He took a quick gulp of breath.
‘It’s Mylchraine. You don’t understand him. He—He’s—The man is—He’s bad.’
Suddenly the word he really wanted came to him.
‘That man is evil,’ he blurted out. ‘He is an evil man. He’s not one of the ones you get rid of by words. He wants what he has too much for words to shift him. He wants—’
Again there came the terrible, horribly embarrassing pause.
‘He wants to give orders,’ he said at last, shaking his head in bafflement as he realized he had failed to hit on the proper term.
‘He wants to tell people what to do—and to have them do it. To rule. To be boss, over everyone. And he’s got it now. And you won’t get that away from him with all your words and writings, no matter how many of them.’
He turned from Tear and took a long look at the crowded hall, forcing himself to it. And then he jabbed out one more blocked, halting, yet strong jet of black warning.
‘If you want to stop that man you’ve got to be as hard with him as he’d be with you. If you want to get rid of Mylchraine you’ll have to kill him.’
There was a shocked gasp from the hall. Words which are not said had been spoken. Keig, for all the effort of concentration he was having to make just to get out his words, was hit by the wave of affrontedness that swept up to us. He stopped and began again.
‘That—Oh, yes, to kill him. There’s the trouble with all of you. You like to sit here in Dublin and dream of the day when Mylchraine vanishes away. But Mylchraine isn’t the sort to vanish: he’s the sort to feed. To feed himself on those who can’t get away from him. And he’s got to be pulled off his feed. And you won’t do that by stroking his back. You won’t finish Mylchraine till you kill him. That’s all.’
He sat down abruptly. I heard the chair give one loud creak under his weight.
For some time there was a silence below us. Then a little clapping, spasmodically here and there, and a great deal of sharp whispering. And at last someone began heaving himself into a damp mackintosh.
It was a signal. Before many minutes the little hall would be left to the unseeing gaze of the two rows of dust-crowned yellowing busts whose plaster brains would never be troubled with the barbed question that Keig had thrust into our minds.
2
Keig and I left the Swedenborgians’ hall without doing more than nod at the Council members busy receiving donations. It was still raining when we stepped outside.
‘Are you going home?’ I asked Keig.
‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘Margaret’ll have tea waiting.’
I felt a twinge of envy. There was a warmth of comfortable familiarity in the remark, while I had felt inhibited as a fairly poverty-stricken spare-time revolutionary publicity-officer from acquiring in Dublin the sort of semi-permanent girl-friend I had had in London.
Keig walked off and I stood there in the rain, feeling the onset of acute depression. Then suddenly Peter Cormode came hurrying out of the hall and looked quickly up and down the street.
‘Mr Keig, Mr Keig,’ he called. ‘Just a word.’
He began running along the slippery gleaming pavement, and I set off after him with my curiosity pricklingly aroused. Soon Keig heard his shouts and turned. Cormode went up to him, a slight figure against Keig’s great width of shoulder although both were much of a height.
‘I’ve got a request to make,’ I heard him say.
‘Yes?’ Keig answered.
Cormode, runnels of rainwater trickling down on either side of his large pointed nose, looked Keig straight in the eye.
‘Mr Keig,’ he said. ‘I’ve come to admit that what you said in there was right. And if I undertake to press that view both in and out of Council, will you in turn release gold to finance The Voice of Oceana?’
I felt a swift leap of elation. So, in spite of all appearances, Keig had actually converted Cormode to his tough truth. The others would follow soon enough. It was a remarkable feat.
And I found, too, that I had a new admiration for Cormode. It would take not a little moral courage to admit that someone as uncouth as Keig was right and oneself wrong.
‘Mr Cormode,’ Keig answered, after a long pause. ‘You’ll get that gold soon enough—on the day you tell me you know of a boat that’ll put a hundred fighting men into Oceana.’
He swung on his heel and marched off. I stood hesitating. I did not want by staying where I was to seem to be acknowledging Cormode was right, but Keig’s abruptness had certainly jarred. In the end I set off at a run after Keig. After all, I was on his side.
Catching him up I searched for a remark to make, though I might have known even then that Keig was never one to expect mere conversation.
‘What did you think of Marshall Tear?’ I said. ‘Id no idea he could handle a crowd so well. You know, he could move thousands, literally thousands. Get them to follow him through thick and thin.’
I was not even certain Keig had been listening, so firmly had he strode on through the rain, eyes down. But he had heard all right. He jerked round to me.
‘That voice of Tear’s,’ he said. ‘If we don’t watch out, it’ll land us and him into real trouble one day.’
