The Third Policeman

by O'Brien, Flann;

  ‘I do,’ I answered.

  ‘Then there was my studs and the enamel badge and my presentation iron-pencil with a screw on the end of it to push the point out, an intricate article full of machinery and a Present from Southport. All these things are what are called Examples of the Machine Age.’

  ‘They would be contrary to the spirit of the chest,’ I said.

  ‘They would be indeed. Then there was my razor and the spare plate in case I was presented with an accidental bash on the gob in the execution of me duty …’

  ‘But not them.’

  ‘Not them. Then there was my certificates and me cash and the picture of Peter the Hermit and the brass thing with straps that I found on the road one night near Matthew O’Carahan’s. But not them either.’

  ‘It is a hard conundrum,’ I said.

  ‘In the end I found there was only one thing to do to put myself right with my private conscience.’

  ‘It is a great thing that you found the right answer at all,’ I countered.

  ‘I decided to myself,’ said MacCruiskeen, ‘that the only sole correct thing to contain in the chest was another chest of the same make but littler in cubic dimension.’

  ‘That was very competent masterwork,’ I said, endeavouring to speak his own language.

  He went to the little chest and opened it up again and put his hands down sideways like flat plates or like the fins on a fish and took out of it a smaller chest but one resembling its mother-chest in every particular of appearance and dimension. It almost interfered with my breathing, it was so delightfully unmistakable. I went over and felt it and covered it with my hand to see how big its smallness was. Its brasswork had a shine like the sun on the sea and the colour of the wood was a rich deep richness like a colour deepened and toned only by the years. I got slightly weak from looking at it and sat down on a chair and for the purpose of pretending that I was not disturbed I whistled The Old Man Twangs His Braces.

  MacCruiskeen gave me a smooth inhuman smile.

  ‘You may have come on no bicycle,’ he said, ‘but that does not say that you know everything.’

  ‘Those chests,’ I said, ‘are so like one another that I do not believe they are there at all because that is a simpler thing to believe than the contrary. Nevertheless the two of them are the most wonderful two things I have ever seen.’

  ‘I was two years manufacturing it,’ MacCruiskeen said. ‘What is in the little one?’ I asked.

  ‘What would you think now?’

  ‘I am completely half afraid to think,’ I said, speaking truly enough.

  ‘Wait now till I show you,’ said MacCruiskeen, ‘and give you an exhibition and a personal inspection individually.’

  He got two thin butter-spades from the shelf and put them down into the little chest and pulled out something that seemed to me remarkably like another chest. I went over to it and gave it a close examination with my hand, feeling the same identical wrinkles, the same proportions and the same completely perfect brasswork on a smaller scale. It was so faultless and delightful that it reminded me forcibly, strange and foolish as it may seem, of something I did not understand and had never even heard of.

  ‘Say nothing,’ I said quickly to MacCruiskeen, ‘but go ahead with what you are doing and I will watch here and I will take care to be sitting down.’

  He gave me a nod in exchange for my remark and got two straight-handled teaspoons and put the handles into his last chest. What came out may well be guessed at. He opened this one and took another one out with the assistance of two knives. He worked knives, small knives and smaller knives, till he had twelve little chests on the table, the last of them an article half the size of a matchbox. It was so tiny that you would not quite see the brasswork at all only for the glitter of it in the light. I did not see whether it had the same identical carvings upon it because I was content to take a swift look at it and then turn away. But I knew in my soul that it was exactly the same as the others. I said no word at all because my mind was brimming with wonder at the skill of the policeman.

  ‘That last one,’ said MacCruiskeen, putting away the knives, ‘took me three years to make and it took me another year to believe that I had made it. Have you got the convenience of a pin?’

  I gave him my pin in silence. He opened the smallest of them all with a key like a piece of hair and worked with the pin till he had another little chest on the table, thirteen in all arranged in a row upon the table. Queerly enough they looked to me as if they were all the same size but invested with some crazy perspective. This idea surprised me so much that I got my voice back and said:

  ‘These are the most surprising thirteen things I have ever seen together.’

