The Third Policeman

by O'Brien, Flann;

  My eye moved from his explaining face to the block of gold which my attention had never really left.

  ‘What I would like to see now,’ I said carefully, ‘is fifty cubes of solid gold each weighing one pound.’

  MacCruiskeen went away obsequiously like a trained waiter and got these articles out of the wall without a word, arranging them in a neat structure on the floor. The Sergeant had strolled away idly to examine some clocks and take readings. In the meantime my brain was working coldly and quickly. I ordered a bottle of whiskey, precious stones to the value of £200,000, some bananas, a fountain-pen and writing materials, and finally a serge suit of blue with silk linings. When all these things were on the floor, I remembered other things I had overlooked and ordered underwear, shoes and banknotes, and a box of matches. MacCruiskeen, sweating from his labour with the heavy doors, was complaining of the heat and paused to drink some amber ale. The Sergeant was quietly clicking a little wheel with a tiny ratchet.

  ‘I think that is all,’ I said at last.

  The Sergeant came forward and gazed at the pile of merchandise.

  ‘Lord, save us,’ he said.

  ‘I am going to take these things with me,’ I announced.

  The Sergeant and MacCruiskeen exchanged their private glance. Then they smiled.

  ‘In that case you will need a big strong bag,’ the Sergeant said. He went to another door and got me a hogskin bag worth at least fifty guineas in the open market. I carefully packed away my belongings.

  I saw MacCruiskeen crushing out his cigarette on the wall and noticed that it was still the same length as it had been when lit half an hour ago. My own was burning quietly also but was completely unconsumed. I crushed it out also and put it in my pocket.

  When about to close the bag I had a thought. I unstooped and turned to the policemen.

  ‘I require just one thing more,’ I said. ‘I want a small weapon suitable for the pocket which will exterminate any man or any million men who try at any time to take my life.’

  Without a word the Sergeant brought me a small black article like a torch.

  ‘There is an influence in that,’ he said, ‘that will change any man or men into grey powder at once if you point it and press the knob and if you don’t like grey powder you can have purple powder or yellow powder or any other shade of powder if you tell me now and confide your favourite colour. Would a velvet-coloured colour please you?’

  ‘Grey will do,’ I said briefly.

  I put this murderous weapon into the bag, closed it and stood up again.

  ‘I think we might go home now.’ I said the words casually and took care not to look at the faces of the policemen. To my surprise they agreed readily and we started off with our resounding steps till we found ourselves again in the endless corridors, I carrying the heavy bag and the policemen conversing quietly about the readings they had seen. I felt happy and satisfied with my day. I felt changed and regenerated and full of fresh courage.

  ‘How does this thing work?’ I inquired pleasantly, seeking to make friendly conversation. The Sergeant looked at me.

  ‘It has helical gears,’ he said informatively.

  ‘Did you not see the wires?’ MacCruiskeen asked, turning to me in some surprise.

  ‘You would be astonished at the importance of the charcoal,’ the Sergeant said. ‘The great thing is to keep the beam reading down as low as possible and you are doing very well if the pilot-mark is steady. But if you let the beam rise, where are you with your lever? If you neglect the charcoal feedings you will send the beam rocketing up and there is bound to be a serious explosion.’

  ‘Low pilot, small fall,’ MacCruiskeen said. He spoke neatly and wisely as if his remark was a proverb.

  ‘But the secret of it all-in-all,’ continued the Sergeant, ‘is the daily readings. Attend to your daily readings and your conscience will be as clear as a clean shirt on Sunday morning. I am a great believer in the daily readings.’

  ‘Did I see everything of importance?’

  At this the policemen looked at each other in amazement and laughed outright. Their raucous roars careered away from us up and down the corridor and came back again in pale echoes from the distance.

  ‘I suppose you think a smell is a simple thing?’ the Sergeant said smiling.

  ‘A smell?’

  ‘A smell is the most complicated phenomenon in the world,’ he said, ‘and it cannot be unravelled by the human, snout or understood properly although dogs have a better way with smells than we have.’

  ‘But dogs are very poor riders on bicycles,’ MacCruiskeen said, presenting the other side of the comparison.

