It took me long enough to reach him though. My new energy was short-lived and soon the effect of all that had happened in the preceding twenty minutes began dragging heavily down on me. But in the end I made it and Keig hauled me on board, too spent to do anything more than lie on the narrow strip of deck beside the cabin and acknowledge the nightmare had somehow ended.
But eventually my sense of curiosity flickered to life again. I heaved myself up a little and looked about. Keig was back on the cabin roof, steadily surveying the water all round. The utmost quiet prevailed. The launch’s engine was not running; there were no shouts from the sea; no sounds from below; only the plip-plop of the wavelets slapping against our sides.
‘What happened?’
Keig looked down at me.
‘When that madman started using the machinegun,’ he said, ‘I reckoned the only way to stop them blowing us to bits was to get on to their boat. So I slipped down into the dinghy and paddled round and took ’em by surprise.’
‘All by yourself?’
‘They were middling occupied shooting poor fellas swimming in the water,’ Keig replied. ‘I had my axe and I’d done for the gunner before they even knew I was there. A couple of ’em came at me, but my blood was up by then.’
‘But how many were there altogether?’
‘Six, if you count one that was wounded already. The last two jumped in and swam for it.’
Keig turned away and looked round the quiet sea again. The beam of the distant searchlight was still playing on us. I suppose back there on the Kernel they thought the craft’s outrageous task had been completed. I saw suddenly that Mr Mylchraine himself must have given the order to kill us all; he would have been woken in that big house of his not many miles away from the searchlight post and told what had happened; and then he had ordered us all to be finished off. It seemed revealed to me like a truth.
‘Reckon there’s no one else alive in the water now,’ Keig said sombrely.
He jumped down beside me.
‘You weren’t hit as far as I could see,’ he went on. ‘You about ready to give me a hand? We’re going to need all the help we can get if we’re going to get back to Ireland. I pulled Fayrhare out but he’s hurt bad, and he’s the only one who knows anything much about boats.’
I made an attempt to stand and, by holding hard on to the cabin roof, succeeded.
‘Are there many dead in all?’ I asked.
There are eighteen of us here, not counting Mylchraine’s man,’ Keig answered. ‘And you and I and one other are the only ones not wounded.’
He stumped off down below and a few seconds later I heard him talking about re-starting the engine to someone I recognized as a man called Fred Quiddie, a motor mechanic by trade. Before long they had managed it and Keig came up and took the wheel. After a few experimental swaying turns he succeeded in getting us heading steadily away from Oceana in the direction of Ireland—if the amateur reading of the compass that I had done for him was in any way right.
When we seemed well set I went below to get rid of some of my wet clothes and see if there was anything I could do. There turned out to be quite enough in the way of finding first-aid supplies and generally looking after the wounded to keep me busy right until I noticed through the narrow cabin windows the whiteness of dawn.
I made my way up on deck again and Keig at once asked me to take the wheel for a bit. I thought he sounded a little strained, though in the light of his customary severe rationing of his words it was difficult to be sure.
I held the spokes of the wheel and watched him as he made his way stiffly forward.
Perhaps it’s only that he’s tired, I thought. He’s every right to be.
But that was not what the matter was.
He went up as far as the curiously-shaped Oerlikon gun and there I saw him stoop. Then I realized what it was he had wanted. His axe was there. He must have propped it up against the barrels of the gun when the last of Mr Mylchraine’s men had jumped overboard, and only with the coming of the light had he seen it again.
I smiled to myself. Had even that tough soul felt the childish need to touch a familiar object?
And then I saw that he was holding the broad blade of the axe close up to his face and looking at it intently. I leant forward and peered in my turn. The light was strong now—there was not a cloud in the sky—and the launch was not after all more than a few yards long. I was able to see quite easily that the once shining axe-head was plainly and darkly stained.
Blood, I thought with a sudden heave of queasiness.
On that steel head, which I had seen used to fell saplings for our escape raft on the Kernel and more prosaically chopping wood for our cautious fires when we hid in the fir woods waiting to ambush the gold train, there was human blood. The blood of the men Keig had killed the night before.
And from the way he still held the axe up to his face and looked at it so unblinkingly I guessed that thoughts much like my own must be passing through his head. He had told us all in the Swedenborgians’ hall that getting rid of Mylchraine was going to mean being as ruthless as Mylchraine was prepared to be himself. Now he had witnessed that ruthlessness and in one short cosmos-altering hour had had to match it with a ruthlessness of his own.
Was the lesson bitterer than he had expected?
Suddenly he tipped forward on to one knee, swung the long-handled axe round and plunged it into the boiling sea by our bow. For a long minute he held it there, peering passionately downwards. Then he straightened himself up and took a quick confirmatory glance at the blade. It shone and glittered in the new day’s light.
I think that at that moment he saw me watching him. Anyhow he turned his head and gave me a steady look.
‘When we get back and can talk with no one to hear us,’ he said, ‘I’ve got something I want to tell you.’
He swung round to face ahead again.
I wondered what he was going to do.
Then, just before he began, I knew. He placed his two feet firmly on the planking of the deck. He flexed the muscles of his shoulders and he sent that long axe twirling up into the morning air.
