I still cannot quite believe that the effort needed to lift all the rest of those deadweight blocks in the short period we had was actually possible. I know that time and again I thought I was going to fail in my own small Part. And each time, faced with the evidence of so much more being done by my companion, I did not dare let myself give up.
But at last the end came in sight.
‘Up with you now. Have to look sharp.’
Trembling uncontrollably, I scrabbled up.
‘Slip this one nearer the edge with me, and after that you can get in.’
It needed even more force to slide that last block to a place where it could be tipped in over us. Its new-cut surface grated with jagged obstinacy the whole way. In little half-inch jabs we jerked it forward and with every shove it slewed maddeningly out of line and had to be slewed back again. But at last I heard a grunt of approbation.
‘Should do there. Now, get in, quick.’
I crawled, shaking, round the block. The gap I had to slide into was very small, and for a moment I doubted whether I was lithe enough. And then I said to myself that it was this or a backful of shotgun pellets. And I put my feet in and wriggled and scraped myself and tugged at my sea-sodden clothing and at last dropped down into the low oblong we had built.
Now the convict scrambled in while I flattened myself against the far side. Soon he was beside me, half sitting, half lying.
‘Are they coming?’ I asked, more out of a need to reach out to somebody than for information.
‘Not yet.’
It was a barely grunted answer. And then he reached up to the last block with one broad hand and tugged hard. Slowly the heavy stone toppled over towards me. Yet more slowly he let it sink. I saw with acute pleasure that it was going to fit neatly on the tiny ledge allowed for it. It seemed somehow an omen of success.
And then we were shut in. The darkness seemed complete. I lay there, hearing my companion’s heavy breathing gradually quieten, and I thought ‘What a fool I was to think of omens. Luck is two-sided.’ I wanted to leap up, fling off the heavy stone and run and run.
5
Suddenly a sharp sound rang out, a shouted word. It seemed to come from within a yard of the narrow sealed cubicle where the two of us lay stiff and motionless.
‘Now!’
I almost screamed aloud. Sweat flooded over me.
They’re here, I thought. Did they see the stone moving? They must have been coming up very quietly, and that shout was the signal.
But in a moment the sound of quick querying voices came to us, it seemed, from various directions. Plainly the hunters’ expectations of surprising us cowering behind the piled stones of the lighter had been disappointed. Soon after there came the clanging of booted men clambering up the vessel’s iron sides.
‘Not a sign,’ said a voice.
‘Well, where the hell are they then?’ another voice said.
‘I dunno.’
‘They must be here, I tell you.’
‘All right, where are they then?’
‘P’raps they’ve made themselves a little lair under the stones.’
The voice sounded distinctly doubtful, but I went cold with fear. I saw myself suddenly exposed to the light, like a darkness-whitened centipede, and then crushed.
A moment later the long thin line of faint light at the edge of the final block was suddenly blotted out in two separate places.
Hands, I thought. Fingers. Someone is going to lift the block.
I forced myself to keep my eyes open.
‘No,’ said a voice horribly close to my head. ‘Can’t shift the bastard.’
And then the second voice called over to the beach.
‘They must’ve got away. Try back towards the town.’
We lay and listened to the clanging on the lighter’s side as the boarders got down. Then there were a few sweetly distant shouts. And at last silence. But neither of us moved. I even decided not to whisper a word till the barrel-chested man beside me had spoken.
And then I wondered why I had. I had handed over the initiative, it seemed. At some point he had become the leader and I the led.
I lay there speculating about just what had occurred. Here was this man, physically strong as a brute of course, but who seemed from his thick country accent to be no more than a farm labourer or small tenant at best. And here was I, educated, knowing the world, quite capable of holding down what is generally considered a tough job. Yet at some point in our joint flight this simple fellow had just taken charge.
People did it. It was odd. Some of them—I thought of a former Editor of the paper—did it by sheer willingness to shout, bully and lose their tempers. Others, my present Foreign Editor was an example, achieved it in almost exactly the opposite way, by smiling and smiling with underneath an unswerving assumption that what they wanted they would get. And, of course, there were degrees to it. After all, I myself had my quantum of strength. Confronting a certain sort of person in an interview, I knew that, however much they wanted to tell me nothing, they could not. But I had learnt over the years I was one of the ones who were only to watch what went on at the top, to look on for instance at my ex-Editor yelling like a spoilt three-year-old shamelessly carry it off every time against the cold smiles of the Foreign Editor. And I knew, too, that however often I saw this I would never assert myself over the latter, except at a wildly disproportionate cost.
‘Going to see if I can get a sight of ‘em.’
It was my companion, my leader.
He began to lift at our heavy covering block. For a cold moment I imagined a ring of grinning Keepers, shotguns pointing, watching the square-cut stone move inch by inch. But that was only imaginings. In a little the block was high enough for my companion cautiously to thrust his head out.
‘No one,’ he reported.
He squeezed himself out and I followed.
The last of the day had gone and it had stopped raining. A diffused moonlight was pouring down.
‘We’d better be moving, I suppose,’ I said.
‘No.’
