‘My gun,’ I exclaimed without thinking, ‘they’ve made me lose that too.’
‘Your gun?’ Keig said in my ear, speaking urgently and sounding subdued angry. ‘You dropped it?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Damn it, by the hedge there.’
‘Wait.’
And without an instant’s delay Keig dropped to his belly and set off at a vigorous crawl through the rain-heavy grass.
Oh God, I thought, I’ve made him go back into where they’re shooting. He’ll be killed.
And it was true that the three Keepers were still solemnly shooting into the empty darkness. What Keig had said in one of his lumpy jokes about them earlier was certainly true: they had enough ammunition to make a Hallowe’en celebration that would last all night.
And then suddenly they stopped and, all three at once, flung themselves face-down flat. By my side I heard the rapid banging of shotguns. The rest of our party had appreciated the situation and had taken action.
Two minutes later Keig was back with us. He was holding my gun.
‘Here,’ he said, ‘can you carry it?’
‘Oh, yes,’ I answered, a true and wild joy leaping up in me. ‘So long as I don’t have to shoot with it.’
Keig ignored my childishness.
‘Come on then,’ he said. ‘We’ve done what we came here for. The sooner we’re on our way the better. I don’t want to end the night by finding we’ve had someone killed.’
And he swung off into the dark in the direction of the slight but adequate hiding place provided for us by the stream.
Twenty minutes later, after wading upstream much faster and less cautiously than we had slipped downstream before the attack, we emerged from the water and gathered in a sodden-legged but electrically cheerful group under cover of a clump of elder bushes.
Keig, who had brought up the rear, was the last to join us.
‘They haven’t tried to follow at all,’ he said, the flatness of his tone contrasting sharply with the incessant jokiness of the rest of us.
He turned to me.
‘That finger,’ he asked, ‘should we trv to get you to a doctor for it?’
‘Doctor, nothing,’ I replied light-heartedly, ignoring to my later shame the real concern Keig had expressed. ‘I fixed the whole thing by trailing the stub in the water as we came along. I think it’s even stopped bleeding now.’
I felt, in fact, wonderfully light-hearted, a nonchalant Douglas Fairbanks type hero making light of my wounds in what had turned out to be, after all, a curiously celluloid business.
‘It’s one of my best typewriting fingers, of course,’ I went on. ‘And I shall never bring the same subtle accuracy to my pieces again, but—’
‘Quiet,’ Keig hissed.
I thought at first that he was simply taking rather excessive precautions to make sure no one spotted us and, though I did not dare flout him, I mentally indulged in a few disloyal remarks about sometimes being too ploddingly careful.
But Keig had shut me up for quite a different reason.
‘Yes,’ he said after a moment, ‘I thought it was. There’s still firing from the camp.’
We all concentrated hard on listening then. And, sure enough, from the direction of the distant wrecked camp a steady patter of gunfire, like the tocking of some night-beetle, could be heard.
‘Damn,’ Keig said, with more bitterness than I had heard from him before.
We stood, suddenly much more subdued, and listened again to that distant irregular patter of sound. A sharp uneasiness ran from one to another of us. There ought not to be firing now.
I peered at my watch in the darkness and made some calculations. To my surprise I found that the whole battle, with all its wild confusion and with all the damage we had inflicted, could not have lasted much more than a quarter of an hour, on our side of the camp at least. But why had it apparently gone on for over half an hour on Donald Fayrhare’s side?
‘Quine,’ Keig said to me abruptly. ‘I want you and young Alan to go to the meeting place and wait there one hour past the final time but no more. The rest of us’ll go and see if we can find out what’s happening.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Come on, Alan.’
The boy and I made our way back along the route we had taken earlier. Deprived of the invisible strength that came from Keig’s presence, I began to feel unsure of myself. I soon became convinced I would somehow fail to find the place we were to wait at where the stream ran through the culvert under the road. And my finger began to hurt too. The last dregs of exhilaration oozed rapidly away.
