Abercare, at his desk already, told Suttor to feel free to smoke. Unless events were too pressing for that.
“No,” said Suttor, placing a brief written report on the table and bringing out his fashionable cigarettes. “I don’t think pressing is the exact word. There are certainly reportable incidents. But the duty officer has no doubt told you this, and some of it you witnessed earlier in the evening for yourself.”
The colonel opened the report. As he read, he, too, pulled out a cigarette and lit it.
“So, reportable,” he said, and inhaled from his cigarette and continued to read. Then he looked up at Suttor, rather reassured. Suttor looked back at him with those blank, handsome, hostile eyes, and began his verbal report. The feverish walking about, hut to hut, had continued. Nevski, said Suttor, had had the guard take him into the entertainment hall to confirm that there were no play rehearsals going on at the moment. All the costumes were hung up. But that was understandable given that half the cast of future shows would no longer be in Compound C to perform. On a slightly later visit to a hut, he’d discovered that, partially hidden behind a draped blanket hung from a mosquito net bracket, the man they called Sakura was in drag, all queened up, as if intending to perform later. If anything were seriously untoward, Nevski reported, he doubted the female impersonator would have gone to the trouble of attiring himself.
Suttor had delivered the report until this point through lips pursed around his cigarette. Even though the man had been offered the opportunity to smoke, to deliver a report in this way—in a manner appropriate to a recording studio, perhaps—affronted the regular officer in Abercare. This apparently minor gaffe of Suttor’s seemed like a case of mockery—was almost certainly mockery. Even so, that didn’t worry Ewan Abercare as much as the competing images of a deserted stage but a female impersonator dressed as for a performance. That paradox enhanced a little the unease he’d contracted at the Garners.
Abercare said, “We’ve given them free run tonight. But we must tell the triumvirate tomorrow that we won’t tolerate all this running around tomorrow night, or the next. As far as I’m concerned, they’ve had their party.”
“Yes,” said Suttor dreamily. “I think they have. I have to remind you, though, that if they hadn’t been told about the move, this would have been a more normal night.”
Abercare stared at him. “Would tomorrow have been a normal night, if they found out by accident? There’d be greater unrest still.” He broke off, thinking, This is not wise—having a debate with the bugger who had his cigarette cocked upwards like a bookmaker about to write a ticket. It seemed to have gone out, too.
“Do you want the machine guns manned?” asked Suttor. “As a display of serious intentions.”
“There’s no need,” said Abercare, and chose to leave his reasons unexplained. The guard had been doubled, for Christ’s sake!
“Machine guns in the wrong place,” muttered Suttor, like a civilian. “And unmanned.”
Abercare said, “Suttor! None of that.”
He was thinking he would contact the training camp, and remembered the two tottering young trainee warriors he had passed in Gawell that night. Training brigade. The backup. He got up now, ending the interview with Suttor. Too much time spent on humoring this scribbler! Suttor got his own back by holding that bloody cigarette, which should by now have been ground out in the ashtray, cupped in his left hand as he saluted.
Uneasy that he was working from such imponderables, which seemed most imponderable now, at midnight, Abercare called the duty officer at the training camp. He told the man, a true veteran, minder of boys, to inform Colonel Deakin that the signs in Gawell were ambiguous and that Deakin should entertain for the next three nights the possibility of an outbreak at the prison camp and make his dispositions accordingly.
He felt less restless in his soul as he hung up. He returned now to his quarters and, opening the door into the warm living room, saw that the fire had burned down a little. He smelled an acid sourness in the air. Mrs. Galloway lay on the floor with a spilled gin bottle. She had been sick within the ambit of the spillage. He was appalled, but making jolly pronouncements—“Here we go, Thelma!”—he lifted her from the floor to an easy chair. Her body was firm in his arms, a young woman’s body still, asserting its hope for appreciation or even something as fulsome, as un-Gawell-like, as adoration. She opened her eyes and groaned.
