Marshall Tear, chairman of the Council, former headmaster of Brignogan School, acknowledged leader of the exiles, was not there. It was, from what I knew of him, to be expected. He liked to hold a little aloof. He would arrive when the first flurry of greetings was over.
But now the excitement was upon us in full flood. The moment they saw me at the door, everyone in the room, it seemed, jumped up and hurried forward. Eyes were shining, voices were suddenly raised. This was a great day for Oceana.
Cormode seized my hand and shook it time and again. I introduced Keig, who in turn allowed his great fist to be pumped up and down.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said, managing to get the corners of his mouth up into a definite smile.
Then the others came up and I introduced some of them and Cormode introduced the rest. There were shouts of ‘Congratulations’ and ‘That’ll teach Mr Mylchraine’ and people started slapping each other on the back as if the success had somehow been Partly of their own making.
‘A drink,’ Cormode shouted. ‘Someone get two doubles for the heroes of Free Oceana.’
A moment later glasses were being passed from hand to hand towards us. They took some time in coming, and I could see that Cormode, as he mouthed more congratulations, was already working out how this new element in exiled Oceanan politics was going to fit in. Nor did it take him long to decide. Just as the drink arrived he looked at Keig and offered him stout in place of whiskey. In his book the newcomer was to be the rough country simpleton, the slow plodding force unused to the wider ways of the world.
‘No, this will do grand,’ Keig said, snatching at the whiskey glass with an expression of sudden resoluteness.
‘I give you a toast then,’ Cormode called out. ‘To the downfall of the tyrant Mylchraine.’
I was looking at Keig closely as a nursemaid watching her charge perform its first curtsey and I saw that the glass when he set it down on the green-tiled table in front of him was almost as full as when he had been given it. Was he nothing of a drinking man? There were many aspects of him I had not yet encountered.
A great to-do followed over ordering another round. The Oceanans, generally eking out a whole evening of political discussion on a single bottle of stout, were evidently in finely careless holiday mood.
And soon the glass-panelled door was opened wide and Marshall Tear strode in.
He was a commanding figure, no doubt about that. A good six foot tall, he had a great mane of whitish-grey hair and a long, full, gravely handsome face, the skin slightly deadened with age. He would be then in his late fifties, perhaps just sixty. He wore a dark blue suit, old but well-cut, a plain white shirt—very fresh looking—and a plain blue tie. He would have photographed well.
Everybody had risen to their feet again. He gave us all a remote smile. Cormode hurried forward and introduced Keig and myself. Then, when Tear had seated himself in the place clearly regularly reserved for him, he invited us to tell our story.
I took the task on myself and made a thorough job of it, taking good care to leave it clear who had planned the undertaking and had been its leading spirit. I was not going to have Cormode and his like belittling Keig.
Marshall Tear certainly appeared to get the message. At the end of my recital he leant forward in his chair.
‘Mr Keig,’ he said, ‘I want you to know that I myself, like every single one of us in this room, have nothing but the highest admiration for your daring and resource.’
Keig shifted uneasily on the chair that looked so frail under him.
Tear looked all round as if the small assembly was a mighty crowd beneath him.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘from this moment Mr Keig is a member of the Revolutionary Council.’
There was a patter of applause.
‘I think, sir,’ Cormode broke in, easily silencing the sound, ‘that we are not in fact a properly constituted meeting. Of course—’
A cold light had come into Tear’s eyes.
‘I hardly think this is an occasion for the minutiae of protocol, Cormode,’ he said. ‘Mr Keig is appointed on my authority.’
‘Of course, sir.’
Tear stayed on only long enough to consolidate, so to speak, this small victory. When he left it seemed to me that the atmosphere loosened up considerably, and soon I was busy with various people elaborating on what I had told them earlier. So it was some time before I noticed that Keig, who had taken a minimal part in the talk, had risen from his chair. I was at that moment closely engaged with Commander Fayrhare—very keen to know if there had been anything said in the island about Mr Mylchraine’s Keepers acquiring sea-going craft—but I was able to see Cormode go quickly over.
‘Now what about another drink?’ I heard him say.
‘No,’ said Keig, almost vehemently.
And then he added a painfully obvious concession to politeness.
‘Thank you all the same, but I’m away now.’
I excused myself reluctantly from Fayrhare, who was a nice, serious, straightforward man, and made my way across.
‘I must go too,’ I said to Cormode. ‘The prospect of a bed with sheets on it is beginning to seem extraordinarily attractive.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Keig. ‘Yes, we must get some sleep. And there’s my wife. She’ll be fradgeting.’
At the door Cormode laid his fingers on Keig’s sleeve.
‘One more thing,’ he said, ‘where is the gold actually?’
Keig looked at him.
‘Here,’ he said, picking up his two heavy black leather bags.
‘Good gracious,’ Cormode said, ‘have you been carrying it round with you?’
‘Where else would it be safe?’ Keig asked.
Cormode smiled, without warmth.
‘Well, I suggest a bank deposit box,’ he answered. ‘I was arranging for one this afternoon as a matter of fact. I’ll call for you in the morning and we can put it safely away.’