But I pushed on and young Alan followed apparently oblivious of my lack of confidence. And one by one the landmarks I had forgotten came up, and before long we reached the culvert and I settled down to wait in its shadow. Young Alan, who was still in a state of high euphoria, was by no means content to stand in the darkness of the culvert however. A patch of blayberries grew on the road embankment and he ranged about scrabbling at it looking for early fruit. And whenever he did come back to where I was hiding he resumed a ceaseless prattle about wishing we had stayed at the camp till we had killed ‘every last one of the bastards’. He must have used those exact words twenty times at least.
At last, darts of pain seeming to shoot up in the whole length of my arm with every pulse of my blood, I could stand it no longer.
I swung my gun round with my good hand and pointed it straight at the poor boy.
‘Shut up,’ I said. ‘Shut up and stay right where you are beside me or, by God, I’ll let you have it.’
After that we stood there, the pair of us, at the edge of the wide round culvert in total silence with only the stream lazily chuckling at our feet in the darkness. Poor Alan watched me positively unblinkingly, as if he had unexpectedly found himself locked up in a cage with a python.
Our stay in these circumstances extended up to within a few minutes of the agreed time of departure. Then I heard more purposeful noises in the warm night than the faint rustlings that had been all that had so far disturbed us. Even Alan took his eyes off me.
We clambered cautiously a few feet up the embankment and looked about. A moment later there came a soft call. It was Keig.
I hurried up on to the road and saw to my relief that, stringing out behind him, there were more than the eighteen men he had set off with to find Donald.
‘Everything okay?’ I asked.
‘No,’ Keig said. ‘Fayrhare’s wounded. Badly.’
At that moment two of the men came stumbling through the darkness with a heavy slack form supported between them. Even at a first glance I thought there must be very little hope.
‘What happened?’ I asked Keig.
‘He didn’t make an end when the Keepers started to get a mite clever again. He was hit just before we reached them.’
He told me no more, then or later. It was only from the others that eventually I discovered what had in fact taken place: that Keig had come up with his party when the rest of Donald’s group had already begun to run off in a panic after he had been hit and laid low. Keig had simply said that he would go back and get him. And, with two of the newcomers, that was just what he had done. They had gone charging down at the small group of Keepers standing over Donald, yelling like dervishes. The Keepers had scuttled off and Keig and the other two had picked up Donald’s unconscious body and had made their way back, only eluding pursuit from the Keepers after a mile or more of hard running.
Now we picked a near-by clumsy field gate off its hinges and, with one of us at each corner and Donald’s unmoving form stretched in the middle, we set off for our old headquarters, which we had planned to move that night before the Keepers could retaliate for the attack on the camp. It was a much less happy journey than I had thought it would be when we had re-entered the so useful stream after our share of the battle. But we at least made good time.
We were within a quarter of a mile of the farm and the cows in the fields round about were beginning to rise to thei
r feet in the pre-dawn restlessness when, at the end of one of my turns as a carrier I put my hand on Donald’s chest where from time to time I had felt the slow irregular beat of his heart. I felt it no longer.
‘Keig,’ I called out. ‘He’s dead.’
The men who had picked up the gate ready to move off for the last lap lowered it to the ground again.
Keig came up and stood looking down at Donald’s body for what seemed a very long time, in complete silence. Then he lifted his head and glanced sharply about him in the before-dawn chill.
A small spinney lay about fifty yards away at the top of a gentle rise. It consisted, I suppose, of four or five big beech trees, making a patch of dark untillable ground. We had been accustomed to post one of our sentries in it. Now Keig pointed across towards it.
‘Bury him there,’ he said brutally. ‘And be quick about it.’
6
Fred Quiddie, who had been one of the four waiting to carry Donald on to our temporary headquarters in the scarcely expressed hope that something might be done for him, wheeled sharply round. He did not speak, but the violence of his movement expressed more clearly than words the shock he had felt at Keig’s brusque direction to bury at once and ignominiously the man who had for so long been very much one of us.
