Strong Man

by H. R. F. Keating

‘You know he’s got howitzers over there, and the big coast defence battery?’ Keig said. ‘I haven’t finished reading through these reports yet, but already we’ve made sure he’s got all the ammunition he could want.’

  Cormode shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘In any case Mr Mylchraine no longer matters,’ he said. ‘We’re in Lesneven now.’

  Keig’s dark face almost convulsively darkened even further.

  ‘We’re here,’ he said. ‘And Mylchraine’s there. There sitting in that great house of his, lord and master. Surely to God, you don’t think this business is finished?’

  The friendliness Cormode had exuded from the moment he had stepped in now faded visibly.

  ‘I’ll tell you quite frankly what I do think, Mr Keig,’ he said. ‘I consider that the first priority is to get proper democratic government functioning in the island once again. That’s our duty. And I would view with gravest suspicion any military adventures that might jeopardize that task.’

  ‘So you’re against finishing Mylchraine,’ Keig declared, almost physically thrusting his way through Cormode’s verbiage.

  ‘Yes,’ Cormode answered him. ‘If you want to put it in that way, I am against finishing Mylchraine at the present time. I consider there are things that take precedence, the holding of an election, the re-establishment of order.’

  ‘Nothing comes before getting that man,’ Keig replied with a complete uncompromisingness that I felt I could hardly go all the way with.

  I give Peter Cormode considerable credit for not flinching under it. Indeed, he positively fought back.

  ‘I am afraid I must disagree,’ he said. ‘And perhaps while we are on the subject of policy I may add that I also disagree with your firing of that whiskey warehouse out there. I’m told it was done on your Particular orders. Is that so?’

  ‘It was,’ Keig growled. ‘Whiskey has drained the guts out of half the people in the island.’

  ‘I am well aware that the drunkenness figures are greatly in excess of those of ten or fifteen years ago,’ Cormode replied, still succeeding in standing up for himself. ‘But nevertheless I consider any premature destruction of whiskey supplies can only lead to unnecessary resentment against the new governing authorities. And we shall need all the support we can get in the transitional period.’

  I felt a glimmer of sympathy for Cormode at this. I might not agree with his argument ultimately, but he was making something of the case against Keig that I had not had the mental toughness to make myself when that white blaze outside had been started.

  But Keig had risen to his feet behind the desk. His whole ironstocky body, rather than his inexpressive face, seemed to be conveying utter opposition to Cormode’s views. He spoke quietly but with all the force behind the words that his lonely years had endowed him with.

  ‘No one’s going to buy support with whiskey while I’m here to stop them,’ he said.

  And Peter Cormode did then what I had been doing all along. He side-stepped the issue.

  ‘Well, whiskey is a comparatively unimportant matter,’ he said, not very graciously. ‘What is important is the election. I take it we are agreed there?’

  ‘If you mean the old Rota should come back,’ Keig said, ‘I agree to that.’

  Cormode produced a wintry smile at this, and a quick dive into uncontroversial arrangements for the continuance of normal life in the town. He talked sense, too, and I was amused to notice when he left that he had succeeded in occupying more than half an hour of Keig’s time instead of the threatened ‘few minutes’.

  And certainly in the next few days Cormode accomplished a really tremendous amount, while Keig, heedless of almost everything else, continued making his fierce assessment of exactly how much material Mylchraine had succeeded in getting over to the Kernel and saw with ferocious energy to the establishing of a twenty-four-hour massive watch on that choppy current-swirled stretch of water between the town and the low green outline of the tyrant’s last refuge.

  And if Cormode in the course of all he was doing contrived to make himself pretty well known, and to make it exactly clear that he was the elected leader of the old Revolutionary Council which had been transformed into the new Progress party, I scarcely blamed him. He may have been ambitious, but his ambition was clearly harnessed to a strong belief that what he had to offer was what was best for the island.