‘No,’ Keig said.
Cormode blinked.
‘Er—Well, when shall I come then?’
Keig looked at him unsmilingly.
‘I prefer to keep it myself for the time being,’ he said.
The judger had been judged.
Nor did Keig ever put the gold into the keeping of the Revolutionary Council. That first encounter proved to be an accurate foretaste of his relations with the established leaders of the exiles during all the time he spent in Dublin. For the first few months he attended every meeting of the Council, for which Cormode, a punctilious secretary, sent him badly duplicated agendas. But from what I gathered he never said very much and soon I realized that he was going to them not with the idea of contributing anything, and certainly not to be obstructionist—a pleasure which seemed wholly to consume some of the members—but to make up his mind about the men heading the struggle against Mr Mylchraine.
And, as meeting followed meeting during that summer and autumn, Keig, I could well see from the quick dismissive frown that appeared on his broad brow whenever I mentioned names, crossed off in his mind one by one every single member of the Council. Only Marshall Tear, who seldom attended the meetings on the grounds that detail work was Cormode’s task, escaped.
Keig himself told me very little of what went on in the Council. I had been judged too, I knew, and relegated to the role of mere useful informant on certain subjects, for all that I continued to see a good deal of him in the evenings after he had finished the navvying job he had taken and I my clerk’s work. I had no difficulty however in learning about the Council’s deliberations: the incessant gossip that riddled the whole exile movement saw to that.
In this way I learnt that the Council, for all Keig’s unyielding dismissals of its members, was not idle. Decisions were taken and action initiated. It was agreed to start a newspaper. And some time in October a public meeting was held to raise funds, in of all places a hall attached to a Swedenborgian chapel which in those days led a declining life somewhere amid the tumbledown elegan
ce of the North Side of the city.
The place when Keig and I entered seemed strongly redolent of steaming raincoat. Looking down at the hard-gossiping, damp gathering were two high rows of plaster busts, yellowing and dust-capped, noble and anonymous, the most lifelessly ideal contemplating the real at its least lovable. Keig tramped me through the crowd to sit up on the platform with the rest of the Council—raised eyebrows from Clifford Willine, the poet—and soon an elderly former Delegate to the Rota called Abraham Skillicorne was opening the meeting. I remember Cormode made a long speech explaining the projected Voice of Oceana and that it put a mass of financial complexities with admirable clarity. Its closing words I can quote almost exactly.
‘But of course, my friends, all this will be slow work. We cannot make the immediate impact on world opinion which we ought to make, which we are here to make, without a large opening deposit. You need one big stake to start you off.’
It was then that I realized what the main purpose of the whole meeting was: to get Keig to cough up.
No doubt the hat would be passed round and a certain amount raised. Perhaps the Council did have enough in hand to make a beginning, though exact sums had carefully not been mentioned. But the chief object, I saw, was to bring all the pressure of opinion Cormode could muster to push Keig into declaring that the gold he was clinging to was at the Council’s disposition.
Quietly I eased myself round in my chair till I had Keig in full view. The broad face with its brow-hidden eyes maintained the old impassive expression which somehow recalled to me the quiet fields of remote Oceana and gave no sign of comprehending what was happening.
Then Abraham Skillicorne called for questions, and the usual embarrassed silence followed. I saw Keig shift a little on his chair and thought he was about to ask something himself. But he remained seated. And I remembered that in all probability he had never actually seen so many people as the two hundred odd here assembled together in one place before. To get up and put a question in front of them all would be a decided ordeal.
An elderly man with straggly white hair eventually stood up and asked in a strained squeaky voice ‘whether room would be found in the new journal for the art of poetry’.
Keig’s quick frown flickered over his face. Clifford Willine, who had been announced as the paper’s editor, serpentined eagerly to his feet.
‘Mr Chairman, may I say that there certainly will be room. For what has more power to terrify the tyrant and to totter thrones than the sharp and divine tongue of poetry?’
Vigorous applause from some sections of the hall. Willine sat down, a smile curving his long knife of a face.
And then Keig was on his feet. I thought his dark complexion was plainly a degree darker than usual.
‘The smuggling,’ he blurted out. ‘How’s that to be done?’
Cormode turned to him, genuinely puzzled I thought.
‘The smuggling?’ he asked cautiously. ‘I don’t think I quite understand.’
‘If this paper’s to do any good,’ Keig replied, looking fixedly at Cormode, ‘it’s got to be read by the people Mylchraine’s fattening himself on. How’s it to be got to them? You never said much about that.’
Cormode smiled a little.
‘To tell you the truth,’ he said, ‘we haven’t had time to go into that more than cursorily. But I have no doubt we shall get copies to the island without too much trouble. There’s the weekly steamer and so forth.’
‘All this business won’t go far to finish Mylchraine if that’s the best we can do,’ Keig said.
He sat down lumpily. There was no applause.
Willine leant across towards him, eyes bright with malice.
‘But tell us, Mr Keig,’ he said, ‘what would you do as something better than awakening the conscience of the world to Mr Mylchraine’s tyranny?’
