Without more than the swiftest of glances round the inside of the high granite-walled fort, Keig marched across to the cottage. He tried the door. It did not budge.
Keig turned to us.
‘Locked herself in,’ he said. ‘All the better.’
The dull glinting head of his axe rose once in the air and swiftly came down. The cottage door shot back as if it had been charged at.
We found ourselves in the combined living room and kitchen. I remember little of it now. There was a table, covered with a check oilcloth, I think. And a range with a glowing fire in it and a couple of comfortable armchairs on either side. And a dresser. There was certainly a dresser against one wall, stacked with the couple’s small store of crockery. And the whole room gave the effect of a snug little nest altogether.
But the centre of our attention from the moment we burst in was the girl. As the door gave we had caught a glimpse of her running desperately into the furthest corner of the room, and there she cowered like a child suddenly confronted by some threat beyond its understanding. It was not at all a pleasant sight.
But it must have been a welcome one to Keig all the same because of the way everything depended on the girl being well and truly frightened. Unless she could be made to tell us quickly where the key of the armoury was kept the Keepers outside might be back on us and we would be caught in the watch-point like rats in a trap with nothing to fight back with but these empty guns of ours.
Keig marched straight over to the cowering girl, put out a hand and jerked her round. Her face when we saw it properly was such a picture of abject terror, mouth hanging open, cheeks blotchy, eyes unseeing, that I was convinced that she was going to be incapable even of speech.
‘Now then,’ Keig said, ‘we’ve come here to get the guns from that little hut. It’s locked, we know. And we want the key. Where is it?’
The girl answered with a single horror-struck whispered ‘No.’
But that was excellent. For one thing it showed she had at least understood what was being said to her but, better, it meant she was admitting there was a key to be found somewhere inside the granite-walled watch-point. This had been one of our fears, that there might be only one key to the little armoury and that the Overseer himself might always carry it on his person. Keig, in making the plan, had reckoned there was bound to be a spare key, and now it looked as if there was one. But where was it?
Keig glared into the girl’s blotchy pink-and-white face.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘I’m going to give you till I count five to tell us where that key is. Understand?’
A precariously gathered resolution could actually be seen forming on the girl’s features. She knew she must not tell. And it was plain she knew too that she would.
‘Crowe,’ barked Keig. ‘If she hasn’t spoken up by the count of five you’re to shoot. Ready?’
‘Yes, sir,’ tubby little Francis Crowe answered, contriving to sound authentically grim.
He planted himself in front of the girl, his empty gun held in the crook of his arm pointing implacably towards her. Keig stepped back.
And, whether it was that this movement allowed more light to fall on the girl, or whether she herself moved a little as Keig withdrew I do not know, but at that instant it was suddenly obvious that the belly at which Francis Crowe was pointing his steadily held gun was rounded out in an early stage of pregnancy. It was obvious to me. It was obvious to Francis Crowe, I saw, because his gun abruptly was no longer held so steadily. And it was obvious to Keig.
There was a long silence. We faced the girl. The girl, taut in expectation of the coming ordeal, stared back at us. And time went by, time that would sooner or later bring back the armed Keepers to the watch-point as inevitably as the hands move on a clock.
But we had to have that key.
Then Keig spoke.
‘Crowe, aim for the legs.’
The muzzle of the gun dropped till it was pointing at the girl’s bare white rather flabby-looking calves.
‘All right,’ Keig growled to her. ‘Now where is that key?’
She shook her head a little, as if she could not trust herself to say anything without telling us what we wanted to know.
‘Then I’ll give you till five, or it’s your legs full of shot,’ Keig said. ‘You’re a Keeper’s wife, you’ll know how much that’d hurt.’
The concretely presented threat brought a sobbing whimper from the girl.
‘One,’ Keig counted.
I gave her till ‘Three’ at the outside. ‘Two’ was more likely, I thought.
Keig waited a little. Then he counted again.
‘Two.’
Would she? Her lips moved a little. But she managed to bite at the lower one and hold it. You could see two milk-white teeth just catching the light.
‘Three.’
She moved her shoulders against the hard granite wall behind her as if she was trying to work her way back into it. Keig again left a long pause. It seemed to make the time drag out interminably even to me. I could almost hear the Keepers outside thundering back to the watch-point.
‘Four.’
Keig’s voice sounded like a pistol shot in the little cottage.
This will be it, I thought in a flash.
But it was not. Far from it. It seemed to galvanize the girl into sudden resistance.
‘No,’ she shouted. ‘No, no, no. I won’t tell. I won’t. I don’t care what you do to me. I won’t tell. Never.’
The sweat sprang up on my forehead.
My God, I thought, what shall we do? What can we do? The gamble hasn’t come off. When all the odds were stacked in our favour, when this creature looked so timid, so easily intimidated . . . It just hasn’t come off.
I had not the least idea how we were going to get out of the situation we had placed ourselves in. Keig would have to count his ‘Five.’ The bluff with our empty guns would be pitifully exposed for what it was. And that would be that.
I glanced at Keig. He was contriving to hold his face as grim as ever. He drew a little breath in.
