Calverley hissed.
‘How dare you!’ he said. ‘The girl is not even a decent wife.’
Halloran kept his back to the chaplain.
‘The girl is my wife.’
He said it with so potent a calm, that Calverley thought, how he must hate me, how he hates the London Mission Society’s prize vigneron of souls. But how could he fairly detest the prestigious editor of Tibullus’s Elegies, who has hauled his erudition across the windy night to throw light on the faces of the damned?
‘You never came before me,’ he said.
‘You aren’t one of our priests.’
Calverley laughed a short time, or the laughter in him laughed, while he remained mourning beside Halloran.
‘That’s an excuse for concubinage,’ he said, ‘if ever I heard one.’
The boy looked at him.
‘You give your blessing to hangings, you call God down on the gallows.’
‘The gallows are better for my being there.’
But if he had really believed it, he would have left then.
‘If they hang my girl before a crowd . . .’ said Halloran incompletely, the light of the lanthorn washing over his face, and one of his eyes within the light but stark, seeming to be all pupil, not drawn by the light. ‘And if you’re there blessing it . . .’ He remembered a phrase of Blythe’s. ‘If you’re there blessing the long sweat of indecency of the crowd,’ he said. ‘Rape by hempen rope.’
For some reason, he was almost asleep.
‘May the Lord High God of Glory spit you up,’ he managed to say in the end.
The pastor stood up straight. He had a habit of surface rage from the times when he had felt sure of his calling. Without this certainty to temper it now, it ran wild and inordinate.
‘Do you think the All-Highest will listen to you? Do you think God will avenge your harlot on me, his minister?’ He cast his eyes up. ‘I am wasted on you. I am wasted on this town,’ he lamented.
‘Yah!’ Miles called at him.
He turned to the hut in general.
‘I carry the Cross to you, the Saviour’s Cross to the four of you. And the single man who will speak to me does not speak of justification but of a – of a randy girl.’
‘Yah!’ Miles told him again.
‘I leave you to the worm of death. I leave you all to the worm of death. He will bite deep on you while I still laugh.’
He gave three hacks of laughter to show them. He opened the door. In the flouncing skirts of the light from his lanthorn, he rushed out, roaring to the Constable, ‘Flog them if they move!’
The Constable saw the light of salvation jogging away into the darkness. Towards the small, black fury who carried it, he made a pronounced motion of the hand. Then he locked the death-hut door.
28
In the death-hut, they were half-mad from the cold. Halloran could not tell from the hole in the roof that the day was made of low cloud, pearl-grey, pearl-radiant. Everything on which the morning lay, especially the water, was touched with the lambency of the pearl. Beyond the bay, the sea ran like a beast with slick, numerous muscles.
Above the sea and amongst the wet undergrowth on the headland, a Marine had the work of watching for a convoy. He sat on a pole, on two blades nailed either side of the top. His coat had edged up round his ears. He had ceased to feel the blades cutting into his buttocks. The frostiness made his legs and feet itch. He was certain that this was not the acceptable hour. By the time he sighted the pin-new East Indiaman, it had already ripped through the oyster-shell horizon far out to the south-east, and daylight poured in behind it. The Marine did not believe in what he saw. It was too sparkling and spanking and lissom a ship, seven and eight hundred tons.
But half the main topmast had gone – something never missing on dream ships. He climbed down the pole screaming. There was a hut below him, and a Sergeant and a servant jerking wide-eyed out of the door. The Sergeant had his stare, and they got their muskets and fired three shots twenty seconds apart – the Sergeant, the Marine, the Sergeant. Their feu de joie split the china-ware morning.
‘Rowley, Rowley,’ screamed His Excellency, trundling down the hall of Government House. He had been gaseous with hunger, and now his bowels jumped at the deliverance. ‘I’ll cut their tripes out if they’re larking.’
