I turned away, stooped and picked up another of our seal-heads.
‘I’d better set this off,’ I said. ‘Otherwise you’ll be all on your own.’
‘Yes,’ Keig said. ‘It’d be best.’
He turned to take up a thick tray of bundled sticks which I had made for him to float in front of himself to carry one of the few sniper’s rifles our army had possessed, well wrapped in greased rags, and his own old long-handled axe. But before he had taken as much as a pace he stopped and swung round again.
‘Damn it, shake hands,’ he said to me.
And I remembered all that we had undergone together and I let the stupid seal-head I was holding fall and seized Keig’s hand.
Word-merchant that I am, I could think of not a single thing to say to him then. For a little we stood there pumping away at each other’s arms till at last Keig relaxed his grip.
He turned and walked across the sand to his weapon-carrier raft and picked it up. Then bearing it in front of him he strode into the grey-green foam-flecked water.
I stood where I was, watching as he swung out till the sea came up to his thighs. Then he lowered his small raft in, crouched down a little and started to swim. Long quiet strokes, moving slowly at first and then as a current caught him suddenly much faster.
I hurried forward to place more dummy seals in the water, peering as I did so out into the grey day. But within two minutes I had lost him.
I went on standing there afterwards, and from time to time I thought I saw something dark bobbing far out in the channel. But I never could be sure whether it was one of my mock seals or the man they were intended to protect.
I never did hear any but garbled reports of what happened out there on the Kernel. Had I had all the time in the world I could, no doubt eventually have reconstructed the whole story down to its last details, and I would then have been able to give as full an account of it as I have done of the Parts of Keig’s life I can vouch for as having seen with my own eyes.
But as it is I know only the bare outline, part of which—but by no means all—I extracted from Keig himself.
There were several times, apparently, during that swim when he thought he was not going to make it. The first of them came not long after he had started out, and I suppose I myself might have seen something of it if I had chanced to be looking at the right part of that grey, turbulent, white-capped stretch of bleakly cold water at the right moment. What happened was that a rogue wave, larger than any he had coped with up to then, suddenly reared up and fell right on top of the little stick-bundle raft he was pushing ahead of himself. It pulled the frail affair right out of his grasp and then apparently picked it up and tossed it completely over. When Keig emerged from the wave himself, blinking the water out of his eyes, he saw only the bottom of the little almost completely submerged raft and this was several yards away from him. He made terrific efforts to get to it and at last succeeded. Then he reached underneath to try to rescue the two weapons he hoped it still had fastened to it.
I have always harboured slight doubts about Keig’s strict veracity at this point. He told me that just as his fingers touched the hard shapes of the two weapons he felt them slipping from their fastenings and that he was able only to get hold of the axe. But I have sometimes wondered whether he did not have a certain choice in the matter and could have rescued either the axe or the carefully-encased sniper’s rifle and whether in that extremity he did not positively choose his old and trusted companion.
But, whatever happened, it left him alone in that sucking sea holding with one hand his axe, and with nothing else.
His troubles were by no means over either, but by heaving himself on to his back and letting the currents take him at times swiftly away from the shore of the Kernel and at times towards it he was at last able to swim to safety, though he was too exhausted to do anything but lie out in the open near the beach.
He was now in countryside he knew in intimate detail and he had no difficulty, though he was shaking he said ‘like the ague’ from exposure, in making his way to his house, now deserted and Partly in ruins he found, and installing himself in hiding there. He rested up and even nourished himself on a couple of old candles which he found where he had tucked them away in a tin box years before.
By dusk on the second night—when back in Lesneven I was driven nearly mad repeating and repeating the not very plausible story I had cooked up to account for his absence, and being sure all the while that he must be dead—he had recovered enough of his strength to set out to reconnoitre the grounds of Mylchraine’s immense mansion.
And here the essential daringness of the whole operation paid off handsomely. Plainly the last thought that had entered Mylchraine’s mind was that he was in any immediate danger. There was just one sentry posted at the house and he was standing on the front steps ‘straight up like he was made of stuffed straw,’ in Keig’s words.
So there was no difficulty in penetrating the huge mansion itself. But then Keig did run into complications. He soon enough located Mylchraine—seeing his great enemy for only the second time in his life—but it appeared that the heavy-bodied tyrant was never alone. He did not even seem to be thinking of going to bed. The hours went by and still he went from room to room with a whole bevy of cronies, eating supper, playing cards, drinking, until Keig, skulking in the dark recesses of the enormous house, was driven to debate whether to have a go at him however many people surrounded him or simply creep back out of the house. He had reckoned that he would hardly be able to stay hidden inside once it was daylight.
But dawn, it turned out, was what Mylchraine was waiting for. Hiding, wondering how much longer it would be safe to leave making the attempt, Keig noticed a certain amount of activity that indicated that some sort of witchcraft ceremony was being prepared for in the biggest room in the big house—‘a sort of dancing place’ he called it—and from a scrap of conversation he overheard as various servants carried in the paraphernalia required he gathered that the moment of dawn itself would form the climax of the rites.