‘Five.’
4
‘Five.’ The word had been said. What now?
We were spared from finding out. A moment after Keig had barked that single syllable the girl spoke. She blurted out the one word ‘Teapot.’
‘What teapot?’ Keig snapped.
‘There,’ the girl said desperately. ‘There.’
And she pointed to the top shelf of the dresser where there was a lidless coloured teapot, a rime of dust along its shoulders.
Keig marched across, lifted it down and reversed it swiftly over his open palm. A heavy iron key fell out.
‘Crowe,’ he said, ‘take that washing-line from the hook there and tie her up. When you’ve both finished, come out to me.’
Dextrously as if he was back putting an apron round some customer in his barber’s chair, Francis Crowe tied up the now wildly weeping girl. I stood by acting out the remains of our charade with my empty gun, though I doubt if the girl would have done anything to stop us now even if we had had no arms at all. Then I hurried out and across to the armoury. Its narrow metal door was already gaping wide and as I came up Keig emerged. In one hand he was clutching a large box of cartridges and two shotguns, in the other he had his axe.
Now we were fully armed.
We found, in fact, even more than the extra shotguns and plentiful cartridges we had hoped to get from the little armoury. There were also no fewer than six revolvers, with plenty of ammunition, and a single rifle. So that, back by ten that morning in our well-hidden glen, I found myself confronting the pleasant dilemma of trying to decide which of our now overstocked supply of weapons best suited my own Particular temperament.
Keig however seemed more interested in the weapon he had had all along. Having satisfied himself we were all sensibly equipped, he marched off alone to the far end of the glen, tossed the long-handled axe once or twice in his upturned hands as if reminding himself of its
exact feel and weight and then began again another of those virtuoso displays like the one he had treated me to in the moonlight in the little cove where he, I and Margaret had landed after escaping from the Kernel.
The axe was sent flying high in the air, came awkwardly down flicking its handle to this side and that, was caught at its exact point of balance and sent sweetly and easily flying up again. And as the feat was repeated and repeated, wherever its sharp heavy head was when it descended, Keig’s quick-darting hand avoided it completely and seized fair and square on the time-polished haft. Up and up, twirling and twirling, time and again the old axe went till eventually whatever bursting feeling of triumph this display answered to in Keig’s breast was stilled. And then he caught the axe one last time, not at the balance point but at the end of its shaft, swung it to his side and came walking over towards us with a sombre brooding look on his face that defied every single one of us to make the least comment.
But to myself I could not help wondering from what deep-harboured thoughts these outbreaks of his took their origin. And I had, too, to admit that in this Particular instance a triumph of some sort seemed justified. Not much more than a week earlier the fifteen of us had been swept up on as inhospitable a point as could be found on the whole Oceanan shore reduced to only the clothes we stood in. And now we were each of us armed and even had weapons to spare. We had come a long way in a short time.
Just how far we had come was demonstrated rapidly enough. Without fail every day after our raid on the watch-point at least one group of us would set out to waylay a Keeper or a pair of Keepers, never more, at some deserted point in the mountains or foothills within ten or twelve miles of our hidden retreat.
It turned out to be easy enough work. A cautious walk down the mountains and into the area of the rounded clumpy foothills with guns checked and ready for use; the quiet drop into hiding as soon as we saw anyone approaching or at work in the fields; watching in an almost leisurely way till we had seen all that was to be seen about them; then the approach, with one of us going forward while the others waited.
Perhaps our target would be a lonely tenant farmer busy over spring ploughing with a pair of heavy horses, necks down in front of him. First, one would pass the time of day with him, watching all the while as his curiosity grew about a stranger appearing from nowhere. Then one would take the plunge—Keig set me the example, pointing out it was up to us to show trust first—and announce boldly that one had only just come back to Oceana ‘after some years’. This gambit always seemed to produce a reaction, however guarded. Sometimes it would be a slowly expanding smile, sometimes a glint of suspicion quickly checked.
Then, with the smilers, one would begin to ask questions about life ‘nowadays’, quickly coming round to the subject of the Keepers and as often as not landing within a few minutes some sizeable gobbet of information, such as the route a patrolling Keeper on his inevitable motor-cycle always took on such-and-such a day. With the suspicious ones, the routine—and it soon, to my surprise, did become a mere routine—was to give one’s hidden companions some pre-arranged signal, like pulling out a handkerchief, and then after a few minutes saying goodbye and appearing to make off. Almost always the doubtful prospect would be off in his turn within a minute, heading as fast as his legs would carry him for the nearest farmhouse that boasted a telephone, the notion of a reward for ‘information leading to the apprehension of an armed outlaw’ almost shining in his face, only to be wiped off abruptly when the others in the party suddenly confronted him, weapons at the ready. Back he would slink to his patiently waiting horses, and off we would go to try our luck with someone else two or three miles away.
It was astonishing how it worked time and time again. And the subsequent ambush of a Keeper on a motor-cycle—the shot at the front tyre, the rush from roadside cover to grab the gun, the quick getaway while the upturned machine still spat and racketed in the balmy spring air—this too became a regular occurrence, almost a dull one.
