The Third Policeman

by O'Brien, Flann;

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Not very far away from the fire?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Near enough to the family to hear the conversation?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not a thousand miles from where they keep the eatables?’

  ‘I did not notice that. You do not mean to say that these bicycles eat food?’

  ‘They were never seen doing it, nobody ever caught them with a mouthful of steak. All I know is that the food disappears.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘It is not the first time I have noticed crumbs at the front wheels of some of these gentlemen.’

  ‘All this is a great blow to me,’ I said.

  ‘Nobody takes any notice,’ replied the Sergeant. ‘Mick thinks that Pat brought it in and Pat thinks that Mick was instrumental. Very few of the people guess what is going on in this parish. There are other things I would rather not say too much about. A new lady teacher was here one time with a new bicycle. She was not very long here till Gilhaney went away into the lonely country on her female bicycle. Can you appreciate the immorality of that?’

  ‘I can.’

  ‘But worse happened. Whatever way Gilhaney’s bicycle managed it, it left itself leaning at a place where the young teacher would rush out to go away somewhere on her bicycle in a hurry. Her bicycle was gone but here was Gilhaney’s leaning there conveniently and trying to look very small and comfortable and attractive. Need I inform you what the result was or what happened?’

  Indeed he need not, Joe said urgently. I have never heard of anything so shameless and abandoned. Of course the teacher was blameless, she did not take pleasure and did not know.

  ‘You need not,’ I said.

  ‘Well, there you are. Gilhaney has a day out with the lady’s bicycle and vice versa contrarily and it is quite clear that the lady in the case had a high number – thirty-five or forty, I would say, in spite of the newness of the bicycle. Many a grey hair it has put into my head, trying to regulate the people of this parish. If you let it go too far it would be the end of everything. You would have bicycles wanting votes and they would get seats on the County Council and make the roads far worse than they are for their own ulterior motivation. But against that and on the other hand, a good bicycle is a great companion, there is a great charm about it.’

  ‘How would you know a man has a lot of bicycle in his veins?’

  ‘If his number is over Fifty you can tell it unmistakable from his walk. He will walk smartly always and never sit down and he will lean against the wall with his elbow out and stay like that all night in his kitchen instead of going to bed. If he walks too slowly or stops in the middle of the road he will fall down in a heap and will have to be lifted and set in motion again by some extraneous party. This is the unfortunate state that the postman has cycled himself into, and I do not think he will ever cycle himself out of it.’

  ‘I do not think I will ever ride a bicycle,’ I said.

  ‘A little of it is a good thing and makes you hardy and puts iron on to you. But walking too far too often too quickly is not safe at all. The continual cracking of your feet on the road makes a certain quantity of road come up into you. When a man dies they say he returns to clay but too much walking fills you up with clay far sooner (or buries bits of you along the road) and brings your death half-way to meet you. It is not easy to know what is the best way to move yourself from one place to another.

  After he had finished speaking I found myself walking nimbly and lightly on my toes in order to prolong my life. My head was packed tight with fears and miscellaneous apprehensions.

  ‘I never heard of these things before,’ I said, ‘and never knew these happenings could happen. Is it a new development or was it always an ancient fundamental?’

  The Sergeant’s face clouded and he spat thoughtfully three yards ahead of him on the road.

  ‘I will tell you a secret,’ he said very confidentially in a low voice. ‘My great-grandfather was eighty-three when he died. For a year before his death he was a horse!’

  ‘A horse?’

  ‘A horse in everything but extraneous externalities. He would spend the day grazing in a field or eating hay in a stall. Usually he was lazy and quiet but now and again he would go for a smart gallop, clearing the hedges in great style. Did you ever see a man on two legs galloping?’

  ‘I did not.’

  ‘Well, I am given to understand that it is a great sight. He always said he won the Grand National when he was a lot younger and used to annoy his family with stories about the intricate jumps and the great height of them.’

  ‘I suppose your great-grandfather got himself into this condition by too much horse riding?’

  ‘That was the size of it. His old horse Dan was in the contrary way and gave so much trouble, coming into the house at night and interfering with young girls during the day and committing indictable offences, that they had to shoot him. The police were unsympathetic, not comprehending things rightly in these days. They said they would have to arrest the horse and charge him and have him up at the next Petty Sessions unless he was done away with. So my family shot him but if you ask me it was my greatgrandfather they shot and it is the horse that is buried up in Cloncoonla Churchyard.’

  The Sergeant then became thoughtful at the recollection of his ancestors and had a reminiscent face for the next half-mile till we came to the barracks. Joe and I agreed privately that these revelations were the supreme surprise stored for us and awaiting our arrival in the barracks.

  When we reached it and the Sergeant led the way in with a sigh. ‘The lock, stock and barrel of it all,’ he said, ‘is the County Council.’