Across to the headland, where the dew had melted and the morning become more solid, far too solid when you had to climb its spiky sides. Having surmounted it and come halloing through the snapping undergrowth, His Excellency snatched a glass from the Sergeant. He screwed it into his eye-lid with such savage hope that the Sergeant backed away and hoped that the superb vision would show up on those hard, sovereign eye-balls.
‘Where is it? It’s all right, I see it. It’s a beautiful ship, Rowley. Looks as if it came from the shipyard yesterday. Well, not quite. It’s had trouble with its main-topsail. East India company pennant. About seven hundred tons.’
He laughed, still ogling the streamlined salvation of his town.
‘It’s not exactly what I expected.’
Of his bounty he let the others look. While they searched for it, he laughed in their ears. He was very taken with that limber ship.
‘Rowley, take the boat, bring the pilot. Oh, and warn the battery. Eleven gun – no, thirteen gun salute! Then straight across and collect me. You understand?’
Rowley did, and minced away across the headland. The brush snapped at his button-up gaiters, private Marine’s issue.
At the look-out, His Excellency was sobering, thinking, What if it’s only one of a convoy, what if it’s a matter of hundreds more felons on their way to me, a half dozen ungovernable cargoes due to be with me by dusk? He felt sick and climbed down to the bay to wait for Rowley.
A brush bonfire had been built on the headland to guide the ship in. But the white smoke did not show well against a west of pewter. All morning the sergeant looked for a bark that would make black smoke, but gave up at noon to cheer the sleek shape through into haven.
Chatham, said its stern.
Aboard it, His Excellency heard the details of his rescue. The Chatham was one of a fleet; it was under charter as a store-ship. This was its maiden voyage to India. The Navy agent happened to be on board, having crossed to it in the Indian Ocean to look into some routine matter. Since then they hadn’t seen any more of the fleet, for they soon entered a five-day gale. The Chatham was the first of the convoy to reach Batavia, and left messages there for the rest, if there were any.
Callow in his joy, His Excellency nodded. ‘I hope they’ve all drowned,’ he said.
Allen was at Government House that afternoon to ask for barracks for his company. He was a blunt enough man to think that since His Excellency would that day be extraordinarily happy, he would be more willing to stretch his resources. His Excellency was not happy in as unmixed a way as that. For one thing, which of the condemned could now be pardoned? He asked Allen, whom he thought the most thoroughgoing officer amongst the Marines.
‘You could safely pardon the two guards,’ Allen said. ‘The gravity of taking food depends upon whom the food is taken from, how great was their actual need of what was taken. That is, such thefts are of varying gravity. Our need was not as great as we thought at the time of sentencing, because the Chatham was just beyond the horizon. But once treason enters . . . There you have something whose seriousness never varies.’
His Excellency had already reached the same conclusions, although he was far more disturbed by them than Allen could ever be by what was manifest justice.
At last His Excellency got up and crossed in front of the fire to the door. His mouth was genuinely crooked, and his big, arched eyebrows channelled doubt down to the wrinkles above his nose. He called for his secretary.
‘If that’s all, Allen . . .’
he said, and he lumbered back to his desk, having a decree concerning ‘general jubilation’ on his mind, as Blythe had predicted.
‘That’s all,’ said Allen. ‘Though I’ve got something here for you.’
He took three folded pages out of his shallow waistcoat pocket.
‘It’s some verse of that fellow Halloran. I thought you might like to keep it. When you’ve retired from public life, it may remind you of what a varied herd you ruled in this place.’
His Excellency took the pages, still frowning. He couldn’t understand how he would ever need souvenirs.
‘Thank you, Allen.’
Allen bowed and went.
On the desk, the folded pages began to creak open. The secretary came in.
‘Sit down, Long,’ the Governor muttered, and screwed up his eyes at Halloran’s idle art. The pages looked threatened in his big hands. What he saw was the debris of minor inspirations, much crossing and blotting. Two verses seemed to be written whole, although a great number of rhyming words had been written down beside them and scratched out.