It was Jack Ascough, well reconciled to Keig’s leadership but never reconciled to the non-observance of the formulae he had learnt in his army days, who was the one to put the general objections into words.
‘But, sir ...’ he said.
Sir. No one but Ascough, and he only when thus caught off guard, ever addressed Keig as ‘sir’.
‘But, sir, we can’t hope to organize the proper ceremonial here and now, sir.’
Keig turned a totally inexpressive face towards him.
‘There isn’t any proper ceremonial,’ he said. ‘Fayrhare’s dead, he’s got to be buried. The spinney’ll suit nicely.’
There was a shimmer of protest among those gathered round the heavy gate we had lugged, with its heavy burden, all that way. It took the form of no more than half-exchanged glances and men taking half a pace backwards, but I saw it was nevertheless serious. I decided that, for once, I must take advantage of my friendship with Keig—if friendship was the word for the link between us—and try to intervene with him.
‘Keig,’ I exclaimed quickly.
The impassive face, broad of brow, deep-eyed, turned towards me in the fast growing light of this new and blackly depressing day.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘Donald was with us from the very earliest time. And he did damn well by us. I know he made a mistake last night, a bad one if you like. He disobeyed orders, and there’s no excuse for that. But you’re punishing him when he’s dead. For all our sakes, let us give him what decent burial we can.’
I thought I saw a flicker in Keig’s eyes. But, if I did, I was mistaken about its meaning.
‘You’re a fool,’ he burst out harshly. ‘D’you think I’d do that? Take revenge on someone dead for not obeying an order?’
‘Well then, what?’ I asked. ‘Why do you want him shoved away like this? Damn it, like a dog.’
For a moment or two Keig stood there in front of me. For the first time I saw him completely at a loss. He actually shifted from one foot to the other. But before long he forced himself to speak.
‘It’s not that,’ he said, as if each word had to be quarried from the rocky core of his mind. ‘No, it’s not that. Though I see how you thought it was. I ought to have made it clearer like. It wasn’t that. It was . . .’
A frown stood out on his forehead, and for once stayed there.
‘It was this,’ he went piecemeal on. ‘Fayrhare’s dead. Never mind how he came to die, he’s dead. He’s fin—He’s no more, gone. If there was time—If this was ordinary days, I’d go to his funeral like I’d go to any other man’s. But this isn’t an ordinary time. All that’s put away. There’s only one thing now: to topple Mylchraine. And we’ve got to look ahead, see what’s next. Always. And Fayrhare’s not next, he’s last. Poor soul, he’s over and done with now.’
His face, looking straight at me, seemed almost split across by that deep-sunk frown.
I turned away.
‘Pick up the gate,’ I said to the others. ‘We must bury him straightaway. It’s the right thing.’
And bury Donald before, weary and miserable, we packed up our scanty headquarters and moved off to a safer area, we did. I do not know how many of those who helped dig a shallow grave among the fibrous roots in the beech spinney agreed with me—not a lot to judge from murmurs I heard later—but some of them did, and I was not going to see Keig troubled more if I could help it.
As I stood watching the mean business of scuffling out that grave in the soft earth—my little wound excusing me from taking an active share in the work—I realized to the full what extra strain a leader must bear, and especially a solitary leader like Keig and one unsupported by any traditions of correct conduct in such circumstances.
I knew, too, that there would seldom be anything I could do to help him here.
But, if the day after the battle had seemed as black as any I had experienced since that extraordinary and distant evening when I had first met Keig in the lurid surroundings of the Rota, the blackness was only temporary. Donald’s death sent a heavy shadow indeed over those of us who had known him from the start, but it was a shadow rapidly chased away by the irresistible push of events. Because the battle in which he had died proved to be even more of a defeat for Mylchraine than even the substantial number of casualties we turned out to have inflicted should have warranted.