  Chapter 7

  The severe shock which I encountered soon after re-entry to the barrack with the Sergeant set me thinking afterwards of the immense consolations which philosophy and religion can offer in adversity. They seem to lighten dark places and give strength to bear the unaccustomed load. Not unnaturally my thoughts were never very far from de Selby. All his works – but particularly Golden Hours – have what one may term a therapeutic quality. They have a heart-lifted effect more usually associated with spirituous liquors, reviving and quietly restoring the spiritual tissue. This benign property of his prose is not, one hopes, to be attributed to the reason noticed by the eccentric du Garbandier, who said ‘the beauty of reading a page of de Selby is that it leads one inescapably to the happy conviction that one is not, of all nincompoops, the greatest.’1 This is, I think, an overstatement of one of de Selby’s most ingratiating qualities. The humanising urbanity of his work has always seemed to me to be enhanced rather than vitiated by the chance obtrusion here and there of his minor failings, all the more pathetic because he regarded some of them as pinnacles of his intellectual prowess rather than indications of his frailty as a human being.

  Holding that the usual processes of living were illusory, it is natural that he did not pay much attention to life’s adversities and he does not in fact offer much suggestion as to how they should be met. Bassett’s anecdote2 on this point may be worth recounting. During de Selby’s Bartown days he had acquired some local reputation as a savant ‘due possibly to the fact that he was known never to read newspapers.’ A young man in the town was seriously troubled by some question regarding a lady and feeling that this matter was weighing on his mind and threatening to interfere with his reason, he sought de Selby for advice. Instead of exorcising this solitary blot from the young man’s mind, as indeed could easily have been done, de Selby drew the young man’s attention to some fifty imponderable propositions each of which raised difficulties which spanned many eternities and dwarfed the conundrum of the young lady to nothingness. Thus the young man who had come fearing the possibility of a bad thing left the house completely convinced of the worst and cheerfully contemplating suicide. That he arrived home for his supper at the usual time was a happy intervention on the part of the moon for he had gone home by the harbour only to find that the tide was t
wo miles out. Six months later he earned for himself six calendar months’ incarceration with hard labour on foot of eighteen counts comprising larceny and offences bearing on interference with railroads. So much for the savant as a dispenser of advice.

  As already said, however, de Selby provides some genuine mental sustenance if read objectively for what there is to read. In the Layman’s Atlas3 he deals explicitly with bereavement, old age, love, sin, death and the other saliencies of existence. It is true that he allows them only some six lines but this is due to his devastating assertion that they are all ‘unnecessary’.4 Astonishing as it may seem, he makes this statement as a direct corollary to his discovery that the earth, far from being a sphere, is ‘sausage-shaped.’

  Not a few of the critical commentators confess to a doubt as to whether de Selby was permitting himself a modicum of unwonted levity in connection with this theory but he seems to argue the matter seriously enough and with no want of conviction.

  He adopts the customary line of pointing out fallacies involved in existing conceptions and then quietly setting up his own design in place of the one he claims to have demolished.

  Standing at a point on the postulated spherical earth, he says, one appears to have four main directions in which to move, viz., north, south, east and west. But it does not take much thought to see that there really appear to be only two since north and south are meaningless terms in relation to a spheroid and can connote motion in only one direction; so also with west and east. One can reach any point on the north-south band by travelling in either ‘direction’, the only apparent difference in the two ‘routes’ being extraneous considerations of time and distance, both already shown to be illusory. North-south is therefore one direction and east-west apparently another. Instead of four directions there are only two. It can be safely inferred,5 de Selbys says, that there is a further similar fallacy inherent here and that there is in fact only one possible direction properly so-called, because if one leaves any point on the globe, moving and continuing to move in any ‘direction’, one ultimately reaches the point of departure again.

  The application of this conclusion to his theory that ‘the earth is a sausage’ is illuminating. He attributes the idea that the earth is spherical to the fact that human beings are continually moving in only one known direction (though convinced that they are free to move in any direction) and that this one direction is really around the circular circumference of an earth which is in fact sausage-shaped. It can scarcely be contested that if multi-directionality be admitted to be a fallacy, the sphericity of the earth is another fallacy that would inevitably follow from it. De Selby likens the position of a human on the earth to that of a man on a tight-wire who must continue walking along the wire or perish, being, however, free in all other respects. Movement in this restricted orbit results in the permanent hallucination known conventionally as ‘life’ with its innumerable concomitant limitations, afflictions and anomalies. If a way can be found, says de Selby, of discovering the ‘second direction’, i.e., along the ‘barrel’ of the sausage, a world of entirely new sensation and experience will be open to humanity. New and unimaginable dimensions will supersede the present order and the manifold ‘unnecessaries’ of ‘one-directional’ existence will disappear.

  It is true that de Selby is rather vague as to how precisely this new direction is to be found. It is not, he warns us, to be ascertained by any microscopic subdivision of the known points of the compass and little can be expected from sudden darts hither and thither in the hope that a happy chance will intervene. He doubts whether human legs would be ‘suitable’ for traversing the ‘longitudinal celestium’ and seems to suggest that death is nearly always present when the new direction is discovered. As Bassett points out justly enough, this lends considerable colour to the whole theory but suggests at the same time that de Selby is merely stating in an obscure and recondite way something that is well-known and accepted.

