discomfited by Halloran's blindness than he did by the deluge.

‘Let me tell you, Halloran, you're worried by this conundrum about the God of your oath, the God of the Army and Navy that is, and the true God. Isn't that so?'

‘It's no conundrum. Go home!'

Hearn's black bulk remained only just visible, but impassive. The night had become deeper, and the
downpour more vigorous. One could hear the trees being thrashed.

‘Go
home!
Don't you obey anyone?'

‘Yes, yes, Halloran. I'll obey you. You think you're safe if I obey you. But I doubt it, since you're honest. But more than honest, you're conscience-bound. You are, here in the dark, in the rain, more afraid of your conscience, what it might ask, than you are of black fever and shipwreck and death from thirst. You're afraid of this system you guard with your strong young arm. You are not afraid of its noose and knout, but of how it stands to your conscience.'

‘Damn conscience!' said Halloran. ‘And damn this strong young arm you speak of.'

‘I'll leave you on your military hill then. I hope the God of the King's Marines looks after you. But look out for the God of the Spanish guards, who's a terror for dropping tree trunks on loyal Irish boys. Not to mention the God of the French dragoons. His weakness is landslides.'

‘You're a blasphemer,' Halloran called, beginning to shake with reverence.

‘No,' Hearn asserted, ‘God is untouched.'

Yet he himself was not untouched. He turned his back on Halloran.

‘Blasphemer?' he asked himself. ‘No!'

He went away. It was such a night as could dissolve any large man with dramatic swiftness.