“Sorry,” she told him. “Came on sudden.” She belched and laughed a private laugh. “Madame Garner’s bloody hospitality . . . It creeps up on you, doesn’t it?”
He hoped none of this acrid smell would attach itself to him. He dumped her in the easy chair again and covered her, and picked up the bottle of largely spilled gin, and then set himself to considering whether to clean up the mess himself. That would create a supposition he had something to hide. He went to his bathroom and got a bleached towel of pale khaki and threw it over the mess. Then he called the guardhouse and demanded to know where the truck and mechanic were.
“There’s been a problem, sir, with the tow truck.”
“It is broken down too?” he asked incredulously.
“A steering shaft broke,” the orderly officer explained. “It wasn’t properly reported earlier today.”
Like most bloody things, he was tempted—in his impotence—to say.
“They’re working on it now with welding tools.”
He could not tell the officer the cause of his impatience. It struck him, too, that Thelma Galloway could hardly be transported home, in this state, in a tow truck, even when its steering shaft was repaired. He would send her home in one of the garrison cars and be quit of her. It would reflect badly on her, in that she was clearly well gone. But she could afford that, and he could not afford to have her here long enough for her to recover. He did not care about adverse gossip, except for the way it might reflect on Emily.
“Send me a car and driver. I think my poor driver’s already asleep. I need to drop the person whose car broke down earlier back to her home.”
He went into his room to get an extra blanket and took the chance to strap on his Webley & Scott revolver. If he had ordered the doubling of the guard, then he should make this concession to precaution. But he did not know whether to stay with Thelma till the driver came or leave again to inspect the perimeters and have the four machine gunners roused. “You’re a bloody nuisance,” he told her under his breath. Even if she heard him she would have forgotten it by tomorrow.
He felt an unwarranted stab of responsibility. A potent aftershock from his original culpability. In scalding memory of his crimes he could somehow not avoid uttering a sudden and sharp suppressed gasp of pain and self-condemnation. This sort of thing had happened to him before in private moments. But this one wasn’t private. In her half sleep Thelma Galloway murmured, “Come again?”
“Have a sleep,” he ordered her, almost gently, as he blazed with memory. The storekeeper’s wife at the bush hamlet of Elgin remained with him acutely. He thought it would be wonderful to share the story sub rosa with someone like Delaney. But speaking it—that would be the problem.
29
On his tour of the sentry posts, Abercare had seen the machine guns shrouded by frost-stiffened tarpaulins. Should they now be manned? Was manning them an unnecessary provocation? The sentries along the fences and in Main Road, and the well-armed men in the two towers facing the compound, were surely sufficient to raise an alarm? If the machine guns were manned there was a chance that should a rush be made against the wire, sentries would be shot before they could withdraw to garrison lines. On the other hand, the gunners could be warned to take that precaution. And he should not be influenced by the fact that the odious Suttor had suggested the measure. Abercare told the duty officer that the gunners should be roused to uncover and prepare and take to the guns.
Corporal Headon, the man assigned to fire the crucial Machine Gun A, would have happily been by his gun, his true vocation, with each atom of his being focu
sed on it, and on covering the earth before him from near the gates of Main Road into the innermost hut of Compound C and along the line of the fence, should anyone reach it. His fire, if ever unleashed, would meet interlocking fire from Machine Gun B a little further south, and the enemies of his white race would be caught in that net. Headon thus took on the appointed task with a solemnity no one else in the garrison brought to their duty. He needed that holiness of endeavor.
But he who would have happily been awake was asleep now. He had not been to town and was virtually teetotal anyhow, and his dreams were dreams of being mocked by less conscientious men as he tried urgently to impress upon them the essential function of the fusee spring. As ever he was not taken seriously—his sister having misunderstood his torch morse from the tram on his last leave.
Eamon Cassidy and the two other gunners remained asleep, too, since Abercare’s new command that they stand by the guns all night was slow to make its way to their barracks.
