Bring Larks and Heroes (3 page)

From the Blythes' garden, doves were mumbling warnings to him. He wondered whether the woman was merely plagued with conscience on Ann's behalf. It was a deadly thing to be conscience-stricken for the sake of others. You needed a leg ulcer for respite. Or was she malicious? He would have to take Ann's advice and be assiduously humble.

‘I promise you . . .' he began.

‘Your promises won't buy anything in this establishment,' she told him, tipping her right shoulder with the fingers of her right hand. ‘The pledges of our men of affairs have given us the appearance of a godly nation,
Halloran. The breaking of their pledges has given us an Empire.' She became unexpectedly bemused, as if, at the back of her mind, she were ruffling through some of the unredeemed pledges she herself had in hand. ‘I cannot accept promises.'

‘Mrs Blythe, what else can I do?'

Deference came effortlessly to him, now that he was honestly bewildered.

‘I am aware you are seeking your brand of salvation. I will accept your oath. On my Bible here.'

She had sovereignty over Ann. All the sovereignty under heaven was in the wrong hands, and as soon as the wrong hands had it, they had you taking oaths.

‘Is an oath needed, Madam?'

‘Why wouldn't it be, Halloran?'

‘I believe my intentions are good, Mrs Blythe.'

‘You may believe it. I don't. Your intentions are not good enough for me.'

Down came her fist on the griffin's head in which the chair-arm ended. Poor damned griffin, with its tongue out from being pummelled by such a scourge of a woman. At the same time, her handkerchief fell from her wrist. She allowed Halloran to round the hassock and recapture it for her. It was limp with the heat of the day, and of the day before that too, and rather yellow. He thought, Ann washes her stinking leg rags.

‘Thank you, Halloran.'

‘I don't think I can take that oath, Mrs Blythe.'

‘Listen to me!' She paused to give him time to do so. ‘I can arrange your affairs from this room. If I wanted to, I could pester Captain Allen until he gave way. I could have you sent to the Crescent.'

Which was twenty miles up the river. He scratched the side of his neck with crooked, nonplussed fingers.

‘How do you dare to argue?' The griffin took another clout. Mrs Blythe held her chin high and shaky; there was some sort of palsy dragging at her far cheek. ‘For Ann's sake, I am willing to let you see her once every week. On Sundays, since there isn't any other day; from three o'clock, since there isn't any other time; and on your own, since there is no one to supervise. But I want her virtue more strictly guaranteed than it is. I want you to call God's justice on your head, in the event that you wrong her. There! You have had three times the explanation anyone in your position deserves. I won't have my servant fat with your bastard. Do you understand that? Swear or get out! That's how simple it is.'

Pain, once more. It took her by the corners of the mouth and the corners of the eyes. Oh, it admired her justice and her buttock-rolling straight-talk.

‘Then I'll swear the oath for you.' He was pleased to find that sullenness helped him to sound a bumpkin, knowing that what Mrs Blythe wanted for her Ann
was an honest bumpkin. ‘But I promise as well. And the promise will be just as sacred to me as the oath.'

‘A promise cannot be as sacred as an oath, Halloran.'

She lifted the Bible from the table with her left shaky hand. She fluttered it open. It stood on her palm like a bird, its wings spotted with black truth.

‘Kneel down!' she commanded.

This afternoon, Halloran is superior to the heat. He isn't dwelling, at the moment, on Ann's defencelessness. He's actually singing, ‘Never have I seen a maid oh half as fair as that Spanish lay-dee'. To such an extent is he enjoying the rare wine of self-confidence, that he has even omitted to bring in his shirt today Dean Hannon of Wexford's little book,
De Vera Amoris Disciplina
,
a small treatise giving counsels on divine and human love. Written in Latin, printed in Brussels, marked and wise-smelling now from having travelled with dispossessed Halloran through such a range of climates, it, and not his oath to Mrs Blythe, gives him a high authority to see Ann.

He has not told Ann that he's under Mrs Blythe's oath of decency. Some days after the oath-taking, he recalled in a rush the details of a passage towards the back of Dean Hannon's book. With his slow Latin, it took him hours to find the page. When he had found it and read it, it rang in his mind like a mandate.

‘The spouses are the true ministers of the marriage sacrament,' it said. ‘Does not the Church demonstrate this by one of her laws regulating the sacrament? This is the law which states that two people, moved by mutual affection to contemplate the holy state, yet so placed that they will not, with reasonable certainty, find within a month a priest before whom to exchange their vows, that such people are permitted to administer the sacrament to each other by giving the normal marriage pledges. They are then as truly married as if they had spoken their promises before the Holy Father himself in the Basilica of St Peter.'

