Grinning at Ann, he said privately to Herod’s wife, You’re a lucky old crone, suffering many things in a dream only on account of him. In a dream only.
‘We must cherish him very much,’ he said, meaning the child.
‘Of course we must. Of course, I couldn’t swear he was there.’
‘When would you be certain?’
‘I’d be almost certain in a week. I’d be terribly certain in two weeks.’
‘Son and heir,’ said Halloran, but mourned the thing already.
‘What about the cord?’ he felt justified in asking gently.
‘I don’t know. You have to put your faith in something, but nothing brings what you want all the time.’
‘Yes, you’re right about that.’ He couldn’t refrain from saying, ‘I thought it put matters beyond doubt.’
‘Nothing puts things beyond a doubt,’ said Ann. ‘Perhaps I didn’t wear it in the right frame of mind. If that’s so, I’m sorry, Halloran.’
The sun was low and strawberry. Streaks of cloud fumed before its face; the west had gone smoky, the water like mercury. He could no longer pretend to levity.
‘Right frame of mind or otherwise, what does it matter?’ he told her. ‘It must be meant. You’ll start to think I’ll leave you, nothing surer. You’ll have to remember I have no home except you. You’ll have to remember I’d be in a desert.’
‘I will get fat and splotchy beyond bearing.’
‘Beyond whose bearing?’
‘Yours, Phelim.’
‘Ann, Ann,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t be fat and splotchy ever, as far as my eyes go. Not even if you were fat and splotchy.’
They laughed together.
‘We must just be strong, Ann,’ said Halloran, grieving prodigiously for the child.
As much of the situation as they could, they organized. If by Friday Ann still believed herself with child, she was to send him a creamy pebble from Mr Blythe’s garden. If she knew she was without child, she would send him two. She would send these signs by the hand of the Blythes’ male servant, who would deliver them to him on the garrison side of Collett’s Brook, just beyond the bridge.
On Friday, the servant came and tipped one cream pebble into Phelim’s cupped hands, who sighed and received the iron into his soul.
‘The girl give me two,’ said the servant then, ‘but I dropped one of them.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I’m sure. Anyway, pebbles is cheap.’
Valley, bridge, departing servant, all spun, Halloran being a mite in a twirled saucer. And though he had become drunk with release, he felt deprived of the child for whom, all the week, he had been practising his valour.
11
Easter rain came down like flint-arrows on the Tuesday of Holy Week, and people, unaccustomed to its vehemence because of the dry weather, stood under eaves and grimaced at it. Suddenly, the clay- and saw-pits gurgled and filled with a stew. Some alien earth was in the stew, but it was almost possible to believe, standing above these places with idle tools in your hands, that each pit was coloured the peculiar colour of the pain of the men who had filled it summer-full of blisters, heartburn, gut-cramp, god-hate. Men blinded at the shipyards and brickfields by tropic gobs of water on their lashes, groped for gear, blinking the improbable colours of the prism out of their eyeballs, until once more they could see an adze for an adze, which was the only safe way of seeing anything.
Rev. Mr Calverley, lucky under hardwood shingles this thatch-reaving weather, went to his desk and wrote down, ‘The rain has come, and bounty has lit up again the weary land’. It was a suitable Easter theme. But towards dinner, he remembered the heartless way long rain dealt with churchyards and went out with a lantern to see if his son’s grave had sunk in the outline of a coffin, threatening the resurrection.
In Halloran’s hut, the rain spouted through many weaknesses in the roof. Halloran himself pulled up the flooring of cabbage tree mats and planking and dug a ditch with his bayonet, incorporating many puddles into one, guiding the one out of doors.
He would have liked to repeat his achievement for Ann. It was close to six o’clock. Soon she would be alone in the equinoctial gloom of her kitchen, hauling her mattress here and there, seeking a warm place away from the wet, dabbing at her cold with an apron corner. About nine, she would try to brew miserable tea from the Blythes’ used leaves.