  ‘We have a machine down there,’ the Sergeant continued, ‘that splits up any smell into its sub- and inter-smells the way you can split up a beam of light with a glass instrument. It is very interesting and edifying, you would not believe the dirty smells that are inside the perfume of a lovely lily-of-the mountain.’

  ‘And there is a machine for tastes,’ MacCruiskeen put in, ‘the taste of a fried chop, although you might not think it, is forty per cent the taste of …’

  He grimaced and spat and looked delicately reticent.

  ‘And feels,’ the Sergeant said. ‘Now there is nothing so smooth as a woman’s back or so you might imagine. But if that feel is broken up for you, you Would not be pleased with women’s backs, I’ll promise you that on my solemn oath and parsley. Half of the inside of the smoothness is as rough as a bullock’s hips.’

  ‘The next time you come here,’ MacCruiskeen promised, ‘you will see surprising things.’

  This in itself, I thought, was a surprising thing for anyone to say after what I had just seen and after what I was carrying in the bag. He groped in his pocket, found his cigarette, relit it and proffered me the match. Hampered with the heavy bag, I was some minutes finding mine but the match still burnt evenly and brightly at its end.

  We smoked in silence and went on through the dim passage till we reached the lift again. There were clock-faces or dials beside the open lift which I had not seen before and another pair of doors beside it. I was very tired with my bag of gold and clothes and whiskey and made for the lift to stand on it and put the bag down at last. When nearly on the threshold I was arrested in my step by a call from the Sergeant which rose nearly to the pitch of a woman’s scream.

  ‘Don’t go in there!’

  The colour fled from my face at the urgency of his tone. I turned my head round and stood rooted there with one foot before the other like a man photographed unknowingly in the middle of a walk.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because the floor will collapse underneath the bottom of your feet and send you down where nobody went before you.’

  ‘And why?’

  ‘The bag, man.’

  ‘The simple thing is,’ MacCruiskeen said calmly, ‘that you cannot enter the lift unless you weigh the same weight as you weighed when you weighed into it.’

  ‘If you do,’ said the Sergeant, ‘it will extirpate you unconditionally and kill the life out of you.’

  I put the bag, clinking with its bottle and gold cubes, rather roughly on the floor. It was worth several million pounds. Standing there on the plate floor, I leaned on the plate wall and searched my wits for some reason and understanding and consolation-in-adversity. I understood little except that my plans were vanquished and my visit to eternity unavailing and calamitous. I wiped a hand on my damp brow and stared blankly at the two policemen, who were now smiling and looking knowledgeable and complacent. A large emotion came swelling against my throat and filling my mind with great sorrow and a sadness more remote and desolate than a great strand at evening with the sea far away at its distant turn. Looking down with a bent head at my broken shoes, I saw them swim and dissolve in big tears that came bursting on my eyes. I turned to the wall and gave loud choking sobs and broke down completely and cried loudly like a baby. I do not know how long I was crying. I think I heard the two policemen discussin
g me in sympathetic undertones as if they were trained doctors in a hospital. Without lifting my head I looked across the floor and saw MacCruiskeen’s legs walking away with my bag. Then I heard an oven door being opened and the bag fired roughly in. Here I cried loudly again, turning to the wall of the lift and giving complete rein to my great misery.

  At last I was taken gently by the shoulders, weighed and guided into the lift. Then I felt the two large policemen crowding in beside me and got the heavy smell of blue official broadcloth impregnated through and through with their humanity. As the floor of the lift began to resist my feet, I felt a piece of crisp paper rustling against my averted face. Looking up in the poor light I saw that MacCruiskeen was stretching his hand in my direction dumbly and meekly across the chest of the Sergeant who was standing tall and still beside me. In the hand was a small white paper bag. I glanced into it and saw round coloured things the size of florins.

  ‘Creams,’ MacCruiskeen said kindly.