‘We are castaways,' Halloran told Ann. ‘The law is made for us.
They are then as truly married . . .
'

There was joy in seeing an older, craftier theology triumphing over Mrs Blythe's blunt and callow one. Yet this was not the motive behind Halloran's secret marriage. To penetrate his reasons, Ann's reasons, it has to be explained that in this region were woods and hills and water, yet that they were somehow far too open to a bland, immense and oriental sky. Those who lived here felt that they lived in a desert. In civilized parts, people formed unions for subtle reasons; but in a desert, they united to ward off oblivion. The secret marriage of Ann Rush and Halloran was an attempt at
warding off oblivion.
It was a pledge by each other to each other's survival. It was an attempt to earn pity or leniency from the providence, sultan-wise, sultan-cool,
who watched them from the far side of the nightly lattice of stars.

Despite that it is Dean Hannon, Halloran's teacher in the Wexford days, who states the rule on priestless lovers; despite the canon lawyers of the God-binding Curia, who proposed the rule, and the Supreme Pontiff, who ratified it, it is not possible, except on the most sanguine days, for Halloran to believe beyond doubt that he is a husband and has a bride. He is sanguine today. Corporal Halloran, poet and husband; and nobody knows. His poetry is safe in the back pages of Captain Allen's orderly book. His married state is safe in the back pages of Dean Hannon.

2

His elation on what, for the sake of starting the story, we have called
today
and
this afternoon
is buried now beneath a cairn of years. So his
today
is not ours; his
today
is
that day
to us, and we are, after all, the people for whom the story is being told. Keeping sight of him, let us nevertheless say that
that day
,
he arrived elated amongst the blighted turnips at the backdoor. He had his hand up on the trellis which Mr Blythe's nascent vines had no chance of covering for many a summer.

‘It's General Caesar,' he called in a gusty basso, ‘come for his Mistress Cleo.'

Ann Rush, the Mistress Cleo, snorted. She was scouring a pot in which the midday beef had been boiled. The pumice grated, and she comforted this or that on-edge tooth with the tip of her tongue.

‘Is it time?' she asked slackly.

‘It certainly is time. It's just on three.'

He whistled low through his teeth, jigged like a clown or a young animal. He hissed, ‘Let your roaring old lover in!'

‘If you want me altogether damned . . .' she said.

‘Oh, I see, altogether damned?'

What he saw was that she had felt half-damned about their marriage all morning, and that complete damnation would be to lose her place in the Blythes' home and to enter the beggared limbo of women felons, whose little huts grazed on the east bank of Collett's Brook.

‘You stay there,' he said gently. ‘I'll keep this side of the wall warm for you. That's my especial destiny.'

‘Dear God,' Ann called out, ‘he's pitying himself now!'

Halloran rolled his eyes. Ann, frightened, would never tell you that she was frightened. She would make ferocious remarks, such as, ‘Dear God, he's pitying himself now!' She was still afraid of what he had told her last week about his Wexford studies, and of how they had left him rather in pieces as a lover. In this way. Dean Hannon used to ask, ‘What is love?' He could actually write up all the answers in chalk on the wall and stand back unabashed, beaming at all the chaste Latin tags, the names of all the human faculties involved, the geography of the human spirit. Love is a fusing of the mind and will to God, said the Dean, all
other loves are good only in so far as they flow from this love. From this source came the love of Jonathan and David, the love of Queen Blanche for her son, King Louis. Of course, there is some sort of dull but steady affection between spouses, aimed at the dull and steady begetting of children. And then, you descend to what is love only in a debased sense of the word, love by analogy only, love execrable in a tipsy ditch with a dirty, racy vagrant woman.

All this, Halloran had tried to explain to Ann the week before. He had said that his aim, whenever he lay with her, was to keep matters as close to God and as far away from the vagrant woman as he could. When Ann showed herself as racy as any vagrant woman, he would be delighted but baffled. His mind would intervene as an arbiter and try to reorganize his motives according to the rules as laid down by Dean Hannon. And his ardour would die, and he would see doubt all over Ann's face.

Last week, she had said plaintively at the end of the afternoon, ‘Don't turn into the scholar on me at this stage, Halloran'. She meant, as well, ‘Now that you've despoiled me'. He had then soothed her for all he was worth; and, apart from the monstrous aspect of their not seeing each other for another week, she was happy when he left.

Today, he intended to show some wisdom. The trap would be to rant about how he didn't pity himself, but pitied her seven days a week. As if she really wanted
to argue about pity! He did not fall into the trap. He did not even glance around the doorway, but stood listening zealously to the clatter of the big pot, and all but seeing her brown tall woman's arms battling it. Thinking of her arms, he came close to the undressed cedar walls, and put his mouth to one of the cracks which they had left in drying.

