Now Keig allowed Cormode to have the lengthy bout of explanation that his own sharp remark had given birth to, but it was no longer a lecture. Cormode stood directly in front of Keig, bent forward at a slight angle, a shininess on his pale skin, a sharpness in his voice, and pushed hard to make a hopeless case. At the end of it Keig asked one more question.
‘When are you to meet them next?’
‘A fortnight tomorrow. As I said, we’ve a long way to—’
‘Tell them the meeting’s for a week today. And they’re to come to me here.’
I had not been altogether happy about Keig’s treatment of Cormode. He too after all had been an exile from Mylchraine’s tyranny and his very concern with such things as the minutiae of chairmanship was an acknowledgement, if a not very attractive one, of the democratic principle. But, for all the aggressiveness with which Keig had taken negotiations with the estate-owners out of Cormode’s hands, I guessed he must have considerable reservations about meeting them. I suspect that he was a little frightened, not of their strength in any contest of wills, but of their ability to make small talk.
Certainly as the day for the meeting drew near—the peremptory ‘a week today’ had been accepted tamely enough by the estate-owners’ informal committee—he began to fuss almost like an old woman, a thing I had hardly ever known him do. He fussed about the hall, he fussed about the sort of table that would be appropriate, he fussed about chairs.
To begin with I had rather liked it: it showed a kind of childishness about him that was not often present. It even brought out my protective instincts. If he really was scared of meeting the assembled aristocracy of Oceana—pitiful and provincial though this was in actual fact—then I was more than happy to put at his service my ‘experience of the world’. But then I began to see it all in another light. Keig, the child, vanished: Keig, the capricious autocrat, stepped on to the stage.
When I had arranged the chairs I had acquired with the utmost punctiliousness round a big cloth-covered table he came in to the hall to inspect. There was a long silence.
‘Drink,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t we be giving them something to drink? That’s what people do, isn’t it? I suppose there may be something to it.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘This is a meeting to discuss business only. Drinks would be out of place. Definitely.’
Keig grunted and went back to his room.
I joined him after making a few final arrangements. But I had positively to persuade him to tackle our routine tasks.
We were busy over a sketch-map of Mylchraine’s defences on the coast south of Portharnel when the sentry outside called that Cormode was there, and a moment later the man himself put his blue-suited shoulders in at the door.
‘They’ve arrived,’ he said. ‘They’re all here. I came with their chairman, Colonel Aleyn.’
I looked at Keig who was standing in silence. Did he know whom Colonel Aleyn was? I did. He was the owner of the house in the remote north that we had burgled on our second day in the island. Then I saw that Keig had recognized the name, but he went on standing there, thinking.
Then, after a pause which seemed to last two or three minutes but which, I suppose, can have been of only some twenty seconds, he stepped forward.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘If you’re ready, I am.’
In the hall at the head of a group of half-a-dozen palpable estate-owners—two actually in plus-fours—was the man I knew at once to be Colonel Aleyn. He was elderly, probably in his seventies, but he held himself with that ramrod straightness of back which some former soldiers never lose. His face was lined and serious, with a neat grey moustache above an unsmiling mouth.
Cormode walked up radiating sticky embarrassment.
‘Colonel,’ he said, ‘I would like to introduce Mr Keig, our military leader.’
‘Good morning,’ Keig said, extremely creakily.
He glanced at the cloth-covered table, and I wondered if I did not see a spark of reassurance in his eyes.
‘Will you sit down?’ he said, with a stiff gesture.
There was a fair amount of fuss as Colonel Aleyn and the five other estate-owners found themselves places. Keig planked himself down in the centre on the opposite side to them, leaning his axe up against his chair in his customary manner. I quickly slipped into the seat beside him.
The moment the team opposite had got themselves sorted out Keig began. He addressed them almost as if he was a prison warder getting on terms with a bunch of semi-imbecile convicts.