It was silly of him. Keig rose to his feet like a steam-hammer.
‘I’ll tell you what I’d do,’ he roared. ‘I’d get out there into the hills and I’d start doing some military drill.’
There was a long moment of silence. And then someone sitting near the straggly-haired old man who had asked about poetry began to titter. The reaction caught on. In seconds there was laughter everywhere. I sat absolutely still, my eyes fixed on Keig. He lowered himself down again slowly and let the laughter echo round him. His face was perfectly calm. I gave him full marks.
Someone brushed past me. I glanced up and saw it was Donald Fayrhare, apparently in a great hurry. I looked over at Cormode to see what was up. He was watching the tall ex-sailor go down the hall with an expression of sharp anxiety. But the moment that he noticed I was looking he resumed his public-meeting expression of unvarying courteous interest.
Skillicorne was on his feet now, shushing the laughter with spreading movements of his large hands. Other questions, mostly lamentably silly, were asked. But it was plain Cormode’s main purpose had foundered: Keig was hardly going to make a big gesture now.
And then a flurry of movement at the entrance doors caught my eye. I turned and saw the tall, grey-haired, impressive figure of Marshall Tear. Fayrhare was hovering behind him, and I guessed then what the astute Cormode had done. He had sent for his strategically-placed reinforcements.
By now most people in the hall had also spotted Tear and as he began to walk up towards the platform someone started to clap. By the time he had taken his place everybody was applauding for all they were worth. And you could tell why. Tear was a magnetic figure. He had the gift of standing quite still, doing nothing and saying nothing and yet concentrating all attention upon himself.
Then he began to speak. His words were banal enough, something about a force being generated to hurl the tyrant from his seat. But they brought a deep baying approval. At once he seemed to have lifted the whole occasion up on to another, altogether higher plane. And then, almost as if he was milking a roaring lioness, he altered his note.
‘Let me go back,’ he said almost crooningly, ‘let me go back and recall for you a quiet day in our beloved island some fifteen years ago. Not a very remarkable day, the occasion of a peaceful and simple ceremony, the annual prizegiving at Brignogan School.’
He gave a gentle smile.
‘There had been,’ he said, ‘if I recall aright, blayberries and cream somewhere about. And now it was time for me as headmaster to say a few words. I chose as my theme something often in my mind in those days still within the orbit of a war that had ravaged the civilized world. I spoke about democracy. I tried to plant in the minds of those of my pupils who had just reached the end of their schooldays one last hard seed of belief: belief in the virtue of a people ruling themselves.’
In that dank Dublin October afternoon I really believe everyone listening was at that moment in Lesneven, under a deep blue summer sky, with the sharp odour of fresh blayberries in the air, hearing that other speech.
‘I hope,’ Tear went on, ‘that my words were listened to, that the seed I tried to plant is still, here and there, attempting to grow to the light.’
He lifted up his head under the mane of grey hair.
‘I know that my words were indeed listened to in one quarter,’ he said more sharply. ‘Because just one week later I received a letter from the Board of Governors, a body to which a certain Rolph Mylchraine had recently been co-opted. It took specific exception to my raising “a matter of politics” in a speech in my official capacity.’
Tear paused till every ear was doubly strained.
‘My friends, in that hour tyranny began in Oceana.’
There was a long murmur of released emotion.
‘Yes,’ Tear said, ‘I truly believe that such was the small beginning of the terrible troubles that have come to our beloved country. I will not burden you with the rapid progress things took from that point, how I was forced to resign, how I found all other possible posts in the island barred to me till, sick with disgust and despair, I sought refuge on these hospitable shores.’
He p
aused, perhaps looking back on the day he arrived in Dublin, penniless, jobless, with little hope. In complete silence every pair of eyes in the hall watched him. The whitish-grey mane of hair was bent as if to receive yet more blows of fate. The lined grave face was sombre. Then it lifted with an air of challenge, wearily taken up, and he made his own appeal for funds for the new paper.
If there had been applause before it was doubled and trebled by the time he had come to an end. I never thought to see an Oceanan audience, which even when made up of rebels is likely to contain a good half of stolid citizens, go so wild.
I turned to Keig.
He was sitting with his face as expressionless as those of the yellowed plaster busts on the walls. Yet it was plain he was in some way affected by it all. He was shifting about again on his chair and his hands were gripping hard at its seat. I even saw a sheen of sweat on the hairy backs of them.
It must have been nearly ten minutes before the noise subsided, and people, realizing that nothing could cap what they had just heard, began to stand up, opening wallets and purses and talking excitedly.
‘Wait. Wait. There’s something I want to say.’
It was Keig. He was on his feet, bellowing.
An uneasy silence rippled over the audience. Already it was plain to all of them that this was something out of key. I saw that Keig was digging his fingernails into the palms of his hands till the muscles bulged in the arms of his badly-fitting tight brown tweed jacket.
‘You won’t do it by words,’ he said, jerking the syllables out towards the still standing figure of Marshall Tear.
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