Cassidy had begun learning to fire on an earlier model than the one sent to him at Gawell Camp. But all the components were the same ones they had always been. Before the gun had been mounted on its trailer on the site chosen by the colonel, Suttor had assured himself that the two men were competent by observing them fire a short burst at the makeshift rifle range a little to the southeast of the camp. And that, Suttor considered, thoroughly proved their aptitude. Suttor had offended Cassidy somewhat by emphasizing the importance of adjusting the angle as targets got closer to them. And he advised Headon to sweep the ground ahead, since if anything the Vickers was too accurate—its bullets did not deviate, and there was no sense in firing repeatedly into a space whose occupiers had already fallen.
Headon would have preferred a more thorough and serious rehearsal, since he really believed, Eamon Cassidy noticed, that he’d end up using the gun in anger. Cassidy, given his chief ambition to go home and look after his two aging and beloved dependents, was rendered uneasy by that. Headon left no subtlety of the machine unvisited while instructing Cassidy in its wonders. After their first minor use of the thing on the range, and while making sure Cassidy observed, Headon had poured boiling water down the barrel to clean it. He was faintly officious about the seven-and-a-half pints of water the cooling system required and how it was to be emptied and refilled.
He regularly persuaded Cassidy to climb onto the trailer where the gun lay ready on its tripod under a tarpaulin, and unveil it and apply oil to the outside of the barrel. Headon inspected the muzzle cup and the cone yet again to ensure they were free from oil or any obstacle, and then dismantled the thing, looking to all the working parts, emphasizing to Cassidy the importance of the lock and the extractor. He proceeded to oil or add graphite grease to all the working parts, as he had learned as a boy and during the intervening decades, and checked that the connecting rod was adjusted to its correct length. Then he reassembled the gun, giving Cassidy the chance to contribute advice and the occasional correct part. So, such items as recoil plates, handle-block pins, fusee spring, safety-seer, and barrel disks, lifting levers, side levers, and a range of many other magnificently tooled parts became familiar to Cassidy. He did not seem to get the exaltation from it all that Headon did, but he was efficient in loading and feeding the canvas ammunition belt through the belt passage, which was the main order of business.
Headon also instructed Cassidy in the issue of stoppages and the use of the clearing plug. Cassidy wondered if Headon, the priest of the mechanism, by the strength of his desire, would conjure up some accommodating surge of prisoners towards the fence. Nonetheless, he took correction in a very relaxed way. He was a calm, reticent man, and his compliance gave Headon less grounds to be didactic than Headon himself would have liked.
• • •
At midnight Aoki ordered the lights to be turned out in the huts, to soothe any garrison suspicion of extreme possibilities. He thought it was his duty now, as a member of the council, to visit the recreation hall, the kitchens, and mess hall, and was amazed by how many men were still moving about, hut to hut, engaged in good-byes. He was a little disappointed by this sign of carelessness, and though he doubted in the circumstances it would cause any dangerous conjecture on the part of the garrison, he ordered these men to return to where, at this hour, they belonged.
By the combined help of moonlight and searchlight, he entered the recreation hall—the venue for plays, music and revues, and, above all, for Sakura. He found on the floor near the stage a sailor who had cut himself open thoroughly. This man had chosen to be a forerunner, to make things certain, not to leave it to the law of chaotic outcome or to risk any intrusion by the garrison. His inner organs were seeping onto the floor. This was one of the buildings intended for burning later in the night and palliasses were already heaped in one corner, and there lay the sailor who had chosen his ritual early, in the knowledge of his own coming cremation. So it is happening, Aoki told himself as if until now he had not quite believed it would. The mind might choose extinction, but the heedless blood kept singing, “Life, life.” The sailor’s act and the way he lay gave the world an acidic, heightened look. Aoki was stimulated, frightened, and delighted that this young forerunner now compelled him and the others to act.