He was duty-corporal in the cook-house that night; hard work. Every man’s plate of meat was weighed, and he had to supervise the weighing. He went out of doors barefoot, carrying his shoes in his hand, to attend to this duty. It was blue dark. Sheathed in the rain, he had a rare privacy. Here was good thinking weather, yet he didn’t exactly think. First he stood slack-shouldered in the drench, making pledges to Ann and himself. Times when he felt brash enough to spit in the eye of the weather and make pledges to his future were rare, but tonight was such a time. He had confidence, and the confidence came from his having written a verse about the ants. It was such a savoury thing to be a poet. It side-stepped mortality so deftly that you could hug yourself.
The ants of whom his poem was made had known about the rain some days before it had begun. They had come hustling indoors, and Halloran saw them now as having carried in the sunlight on their backs to store it in the wall cavities and under the flooring for the day when it would be, once more, the cosmic fashion. Which seemed at present to be going to be a long time.
He made patterns in the mud by dabbing at the track with one foot or the other. He scarcely cared if he was seen, because a man could be doing any extravagant thing to save himself from whatever of malice there was in the blinding wet. Each time he laid his foot down in the mud, he uttered a foot of the verse. The joy of words and rain, the joy of capering legs. He took the blanket off his head and whirled it once. But it was a bit sodden for abandonment.
‘My ant of the red earth,’ he said and sang,
‘My harvester small,
Bears sheafs of the sunlight
To his barn in my wall.
‘From his pit beneath tap-roots,
Once drawn its claws,
He carries the soft corpse
Of summer indoors.
‘My little, black friar,
A speck of my bread
Will not be begrudged you,
While summer is dead.
‘A steak from the lizard
Who died by my door,
Is his by just stipend,
Who scours my floor.’
Halloran, who had none the less crushed with his canvas shoe a flock of ants feeding in blind ellipse round a lizard’s tail.
‘Very fine, but what about Ewers?’ asked someone just behind him.
There, improbably, was Hearn, very close, on the edge of the embankment. He had a blanket on his shoulders, but his big grey face got a drenching. The copious briars of grey hair seemed just as briary despite the rain.
‘Ewers? Don’t talk to me about Ewers, Mr Hearn. Ewers was unjustly destroyed, I give you that. But not by me.’
He thought how uncivilized it was to allow a man to dance through four quatrains believing himself alone, and then to spring flummoxing questions on him.
‘By the system you serve,’ said Hearn.
No How are you, isn’t it wet? about Hearn’s conversation. Headfirst into questions of eternity, questions of guilt!
‘Not by any system I serve,’ said Halloran. ‘It was the Dakers again.’
‘The system is all the Dakers from here to Ulster.’
Halloran threw one of his shoes five yards. Petulance.
‘What are you at? What are you after? I know my conscience. Damn you!’
His shoe had capsized in a puddle.
‘Christ!’ he said flicking
it up. ‘There you are, Mr Hearn. You have me taking the Holy Name.’
‘That stings your conscience,’ observed Hearn, mocking in his peculiarly level way of speech.
‘Yes it does, if you want to know. How do you come to be here, instead of the Crescent?’
‘I’ve come to help Long, His Excellency’s secretary. His Excellency believes that even if the last storeship was taken by enemies of the King – whoever they might be – another one should be with us inside four months. Long and myself are doing estimates for the office-hacks in the Admiralty and at the Home Secretary’s.’
‘I suppose this is not called serving the system,’ Halloran muttered.
‘Only on paper. Only by shuffling numbers.’
‘If you didn’t shuffle the numbers, someone else would have to. They’re dirty Hanover numbers, Mr Hearn. You’ll catch the pox of damnation from them quick as I will from this old coat. Did you know, by the way, that you’re not supposed to be on this hill?’
Hearn tried to shake the water out of his locks.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I was never at this place long enough to learn the out-of-bounds for my class. Working at Government House, I have a freedom of movement which mightn’t always be for the best.’