  ‘Wait now, man,’ MacCruiskeen said.

  All my senses were now strained so tensely watching the policeman’s movements that I could almost hear my brain rattling in my head when I gave a shake as if it was drying up into a wrinkled pea. He was manipulating and prodding with his pin till he had twenty-eight little chests on the table and the last of them so small that it looked like a bug or a tiny piece of dirt except that there was a glitter from it. When I looked at it again I saw another thing beside it like something you would take out of a red eye on a windy dry day and I knew then that the strict computation was then twenty-nine.

  ‘Here is your pin,’ said MacCruiskeen.

  He put it into my stupid hand and went back to the table thoughtfully. He took a something from his pocket that was too small for me to see and started working with the tiny black thing on the table beside the bigger thing which was itself too small to be described.

  At this point I became afraid. What he was doing was no longer wonderful but terrible. I shut my eyes and prayed that he would stop while still doing things that were at least possible for a man to do. When I looked again I was happy that there was nothing to see and that he had put no more of the chests prominently on the table but he was working to the left with the invisible thing in his hand on a bit of the table itself. When he felt my look he came over to me and gave me an enormous magnifying-glass which looked like a basin fixed to a handle. I felt the muscles around my heart tightening painfully as I took the instrument.

  ‘Come over here to the table,’ he said, ‘and look there till you see what you see infra-ocularly.’

  When I saw the table it was bare only for the twenty-nine chest articles but through the agency of the glass I was in a position to report that he had two more out beside the last ones, the smallest of all being nearly half a size smaller than ordinary invisibility. I gave him back the glass instrument and took to the chair without a word. In order to reassure myself and make a loud human noise I whistled The Corncrake Plays the Bagpipes.

  ‘There now,’ said MacCruiskeen.

  He took two wrinkled cigarettes from his fob and lit the two at the same time and handed me one of them.

  ‘Number Twenty-Two,’ he said, ‘I manufactured fifteen years ago and I have made another different one every year since with any amount of nightwork and overtime and piecework and time-and-a-half incidentally.’

  ‘I understand you clearly,’ I said.

  ‘Six years ago they began to get invisible, glass or no glass. Nobody has ever seen the last five I made because no glass is strong enough to make them big enough to be regarded truly as the smallest things ever made. Nobody can see me making them because my little tools are invisible into the same bargain. The one I am making now is nearly as small as nothing. Number One would hold a million of them at the same time and there would be room left for a pair of woman’s horse-breeches if they were rolled up. The dear knows where it will stop and terminate.’

  ‘Such work must be very hard on the eyes,’ I said, determined to pretend that everybody was an ordinary person like myself.

  ‘Some of these days,’ he answered, ‘I will have to buy spectacles with gold ear-claws. My eyes are crippled with the small print in the newspapers and in the offeecial forms.’

&nb
sp; ‘Before I go back to the day-room,’ I said, ‘would it be right to ask you what you were performing with that little small piano-instrument, the article with the knobs, and the brass pins?’

  ‘That is my personal musical instrument,’ said MacCruiskeen, ‘and I was playing my own tunes on it in order to extract private satisfaction from the sweetness of them.’

  ‘I was listening,’ I answered, ‘but I did not succeed in hearing you.’

  ‘That does not surprise me intuitively,’ said MacCruiskeen, ‘because it is an indigenous patent of my own. The vibrations of the true notes are so high in their fine frequencies that they cannot be appreciated by the human earcup. Only myself has the secret of the thing and the intimate way of it, the confidential knack of circumventing it. Now what do you think of that?’

  I climbed up to my legs to go back to the day-room, passing a hand weakly about my brow.

  ‘I think it is extremely acatalectic,’ I answered.