4
We reached Ireland, at a lonely spot in Courtmacsherry Bay about twenty miles from Cork, towards evening that day and succeeded eventually in getting all our wounded ashore. And it was while we were waiting for Cormode and the rest of the Revolutionary Council to come in some hastily hired cars from Cork with a sympathizing doctor that Keig had the private talk with me he had spoken about.
We walked off along the bright green seaweed-strewn rocks of the shore until we were well out of earshot of the others. Then Keig halted.
‘I’m going back there,’ he said.
To Oceana?’
‘Where else?’
‘But on your own?’
‘Not at all. With enough men to guard a good load of guns till they can be handed on to lads there who’ll use them for what they were made for.’
‘You’ve got gold left to buy them then?’ I asked, having long before lost track of the figures.
‘There’s some. Not as much as there should be, but maybe enough.’
I thought for a little, flapping my arms to keep warm in my still damp and salt-heavy clothes.
‘Do I take it,’ I asked, ‘that you don’t intend to consult the other Council members?’
‘I don’t intend to tell anyone at all a mortal thing,’ Keig answered. ‘There’ll be you and whichever others I pick on later. And not a soul else.’
He swung up his axe, which had never been long out of his grasp since he had washed the blood off it that morning, and gently tossed it once or twice in the palms of his stubby-fingered hands.
‘There’ll be no more blabbing in front of that flap-eared barman at Caveen’s,’ he said.
‘No,’ I replied, ‘I reckon that chap made a tidy sum passing things on. If you can stop that, you’re half way home.’
‘Then that’s all,’ Keig said.
And he turned and tramped back to our waiting wounded. I followed more slowly.
What was I to make of this? Bringing down the government of a country, even of such a small country as Oceana, was an undertaking of magnitude. Had Keig anything like enough weight for it? Or was this simply a rush of over-confidence to the head born of his success in pulling a few chestnuts from Marshall Tear’s fire?
I could not make up my mind. And, in any case, Tear’s name set up a new train of thought. The man had after all died what they call a hero’s death and this was a quiet time in the world, unless something altogether unexpected had broken in our absence. I rang Fleet Street as soon as we had got back to the telephone we had used to fetch Cormode.
With our return to Dublin, limping though it was, my vague imaginings on that deserted shore came true with a rapidity that took even me by surprise. Every one of the survivors fit enough to travel was at once buttonholed at Heuston Station by a pack of reporters flown in from England, and even from further afield. Only Keig succeeded in shaking them off. Margaret was there to meet him looking, I noticed with an abrupt foreboding, not at all well. The anxiety while Keig had been away seemed to have made her more ill in a few days than in all the time we had been in Ireland. Keig hurried over to her and pushed a way clear.
But the others were only too happy to talk, and Marshall Tear, from having been a name sub-editors would have to look up in the cuttings if ever he was mentioned, became within days one of those people everybody has heard of.
And in consequence the Revolutionary Council now became a hive of activity and in a field quite new to it, the receiving of donations. Even the placid exiles who had preferred jobs in London or Manchester to plotting in Dublin when they heard—as I saw that they did—of the huge sums being sent from America, where the Tear cult caught on by proxy with the Irish, began to send the money that had been so noticeably absent during Tear’s lifetime. So soon I worked full time for the cause and was paid for doing so. My only regret was that Keig had quarrelled with me.
It happened about a month after our return. I had actually seen him only once since the big scrimmage at Heuston Station and, feeling I owed him a visit, I dropped round to his rooms at about six one evening, when I calculated that he would have been back from his nawying job long enough for Margaret to have given him his evening meal, if she was able to.
It seemed I had judged the time to a nicety. The oilcloth-covered table in the small sitting-room had been mostly cleared and Keig was sitting at it with a book spread squarely open in front of him and a cup of tea by his side. Margaret was up, sitting in a battered armchair by the window with some sewing.
‘Sorry I haven’t managed to look in as often as I used to,’ I said. ‘But I’ve been fantastically busy.’
‘I know that,’ Keig said, hardly looking up from the book.
After a moment I pulled out the chair opposite him and sat down.
‘Well,’ Margaret said, ‘since it looks as though you’re here to stay, would you like a cup of tea?’
She got up, worryingly listlessly, and fetched a cup and saucer.
‘What’s that you’re reading then?’ I asked Keig.
‘It’s what they call memoirs.’
‘Oh? Whose?’
Memoir-reading was a new side to Keig.
He let his quick dismissive frown flicker on his broad forehead and named a well-known British general of the 1939-45 War.
‘But it’s nothing more than bickering all the way,’ he added.
‘That’s pretty well standard form for memoirs. But why are you reading these?’
He glowered across at me.
‘Why do you think? Because I want to find out how to fight a war. I suppose you can’t tell me what else to read?’
‘Well,’ I said disconcertedly, ‘there’s a chap called Clausewitz. He’s supposed to have written the great treatise on war. But the subject’s hardly my field.’
‘I thought you knew about books,’ Keig growled.
There are books and books. You can’t expect me to be able to rap out an answer on absolutely everything between covers.’