The answer was flatly uncompromising.
Damn it, I thought. This is where I should take over again.
But at once the counter-thought came into my head that if ever anything was pointless it was conducting a running power struggle with my fellow fugitive in hostile Oceana.
I looked at him, out of the side of my eyes. This was the first chance I had had to give his face more than the quickest of glances. Under a shock of black hair, it was broad and dark-complexioned, one of the typical faces of the island. The nose was short, the mouth wide but very straight, the cleft chin determined. The eyes, hidden below a beetling brow, were dark. Later, when I came to know them better, I found they were a deep liquid brown often filled for hours with a faraway inward-turned contemplativeness which was to remind me time and again of the slowly changing little fields and pervasive quiet of the world which for half a lifetime was all he knew. But this look could, I was to learn, turn to something very different, a hard alertness which, if one took into account only the impassive features, it was possible entirely to miss. Possible but foolish.
‘Tell me,’ I said, putting the first of a good many questions beginning to buzz in my head. ‘How did you get put in gaol in the first place?’
‘I’ve got a smallholding out on the Kernel. It used to be enough to keep me from being idle and I never paid much notice to what was going on over in Lesneven and places. Then one day they came along and took three Parts of my land for that great house they’re building. Just like that. No payment. Nothing. We’d have starved. So I told ‘em be damned. And before I knew it I was in the town gaol here with a couple of chains round my legs.’
So, I thought, that accounts for the strong burr. The Kernel is only a small island, perhaps seven miles long and five wide at its broadest, and it is not far out to sea but it had always been extraordinarily isolated, thanks to the terribly dangerous currents in the mile of water
that separates it from Lesneven. So quiet it is that they used to say people lived in the middle of it who had actually never seen the sea. An exaggeration, no doubt, but one that accounted for my friend’s burr, and probably too for his self-sufficiency.
‘And how long ago was that?’
‘Eighteen months. Tonight was the first chance I had of getting out.’
‘How was that?’
‘They put me in another cell. As soon as the door was locked I tried the window bars and one of ‘em was a bit loose like. I got it bent in the end.’
‘But the chains?’
‘They come off at night.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘now we must think how we can get over the water. Luckily I’ve a fair amount of cash on me, all I brought for a fortnight’s stay here, so we ought to be able to find a fishing-boat that’ll take us to Ireland.’
I gave him as much of a smile as I could muster.
‘In a couple of weeks,’ I said, ‘we’ll have you fixed up with a job in England and this will be just a bad dream.’
He wheeled round and thrust his face near mine.
‘Do you think I risked maybe my life getting out of gaol for that?’ he demanded.
‘But—but for freedom.’
‘I got out of gaol for one reason only—to fight Mylchraine.’
It was not the sort of statement to which you reply ‘How interesting.’ I stood in silence looking out to sea and thinking over all that that one fiercely uttered sentence implied. It was a long time before I spoke again.
‘I don’t even know your name,’ I said eventually.
‘It’s Keig. Thomas Keig.’
Keig. The name is an old one in the island. It is pronounced there to rhyme with Haig. No doubt this man’s forefathers had farmed the same parcel of land for hundreds of years. And then Mr Mylchraine had come along with his plans for that enormous house, and Keig had been in his way.
I looked at him.
‘Do you know the name Marshall Tear?’ I asked.
‘No.’
‘No? He’d be disappointed to hear that. Marshall Tear lives in Dublin and is the leader of what they call the Revolutionary Council of Oceana. He used to be headmaster of Brignogan School till he voiced his opinions about the liberty of the subject a bit too freely. I suppose, in fact, he was lucky to get out. But that was some years ago.’
‘And what’s he done since then?’ Keig asked abruptly.
I smiled.
‘It’s a pretty big task to overthrow someone as well entrenched as Mr Mylchraine,’ I said. ‘Especially if you’re almost completely without funds.’
Keig made no reply. He stood beside me in disconcerting silence for what well might have been five minutes, perhaps even more. His expression, when I turned to him once or twice, was deeply withdrawn. It was almost impossible to see the eyes under the beetling brow.
Then at last he seemed to jerk to life.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s it.’
He swung round to face me.
‘The first thing is,’ he went on, ‘my wife over there on the Kernel. She’s to come with us. They’ll take her else. They’ll think to get me back that way. So it’s over there we must go, and as immediate as we can.’
‘Yes. But how—’
‘The one thing they’re sure and certain to do is watch the boats round about as soon as they find they’ve lost us. So we’ll go over as we are, in the lighter.’
I was a little taken aback. True enough, a watch was likely to be kept on the boats, but there seemed to be all sorts of risks.
‘Look, couldn’t we swim it over there?’ I said.
‘I might, but I doubt you could,’ Keig answered bluntly. ‘I’ve known it swum once or twice but never except at the neap. No, we’ll go over this way. When we get there they leave the lighter untended while they go for a meal. Once we’re off, I know men as’ll row us out to the steamer when she goes by next. And she’ll take us up. We had one of the sailors in gaol.’