Evidently unable to believe that such a drubbing could have been inflicted on the cream of his Keepers by any force smaller than his own, he at once assumed that he had been misinformed about the whole character of Keig’s revolt and acted as if a substantial army had been brought into the field against him. He rapidly withdrew all his remaining strength, which was of course considerable, to Lesneven and the southern half of the island. So that on our Part, far from retreating to the safety of the mountains as we had expected we would have to do to avoid reprisals, we simply advanced farther and farther southwards, entirely unopposed.
Within a week of the night of the battle we had set up our headquarters with perfect confidence in the little town of Carnack, some miles south of the actual scene of the attack on the camp. And all this at cost to us of one killed and one, myself, wounded, if such a minor injury—the fingertip was already healing well—could qualify as a wound.
In Carnack we had even installed ourselves under a roof, that of the town’s single small hotel. I think it was from this time, in fact, that an incongruous mental picture I have of Keig must date. I see him sitting on the bed in a hotel room with a slate-topped wash-table drawn-up in front of him to work at, a tough-looking bandoliered figure firmly planted on a flower-patterned counterpane with his long-handled axe on the bed beside him.
It was certainly from the bar of this hotel that I rang up Peter Cormode in Dublin.
It was an odd business from the start. We were sitting in the bar-room which also served as a dining-room for the occasional guest the hotel had. There was no one else there except Francis Crowe and the landlord, a lank-faced lugubrious character with two great hanks of dark moustache, with young Alan lying fast asleep on one of the side-benches. Only Fred Quiddie of what might be called our regular headquarters staff was absent. Town life, even the life of such a staid little town as Carnack, was exercising its old fascination on him and he was off somewhere—what doing, in view of Keig’s strict attitude to camp-followers, I did not dare think. Certainly, however, if he wanted social activity even of the most innocent kind he had to go out for it, because not one of the townspeople ever ventured into the hotel after we had adopted it.
Keig, in fact, said something about this to the landlord.
‘We’re only guests here the same as anybody else, you know.’
As indeed we were, since Kei
g was punctilious in settling up for everything we had, solemnly conducting an accounting with the landlord at the end of each day. But if his message was passed on at all, it certainly had no effect. The citizens of Carnack shunned us. I was not altogether surprised: they seemed to be, even more than people in the surrounding wolds, stolid keepers-to-themselves, impossible to stir, dourly determined to stick to the firm routine of their lives, stony-eyed in face of all appeals. And we carried our war-like atmosphere around with us like a powerful cat-odour.
So there we were alone in the bar, Francis Crowe and I having an after-supper drink, Keig abstaining. And then, shrilling over our quiet talk, the telephone on the wall close to the bar rang out sharply.
The landlord moved across to the instrument in an instant and whipped the old-fashioned separate ear-piece off its hook.
‘Wrong number,’ he barked.
Keig got up from our table and went over to the telephone.
‘I didn’t know that was working,’ he said.
‘Why wouldn’t it be working?’ the landlord replied. ‘Not that anyone would have anything to ring through here about.’
He darted Keig a look of sombre triumph over the depth of the misery he felt himself reduced to. The gesture turned out to be one he must have wished he had not indulged himself in.
‘So we could use this to talk to anywhere?’ Keig pounced, jabbing a blunt forefinger at the phone.
‘Suppose you could,’ the landlord conceded. ‘But where would you want to talk to?’
A look of fright had appeared in his lacklustre eyes at the idea of such a villain as this speaking from his hotel.
‘Dublin,’ Keig said. ‘We’ll talk to Dublin.’
I will admit I was as astonished as the landlord. But a moment’s quick reflection showed me that, given the half-war, half-peace state of the northern part of the island, it was quite conceivable for a telephone here still to be capable of being connected to Dublin. Only one would never have thought of it, except that Keig had. And in doing so he had dealt with the problem of being totally cut off from the outside world that we had suffered from ever since our famous radio-transmitter had been battered to pieces in the sea.
The Strong Man Page 20