There was nothing to say to that.
Hearn stroked down his bard’s locks.
‘What would you have done, Corporal, if you’d had others with you and found me here? Would you have found that your chances of riding the tempest would be bettered if you had me flogged? Then you would have had me flogged, and you’d say to yourself . . .’
Halloran cast up his blanket-shrouded arms.
‘I’d say the angel Gabriel could be flogged for being on this hill, unless he’s a member of the garrison. Which I’ve never seen any sign of. I wouldn’t go off my singing if he was flogged, because he’s damned well not supposed to be here at all. I don’t have to forswear life and shoot the Governor because you come creeping through the rain like a Redemptorist, booming out omens. I told Ewers when I took him to the Dakers. You’ll get a big hearing and little mercy from Mrs Daker. I couldn’t do any more.’
It grated to see Hearn’s head remaining upright and uncovered, heedless of the rain.
‘Now, go home!’ cried Halloran, like a whooping farmer to a cow in the barley. ‘Go on! Go home! You’re a troublemaker and seditious as hell. I’ve got nothing to say to you.’
There were ten seconds. Nothing happened, but the peacemaking rain soothed their shoulders.
‘I’m disappointed, Corporal.’
‘Thank God for that much. The surest way to be disappointed is to live long enough. Besides, I wasn’t put here to satisfy you, even if you were Wicklow’s Alnegar.’
Though Hearn shook his head, he did not seem any more seriously discomfited by Halloran’s blindness than he did by the deluge.
‘Let me tell you, Halloran, you’re worried by this conundrum about the God of your oath, the God of the Army and Navy that is, and the true God. Isn’t that so?’
‘It’s no conundrum. Go home!’
Hearn’s black bulk remained only just visible, but impassive. The night had become deeper, and the downpour more vigorous. One could hear the trees being thrashed.
‘Go home! Don’t you obey anyone?’
‘Yes, yes, Halloran. I’ll obey you. You think you’re safe if I obey you. But I doubt it, since you’re honest. But more than honest, you’re conscience-bound. You are, here in the dark, in the rain, more afraid of your conscience, what it might ask, than you are of black fever and shipwreck and death from thirst. You’re afraid of this system you guard with your strong young arm. You are not afraid of its noose and knout, but of how it stands to your conscience.’
‘Damn conscience!’ said Halloran. ‘And damn this strong young arm you speak of.’
‘I’ll leave you on your military hill then. I hope the God of the King’s Marines looks after you. But look out for the God of the Spanish guards, who’s a terror for dropping tree trunks on loyal Irish boys. Not to mention the God of the French dragoons. His weakness is landslides.’
‘You’re a blasphemer,’ Halloran called, beginning to shake with reverence.
‘No,’ Hearn asserted, ‘God is untouched.’
Yet he himself was not untouched. He turned his back on Halloran.
‘Blasphemer?’ he asked himself. ‘No!’
He went away. It was such a night as could dissolve any large man with dramatic swiftness.
12
The rain went on and blew the corner of the Blythes’ roof away. Blythe asked Allen for a man to help his male servant shift the furniture in the front parlour, mend the roof with canvas. Some sergeant saw Byrne idle and sent him.
Byrne went in by the kitchen and dried his feet at the hearth. Ann would scarcely speak to him. The kitchen leaked like a cowshed; the fire was out though the bricks were warm. Byrne stood on them in his bare feet, sighing.
‘I wish they’d sent me to fix your roof, Ann Rush. I wish they’d sent me for that.’
He put his shoes on and followed Ann through the house, staring at her slenderness from behind. In the front parlour, crazy Mrs Blythe sat by her window watching it stream and chatter. She had a rug around her shoulders and a book in her hands, but she took counsel of the gale and never glanced at the book.