I felt a surge of fury. This was going too far. Even if he just had single-handedly implanted the notion that the whole revolutionary movement up to now had failed because it lacked the daring really to tackle Mylchraine, did that make him right about everything? Wasn’t it sheer recklessness of judgment to dismiss Tear like that?
I muttered a goodbye and plunged off down the first turning that presented itself.
Yet now the exiles, after fifteen years of looking at Oceana from a distance, began at last to take steps to prepare for an invasion of the island. And one evening in Caveen’s Bar I was taken mysteriously aside by old Abraham Skillicorne.
There had just been a Council meeting in a room upstairs and I was waiting for Keig, whom I now saw coming in engaged somewhat surprisingly in conversation with Clifford Willine. Hardly about poetry, I thought as I turned to Skillicorne.
‘What can I do for you?’ I asked. Tm in a bit of a hurry: I said I’d walk back with Keig.’
‘Ah yes, Keig,’ Skillicorne replied, putting a wealth of meaning into the name, though exactly what meaning it was hard to decide.
‘Well?’ I said.
‘There was something I wanted to tell you, my dear chap. Just between ourselves—for the time being.’
A great one for laying out guide-lines was Abraham Skillicorne. Doubtless if I was patient enlightenment would follow. Over his shoulder I could see Keig still with Willine. He looked a bit put out and was shaking his head mulishly. What was Willine asking?
‘This invasion, as we call it,’ Skillicorne said softly in my ear. ‘We were discussing that this evening, you know.’
‘Yes. Keig was there. He only goes if that’s on the agenda.’
Skillicorne smiled his watery smile.
‘One had drawn that conclusion, yes.’
Then I saw what the trouble was between Keig and Willine. Willine was pressing Keig to have a whiskey, and Keig, who carefully never took more than one glass of stout for a whole evening, was refusing. Somewhat boorishly. But then it looked as if he was after all accepting.
I discovered Skillicorne had quietly been adding another item to his carefully built-up preamble.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t quite catch that.’
‘Ah.’
Another smile.
‘I was simply saying that we had even got to the point of reaching a decision.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Yes. We have solemnly fixed on a date. A day for the invasion, no less.’
Keig, I now saw, had succeeded in disposing of the whiskey Willine had given him after half-emptying it. He had slipped it behind a briefcase propped near by. But the move had done little good. One of Willine’s cronies was now busy persuading him to have another. I caught the suddenly raised voice.<
br />
‘Too damned proud to drink with us ordinary folk.’
I would have liked to have gone to the rescue, but I had to hear old Skillicorne out.
‘Now, my dear fellow,’ he was going on again, ‘there’s to be another Council meeting tomorrow. The pace is hotting up, you know.’
‘And you want me to make sure Keig is there?’
‘No, not quite that. Though it’s good of you to offer.’
Damn. Keig had taken the second whiskey.
‘No, what I had to propose, my dear fellow, was something a little different.’
‘Yes?’
‘It was simply that you should look in on the meeting yourself.’
I was certain now the business round Keig was a nasty little joke of Willine’s. I answered Skillicorne abstractedly.
‘Me, to be there? But why?’
‘You can manage it? There’s no prior engagement? No lady in the case? We’re meeting at nine p.m. Up at Commander Fayrhare’s house. For reasons of security.’
Was he laughing at the idea of ‘security’? He should not: there was little enough of it.
‘No, I’m free,’ I said.
Yes, Willine was now lifting up the briefcase hiding Keig’s first whiskey and was laughingly insisting on him finishing it.
‘Look,’ I said to Skillicorne, ‘I’ll come if you want me, but you’ll hardly need publicity.’
He gave my arm a swift squeeze.
‘No. No publicity.’
And abruptly he left me. I plunged over towards Keig.
But I was too late. With very bad grace he had just downed the remains of the first whiskey, and by the time I got to him—it cannot have been as long as two whole minutes—he was already showing signs of having had too much. His dark complexion had grown yet ruddier; his dark eyes had retreated even further under his beetling brow.
‘Hello, Keig,’ I greeted him loudly. ‘I’m rather pressed for time. Can you come straight away?’
But my plan to whisk him from under Willine’s nose failed utterly. Keig simply made no reply, standing there immovable as an earth-implanted rock even when Willine tried to thrust yet another drink into his great red hanging hand.
I felt an immense sense of exasperation. How the devil was I to get him out?
I doubt whether I ever would have done on my own. But without the least trace of warning he swung round and blundered into the night. I ran out in his wake. Would he try to march straight through a big green bus?