With considerable audacity, he waited his chance and then got into the big room itself in a pause in the preparations and contrived to hide behind the long curtains draping one of the tall windows at the far end of the chamber from a throne-like chair which he presumed would be the centre of activities. He hoped that the ceremony would be lit as murkily as the esbat in the Rota had been and that this would provide him with a chance of creeping out and getting near enough to Mylchraine to strike.
But in this he was disappointed. When Mylchraine eventually entered, dressed as he had been at the esbat in a long black flowing cloak and with a black skull cap on top of his curious waxen-cheeked face, Keig realized that the affair was to be lit not by torches but by ordinary electric lamps and plenty of them.
But then again he had a stroke of luck. Because apparently it was part of the ceremony that everyone should watch for the first streaks of light of the new day. He had what must have been a nerve-racking minute or two when shortly before dawn was due someone went along swishing open wide the curtains in front of all the windows down the east-facing side of the big room. But they left the windows on the end wall untouched since no dawn would show through them. And soon Keig’s moment came: all the lights in the whole big room were turned out.
The moment he had grasped what had happened he simply walked out of his hiding-place, quietly made his way down the length of the room and eventually stationed himself, axe in hand, at what he judged to be a spot only five yards or so from Mylchraine’s throne.
And then, after an appallingly long wait, in which he detected certain stealthy movements quite near him that must have strained his nerves to the utmost, the first signs of day fully appeared in the east. Almost at once there came a ringing ritual call from Mylchraine himself: ‘I see the light.’
That, it seemed, was the signal for the lamps to be switched on again in a single swift blaze of illumination.
And in that sud
den glare Mylchraine found himself confronting the tower-like form of Keig, still heavily black-greased, with his long-handled axe held lightly and loosely in the palms of his hands. But Keig equally was subjected to almost as unexpected an apparition himself. There on the floor between him and his enemy was a girl, naked as he was and more so, yet not black-stained but luminously white-skinned. She was stretched out as the girl had been at the ceremony in the Rota, crouched over her knees with arms and hair spread on the floor pointing towards the Master of the esbat.
It says much for Keig that he did not allow this totally unexpected event to deflect him from what he had decided to do. He took the two steps forward he had planned, only he had to make them a little obliquely. And then he spoke.
‘Mylchraine,’ he said—in what one of the onlookers later called ‘a voice of thunder’, and no wonder—‘I sentence you to death.’
And he brought his axe crashing down on the centre of Mylchraine’s black skull-cap.
I suppose Keig was lucky not to have been torn to pieces on the spot. But, on the other hand, he had achieved total surprise and this was completely effective. Nobody moved so much as a muscle for several seconds after that blow of his had been delivered, and during that time he heaved his axe-head out of Mylchraine’s skull—‘I’d got it deep in,’ he said to me—and crashed his way out through one of the tall uncurtained windows.
He was chased, naturally enough. But his pursuers lacked heart. With Mylchraine gone they knew their time had come to an end, and it was without any Particular difficulty that he threw them off. And it was equally without any sort of trouble, after he had lain hidden near the isle jetty for some time and had watched the news of Mylchraine’s fate arriving there and seen the guard Keepers abandon their post, that he got hold of a boat and set off for Lesneven.
I saw the boat coming myself. You can imagine that I had spent almost all my time shut up in a room at the Messenger office which was high up enough to have a view out to sea and using Keig’s own field-glasses from it with a sort of flogged-on desperation.
As soon as I saw the boat with the one broad figure rowing I knew what it must be. I snatched up the telephone like a madman and gabbled out instructions to all and sundry in case any of the men Keig himself had put on watch started firing at him.
And half an hour later I was kneeling on the sharp granite edge of the town landing-stage leaning over to give Keig a hand up.
He hauled himself over the edge and got to his feet. Then he looked slowly all round about him. He drew in a deep breath.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘he’s toppled now.’
3
It was just one month after the death of Mylchraine that the Oceanan Rota met, for the first time in fifteen years. The four weeks between the two events were as disturbing as any I have ever spent.
I think that at the moment I first spotted Keig rowing back from the Kernel and guessed that he must, in spite of all the odds, have dealt with Mylchraine I believed all my problems were over. But by the time that I had heard him on the grey Lesneven town-wharf confirm the news that Mylchraine was no more I already had inklings that the whole fantastic expedition had solved nothing. And later, as bit by bit I managed to prise out of Keig the rough outline of what had happened on the little isle, my misgivings swiftly grew in substance.
The worst moment of all was when he told me about the actual killing. I heard other versions later—my brother John was one of the witnesses—and it was only from them that I learnt the very words Keig had used before he had raised that axe of his and brought it thudding down on Mylchraine’s head. But even from what he told me himself back in the editor’s room at the Messenger office that day I found myself beset again with the sharpest of doubts.
They were to be resolved sooner than I had expected and not at all in any way I had envisaged, but this did not make them at the time any less rootedly poisonous.