  1 Hatchjaw remarks (unconfirmed, however, by Bassett) that throughout the whole ten years that went to the writing of The Country Album de Selby was obsessed with mirrors and had recourse to them so frequently that he claimed to have two left hands and to be living in a world arbitrarily bounded by a wooden frame. As time went on he refused to countenance a direct view of anything and had a small mirror permanently at a certain angle in front of his eyes by a wired mechanism of his own manufacture. After he had resorted to this fantastic arrangement, he interviewed visitors with his back to them and with his head inclined towards the ceiling; he was even credited with long walks backwards in crowded thoroughfares. Hatchjaw claims that his statement is supported by the MS. of some three hundred pages of the Album, written backwards, ‘a circumstance that made necessary the extension of the mirror principle to the bench of the wretched printer.’ (De Selby’s Life and Times, p. 221.) This manuscript cannot now be found.

  Chapter 6

  When I penetrated back to the day-room I encountered two gentlemen called Sergeant Pluck and Mr Gilhaney and they were holding a meeting about the question of bicycles.

  ‘I do not believe in the three-speed gear at all,’ the Sergeant was saying, ‘it is a new-fangled instrument, it crucifies the legs, the half of the accidents are due to it.’

  ‘It is a power for the hills,’ said Gilhaney, ‘as good as a second pair of pins or a diminutive petrol motor.’

  ‘It is a hard thing to tune,’ said the Sergeant, ‘you can screw the iron lace that hangs out of it till you get no catch at all on the pedals. It never stops the way you want it, it would remind you of bad jaw-plates.’

  ‘That is all lies,’ said Gilhaney.

  ‘Or like the pegs of a fairy-day fiddle,’ said the Sergeant, ‘or a skinny wife in the craw of a cold bed in springtime.’

  ‘Not that,’ said Gilhaney.

  ‘Or porter in a sick stomach,’ said the Sergeant.

  ‘So help me not,’ said Gilhaney.

  The Sergeant saw me with the corner of his eye and turned to talk to me, taking away all his attention from Gilhaney.

  ‘MacCruiskeen was giving you his talk I wouldn’t doubt,’ he said.

  ‘He was being extremely explanatory,’ I answered dryly.

  ‘He is a comical man,’ said the Sergeant, ‘a walking emporium, you’d think he was on wires and worked with steam.’

  ‘He is,’ I said.

  ‘He is a melody man,’ the Sergeant added, ‘and very temporary, a menace to the mind.’

  ‘About the bicycle,’ said Gilhaney.

  ‘The bicycle will be found,’ said the Sergeant, ‘when I retrieve and restore it to its own owner in due law and possessively. Would you desire to be of assistance in the search?’ he asked me.

  ‘I would not mind,’ I answered.

  The Sergeant looked at his teeth in the glass for a brief intermission and then put his leggings on his legs and took a hold of his stick as an indication that he was for the road. Gilhaney was at the door operating it to let us out. The three of us walked out into the middle of the day.

  ‘In case we do not come up with the bicycle before it is high dinner-time,’ said the Sergeant, ‘I have left an official memorandum for the personal information of Policeman Fox so that he will be acutely conversant with the res ipsa,’ he said.

  ‘Do you hold with rap-trap pedals?’ asked Gilhaney.

  ‘Who is Fox?’ I asked.

  ‘Policeman Fox is the third of us,’ said the Sergeant, ‘but we never see him or hear tell of him at all because he is always on his beat and never off it and he signs the book in the middle of the night when even a badger is asleep. He is as mad as a hare, he never interrogates the public and he is always taking notes. If rat-trap pedals were universal it would be the end of bicycles, the people would die like flies.’

  ‘What put him that way?’ I inquired.

  ‘I never comprehended correctly,’ replied the Sergeant, ‘or got the real informative information but Policeman Fox was alone in a private room with MacCruiskeen for a whole hour on a certain 23rd of June and he has never spoken to anybody since that day and he is as crazy as tuppence-half-penny and as cranky as thruppence. Did I ever tell you how I asked Inspector O’Corky about rat-traps? Why are they not made prohibitive, I said, or made specialities like arsenic when you would have to buy them at a chemist’s shop and sign a little book and look like a responsible personality?’