  He shook the bag encouragingly and started to chew and suck loudly as if there was almost supernatural pleasure to be had from these sweetmeats. Beginning for some reason tó sob again, I put my hand into the bag but when I took a sweet, three or four others which had merged with it in the heat of the policeman’s pocket came out with it in one sticky mass of plaster. Awkwardly and foolishly I tried to disentangle them but failed completely and then rammed the lot into my mouth and stood there sobbing and sucking and snuffling. I heard the Sergeant sighing heavily and could feel his broad flank receding as he sighed.

  ‘Lord, I love sweets,’ he murmured.

  ‘Have one,’ MacCruiskeen smiled, rattling his bag.

  ‘What are you saying, man,’ the Sergeant cried, turning to view MacCruiskeen’s face, ‘are you out of your mind, man alive? If I took one of these – not one but half of a corner of the quarter of one of them – I declare to the Hokey that my stomach would blow up like a live landmine and I would be galvanized in my bed for a full fortnight roaring out profanity from terrible stoons of indigestion and heartscalds. Do you want to kill me, man?’

  ‘Sugar barley is a very smooth sweet,’ MacCruiskeen said, speaking awkwardly with his bulging mouth. ‘They give it to babies and it is a winner for the bowels.’

  ‘If I ate sweets at all,’ the Sergeant said, ‘I would live on the “Carnival Assorted”. Now there is a sweet for you. There is great sucking in them, the flavour is very spiritual and one of them is good for half an hour.’

  ‘Did you ever try Liquorice Pennies?’ asked MacCruiskeen.

  ‘Not them but the “Fourpenny Coffee-Cream Mixture” have a great charm.’

  ‘Or the Dolly Mixture?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They say,’ MacCruiskeen said, ‘that the Dolly Mixture is the best that was ever made and that it will never be surpassed and indeed I could eat them and keep eating till I got sick.’

  ‘That may be,’ the Sergeant said, ‘but if I had my health I would give you a good run for it with the Carnival Mixture.’ As they wrangled on about sweets and passed to chocolate bars and sticks of rock, the floor was pressing strongly from underneath. Then there was a change in the pressing, two clicks were heard and the Sergeant started to undo the doors, explaining to MacCruiskeen his outlook on Ju-jubes and jelly-sweets and Turkish Delights.

  With sloped shoulders and a face that was stiff from my dried tears, I stepped wearily out of the lift into the little stone room and waited till they had checked the clocks. Then I followed them into the thick bushes and kept behind them as they met the attacks of the branches and fought back. I did not care much.

  It was not until we emerged, breathless and with bleeding hands, on the green margin of the main road that I realized that a strange thing had happened. It was two or three hours since the Sergeant and I had started on our journey yet the country and the trees and all the voices of every thing around still wore an air of early morning. There was incommunicable earliness in everything, a sense of waking and beginning. Nothing had yet grown or matured and nothing begun had yet finished. A bird singing had not yet turned finally the last twist of tunefulness. A rabbit emerging still had a hidden tail.

  The Sergeant stood monumentally in the middle of the hard grey road and picked some small green things delicately from his person. MacCruiskeen stood stooped in knee-high grass looking over his person and shaking himself sharply like a hen. I stood myself looking wearily into the bright sky and wondering over the wonders of the high morning.

  When the Sergeant was ready he made a polite sign with his thumb and the two of us set off together in the direction of the barrack. MacCruiskeen was behind but he soon appeared silently in front of us, sitting without a move on the top of his quiet bicycle. He said nothing as he passed us and stirred no breath or limb and he rolled away from us down the gentle hill till a bend received him silently.

  As I walked with the Sergeant I did not notice where we were or what we passed by on the road, men, beasts or houses. My brain was like an ivy near where swallows fly. Thoughts were darting around me like a sky that was loud and dark with birds but none came into me or near enough. Forever in my ear was the click of heavy shutting doors, the whine of boughs trailing their loose leaves in a swift springing and the clang of hobnails on metal plates.

  When I reached the barrack I paid no attention to anything or anybody but went straight to a bed and lay on it and fell into a full and simple sleep. Compared with this sleep, death is a restive thing, peace is a clamour and darkness a burst of light.