And it was extraordinary to me, though not to Keig who had worked out it would happen and simply expected it, that every time we ambushed a Keeper, or, as we soon came to do, held up a mail van or raided a Letter Office for the money in it, next day three or four young men would come, in couples or singly, up into the mountains to offer themselves to us as recruits.
They came, of course, with mixed motives. Most of them naturally were fired to some extent, greater or lesser, with the same force that had driven Keig to bring us with him to the island: the conviction that Mylchraine had to be deposed. But some were in fact no more than young hotheads scenting a lark. To all Keig offered the same medicinally harsh treatment.
Hardy mountain people as they were, they needed little of the physical toughening up we exiles had submitted to in the Dublin Mountains. But they did have to learn the discipline necessary for the new life they had embarked on. And this they were ruthlessly taught. Practice took place by the hour in lying patiently concealed in ambush, in deducing useful information from small perseveringly gathered clues and in the careful use of what arms we had. And even more important was the drumming in of the need to look after these weapons.
‘A gun with rust on it is more likely to kill you than to kill a Keeper,’ Keig would bark time and again.
And if anyone were found to have let his gun get even the smallest rust patch—as with Oceana’s customary successions of softly rain-swamped ‘cloaky days’ all too easily happened—that man was deprived of his weapon on the spot and had to earn another in its place.
So our recruits lived a very different life from what most of them had expected, what with training and weapon care and long sessions spent learning about the more distant Parts of the island with an eye to the future and, above all, Keig’s frequent addresses on the whole object of our activities.
I call them ‘addresses’ but that does not at all convey their nature. They were far from the harangues in noble but imprecise language with which many commanders have favoured the men under them. Keig’s speeches took place at no set times. He would simply see a bunch of the newcomers, go up to them and start firing terse questions without preliminary. And when, as was often the case, the answers he got showed his audience as lacking his own undistorted appreciation of what our quarrel with Mylchraine was about, Keig simply told them, in a few short, jabbed, occasionally word-for-word repeated sentences.
If oratory is the inspiring of specific emotions in the breasts of one’s hearers, then Keig became in these few weeks an orator of considerable power. And he was to continue this progress throughout the long struggle that lay ahead. It was all a far cry from his first speech, on exactly the same subject, that had been so laughed at by the Dublin exiles at the meeting arranged to finance the sickly Voice of Oceana.
But in the first weeks of our time in the island it very quickly began to look as if the struggle would last at most a matter of months. In the April and May of that year almost the whole northern part of Oceana seemed more than ready to throw off Mylchraine’s yoke the moment someone had shown that the tyrant could be fought.
Within a month of our landing we found we were able to abandon the hidden glen as our headquarters. It was no longer worth the long tramps down to the wolds, where the most tempting limbs of Mylchraine’s empire were there to bite into, when we could retain complete safety quite easily elsewhere. So we moved down and established ourselves first in a small wood not far from Colonel Aleyn’s big house, and soon enough after in a barn at a farm in the wolds themselves. The invitation from the tenant to do this was in itself a sign of how our stature was growing. If our presence there came to light, as it easily might, it was not going to endear our host to his distant landlord. The owners of the big estates in the island were, we soon came to hear, by no means unfriendly to Mylchraine. He was leaving them pretty much alone, and they equally left him alone. As a body they liked things to go on as they were, and it was plain that we were not going to be popular with them.
Howeve
r the offer of hospitality had been made and we accepted. And so just six weeks to the day after we had landed on that tiny low-tide beach on the far side of the mountains we slept under cover of a roof again and Keig had hot water in the mornings for his invariable close shave.
But it was to prove in the end more than months, much more, before we ever got to Lesneven and that last fastness of the big stone house on the Kernel. Yet it was not the first stiffening of Mylchraine’s resistance that upset what had seemed to be such smooth progress.
It came as no surprise when Mylchraine’s organization in the northern half of the island was abruptly transformed from a widespread network of Keepers’ posts designed to see that taxes were promptly paid, however heavy, into a quasi-military force whose object was to crush Keig’s uprising.
Keig had expected this and had laid his plans, and we simply carried out orders we had already been given.
Though this is perhaps to give the impression that Keig himself sat snugly in our barn headquarters and issued instructions. That was far from the case. Keig was, so to speak, equally one of those obeying the instructions—as one Particular incident will show.
It was on a day of premature high summer at the very end of May. The sky was a rich deep blue, even beginning to quiver a little from the heat. There were no clouds at all. The sun poured down with only the half-formed lettuce-green foliage of the lilacs and hawthorns to hamper it. A party of half a dozen of us were at one of the typical isolated farms of the wolds at a point actually nearer Lesneven than we had yet ventured. And perhaps for this reason Keig was leading us himself.
The farm, a sprawling solid building set in a fold of ground between two gentle hills, had an enormous chestnut tree growing just beside the house. It was in full white candle now, a marvellous sight with the thick spires of flower standing so uprightly among the firm spiny light-green leaves.
Strong Man Page 17