‘Now you’re not letting the men on your estates come and fight Mylchraine. And it’s got to stop. Straightaway. Is there any reason why it shouldn’t? Any reason at all?’
There was an affronted rustle opposite.
Colonel Aleyn, who seemed most in control of himself, leant forward.
‘My dear Mr Keig,’ he said, ‘we certainly are not going to let our labourers and tenants leave the farms. That’s where they belong. And we see no purpose at all in them going off to join a set of fellows of your sort.’
Keig glowered forward an inch more.
‘The purpose of them joining me is to finish Mylchraine,’ he said.
‘I wonder,’ Aleyn replied.
Keig gave his small quick frown.
‘What other purpose could there be?’
‘A hundred other purposes, my good chap. To line their pockets, to grab themselves women, to have a gun to loose off at all and sundry, to try what it feels like to be top dog for a bit—with no responsibilities. All or any of those.’
‘No men join me for any of that,’ Keig slapped out.
‘Oh, come now,’ Aleyn answered. ‘You can’t tell me that, whatever outward purpose young fellows who join you may profess, what the best part of them are really after is to lay their hands on what they can get.’
Keig half started out of his chair. I resisted an impulse to restrain him. He was letting himself get riled frighteningly quickly.
‘But I do tell you,’ he spluttered at Aleyn now. ‘I tell you this straight: no man under my orders does anything at all but fight Mylchraine.’
‘So you may believe, Mr Keig. But what happens when you’re not there on the spot?’
‘Nothing,’ Keig declared.
Colonel Aleyn leant back.
‘Now, I’m not implying that you do not mean well,’ he said. ‘But I’ve had some experience of men under arms. And I know what happens unless discipline’s kept tight. I’m not blaming you, but I am saying that we don’t want our young fellows leaving the farms to go chasing the girls and living off the fat of the land.’
‘And I’m telling you no man under me does that,’ Keig shouted back.
I felt an inner flush of shame. Aleyn raised his grey eyebrows.
‘Yes, but it’s not much use you simply telling us these things aren’t so,’ he said. ‘The fact is from my knowledge of the young man under arms I know them to be so, and I intend to do every single thing in my power to make sure lawlessness is kept to a minimum.’
‘And are you saying I don’t do that?’ Keig replied, still inclined to shout.
Aleyn stayed calm.
‘I believe in straight talking, Mr Keig,’ he answered. ‘Yes, I am saying I think you and your so-called troops are responsible for the appalling state this island’s got into in the last year, and I intend to see your activities are as restricted as I can make them.’
‘You’re telling me my men are out for what they can get?’
Keig’s face had actually flushed with anger and I was profoundly wishing myself elsewhere when, to my total surprise, he jerked round and glared straight at me.
‘Quine,’ he said, ‘tell them about Quiddie.’
3
It was only the complete abruptness of Keig’s demand that made it possible for me to respond. After so many months of forcing myself to keep the thought of the brutally high-handed manner of Fred Quiddie’s death out of my mind, I could not have brought the facts out into the open had I n
ot been jerked into it. The sweat, I found, was standing all over my body when I had finished the story. What I was seeing then was something I did not put into words: Keig’s unmoving face as Fred’s body slowly tilted over on to the pallid tiles of that conservatory. For the thousandth time I wondered, now with redoubled sharpness, what sort of a man fundamentally it was who could have carried out that act.
Opposite me Colonel Aleyn and the others sat silent till at last Aleyn gave a dry cough.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. Very well, I am prepared to concede that your men, Mr Keig, are kept under better discipline than I thought.’
Keig grimly nodded acknowledgement.
‘And yet,’ Aleyn resumed, ‘I must equally tell you I still feel by no means inclined to let the hands go, even to become well-disciplined soldiers. Half of my days were spent as a soldier and I put the military life second to none. But we haven’t been accustomed to looking for a military solution to our troubles in Oceana, and I don’t think we ought to be today.’
Keig’s open palm smacked down on the table in front of him. Its boards boomed out.