‘Let the sun cope golden,’ he read,
‘With the shoulders of my eaves.
May the hale throats of Beauty’s sons
Shake old eardrums and the summer’s leaves.
‘And when Beauty nods silver –
Kine cropping the lushness of my edge –
May the smiles of our shy grand-daughters
Bring larks and heroes to our hedge.’
‘Larks and heroes,’ he said, ‘smiles of our shy granddaughters. Not my kind of souvenir.’
He rolled the papers in his palms and put them in the fire.
About noon, the massive sounds of cannon penetrated the death-hut, thirteen roars sown like oak-trees amongst the other, ankle-high sounds of this day, their last of all. Albert Miles travestied hope by jumping up but rebounding in the limits of his chains. To Halloran he looked painfully elastic, but capered and laughed.
‘What price the French, eh? What price the rotten old French?’
McHugh and Barrett hauled themselves up as if there were windows. The mad hope had kicked them in the belly.
‘The French?’ said McHugh.
‘Why not the French? If Halloran and his bit of snuff could think of it, why couldn’t King Lou think of it off his own bat?’
Miles looked for Halloran down the long dimness of the place.
‘If you and your whore could think of it, Halloran, why not King Lou?’
Halloran said nothing. For one thing, he fretted for Ann as a sceptical philosopher frets for a God. That is, he was not engrossed in whether she was ashamed, fearful, cold, fevered, nagged or soothed by big-breasted Mrs Calverley. These fringed a larger agony. Did she exist? Did she exist in the way he thought she did, was she in the women’s hut waiting on the rope? Was she; when he remembered her only as a tallness and a presence, the way a god is remembered.
He blamed neither his fever nor last night’s beating for his sense of disbelief. He blamed Hearn partly, for Hearn so powerfully sowed misgivings. Hearn’s whaler, for example. Who could believe in Hearn’s whaler? There had been a whaler certainly, who had visited and been expelled from the bay. Perhaps he had already been days across the Pacific before Hearn and Terry and Halloran himself had begun their grinding debate. Hearn had been left at night on a small beach and was gone in the morning. Yet it was easier to believe he had descended into the pit, stores and all, than that he’d really been taken away by a fleshly, profit-making whaler.
Now, as if through Hearn, doubt had begun to corrode the sureties he had had through Ann: of having possessed and having been possessed. Which no mere disaster could bear away; apart, of course, from the disaster of ceasing to believe in the tissue of your world.
At the same time, he had begun to vacate his house, his house of life. Or so he believed. He sat and let his senses numb and his lights burn out. He had the illusion of closing the door on so many rooms, the comely, the lurid, the useful. He felt that he lived in a porch in the front of his forehead, and was a stranger to the walls behind him.
The others had not yet begun to prepare for the journey.
‘Tell us what she’s like when the decks are cleared,’ McHugh said, speaking of Ann.
‘Yes,’ Miles said, ‘how’s it done?’
And they kept at him until he found that there were rooms where the fires still burnt amidst shrouded furniture, because he began to resent Miles and the other two.
He was angry, but he waited; and when they were quiet, he began to speak out of his serene hatred.
‘Wait till tomorrow,’ he said.
‘Go to hell!’ Miles told him.
‘Tomorrow,’ he said.
‘You silly bastard.’
‘Tomorrow.’
Tomorrow a third time made them listen. They listened in utter quiet, not able to afford neglecting anyone with words to say on that unthinkable occasion. Not even, ultimately, would they neglect to listen to Calverley.
‘What will it be like, do you think?’
They thought but couldn’t achieve anything.
He told them.
‘Tomorrow when we drop,’ he jerked his right fist, ‘every bit of song and prayer and curse will come roaring up our throats. And every insult a man ever spoke to a man. They’ll scream and push to get past the rope. But it might be minutes before our heads blow off. And all the time, as I’ve said, every insult ever spoken will be roaring through us. So save yourselves till then is my advice, friend Miles and friend McHugh.’ He thought of Barrett who had merely laughed with them, would laugh with anyone, a poor bugger without two words to rub together. ‘Friend Barrett,’ he said.