  As usual, there is evidence that he carried out some private experimenting. He seems to have thought at one time that gravitation was the ‘jailer’ of humanity, keeping it on the one-directional line of oblivion, and that ultimate freedom lay in some upward direction. He examined aviation as a remedy without success and subsequently spent some weeks designing certain ‘barometric pumps’ which were ‘worked with mercury and wires’ to clear vast areas of the earth of the influence of gravitation. Happily for the people of the place as well for their movable chattels he does not seem to have had much result. Eventually he was distracted from these occupations by the extraordinary affair of the water-box.6

  As I have already hinted, I would have given much for a glimpse of a signpost showing the way along the ‘barrel’ of the sausage after I had been some two minutes back in the white day-room with Sergeant Pluck.

  We were not more than completely inside the door when we became fully aware that there was a visitor present. He had coloured stripes of high office on his chest but he was dressed in policeman’s blue and on his head he carried a policeman’s hat with a special badge of superior office glittering very brilliantly in it. He was very fat and circular, with legs and arms of the minimum, and his large bush of moustache was bristling with bad temper and self-indulgence. The Sergeant gave him looks of surprise and then a military salute.

  ‘Inspector O’Corky!’ he said.

  ‘What is the meaning of the vacuity of the station in routine hours?’ barked the Inspector.

  The sound his voice made was rough like coarse cardboard rubbed on sandpaper and it was clear that he was not pleased with himself or with other people.

  ‘I was out myself,’ the Sergeant replied respectfully, ‘on emergency duty and policework of the highest gravity.’

  ‘Did you know that a man called Mathers was found in the crotch of a ditch up the road two hours ago with his belly opened up with a knife or sharp instrument?’

  To say this was a surprise which interfered seriously with my heart-valves would be the same as saying that a red-hot poker would heat your face if somebody decided to let you have it there. I stared from the Sergeant to the Inspector and back again with my whole inside fluttering in consternation.

  It seems that our mutual friend Finnucane is in the environs, Joe said.

  ‘Certainly I did,’ said the Sergeant.

  Very strange. How could he if he has been out with us after the bicycle for the last four hours?

  ‘And what steps have you taken and how many steps?’ barked the Inspector.

  ‘Long steps and steps in the right direction,’ replied the Sergeant evenly. ‘I know who the murderer is.’

  ‘Then why is he not arrested into custody?’

  ‘He is,’ said the Sergeant pleasantly.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Here.’

  This was the second thunderbolt. After I had glanced fearfully to my rear without seeing a murderer it became clear to me that I myself was the subject of the private conversation of the two Policemen. I made no protest because my voice was gone and my mouth was bone-dry.

  Inspector O’Corky was too angry to be pleased at anything so surprising as what the Sergeant said.

  ‘Then why is he not confined under a two-way key and padlock in the cell?’ he roared.

  For the first time the Sergeant looked a bit crestfallen and shame-faced. His face got a little redder than it was and he put his eyes on the stone floor.

  ‘To tell you the truth,’ he said at last, ‘I keep my bicycle there.’

  ‘I see,’ said the Inspector.

  He stopped quickly and rammed black clips on the extremities of his trousers and stamped on the floor. For the first time I saw that he had been leaning by one elbow on the counter.

  ‘See that you regularize your irregularity instantaneously,’ he called as his good-bye, ‘and set right your irrectitude and put the murderer in the cage before he rips the bag out of the whole countryside.’

  After that he was gone. Sounds came to us of coarse scraping
on the gravel, a sign that the Inspector favoured the old-fashioned method of mounting from the back-step.

  ‘Well, now,’ the Sergeant said.

  He took off his cap and went over to a chair and sat on it, casing himself on his broad pneumatic seat. He took a red cloth from his fob and decanted the globes of perspiration from his expansive countenance and opened the buttons of his tunic as if to let out on wing the trouble that was imprisoned there. He then took to carrying out a scientifically precise examination of the soles and the toes of his constabulary boots, a sign that he was wrestling with some great problem.

  ‘What is your worry?’ I inquired, very anxious by now that what had happened should be discussed.

  ‘The bicycle,’ he said.

  ‘The bicycle?’

  ‘How can I put it out of the cell?’ he asked.

  ‘I have always kept it in solitary confinement when I am not riding it to make sure it is not leading a personal life inimical to my own inimitability. I cannot be too careful. I have to ride long rides on my constabulary ridings.’

  ‘Do you mean that I should be locked in the cell and kept there and hidden from the world?’

  ‘You surely heard the instructions of the Inspector?’

  Ask is it all a joke? Joe said.

  ‘Is this all a joke for entertainment purposes?’

  ‘If you take it that way I will be indefinitely beholden to you,’ said the Sergeant earnestly, ‘and I will remember you with real emotion. It would be a noble gesture and an unutterable piece of supreme excellence on the part of the deceased.’

  ‘What!’ I cried.

  ‘You must recollect that to turn everything to your own advantage is one of the regulations of true wisdom as I informed you privately. It is the following of this rule on my part that makes you a murderer this today evening.

  ‘The Inspector required a captured prisoner as the least tiniest minimum for his inferior bonhomie and mal d’esprit. It was your personal misfortune to be present adjacently at the time but it was likewise my personal good fortune and good luck. There is no option but to stretch you for the serious offence.’