We had timed our arrival so that we were almost the first to enter the chamber. An attendant, wearing, dug up from heaven knows where, the picturesque old green uniform with gold-laced tricorne hat that the Rota attendants had always worn, showed us to two small gilt chairs that had been placed for us just by the door into the upper wide encircling gallery.
We were to be the only ones other than the elected Delegates present on that day. Keig because he had been asked, myself because Keig had said he wanted to have me there.
The attendant, unable to keep a deep slow smile of satisfaction off his face for all his desire to look properly grave, left us with a clumsy attempt at a bow. I looked round at the building I had not set foot in since that fateful, extraordinary and tawdry night six years ago when Keig had burst into Mylchraine’s esbat—and into my life—a hounded, half-naked, panting, bewildered man.
All traces of the nasty uses the building had been put to since it had last seen the debates of the Rota had been energetically removed. Gone were the yards of black bunting and the obscene pictures that had been nailed to the sage-green plaster of the walls; gone were the laden tables and the crude torches. The little circular-shaped hall had regained all its simple dignity. The central floor was, as had been customary, entirely bare, with its radiating bands of alternate white and grey clean and uncluttered ready for the speakers who one by one would come down from their places on the surrounding green benches to address their fellow Delegates from this area. The leather of the benches had been scrupulously patched where it had become torn; the clerks’ table, gleamingly polished, had on it two new record books lying open at white untouched pages. Above, the President’s chair stood empty, awaiting the election of its first occupant.
Even the holes in the plasterwork had been filled in, I noticed, and repainted to the exact shade of their surrounds. I recognized Abraham Skillicorne’s hand in this. He had been, I believe, the only Delegate from the old Rota to have been elected to the new. Restoring the chamber to its exact former state would be the sort of act of piety his tradition-loving soul would delight in.
All honour to him, too. Seeing the chamber, under its quiet low dome, back again in the state it always ought to have been in, I felt that this summed up all we had struggled for. Suddenly tears were welling up behind my eyes.
I wondered if Keig was feeling the same emotions. Or, my spectre of doubt re-awakening abruptly inside me, was he I asked myself busy with grim calculations and plans.
He was sitting there on his small elegant-looking gilt chair a couple of feet away from me, his axe—that killing axe—propped incongruously beside him, and his eyes were traversing the scene below us. But they had that old inward-turned look in them that baffled me now just as much as it always had done.
What I did see, looking at him now, were the deeper cut lines that surrounded those eyes and the plentiful grey in his tousled once-black hair. Even his massive shoulders were bowed a little, I thought, not so much from the physical efforts of the last six years as from the weight of knowledge that that time had brought him. He had learnt unexpected things about himself I did not doubt, about the buried reserve of implacable toughness, of ruthlessness even, that had lain for all his early years untouched and unneeded in his nature. And he had learnt equally a good deal about other people—how to use them for his ends, how to make them find in themselves strengths they had no idea they possessed, and what treacherous and unexpected weaknesses often lay uncharted in even the plainest of characters. What did he mean to do with this double knowledge, I asked.
And I could not answer. I could not answer.
I turned away to look down into the chamber: the Delegates were beginning to swarm in. They entered by twos and threes, stood glancing round briefly on the central floor, and then, like men in a daze, went and took their places in the encircling rows of green-leather seats.
I recognized a face or two. Skillicorne, of course, now deputy leader of Cormode’s Progress party, with the comfortable knowledge that Oceana’s first organized political group had exceeded its own best hopes in the election, beaming and amiable to everybody—though no doubt unable to stop himself, old politico that he was, from assessing strengths and frailties, potential trouble and reliable tractability.
And there was tubby little Francis Crowe. He had already set up a barber’s shop in Lesneven, bursting to install all the latest fads, and he had been elected for the Brignogan ward. But he was our only former comrade-in-arms that I was able to spot.
The re-enfranchised citizens of Oceana, in fact, where they had not elected the impressive contestants of the Progress party, had voted for solid respectable men they had known all their lives, men who had had little to do with Mylchraine but who equally had had nothing to do with Keig.
I leant across and tapped Keig on the knee now.
‘You could call them sheep and cattle,’ I said, jerking my head at the assembling Delegates. ‘The sheep Cormode chose and the cattle that wandered into the pen as well.’
Keig looked levelly at the Delegates.
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘Not many lean old wolves.’
‘There’s gratitude for you,’ I said, idly enough.
‘No,’ Keig answered, with that old immovable seriousness, ‘this is what we were fighting for: for their right to send who they want here.’
There was a stir down below. I looked and saw that Cormode had come in attended by a small band of intimates from the Dublin days, people like Willine, the poet. Cormode’s deep-set eyes were flashing with unquellable pleasure at this moment and his voice was loud with excitement as he went up to Abraham Skillicorne and congratulated him on his arrangements.
‘Someone’s happy,’ I said to Keig.
‘He’s got his work to do at last,’ Keig answered.
And then Skillicorne down on the central floor, seeing the last of the Delegates taking their places, clapped his hands for silence—rather like a lady teacher, I thought—and the meeting, the historic occasion, began.