  Seeing all this out of the corner of my eye, as it were, as I hurried here and there, I could not help contrasting Cormode with the Keig I secretly feared existed behind his uncommunicative exterior. Certainly Keig, if he had ambitions to continue as leader in Oceana as he had been leader of the forces that had routed Mylchraine, did nothing whatsoever about staking his claim in the present power-vacuum in the island. Judged from this point of view, his conduct was wholly without trace of ambition. But I still suspected that in fact he was possibly far more ambitious than Cormode. His claim, I feared, was so much higher pitched than any Cormode could possibly nurture that mere party man-oeuvrings would be totally irrelevant to it.

  It consisted in nothing less than the assumption that he would simply go on giving orders as he liked and when he liked once his personal vendetta against Mylchraine was at length over.

  Or did it? Behind that unexpressive face what was happening? I could not tell. And, up against that single-minded toweringly energetic concentration on Mylchraine and Mylchraine alone, I could not conceivably even try to ask about what I could not see.

  And then Cormode, as the culmination of his first bout of reorganization in Lesneven, announced that he had arranged a dinner.

  It was, of course, to be something more than a mere dinnerparty: it was to be a celebratory feast. It was arranged for a night exactly ten days after we had entered Lesneven and it was to be held in the hall of Brignogan School.

  ‘Will you be going?’ I asked Keig.

  ‘Yes.’

  I thought that might be all. But after a little he actually gave me his reasons.

  ‘The men’d like it,’ he said. ‘They’d look on it as a reward for the fighting they did—even if it’s not over yet.’

  There were, I suppose, something over a hundred guests, and Cormode had certainly succeeded in making excellent arrangements. There were long tables covered in white cloths. There were flowers, flags and the Band of the Lesneven Watch, resurrected from heaven knows what limbo into which it had fallen during the height of Mylchraine’s power. And there was excellent food, by island standards. It must have been a considerable feat of organization to get hold of it all in the still not yet totally settled chaos. But Cormode had seen to it and we ate roast chicken in plenty and, essential items to any true Oceanan, huge lobster-pies and immense blayberry breaddies.

  In a way I felt the two latter items were Particularly symbolic. Because the people at the dinner were not so much representatives of the actual victors as a cross-section of Oceanan life. They were the solid citizens, the farmers, the shopkeepers, with a sprinkling of estate-owners including Keig’s friend, Colonel Aleyn. The fighting men were there, of course. But, looking round, I decided there were decidedly fewer of them than there ought to have been. However, right in the middle of the top table, next to Cormode, Keig sat. And I felt at least he was there on behalf of all the absent men.

  Looking across at him from my place some distance away, I wondered if he was even now still thinking of Mylchraine out there on the Kernel separated from us by that mile-wide turbulent strait and safe for some time to come, I could not doubt, behind his battery of howitzers and the famous old coastal defence guns that had worried us so much at the time of Marshall Tear’s attempted landing. Certainly, there was as usual nothing in Keig’s expression to indicate at all what he was thinking about. Was he managing to relax, as I was, and basking for a short spell in a little glory? Or was he really still far away in that continuing fight that meant so much to him? The dark eyes gave nothing away.

  Eventually the toasts came. In spite of Keig’s high-hand
ed action over the whiskey warehouse, I noted, Cormode had succeeded in getting hold of what looked like a liberal supply of the hard stuff for this stage of the celebration. The waiters, a scratch lot but willing, were bringing trays in now loaded with fresh glasses and tall opened bottles.

  Perhaps it was because Cormode had had this moment already in mind that he had been so sharp about the fire, I thought. But I quickly dismissed the notion: he had been speaking what must have seemed a self-evident truth to him when he had said to Keig that taking a possibly unpopular measure was something that ought not to be done except under the stress of absolute necessity. The fortunes of the Progress party would have been what was in his thoughts.

  I idly watched a waiter as he went along the line of the top table putting a generous measure of whiskey splashily into each glass as he came to it. No stickler for etiquette, he had cheerfully begun his task at one end of the line and was working his way along to the other.