In the kitchen he found two men hanging from beams—early fruit, soldiers disabled in battle, unfit for a charge. They had believed the vote, the loud majorities, as thoroughly as anyone could. They, too, had established this night’s duty for the rest. One of the hanging men was a veteran Aoki knew, and looked very wizened, his hands spread palms out, like a man demonstrating an argument that should be obvious. A young friend dangled beside him in that terrible, contemplative posture of the hanged. Aoki returned to his hut. He would not blare the news. He would tell it softly.
Tamura the costume maker limped into the recreation hall half an hour after Aoki had left. He had said good-bye to Sakura, who understood his situation. He had not wanted to have Sakura present here, despite her domination of the stage he now approached, and the vivid memories her mere presence could evoke. He saw the same sailor Aoki had and paused by the ruin of his body a moment to honor him, and smelled the weight of his blood.
Then he mounted the stage with his usual slowness, tentative about rushing given his old wound, from a bullet passing through a lower section of his right lung. He entered the wings of the stage, where costumes hung on racks or were folded up in naphtha-smelling tea chests. On a table at the back, masks made by woodcarvers and hats made by Tamura himself were stacked. He went along the rack considering which of the garments—ones he’d labored on—to choose. He laid out some of them on the floor, as if he were about to sell them. He was certain it was appropriate that he should not take any of the more splendid costumes Sakura had worn in her Gawell triumphs. He chose a warrior costume, pants decorated with chariot wheels and closed in tight on the lower leg to signify that the wearer was fitted for action. He selected also a spartan, striped undershirt and an over jacket decorated with sails. This was suitable for a mere servant of the theater, a costume pitched between lordship and peasanthood, and an over jacket signifying departure.
He surveyed some of the other costumes for a while—the courtesan’s dress from Sukeroku, Flower of Edo, and the cocktail dress in which Sakura performed ballads. Having displayed his work to whatever spirits might witness it, he rehung them reverently. Then he approached a beam at the back of the stage and climbed onto an unused chest and made a noose from fabric.
30
A sentry in Main Road, a member of the quarter guard that waited in the tent Colonel Abercare had placed there, was comfortable with the balance of things—that his banal and unnecessary watch on a moon-drenched night would end at two o’clock, that he could then withdraw to the semiwarmth of the guard tent at the intersection of Main Road and Kelly’s Lane, and that tomorrow night he would not have to repeat this.
It was a quarter to two when this view of the easy equilibrium of all elements in the landscape was altered.
For without apparent warning, one of the prisoners was running towards the inner double gate into Main Road with an energy that threatened to break it down. He was in the clear space as he sprinted across the rim of the wrestling arena and over the corner of the baseball pitch, or whatever they called it.
Because the man was clearly more impelled than he himself was, the guard at first stepped then moved more quickly back with his rifle at the ready. The Japanese sprinter, meanwhile, had arrived near the inner gate and raised his hands, and began shouting about unjust men, and the folly of the wise, in what seemed to be a Biblical kind of English but was nothing like the sentry’s English. Emphasis, intonations were all in the wrong place. The prisoner was athletic and began to climb the first gate acrobatically, lacerating his hands and not noticing it, to yell about unjust men dying by the sword.
His fear of something that was broader than his rant transmitted itself to the sentry too. What this prisoner seemed to be trying to do was sizeable, and the sentry raised his rifle by instinct and fired two shots into the air. This, he knew, was meant to be the first alarm.
No one seemed to stir in the company camps at either end of the prison compounds. No flares were fired, no siren began shrieking. The Japanese babbler was standing expostulating in the space between the compound inner gate and the one by which he could enter Main Road when the telephone placed on one of the uprights rang. The guard, watching Ban’s advance and intending to shoot him now that he seemed so close to joining him, answered it nonetheless. It was the corporal of the guard in the tent in the center of Main Road. The sentry told the corporal that a prisoner had run to the gate raving and yelling and was now about to climb over it and jump into Main Road. The corporal told him that if the man did land in front of him, the sentry was to hold him prisoner, and they would all be along from the tent at once.
Shame and the Captives Page 26