‘My bride in Christ,' he murmured when the pot took a rest. ‘My bride in Christ.'

He did indeed suffer a rush of tenderness for her, Ann, overhung by the large brass and copper cruelties of her kitchen.

‘I'm dizzy from waiting to see you,' he felt justified in saying.

‘I hope so,' she muttered.

She was squinting into the boiler. You could tell that from her voice. And very soon, the big pot clanged with a certain finality, conveying that it had had all the cleaning she meant it to take.

Halloran nuzzled his head against the clammy cedar. The red clay mortar, which tried to fill the wall cracks in this hard climate, rouged his forehead.

‘My bride, my bride, my bride. Moriarty, being a real lad, is up and about for you.'

This was the fanciful name he had for the flesh; and he chuckled now, as if Moriarty and all his kin were well-worn friends of his and not the dark strangers they were. Ann was usually diverted by Halloran's fables about this
buffoon within his own walls; but she said nothing today. He heard the little rasps of cloth as she rubbed her hands dry, and scrapings of her skirt against furniture. She poured out some water from a kettle. Some spilt, and the querulous old hearth she served snorted savagely back at her.

‘Do you think I'm coarse?' asked Halloran, to bring her out.

‘Not very much,' she said negligently.

She continued to give three-quarters of her attention to placing utensils and pouring water.

‘Forget what I said last week about God and the woman in the ditch!' he persisted. ‘It means nothing. It's a minor confusion, that's all, and it's no news to anyone. The damned scholars have been talking about it for thousands of years. They call it the battle between sacred and fleshly love – and the beggars are on to a truth for once. But it doesn't matter. It's commonplace. You're rare, and I'm not so big a fool as not to know it.'

‘I have to go and see Mrs Blythe,' Ann told him, coldly ducking the flight of his metaphysics or theology or whatever else it was.

‘Hey,' he called at top whisper, ‘you do believe, don't you? That you're my bride? Dean Hannon wouldn't be wrong. He had a sharp mind. Too sharp.' He paused, and then, in an attempt to force her into making positive conversation, he talked on. It was a
mistake. ‘As for me, it isn't likely a man would turn into some kind of church-lawyer to get his desire. Not in a town like this, where you can have nearly anyone for a shirt or a shred of tobacco.'

That
'
s an apish thing to say
,
he was telling himself before he'd got as far as
shred of tobacco.
He could not believe that he'd said anything so apparently slighting to Ann. However, the words stood, far too barefaced for him to try to tone them down. All he could do was to cock his ear and hope that she was as preoccupied with the kitchen as she pretended to be.

No chance.

She brought her anger close to the wall beyond which Halloran waited.

‘You could never have
me
for a draper's full of shirts.'

‘I didn't mean you, Ann.'

‘What do you want, Halloran? An angel or a whore? Which? You talk about what you learned in Wexford. In what town do they teach men wisdom?'

‘I know, I know. I should go there. I'm sorry, Ann. You're all things to me. In my confusion' (he punched his forehead) ‘I can say that. You're all things.'

But the dead kitchen creaked. The hearth grunted. She had left him alone in his windiness.

He now had an image of himself as he must seem, flustered amongst the Blythes' decaying vegetables, butting the wall, expounding, jabbing at himself. On the slope behind him stood a leering, entirely disrep
utable hut. It belonged to the male felon who did the wood-hewing and water-carrying for the house. It stood like a wrecked collier, and the rocks holding on its bark roof seemed the result of a collision rather than of design. In its bay of scabrous timber, it was altogether a poor comment on Halloran's vehemence.

Now, because he was certain of the old lag's ironic presence behind him, he made a late attempt at dissembling. With studied mannishness, he stared through the slaty trees at the very still indigo water. He stared with the patronizing eyes one kept for porpoises or native canoes. Breath on a mirror, a land-breeze stippled the face of the bay, but preluded nothing. In the thin forest behind him, one insect voice burred the edges of afternoon and, without turning to the hillside, Halloran could see, could hear in the noise, the dearth and drought and straggled bark.

As people will when they're embarrassed, he found himself speaking aloud, though covertly. He was thinking,
And what if Ann doesn
'
t come back out to me this afternoon?
‘We had hoped for a more generous spring,' he found himself saying. He spoke in a low throatiness in which he had first heard the ironic sentence spoken by His Excellency on the parade-ground ten weeks before.

‘We had hoped for a more generous spring.'