  Then I jerked up in my chair. The waiter at the top table had been about to pour from his bottle into Keig’s glass, and quite simply and without fuss Keig had reversed the glass and had shaken his head in negative. I saw Cormode lean sideways and say something to him and heard, I swear, above the excited yammer of celebrating voices, Keig’s burry tones replying: ‘No. I won’t, thank you. Whiskey always makes me all through-others.’

  And suddenly my doubts about him, fended off over the years from even before the time we had returned to the island, and seeming in these last few days to be gathering to bursting-point, vanished clean away. I felt instead an extraordinary sensation of warm triumph, something much deeper and more meaningful than the aggressive celebration I had been willingly joining in. I was triumphing for Keig himself. I was triumphing for the man who had once lived that limited narrow life of a small farmer out there on the isolated Kernel—now bristling with Mylchraine’s cornered men—and who had been forced to emerge into the wider world and had found then a certain shyness in dealing with problems of social conduct like being able to refuse to drink in drinking company, and who had now, simply by the maturing process his character had undergone in these years of stretching up to battle with a ruler of men, learnt to sit back with calmness and say ‘No’.

  I drank my share of the whiskey when it came to me. I joined shortly after in singing the bawdy songs the fighting element at the gathering insisted on, a little to the scandal of the backseat triumphers Cormode had brought to the event. I got a bit drunk, perhaps more than a bit drunk. I swapped a great many stories of derring-do and hardship in ‘the old days’. But all the while I nursed in my heart the sight of that one instant at the top table.

  And when I saw that Keig was shaking hands with Cormode and the other members of the Revolutionary Council around I was quick to break off from the little hunched group I was in and to be standing there by the door as Keig reached it.

  I thought I saw his dark eyes spark out fractionally as he noticed me, but it may have been the drink I had taken. He certainly said nothing to me, but on the other hand he certainly expected me to walk along beside him through the delightful crisp coldness of the November night.

  He led me back via the seafront. It was as good a way as any other to take the longish walk back to the Messenger office, but I had a feeling he had chosen it specially.

  He said nothing as we tramped along. I kept up with him in equal silence, gradually letting the cold air flush out my drunkenness.

  Then, just as we got to the square shape of the Old Watch-point, he stopped. He took a slow look to each side, and, when he was quite sure there was no one near to overhear us, he spoke.

  ‘I’ve seen a way to deal with Mylchraine,’ he said. ‘I’ll need your help.’

  2

  I do not know what exactly I had expected Keig to propose as means of ‘dealing with Mylchraine’. But his plan, when he told it to me, dissipated the euphoria I had taken away from that celebratory feast like a cold wind suddenly springing up and clearing off a cottonwool protection of mist as once a mist had gone to reveal to us the impregnable defences of Mylchraine’s hangar.

  What Keig intended to do was to swim over on his own to the Kernel next day, to seek out Mylchraine and to kill him himself. Just that.

  The sheer arrogance of the idea blacked out all rational thought in me for long seconds.

  ‘But—but you’d never get over there,’ I managed to say at last. ‘It’s sheer idiocy. Damn it, I’ve been out in that channel with you. I know what it’s like. And that wasn’t in November, for God’s sake.’

  Keig looked at me impassively.

  ‘When I last swum out there,’ he said, ‘I had to pull you along after me.’

  ‘Yes, yes. I know that. But all the same you told me yourself that the channel’s only been swum once or twice, and that was when there was a neap tide. Is it that tomorrow?’

  ‘It’s about half-way between neap and spring,’ Keig said. ‘Didn’t you know?’

  ‘How the hell should I—’

  Words failed me. I had not meant in any case to oppose Keig’s idea on the grounds of its practical impossibility. That had been merely the first thought in all the turbulence in my mind that had found expression. Yet how could I say to him what my more fundamental objection was, that the whole idea was the conception of a megalomaniac?

  Then Keig, having said his say, swung on his heel and set out again towards the centre of the town. I accompanied him in total silence.