  1 Not excepting even the credulous Kraus (see his De Selby’s Leben), all the commentators have treated de Selby’s disquisitions on night and sleep with considerable reserve. This is hardly to be wondered at since he held (a) that darkness was simply an accretion of ‘black air’, i.e., a staining of the atmosphere due to volcanic eruptions too fine to be seen with the naked eye and also to certain ‘regrettable’ industrial activities involving coal-tar by-products and vegetable dyes; and (b) that sleep was simply a succession of fainting-fits brought on by semi-asphyxiation due to (a). Hatchjaw brings forward his rather facile and ever-ready theory of forgery, pointing to certain unfamiliar syntactical constructions in the first part of the third so-called ‘prosecanto’ in Golden Hours. He does not, however, suggest that there is anything spurious in de Selby’s equally damaging rhodomontade in the Layman’s Atlas where he inveighs savagely against ‘the insanitary conditions prevailing everywhere after six o’clock’ and makes the famous gaffe that death is merely ‘the collapse of the heart from the strain of a lifetime of fits and fainting’. Bassett (in Lux Mundi) has gone to considerable pains to establish the date of these passages and shows that de Selby was hors de combat from his long-standing gall-bladder disorders at least immediately before the passages were composed. One cannot lightly set aside Bassett’s formidable table of dates and his corroborative extracts from contemporary newspapers which treat of an unnamed ‘elderly man’ being assisted into private houses after having fits in the street. For those who wish to hold the balance for themselves, Henderson’s Hatchjaw and Bassett is not unuseful. Kraus, usually unscientific and unreliable, is worth reading on this point. (Leben, pp. 17–37.)

  As in many other of de Selby’s concepts, it is difficult to get to grips with his process of reasoning or to refute his curious conclusions. The ‘volcanic eruptions’, which we may for convenience compare to the infra-visual activity of such substances as radium, take place usually in the ‘evening’ are stimulated by the smoke and industrial combustions of the ‘day’ and are intensified in certain places which may, for the want of a better term, be called ‘dark places’. One difficulty is precisely this question of terms. A ‘dark place’ is dark merely because it is a place where darkness ‘germinates’ and ‘evening’ is a time of twilight merely because the ‘day’ deteriorates owing to the stimulating effect of smuts on the volcanic processes. De Selby makes no attempt to explain why a ‘dark place’ such as a cellar need be dark and does
not define the atmospheric, physical or mineral conditions which must prevail uniformly in all such places if the theory is to stand. The ‘only straw offered’, to use Bassett’s wry phrase, is the statement that ‘black air’ is highly combustible, enormous masses of it being instantly consumed by the smallest flame, even an electrical luminance isolated in a vacuum. ‘This,’ Bassett observes, ‘seems to be an attempt to protect the theory from the shock it can be dealt by simply striking matches and may be taken as the final proof that the great brain was out of gear.’

  A significant feature of the matter is the absence of any authoritative record of those experiments with which de Selby always sought to support his ideas. It is true that Kraus (see below) gives a forty-page account of certain experiments, mostly concerned with attempts to bottle quantities of ‘night’ and endless sessions in locked and shuttered bedrooms from which bursts of loud hammering could be heard. He explains that the bottling operations were carried out with bottles which were, ‘for obvious reasons’, made of black glass. Opaque porcelain jars are also stated to have been used ‘with some success’. To use the frigid words of Bassett, ‘such information, it is to be feared, makes little contribution to serious deselbiana (sic).’

  Very little is known of Kraus or his life. A brief biographical note appears in the obsolete Bibliographie de de Selby. He is stated to have been born in Ahrensburg, near Hamburg, and to have worked as a young man in the office of his father, who had extensive jam interests in North Germany. He is said to have disappeared completely from human ken after Hatchjaw had been arrested in a Sheephaven hotel following the unmasking of the de Selby letter scandal by The Times, which made scathing references to Kraus’s ‘discreditable’ machinations in Hamburg and clearly suggested his complicity. If it is remembered that these events occurred in the fateful June when the County Album was beginning to appear in fortnightly parts, the significance of the whole affair becomes apparent. The subsequent exoneration of Hatchjaw served only to throw further suspicion on the shadowy Kraus.