I thought it over. It seemed logical enough, once the initial risk had been taken. But that first move still looked incredibly foolhardy. Was there some wild streak in this man in spite of his calm and settled way of approaching things?
That was a question I was to ask more than once.
But that night Keig emanated such quiet confidence that I actually slept. We worked first to enlarge and improve our hiding-place, a task that went without a hitch. Except when, looking out to sea once, I spotted something dark moving across the moon-silvered water towards us and made a fool of myself by panicking over what Keig was quick to identify as a seal, one of the occasional ones to be seen in the channel between us and the Kernel.
This however was the only incident and after it I spent, to my considerable surprise, quite a good night stretched out beside Keig in our well-constructed coffin-for-two. When he woke me the light in the quarter-inch slit we had for air was already bright.
‘Train from the quarry’s coming,’ he whispered. ‘The gang won’t be long after.’
Nor were they. And following their arrival things seemed to go exactly as Keig had told me they would. It even became deadly monotonous lying there hardly daring to move a muscle as the loading was completed. I grew hungry, too. Achingly hollow-stomached with it. The blayberry breaddie I had eaten at home seemed far, far in the past.
But at last there came a new burst of shouted orders and I realized that the loaders were being put to stand in two lines along each side of our cumbersome vessel for the crossing.
It was just as the last of them were taking their places that the progress which Keig had outlined went drastically askew.
6
I had been watching our thin slit of light as the convicts went past it one by one when, after it had been blotted out once a little longer than previously, there came, almost as if from inside our hide-out, a quick gasp of surprise and a voice saying quite loudly ‘Mr Keig.’
‘Ssssh.’
Keig spat the sound out. From the far side of the slit there was silence.
Lying beaded with sweat in an instant, I realized what must have happened. The convict put to stand just in front of our air vent by a chance in a thousand must have seen Keig’s face. An inch to either side and nothing would have been visible. But he had not only spotted Keig, he had spoken his name.
Would one of the Keepers have heard?
I lay unable to think of anything but the sequence of events that would follow. At last I heard Keig whisper.
‘Jim? Jim Caley?’
‘Yes?’
‘Did any of the Keepers see you speak?’
‘No, no. I swear they didn’t.’
‘Quiet. Say as little as you can.’
‘Yes, Mr Keig.’
‘Now listen. Forget you ever saw me. Understand? Put it right out of your head. Forget it immediate. It was a dream. Just that.’
There was a silence. Then a whispered reply in an uncertain tone.
‘But, isn’t there any way I can help?’
‘Listen, lad,’ Keig hissed. ‘I’ve been good to you odd times, haven’t I? In the lines down here at the lighter, I’ve taken a bit of the weight off you, haven’t I?’
‘Yes, yes, you did. When you saw I couldn’t bear it any longer. There’ve been times you kept me from going mad.’
‘Then listen.’
Keig was plainly putting all the force he could into the whispered words.
‘Forget you ever had a sight of me here. Turn away from me now and never think of me again.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Do it now.’
The thin slit beyond Keig’s head winked fully into light again and stayed so.
Keig remained staring at it for the whole time it took them to fix the tow-rope and get us under way. But the slit did not darken again and bit by bit he relaxed.
I think I would have reproached him then. Certainly the thought was boiling inside my head. This was exactly what I had feared. We ha
d put ourselves, with incredible foolhardiness, into the lion’s jaws and if we had succeeded in staving off disaster it was a miracle. But we had hardly been moving three minutes when I had other things to concern me: the square old lighter started to roll like a rhinoceros and soon I was appallingly sick. In the narrow confines of our hiding-place the effect of that does not bear talking about.
But, after what seemed one of the longest hours I had known, the crossing did at last come to an end. I heard voices calling over the water as our towing craft cast off, and then there was a jarring boom as the iron lighter ground against a stone jetty. At last all motion ceased.
‘Looks as if it’s going to be all right after all,’ I murmured out of sheer relief.
‘No,’ Keig whispered. ‘Jim Caley’ll talk.’
‘Talk? Tell the Keepers? But why? He asked if he could help.’
‘He won’t want to talk. But he will.’
‘I can’t see how you can be so sure,’ I replied in a burst of irritation.
‘I know the lad. He’s young. He came from a nice family. He took prison and the beatings harder than most. As soon as it comes to him he knows something that could get him out he won’t be able to help himself.’
‘But he hasn’t betrayed us up to now. You’ve misjudged him.’
‘It’s not his time yet. He wouldn’t let himself tell in front of the others. But at break time he’ll find a chance.’
Hope died: Keig’s reasoning was too plainly well-based.
And once again things happened just as he had predicted. Immediately after the chain-gang had been disembarked they were marched away for the midday meal. I heard their shuffling steps fade away with blank dismay. Keig at once began easing the block above him upwards.
Would the movement have been observed? There could well be some idler on the jetty looking straight at us.
Keig heaved himself on to one elbow and took a fresh position under the long slab. And again, with infinite slowness, he eased it up. Light came pouring in. I saw Keig turn strainingly and peer out.
‘All right?’ I asked, furious with anxiety.
‘Seems quiet enough.’
Strong Man Page 5