But a disappointing spring had given way to the malign summer in which Halloran, aware of his sweat,
no longer sanguine, waited now. December had come rampaging amongst the carnations along Government Road, had trampled on the last blooming of expatriate stocks. It had crushed the title
Advent
,
which the two parsons tried to lay upon its back, until every hint of juice and fruitfulness had been ground out. In dutiful vegetable gardens, the leaves of carrots and turnips had tettered and split, shot full of holes by antipodean summer. The grain had already rusted hard beside the little creek called Collett's Brook; and there would be no harvest at Government Farm, where muddied stooks of young corn stood like the camp wreckage of a beaten army.

At the time of his parade-ground speech, the Governor had devoted fifteen minutes to the sentiment that, although nothing but the worm of death seemed to flourish in this obdurate land, it was the duty of those who served the King not to accept things by their seeming, but to out-stubborn the wayward earth. Yet the officers, their regimentals fibrous from three summers' sweat, had squinted at the sky with flat hatred. There was very little assent in their hearts.

And Halloran felt this hatred too, and he was somewhat short of assent. Yet he knew that this was a summer of unequalled promise. He had begun it with such a welter of emotion that, after the torpor of barrack life at Chatham and the dumb pain of shipboard and colonial service, he felt reborn. This was partly because he had no doubt that he was living in a legend, because
he underwent all the fervours set down in legends and in poetry. It was as if he actually felt, above himself and Ann, the mercy of a story-teller. However, a French sage asked once, ‘How many men would never have loved, if they had never heard of love?' Halloran began to suspect that he was basking in the emotions of other men, and not only that, the emotions of other men as tempered by art and decency, metre and rhyme. By this time, Ann had become the substance of his life.

‘Mrs Blythe says you're to take good care of me and remember your obligations.'

She had come into the garden without his hearing. She stood business-like against the skeletal tracery of her master's sick vines. Her dress underlined her thinness; it was abnormally high-waisted and draped all but the toes of Mrs Blythe's cast-off shoes. The dirty green fabric was so very thick that it seemed to be supported by its own hem. It wrapped her hunger round plentifully, to give her the look of one of those Christ-child statues that are enveloped in vast copes and are pink and lost in their kingship. Already, Ann had her hat on, one of those small top-hats which ladies wear to riding; and once more, Mrs Blythe, who had come thirteen thousand miles to stay indoors, had given it to her.

She frowned. But the dull petulance of the kitchen had drained out of her already. Halloran saw this, with gratitude. The next instant, the oblique sun fetched him a clout on the side of the neck. His mouth flew open for
a second or two in the terror of fainting. But he didn't fall down. In the freezing sweat of sunstroke, he saw how the dark-green of her dress had imposed itself on her. He felt his soul sliced neatly down the middle by a barbarous desire to be poured out like milk, to flow around her ankles and soften that hard hem of rubbish. Soon, though, he began breathing evenly again.

He came two steps closer to her and laughed. All counterfeit roguishness, he asked, ‘Did you tell Mrs Blythe that I'd already taken care of you a few times?'

‘No,' she mouthed, and her head went down. Halloran shrugged, softly, you could say. He caressed her elbow. In the shade of the Blythes, he could do no more; but his fingers staggered daft with pity on her arm.

‘Halloran,' she said, ‘I don't think there's ever been two such hopeless people. You with your confusion and me with mine.'

‘Never have I seen a maid,' Halloran recited to soothe her, ‘oh half so fair as that Spanish lay-dee. I've been waiting all the week to see your Spanish skin again. Without a lie.'

‘Can't we go now?' she asked, without looking up. ‘I can't be myself here.'

He collected Captain Allen's miraculous rifle with which he was often sent hunting and hitched it over his shoulder.

‘My bride,' he said. ‘Come on, then.'

They did not take to the clay road which ribboned up a bunch of officials' homes on the south point. Instead, he led Ann by the elbow up the hill behind the Blythe home, away from the clutter of stale brick cottages. They sidled past the crazy hut. Beyond it, they were aware of being in a sack-cloth forest, in a forest that mad, prophetic, excessive, had heaped dust on its own head.

In no time, the gangling trees had them cut off from the town. Halloran was impressed by the sly antiquity of the place. Glossy shrubs, smelling like a cemetery a week after All Souls, took the spotted light on their tongue and tipped it brassy in his tracks. Rocks smelt of dry age. Here all things went on easily, mercilessly germinating, convinced of their inevitable survival. For some distance, he was more aware of hostility than he was of Ann. It seemed that in these poor scrubby woods, all his judgements on what a forest should look like were being scarcely tolerated by the whole pantheon of the gods of this, the world's wrong end.