  ‘They are a power for the hills,’ said Gilhaney.

  The Sergeant spat spits on the dry road.

  ‘You would want a special Act of Parliament,’ said the Inspector, ‘a special Act of Parliament.’

  ‘What way are we going?’ I asked, ‘or what direction are we heading for or are we on the way back from somewhere else?’

  It was a queer country we were in. There was a number of blue mountains around us at what you might call a respectful distance with a glint of white water coming down the shoulders of one or two of them and they kept hemming us in and meddling oppressively with our minds. Half-way to these mountains the view got clearer and was full of humps and hollows and long parks of fine bogland with civil people here and there in the middle of it working with long instruments, you could hear their voices calling across the wind and the crack of the dull carts on the roadways. White buildings could be seen in several places and cows shambling lazily from here to there in search of pasture. A company of crows came out of a tree when I was watching and flew sadly down to a field where there was a quantity of sheep attired in fine overcoats.

  ‘We are going where we are going,’ said the Sergeant, ‘and this is the right direction to a place that is next door to it. There is one particular thing more dangerous than the rattrap pedal.’

  He left the road and drew us in after him through a hedge.

  ‘It is dishonourable to talk like that about the rat-traps,’ said Gilhaney, ‘because my family has had their boots in them for generations of their own posterity backwards and forwards and they all died in their beds except my first cousin that was meddling with the suckers of a steam thrashing-mill.’

  ‘There is only one thing more dangerous,’ said the Sergeant, ‘and that is a loose plate. A loose plate is a scorcher, nobody lives very long after swallowing one and it leads indirectly to asphyxiation.’

  ‘There is no danger of swallowing a rat-trap?’ said Gilhaney.

  ‘You would want to have good strong clips if you have a plate,’ said the Sergeant, ‘and plenty of red sealing-wax to stick it to the roof of your jaws. Take a look at the roots of that bush, it looks suspicious and there is no necessity for a warrant.’

  It was a small modest whin-bush, a lady member of the tribe as you might say, with dry particles of hay and sheep’s feathers caught in the branches high and low. Gilhaney was on his knees putting his hands through the grass and rooting like one of the lower animals. After a minute he extracted a black instrument. It was long and thin and looked like a large fountain-pen.

  ‘My pump, so h
elp me!’ he shouted.

  ‘I thought as much,’ said the Sergeant, ‘the finding of the pump is a fortunate clue that may assist us in our mission of private detection and smart policework. Put it in your pocket and hide it because it is possible that we are watched and followed and dogged by a member of the gang.’

  ‘How did you know that it was in that particular corner of the world?’ I asked in my extreme simplicity.

  ‘What is your attitude to the high saddle?’ inquired Gilhaney.

  ‘Questions are like the knocks of beggarmen, and should not be minded,’ replied the Sergeant, ‘but I do not mind telling you that the high saddle is all right if you happen to have a brass fork.’

  ‘A high saddle is a power for the hills,’ said Gilhaney

  We were in an entirely other field by this time and in the company of white-coloured brown-coloured cows. They watched us quietly as we made a path between them and changed their attitudes slowly as if to show us all of the maps on their fat sides. They gave us to understand that they knew us personally and thought a lot of our families and I lifted my hat to the last of them as I passed her as a sign of my appreciation.

  ‘The high saddle!’ said the Sergeant, ‘was invented by a party called Peters that spent his life in foreign parts riding on camels and other lofty animals – giraffes, elephants and birds that can run like hares and lay eggs the size of the bowl you see in a steam laundry where they keep the chemical water for taking the tar out of men’s pants. When he came home from the wars he thought hard of sitting on a low saddle and one night accidentally when he was in bed he invented the high saddle as the outcome of his perpetual cerebration and mental researches. His Christian name I do not remember. The high saddle was the father of the low handlebars. It crucifies the fork and gives you a blood rush in the head, it is very sore on the internal organs.’