At the thought of their familiar skulls exploding, they started to roar. Their rank terror made him ashamed. McHugh took a fistful of rubble floor. He threw it like a free man, jarred his arm, saw his hatred fall as a spatter of pebbles in the middle of the hut.
‘Look here,’ said Miles, ‘I believe in the French.’ But now he was aware of the odds against belief.
‘Listen!’ Halloran told them.
From the town they heard a thin croak of cheering, hardly more vocal than the wind.
Halloran could then have been ironic, but irony was a waste on your very last day.
29
The sky above their broken roof, expressive yesterday, was today devious and fish-coloured. It was so dark by three that they thought it was twilight. They were very sober now, in the corners.
The fraudulent three o’clock dusk broke when the door clapped open and showed the grey day to be still in business, showed steely, straight, robust, absolutely non-golden light. Shapes of men, two Marines, clattered in the doorway, curiously flustered with the onus of living, no way assured of death’s amplitude. They showed some interest in Halloran’s head of hair clotted from the chain.
If you only knew how my ears are ringing with the daylight, he thought. The daylight stung the back of his brain, and rushed belling like a festival down his spine.
These two men made noses because of the waste-bucket. They became aware too of Halloran taking a vehement interest in themselves. They did not understand how remote they were from him, how remote as angels in their sinewy, off-the-cuff living. He listened for oddities in their breathing, the distinctive pulse, the lope and gallop of their insides. ‘No, I’m not mad,’ he wanted to tell them. ‘It’s just that I’ve lost the habit of life.’ So he observed them and hopelessly admired their prerogatives, as the pious hopelessly admire the prerogatives of angels.
They stood back from the door to let somebody through. But there was a delay. Outside, the white eucalypts grew, five trees from the one bole, gusting outwards from each other, very much a conclave, more habituated to life than any coterie of alder
men, colonels, judges, who ever stood, heads back, gargling a clannish joke. Life arrogant there, outside the death-hut; life astringent in white trees.
Then, with his notorious grandeur, Lieutenant Rowley came in.
Rowley took in the hut wincing. Halloran giggled in his corner at the dead young man, at the series of vacant stances so plausible that they would one day festoon it with the braids and gold threads of, at least, a Major-General.
The Lieutenant had a paper in his right hand when Halloran came out of his soft mirth. Perched in his fingers, it trembled, and he tamed it with two shakes of his wrist.
‘Whereas,’ the document began hatefully, and went on to tell them how they had been condemned to death the Saturday before because of Act 28 Geo III, C.2 and various letters patent. It said that in view of the general jubilation surrounding the timely arrival of the East India Company’s ship Chatham, the death sentence attaching to James Barrett and John McHugh should be transmuted to life imprisonment in this colony, that the two of them would work with the timber gangs for the rest of their lives, or do anything else they were told to.
Rowley nodded the Constable in to unlock the chains on Barrett and McHugh for their short journey to other fetters. The two of them felt their way up the wall, fish-gaped and chewed their breath. Their faces were curdled white. Then they began to smile, and Barrett winked and McHugh whooped and whacked his thigh.
‘Take them outside!’ Rowley told the Marines. He crinkled his nose at their indecent joy. The Marines nudged and nodded the way to the two of them.
Halloran saw Albert Miles’s big nose jerk in panic. He came forward lop-sidedly on his knees.
‘You’ll rot in chains,’ he roared at them.
Both his flat eyes, moored close in to the bridge of his nose and swamped with his own futile cunning, wept slowly. McHugh, being shuffled to the door looked back. He grinned. He had been saved so instantaneously that he equated himself with life itself, and you could see in him raw hostility for a man so immutably doomed as to be a death symbol.
Bring Larks and Heroes Page 24