‘Hm.’
And he simply plunged his head between his hands and began reading away again in the slow way I had observed of him before, as if he could not believe that anything printed deserved of less than the fullest attention.
‘No, look,’ I said, ‘what have I done?’
He did at least take his eyes off the print.
‘What have you done? What haven’t you done, with your Marshall Tear this and your Marshall Tear that? Does it bring you in plenty? Well set up again, are you, in spite of having let yourself get caught up with fighting Mylchraine?’
‘But listen . . .’
I was taken by surprise. I had seen my promotion of Tear as wholly for the good of the cause and here was Keig disapproving root and branch. I tried to explain.
‘All my Marshall Tear this and Marshall Tear that is bringing us a good deal of support. Three months ago hardly anyone anywhere knew there was any opposition to Mr Mylchraine. Now he’s probably one of the top ten detested men in the world.’
‘And you think he cares?’ Keig said.
I blinked.
‘Well, perhaps not. But all the same it helps a hell of a lot to have world public opinion on your side.’
‘How?’
There is, of course, a good case to be made out for the effectiveness of public backing for any cause, but faced with Keig’s blunt demand for chapter and verse I was momentarily at a loss.
‘It’s bringing in a good deal of cash anyhow,’ I filled in.
‘And what are they doing with the cash they get?’
‘Listen,’ I said, more aggressively than I had meant to, ‘they may not be buying arms, but you seem to forget people like Cormode and Skillicorne are pretty intelligent. And if they think there’s a reasonable chance of getting Mr Mylchraine to change his ways by mobilizing world opinion, who the hell are you to tell them they’re so wrong?’
‘They are wrong,’ Keig said, as you might tell a Martian he was in error when he claimed two and two did not make four.
‘Well, I’m pretty much inclined to back their judgment all the same,’ I retorted. ‘Dammit, they study world affairs, history. They’re able to make comparisons. They bring some breadth of outlook to all this.’
‘I suppose Tear was like that too?’ Keig asked.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I think he was. I’m not cooking up all the stuff I write on him, you know. Marshall Tear was by no means a fool.’
Keig stared me straight in the face across the pages of the general’s bickering memoirs.
‘Tear was no more than a sulky brat,’ he said. ‘Kicking down his little mud-pie because no one would look at it when he wanted.’
‘No,’ I almost shouted with exasperation. ‘Tear may have damn nearly got us all killed, but nevertheless his way of fighting was pretty tough, as tough as yours every bit.’
‘It wasn’t as tough as Mylchraine’s,’ Keig said without heat.
‘How can you say that? I tell you Marshall Tear has already done far more by dying the way he did than anyone who’s stayed alive. Look at what men like Patrick Pearse did for Ireland by their deaths. Tear’s done just the same for Oceana.’
Keig simply stood up, pushing his chair back from the oilcloth-covered table, and looked at me.
‘Aren’t you going to come to Oceana?’ he asked.
It was a choice. I saw that at once. And the decision I eventually took was a bitter one.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but I’m going on with the campaign on Tear.’
‘Goodbye then.’
Keig stood facing me. I got up.
‘Goodbye,’ I said. ‘Goodbye, Margaret.’
I half-saw her white pallidly shining face give me a sharp dismissing nod. I turned and went out.
Months passed before I saw him again. I was, as I had said, wonderfully busy and I knew too there wou
ld be no point in going to him and suggesting we could ‘be friends’ if I was not prepared to say I now agreed with him. And I was not. You just can not, I said to myself every time I thought of him, fly in the face of all other opinion the way he did.
One glimpse of him I did catch. It was in the dull and dreary public library in Pearse Street where early one evening I was chasing some newspaper reference, and as I padded past the reading desks through long mote-thick beams of late summer sunlight I suddenly spotted those unforgettable shoulders squarely addressed to a large book.
I went round behind and peered over. The book was Clausewitz ‘On War’. I felt in the circumstances I had better not interrupt.
The date when we did meet again I can pinpoint exactly because it was the day of the first Marshall Tear Anniversary Meeting. The Tear industry had begun to die down, and we had hit on the notion of a big public meeting to revive interest. The preparations went auspiciously and before long we found we had contracted for a full-scale gathering at that traditional Dublin meeting-place, Nelson’s Pillar—still in those days presiding rather heavily over O’Connell Street.
It had been agreed as well that the day before the big event the Revolutionary Council should choose a full successor to the lost leader so that he could then be presented to the faithful in the right atmosphere. Old Abraham Skillicorne was the most popular choice, but Peter Cormode was also seeking the vacant throne and there was some backing for Donald Fayrhare, Partly because he was the most likeable of men and Partly because he had been wounded when Tear had died. In the earliest stages of the contest—which with a Council seat myself now I was in a good position to appraise—I viewed the whole business with some amusement, but before long no one could think of anything else and I was fuming night and day with exasperation.
I even complained to Cormode.
‘It’s perfectly simple,’ he replied, ‘the movement needs leadership. Clifford Willine tells me you’re refusing to make up your mind over your vote. Do you think that’s altogether responsible?’
The Strong Man Page 12