‘That’s damned foolishness,’ he said. ‘Haven’t you people got eyes in your heads? Do you really believe Mylchraine can be stopped beyond by fighting him? Do you know what he’s had done to men, and to women? What he’s doing still?’
Opposite him Aleyn remained calm.
‘I’m not saying Mr Mylchraine’s any sort of a saint,’ he replied. ‘But he is the legal ruler of this island.’
‘That man’s no more legal ruler of Oceana than a crow’s the legal ruler of a dead sheep it’s tearing the guts out of,’ Keig retorted. ‘Mylchraine cursed and bullied and cheated his way to where he got, and I’m putting him out of it.’
I thought I saw at this a quick look of pure disdain in the colonel’s severe steady face.
‘Yes, Mr Mylchraine may have bullied and cheated,’ he said. ‘But let’s be clear. You’re no better, Mr Keig.’
My first instinct was shocked anger. But even as it welled up I knew Aleyn might be speaking no more than the truth. ‘I’m putting him out of it’: Keig’s words seemed as much a claim to ultimate power as anything that had come from Mylchraine.
And Keig was blustering, surely, now.
‘I’m no better than Mylchraine, am I?’ he shouted.
‘From all I hear,’ Aleyn replied, ‘you’ve done your share of bullying, and of looting.’
Keig’s hand dropped like a weighted sling down to the handle of the axe beside his chair.
No, I thought, he can’t.
‘Looting?’ he yelled in a voice which reverberated round the bare hall. ‘You dare say looting.’
‘Yes,’ Aleyn said quietly. ‘My own house was looted by you and your men.’
And Keig acknowledged the truth of it.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You’re right. We did loot your house, if you like to call it that. If we hadn’t been unlucky and been set on, we’d have left you a receipt. For twelve shotguns, a quantity of food, and no cartridges. Oh, aye, and one little razor.’
Oddly it was this last item that the colonel fastened on.
‘My favourite razor,’ he said. ‘Taken from my own bathroom.’
Keig looked at him.
‘You can have it back if you want,’ he said, somewhat stiffly. ‘I’ve still got it. I use it every morning.’
‘Well, I will have it, if you don’t mind,’ Aleyn replied. ‘I’ve never got on so well with my other one.’
‘Aye,’ Keig said. ‘It’s a nice little razor right enough. It’s got a balance to it. Still, it’s yours if you want.’
And, to my continuing surprise, in mild small talk about the ins-and-outs of shaving Keig and Aleyn began exchanging civilities like any pair of old ambassadors.
It was not the end of the clash. But it was the beginning of the end, and by the time the meeting broke up it had been agreed that we would stop recruiting until the harvest was in, but that after that no one would put any obstacles in the way of the men who wanted to join us.
Sheer bloody-minded toughness is not always a disadvantage for a negotiator, I found myself reflecting as I left the hall.
In fact this meeting materially advanced our eventual assault on Lesneven. For one thing, although we did no recruiting, a steady stream of new men presented themselves all summer, and, for another thing, Cormode now his one administrative failure could be forgotten loosened the purse-strings with despatch and pushed through the purchase of howitzers in a way that did full justice to his reputation as a getter-of-things-done.
Mylchraine, on the other hand, failed to get things done. The months went by, June, July, August, and still the flame-throwing tanks did not materialize. We gathered eventually that the deal had gone through, but no country was willing to face the outcry bound to go up if the much-publicized despot of Oceana was permitted to ship weapons through its ports.
There were moments when I questioned the way we left so much to that getter-of-things-done Cormode. But in the two and a half years we had been in the island we had become soldiers and. extraordinarily but truly, nothing else. So it came naturally simply not to think about anything except the immediate task. Yet one moment of doubt I do remember.