‘Fellow Delegates,’ Skillicorne said in his high rather piping, but carrying voice. ‘Fellow Delegates, I think our first action today, on this day, must be to elect from amongst us a President, to choose one of our number to take that time-honoured chair and to guide us in all we do and say.’
All eyes turned to the high-backed vacant chair above the clerks’ table.
‘Fellow Delegates,’ Abraham Skillicorne went on, ‘I should like to propose to you the name of Peter Cormode for that office.’
He paused for a moment, beamingly.
‘And I feel,’ he went on, ‘that it would be not inappropriate for me to add to his name the words “Former Chairman of the Revolutionary Council of Oceana”.’
There was a rich murmur of agreement. However conservatively many of the citizens of Oceana had voted, everybody here knew where honour was due. The name of the Revolutionary Council was potent indeed. As Abraham Skillicorne had exactly calculated.
He looked all round the circular chamber now.
‘Very well,’ he said, ‘in the absence of any further nomination I hereby propose that Peter Cormode be elected our President by acclamation.’
And, I mentally added, without putting a lot of honest Delegates to the cold decision of voting yes or no for someone who was after all something of an upsetter of the placid order of things.
From the two circles of green-leather seats there was the beginning of a long murmur of acquiescence. But suddenly it came to an abrupt halt. A voice was shouting something.
It was little Francis Crowe. He had jumped to his feet and was waving his hand like a schoolboy in a hurry to leave the room.
‘Please,’ he called out. ‘Please.’
Everybody turned and looked at him. He blushed, painfully obviously.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Er—no. Fellow Delegates, I—I don’t know how to do this, but—Well, I want to—’
He looked upwards with a sudden fiery little express
ion.
‘Damn it all,’ he said. ‘We all know who really saved this country. There’s only one person who should be President and that’s—Look, I propose the name of Thomas Keig.’
There was a confused buzz of questioning down below. I saw Cormode lean over from his seat in the front row and beckon urgently to Skillicorne. They had a short and agitated conference while I toyed with the idea that Keig had put Francis Crowe up to this, and at once dismissed the notion. Poor Francis, his intervention had been all too plainly a spur-of-the-moment affair.
Then Skillicorne held up his hand—I remember how large and white it looked—and begged for silence.
‘Fellow Delegates,’ he said, smiling his old ambiguous watery smile. ‘Fellow Delegates, I fear it is my duty, as one who has had the honour to sit in this Rota before, to point out to those of you who may not be as well acquainted with our customs and rules as they might be, that the regulations have always been quite clear. Clear beyond doubt. The President of the Rota must come from among the ranks of the elected Delegates.’
He surveyed the chamber, dipping his gaze I thought as it chanced to pass over Keig and myself in the gallery.
‘After all,’ he went on, ‘what we are doing is to elect a person to preside over this assembly, no more than that.’
I leant over towards Keig.
‘Only whoever presides over this assembly happens to hold executive power,’ I said.
Keig made no reply.
Down below us, poor little Francis Crowe slowly subsided back into his seat shamed into total silence.
‘Then if there are no further candidates ...’ Abraham Skillicorne said, a little hastily.
A steadily rising tide of applause from the Delegates provided him with answer enough. He went across to Cormode’s place and led him, with something of the air of a father leading his son up to receive a prize, to the President’s chair.
I turned half-round to Keig, grabbing at this chance to penetrate his time-encrusted defences.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘this must be what Cormode’s dreamt of ever since Marshall Tear went. I wonder how he’ll make out. He likes holding the reins, you know. Always did.’
‘There’s not enough to him to do more’n a mite of harm,’ Keig answered.
It was a good judgment. And it got my probing precisely nowhere.
The applause continued. Cormode sat in the high-backed chair and listened to it, looking round, with the light of triumph glowing shinily on his pale cheeks, at all the assembled faces—which seemed to me at that moment to be divided entirely between the white-faced, sharp-eyed and smooth, and the red, gog-glingly heavy and stupid.
At last their plaudits began to die away and Cormode rose to his feet.
I leant back towards Keig.
‘Brace yourself for a solid hour of verbal book-keeping,’ I said.
And that, it seemed, was precisely what we were in for. So it was some time after Cormode’s review had reached the events in which I had had my own minor share that I began to pay much attention. But when I did so I sat up abruptly in a sudden blaze of white anger.
The account I was hearing was quietly and blandly distorting what really had happened. It was a version of affairs, I realized soon enough, which set out deliberately to push Keig from the centre of the stage. To hear Cormode placidly retailing event after event one would have thought that right up until the final few months of the struggle Keig had played only a clearly subordinate role.
I was paying now the very closest attention, but I had to concede that Cormode had re-written his history with a great deal of skill. I believe if in the first flush of my anger I had caught him out in some deliberate untruth I would have upped and denounced him on the spot. But never once was there an opportunity of pinning him down. Yet the general impression his whole speech was leaving was entirely plain. It was that the war had been fought by the Revolutionary Council from Dublin, with the Council directing the various forces on the island through links more formal and less until the moment had come for the move to Oceana and the final welding together of disparate elements to make up the army that had ‘under our chosen commander-in-chief brought Mylchraine to his knees.