  And, still almost completely mute, at dawn next day I accompanied him again to a point on the beaches between Lesneven and Hoddick where he was to put into operation the first stage of his scheme. And there in the sluggish light of a chill and misty morning we stood on the bleak and deserted sands where in my boyhood in the summer I had so often sunbathed the hours away and swum a bit and thrown flat stones at the sea—and where once I had seen myself as running ashore commando-fashion with Marshall Tear’s ill-fated expeditionary force—and we experimented in the manufacture of dummy seals’ heads.

  These were a key to Keig’s plan, which, if I thought it in essence the conception of a madman, was in its details practical enough. He intended to launch a small flotilla of these seal-heads down between us and the Kernel, and, concealed among what Mylchraine’s look-outs would almost certainly take to be merely an unusual number of the seals occasionally seen in these waters, he counted upon being able to approach the shore of the little isle unobserved. It was to be my task to launch the dummy heads, my only task.

  I had to admit that if the idea was to be put into practice at all Keig was going about the incidentals of it in a thoroughly efficient manner. But the whole plan was so overwhelmingly cocky—this conception of one man just because he was Keig being able to do what all the forces we had would find a hard enough business—that the mere fact that its details had been sensibly dealt with paled into complete nothingness. Even the attempt to swim the channel in these conditions, for all Keig’s extraordinary strength, was taking a risk which to ordinary heads would seem totally unjustifiable. And, even supposing that part of the plan came off, there was then the fantastic obstacle to be considered of getting at Mylchraine at all in the midst of all his followers.

  In stubborn silence I went searching about the foreshore for stones of the right weight to keep floating upright the concoctions of sacking, sticks and fishermen’s floats that Keig was fashioning. And after a false try or two, we got the art of making the things off to a nicety, and I watched gloomily our two final specimens swirling convincingly away from us on the strong current before we went back to the Messenger office where Keig, refusing even to acknowledge what we were doing by so much as a look at me, settled down to the work that had been brought him while we had been away. Morosely I left him and set about collecting the various items he had asked me to acquire for him.

  That afternoon he set off.

  He had calculated, probably with justice, that it would be best to make his attempt by daylight. At night search
lights swept the shore of the Kernel and Mylchraine’s look-outs, we knew from the occasional shots we had heard, were Particularly jumpy in the dark. So we had made our way surreptitiously back to our mock-seals starting-point, and there Keig had stripped and had coated himself from head to foot with motor-grease—it had taken me hours to find any in starved Lesneven and at one stage I had thought the whole notion would founder on my lack of success.

  I collected half a dozen of our seals and tossed them out into the water. Then I turned to Keig, standing on the wet sand with a mess of dead star-fish and bits of flotsam all round him.

  The short November day was already looking dusky, although dusk was not due for two hours and more. For a little Keig watched the mock seal-heads as they bobbed away from us.

  ‘Going nicely,’ he commented at last.

  Then he came over towards me and held out his hand.

  ‘Thanks for everything,’ he said.

  I did not take his outstretched hand.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Look I can’t let you do this. You must know that it isn’t necessary. If Mylchraine’s got to be finished, this isn’t the way to do it. We’ll get over there in the end. It’s just a question of time, of getting hold of the right sort of boats, of training men for an assault, of a hundred and one things ...’

  My voice petered out. And still I had not said squarely: ‘Keig, you have become obsessed with Mylchraine. You’re sacrificing everything to a whim of your own.’

  Keig’s hand dropped to his side.

  ‘I haven’t much time for arguing,’ he said unemotionally. ‘But just you remember how we got into Oceana in the first place. It wasn’t by coming at a time we were expected, was it? That sort of foolishness is for the like of Marshall Tear.’

  ‘And aren’t you doing something as damn foolish in another way as anything Tear ever did?’ I stormed at him.

  ‘No,’ he said, quite quietly. ‘I’m not.’

  I think if he had added a single word more of justification I would have stayed there till night fell arguing with him. But his bare statement of what he believed he was doing was too much for me. He meant to go: he saw nothing out of the way in it. Then let him go, and if it was the end perhaps that was best.