Keig had seized the opportunity presented by fine weather after a spell of cloaky days to make a study in good visibility of a section of the front a few miles south of Hoddick, a point that was likely to be vital in the great assault, and he and I had gone up to the most forward observation-post in the area, a platform formed by the bole of a huge oak, probably one of the first to be felled when Mylchraine began using the island’s long-maturing trees as quick revenue, to judge by the screen of well-covered stems all round it. For nearly half an hour I had lain silent as Keig’s field-glasses had methodically roamed over the landscape. Then at last he began to talk, outlining ways of moving men up to the enemy lines.
I was surprised at the size of the force he was envisaging and said something about whether we would be able to spare so many men for this small area.
‘You think the estate-owners won’t let us recruit after all?’ Keig said.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘From what I hear—not that you learn all that much from the wolds lot—there’s already hardly an estate where anyone puts anything in their way. You’ve certainly got your friend Aleyn working for you now.’
Keig grunted. I think my reference to ‘your friend’ pleased him a little.
‘What do you think then?’ he asked. ‘That everything’s not all right back there?’
So you are worried, I thought.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘we don’t know all that much about what’s going on, do we? Did you know Cormode’s formed a political party, for instance? It’s called the Progress party.’
‘What does he want to do that for? Were there political Parties before Mylchraine closed up the Rota?’
I smiled at the extent of his innocent ignorance.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘there were Parties, but most of the Delegates used to be elected on their own merits.’
‘And Cormode wants to be a Delegate when the Rota is opened again?’
‘Of course he does. He’d like to be more than that, come to think of it. He’d like to be President of the Rota.’
‘But he’d be no—’
A stir of movement in the Keepers’ lines attracted his attention. He brought up his field-glasses.
‘No,’ he said after a few moments. ‘Just a relief party coming up to that machine-gun in the big bramble thicket straight ahead.’
‘Keig,’ I said, ‘have you been seeing yourself as President when all this is over?’
Beside me Keig’s broad body shifted sharply.
‘When all this is over,’ he said. ‘You go on like you think you’ve only got to say it. “When all this is over,” and it’ll just be all over. Well, that’s not the way of it. See that field there, this side of the bramble-patch? I reckon eighty men’ve got to go right acros
s that before too long. Straight across. There’s no way round that’ll be quick enough. How many of ’em do you think are going to reach those brambles?’
I wondered whether to try and explain that I was indeed frightenedly aware of what was going to happen. But I saw he was right to rebuke me: if we were going to crush Mylchraine during some few days and nights probably towards the end of October, then neither he nor I had even half a moment to think about anything beyond that. Concentration alone would do it, especially from the man who, in that one strong body of his, was the tiny cell that powered our whole enterprise.
Concentration was what our enterprise certainly got during that autumn, our third on the island and the sixth I had spent with Keig. Simply inexperienced in all the business of fighting a real war, we were embarking on what even among the bigger nations of the world would have been considered quite a respectable battle, worthy of its three lines in the history books. ‘The assault on Lesneven took place in the autumn of that year and marked the final—’ The final what? The ‘final ascendancy of the despot of Oceana’? It very well might be. Or ‘the final triumph of the peasant-born soldier-statesman Thomas Keig’? It had to be.
In the bare Kermaddack Assembly Room table after table was set up to deal with all the paperwork. Keig and paperwork, I had never thought to see the two so linked. But you cannot bring hundreds of fighting-men into position along a front that extends for thirty miles ready for a single great attack without making innumerable lists, preparing sheet upon sheet of orders, sending thousands of memos—‘reminders’ Keig always called them, and more credit to him.
But as if to point out to us we were not simply shuffling pieces of paper but sending one lot of men to death perhaps at one place and another lot to death at a different place there came at almost every hour of the day through the tall grey-glassed windows the tramp of marching feet. It was, I admit, hardly the disciplined crack of several hundred heels descending as one of a British Guards regiment. Our men still loped along as in our earliest days in straggling lines. But the sound was that of soldiers, if only because we were now able to equip every fighting-man with a stout pair of steel-tipped boots.
The Strong Man Page 33