And it occurred to me, listening hard for one fatal slip, that to almost every one of Cormode’s hearers all this would appear to be not a gigantic misrepresentation but rather the clear, perhaps mildly surprising, explanation of muddled events which at the time had presented the appearance of almost complete chaos. None but those who had been in direct contact with Keig in his years in the island could really know the truth. And, besides myself, there was only poor, already crushed Francis Crowe present who was in that position.
And what a monstrous distortion it all was, I thought furiously. Here was Cormode, who had backed the misguided Marshall Tear, who had when the Revolutionary Council at last began acquiring funds procrastinated appallingly over launching a new attack, who when Keig had established himself on the island and had succeeded in inflicting a substantial defeat on the Keepers had found excuse after excuse for not supplying extra arms because—I felt convinced of it now—he must have heard that Mylchraine had procured stocks of napalm and wanted to see the result before taking any risk, here was the man who had made all these timorous errors, not forgetting his backing of the brutal and flashy Marcus Calo, now standing here blatantly allocating to himself and his precious Council all the credit for the victory Keig, and Keig virtually alone, had won.
I turned to Keig now.
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘you ought to put a stop to this. It’s sheer distortion of the truth.’
But all the response I got was a slow decisive negative shake of the head.
What did it mean?
I longed to take Keig by the shoulders and shake some fuller reply out of him—as if I could ever have done that—but here we were more or less trapped in a public place and I could not even raise my voice above a whisper.
This self-reliant taciturnity of Keig’s had hardly mattered when he was only his own master. But now, now that he had made himself a power in the land for better or worse, it mattered like hell to know what he was thinking. And I did not know.
Did this silence of his in the face of all Cormode was saying mean that he was so sure of himself that all the fabrication we had been treated to could be regarded as so much soap-bubble blowing? Was he certain that before long it would all be wafted away and his own account of things would stand four-square in its place? To all appearances, this had begun to seem less and less likely. But I could not believe that Keig would willingly allow his solid position to be sapped to nothing in this fashion. And the more daring Cormode’s displacing of him grew the more convinced I became that Keig had something hidden in reserve which in due time would turn the tables utterly.
Of course, I argued to myself, he has said that he is here to do what the Rota asks him to do and perhaps at this moment he is simply taking in the fact that, with the Rota dominated by Cormode, he is not going to be asked to do anything. I wondered then if that was what Cormode’s offer of a Progress party seat had been about. Was it Cormode attempting to make the same sort of test of him that I had tried to make with my questions, seeking to find out what his intentions were? And had Keig’s refusal of the seat, no doubt curt enough, led to this scheme of Cormode’s to play him down into nothingness?
But as I listened on to Cormode’s nearly concluded travesty version of the island’s immediate past his recital took a new turn.
‘So much for the main outline of the course which events took to bring us to this moment,’ he said. ‘But before I come to look forward to a happier future I would like to examine in more detail some Particular sections of the past. And I do this because I very much fear that these events of yesterday may, if they are not brought fully to light, yet cast a baneful influence on this future of ours which ought to be untarnished by even the shadows of misery.’
There was a movement among the Delegates all round him. It w
as not so much a rustle of re-awakened attention—whatever effect Cormode’s style of oratory had had on me it had held the rest of his audience all along in a wondering grip—but a single concerted leaning forward in expectation.
‘Fellow Delegates,’ that chill voice continued, ‘I have to inform you that the man we entrusted with the command of our forces in the late struggle has manifested in the past—and shows no sign today of any intent to effect an alteration—a settled contempt for the democratic processes which he purported himself to be fighting for.’
There was a tiny sharp hiss from all around at this sudden newly-opened prospect. But not one face turned away from Cormode and looked up in the direction where everybody knew Keig was to be seen.
‘This settled contempt for the proper authority of the people’, Cormode proceeded, ‘began as long ago as the very start of our active revolutionary struggle. Let me give you just two examples. First, Thomas Keig, being possessed of a considerable sum in gold seized from the tyrant Mylchraine, refused to place that sum under the authority of the Revolutionary Council, and at no subsequent time did he cease to retain improper control of those funds. Second, Thomas Keig, in defiance of the agreed policy of the Revolutionary Council, attempted a landing on the shores of this island. That landing, as you know, was in a measure a success. Keig and his companions contrived at least to avoid capture for a long period and eventually were able to join with the other forces of the revolution in the work of deposing the tyrant.’
He fixed the group of Delegates directly opposite him with a cold glance of unrelaxed concentration.
‘But at what a cost that landing was made,’ he said. ‘It is not too much to state that the preparations which the tyrant Mylchraine undertook as a result of that hasty and under-prepared move were such that they were directly responsible for causing the campaign to be prolonged far longer than was necessary, at an expense of how much blood and misery I need not say.’
The Strong Man Page 38