But it was clear to me from the beginning that Keig had constituted himself judge and jury, prosecuting counsel and executioner of Rolph Mylchraine. And, convinced as I was that Mylchraine was in fact guilty of acts which any court would have had no hesitation in condemning, I could not really reconcile myself to the manner of his death. I even saw that it was in a way the only possible course that could have been taken in all the circumstances. Yet it still made me to the marrow of my bones uneasy.
Had I been sure that it was an ending, a complete ending, I would, I think, have been able to acquiesce reluctantly in the harsh necessity of thus abruptly and violently bringing the tyrant’s career to a finish. But, far from being sure this was an ending, I was plagued with the fear that it was, after the many intimations I had had of what was to come, a real beginning. Was it to be that Mylchraine would prove just the first of a growing list of people Keig would in time condemn to death and execute or have executed—or was he, in fact, not the first but the second, the second after cheerful greedy little Fred Quiddie?
And, of course, there was no telling. Keig remained after the death of Mylchraine just what he had been before it, an inward-turned figure. I did succeed by blunt questioning in extracting a little from him, but I never in all those weeks felt I was at all seeing inside the man.
Now that he could no longer reply, with truth or not, that for him the future was the toppling of Mylchraine, I was able to put to him the questions that had been in my mind from more or less the time, almost a full year ago now, that Cormode had landed at Caloestown.
What did he intend to do? How did he see himself in the new Oceana? What part did he want to play? Was he going to go in for politics like Cormode himself, or what?
He looked up at me when I asked him point-blank this last question. That familiar little quick frown came and went on his broad forehead.
‘Cormode asked me to join that Progress party of his,’ he said.
‘What?’ I exclaimed in pure astonishment.
‘He told me that he would find me a seat in the Rota.’
‘What did you say? When was this?’
‘The day before yesterday.’
I waited. But plainly Keig was going to tell me no more unless I pressed him.
‘Well, what did you say to Cormode?’ I asked.
‘What d’you think? I saw all I wanted of councils and committees when we were in Dublin.’
I wondered for a moment whether to try and persuade him that all committees were not like the Revolutionary Council. And then I decided that, since to all intents and purposes they were, it was no use trying to prove otherwise to someone like Keig.
‘So what are you going to do?’ I said at last.
‘What I’m asked to do,’ he replied.
I had to think about this for quite some time, but Keig was never one to notice if a conversation had lapsed.
He was going to do what he was asked to do. What exactly did this imply? It sounded humble enough certainly. But, against this, I knew that Keig had never been one to serve humbly, even in his earliest, most inexperienced days. He had always judged with a cold eye and he had not hesitated to act when what he had seen failed to come up to the standards he held, as often things did fail. So what was he expecting to be asked to do now?
I puzzled on, and at last I thought I had seen through to the end of it.
‘You expect to be asked to look after the running of various things in the island?’ I asked.
His dark eyes regarded me for an instant.
‘That’s for the Rota to say, isn’t it?’ he replied. ‘It’s the Rota that says what’s to be done in Oceana. It always was, and soon it’s going to be so again.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
And there did not seem to be much more, in face of this impeccably constitutional reply, that I could ask. A silence fell, as was so often the case in my exchanges with Keig.
Yet I did not feel that everything in the garden was now lovely.
So Keig saw himself as, or was he even just putting himself forward as, the simple servant of the R
ota. But I knew he had no time for committee compromises, and although the election had yet to be held then, I doubted if the Oceanan Rota was going to be Particularly distinguished for forceful decisions, not if it had got a quota of stolid stony-eyed procrastinating woldsmen among its number. And for how long would Keig go on carrying out decisions he did not respect?
Or was he planning to see that somehow his own decisions went to the Rota and came back to him with the rubber-stamp of democratic procedure wet on their bottoms?
I could not tell. I could not tell.
And in any case I strongly suspected that the Rota was not going to be a rubber-stamp for Keig. In those days we were very busy with the considerable task of disbanding the brigades, a task which Keig, once Mylchraine had gone, was as eager to have carried out as Cormode was. And with Keig I was also much occupied with such things as visiting our wounded in the Lesneven hospital, going to see the widows and mothers of men who had been killed in the fighting and with all the tough miserably complicated personal problems left by the receding tide of war. But I did manage to see, too, a good deal of the Progress party’s activities, and I was considerably impressed by them. I would have been very much surprised if it did not end up with a substantial proportion of Rota seats.
Should I, I wondered, warn Keig of this. I had half a mind to, and then I thought I would not. After all I reasoned, if Keig intended, as I more and more believed that he did, to claim full power in the island for himself, then Peter Cormode’s Progress party was going to be the obstacle that might stop him, and efficient unlovable genuinely democratic Peter Cormode would be the one man who might for Keig’s own good bar his path.
But it was with a feeling of a real release from care that, when all the excitement of the election had passed, four weeks after the death of Mylchraine I accompanied Keig to the Rota for its opening session, using ironically that same back way in that I had used on my last visit to the place six long years before. I walked down the high stone-walled corridor and through the robing room with my cheerfulness growing at every second. This was going to be an occasion to savour, after all.
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