At once the male servant pointed his eye-brows at a chest of drawers in an exposed corner, and he and Byrne hefted it down the room, where Ann wiped the rain from it. They next lifted a tea-table, a trunk, a dresser and Mrs Blythe’s bureau. They grunted and minced with their loads, but Mrs Blythe did not glance at them. In the end they left her beset by her furniture and put up a canvas partition as Blythe had ordered them to do. They worked behind this. It did not take long to rig a sailcloth roof and tie it to the rafters. But they both got very wet and had to work in silence. The once Byrne tried to speak, the servant hissed at him that the old sow was at her thoughts. When they had finished though, and had begun to tip-toe out through Mrs Blythe’s half of the room, Byrne shrugging into his forage coat weathered to pink, the lady seemed to be merely watching the rain and not thinking any more deeply than rain causes a person to think. The servant saluted Mrs Blythe and went out. Byrne nodded and was following.
‘That soldier,’ said Mrs Blythe behind him.
He turned to her.
‘Mrs Blythe,’ he said too loudly, since she had startled him. He scratched himself where his sodden coat had made him itchy.
Mrs Blythe asked him his name. When he’d given it, she asked did he know a soldier called Halloran. He became enthusiastic.
‘Yes. Yes indeed. If you mean Corporal Phelim Halloran, I know him sure enough. We came out of Wexford together.’
They had, in fact, come out of Wexford jail together; but Mrs Blythe was not the style of woman to take account of how easy it is to go to Wexford jail.
‘I’ve heard reports that he’s a rather riotous young man,’ Mrs Blythe said.
Even Byrne could tell that she hadn’t heard any such reports, though with her eyes locked up in serenity, she seemed to be viewing the endless, level plain of her own guilelessness.
‘Him, Mrs Blythe? Corporal Phelim Halloran?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh no, Madam, you must have heard of some other feller. If all of us was as solid as Phelim, the town would be like a monastery. He’s the best type of Irishman they make these days. I wouldn’t say the same for myself.’
‘I see,’ she said. ‘Well, you know of course how rumour-ridden the town is, not being at all like a monastery.’
‘Oh, it’s rumour-ridden,’ Byrne assented strongly, wagging his big childish jaws. ‘A person can’t do a thing, any old thing at all, secretly in this town. It’s a town that feeds on rumour, having nothi
ng else to eat, if you’ll excuse me saying it, Mrs Blythe.’
His fluency had him beaming.
‘Then no doubt you’ve heard something of my husband. Probably you’ve heard a story or two?’
Byrne felt grateful for the barrier of mahogany objects, since the lady had all the power of her gibbous eyes open and bearing on him now.
‘That’d be Mr Blythe,’ he said, for the sake of putting time between himself and the question. ‘Yes, well, he’s a very quiet sort of man by all reports and keeps to himself, which is the best thing of all to do in such a hole as this. This town I mean, Madam.’
Making very little noise about it, Mrs Blythe began to laugh, but shaking and genuinely diverted. Byrne stared at the floor, grinning shyly. Blythe was being laughed at, but so was he.
‘If I were Captain Allen,’ Mrs Blythe told him, ‘I’d make you a colour-sergeant or something else as grand.’
As if the sun had given up the day at eleven o’clock, the room had become very dark. Byrne wondered how the lady would manage to stay there all day under the chancy roof, amongst the haphazard furniture looking oddly restive, like people taking temporary shelter.
‘I’m not made to command,’ he said to show her he had some small knowledge of self.
‘So you have nothing but good to say of both Corporal Halloran and my husband?’
‘Yes, Mrs Blythe. Although I’m closer to Halloran than I am to your husband, as you would know.’
‘As I would know. You’re no fool, are you, Byrne?’
‘Not all day of every day anyhow, Mrs Blythe.’
Once more you’ve said it well, he told himself. But it was wasted on Mrs Blythe, who had gone forward in her seat, her eyes shut but not contemplating her own candour this time. Byrne felt some pity for her unloveable suet face in its pained corner.
Bring Larks and Heroes Page 11