He did not. He seemed even to have a clear idea of where he was going, which was home. I tried to catch up with him but he was walking at such speed, and with so little consideration for anyone in his path, that I was reduced to trotting along always a yard or two behind.
We arrived at his rooms. He had trouble with the key to the house, which was difficult enough to fit into its hole in the paint-peeled door at the best of times since the only illumination came from the fanlight above, already Partially obscured by the landlady’s obligatory doll-statue of Christ the King.
Eventually Margaret came down.
‘Margaret, good evening,’ I said. ‘Listen, I’m afraid some of the lads played a sort of trick on Keig. He’s a bit—’
‘He’s drunk,’ Margaret shot back at me. ‘I can see that.’
She put her arm through Keig’s and drew him in. It was a gesture tender as could be. Keig’s other hand swung back and sent the solid old house-door crashing to.
I stood on the steps, feeling doubly shut out.
When I called for Keig next evening to go up to the Council meeting neither he nor Margaret made any reference to the night before. Nor did I. What was there to say?
We took the bus out towards Howth where, thanks to his retirement pay from the British Navy, Donald Fayrhare lived in rather more comfort than the rest of the exiles, and as we entered his garden an odd incident occurred which I thought almost nothing of at the time, putting it down as another example of how the Dublin Oceanans from highest to lowest could do nothing without making a slight mystery, though later I was to realize that there was indeed a mystery but hardly a slight one.
Marshall Tear came out of the house before we reached the door with a girl of twenty or so who unexpectedly stopped and peered towards us.
‘But isn’t this Thomas Keig?’ she said to Tear. ‘I can still see the face on all those “Wanted” posters back on the island. You must introduce me.’
Tear did not immediately reply. But after a moment he stepped up.
‘Yes, my dear,’ he said. This is Mr Keig.’
He gestured to the girl.
‘This is Alexandra Oboy,’ he explained. ‘Sister of a former pupil of mine. She had the kindness to come to see me on her way to England.’
‘Mr Keig,’ the girl burst out, ‘you don’t know how I wished I could have made my departure from Oceana only half as much of an event as yours. But all I could do was quarrel with my brother and bring a little discredit on the Defence Force.’
Up till now Keig had been standing woodenly there. But these last words stirred him.
‘Defence Force?’ he asked sharply.
‘Miss Oboy’s brother,’ Tear said rapidly, ‘is, I am afraid, an ardent weekend officer in the Defence Force. So naturally there was some upset. But I think I hear a bus. Hurry, my dear, they’re not all that frequent.’
As the girl ran off, calling goodbyes, I wondered a little at Tear’s abruptness. But other events almost immediately drove all such thoughts from my head.
Tear led us into the Fayrhares’ drawing-room, sweetly smelling with vases of spring flowers that made our warlike enterprise seem hopelessly remote, and the rest of the Council came in almost at our heels. Soon Donald’s large-hipped, pink-and-white English wife, full of gardening talk, left us and Cormode set up a card-table underneath the hanging central light-bowl with its border of pastel-coloured flowers.
I had thought that Tear himself would preside tonight, but he sat in the furthest removed of the chintz-covered armchairs and Abraham Skillicorne opened the proceedings.
‘The main business of our meeting,’ he began, ‘is to select a leader for this proposed initial landing-force of ours.’
‘I think,’ Cormode said sharply, ‘it must be generally agreed the leader almost selects himself. Commander Fayrhare is the only one of us with actual experience in war. I feel we needn’t do more than record our agreement to his name.’
Skillicorne leant back in his chair and smiled his indeterminate watery smile.
‘Most cogent,’ he said. ‘But, do you know, I think perhaps we ought to stick to the usual forms, a proposer, a seconder ... And there may be other candidates.’ There was a short silence.
‘Well, gentlemen,’ Skillicorne said, ‘I myself would like to place before you the name of Mr Michael Quine.’
My own name was the very last I expected to hear. What on earth could the old fool—only he was in many ways no fool—be up to?
I heard a voice from behind me say in a well-drilled way: ‘I should like to second that.’
‘I think,’ Skillicorne said, ‘it might be best if I explained a little. It has occurred to me that what is essential in a leader is the possession of up-to-date information about the—um—terrain. And Commander Fayrhare, well versed though he is in naval matters, has not set foot in Oceana for a number of years. Whereas Mr Quine, a successful man of the world, recently carried out an extensive reconnaissance.’
I thought of my visit to Lesneven nine months earlier, it had been an odd reconnaissance.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But, good though your basic reason is, Mr Skillicorne, I’m simply not up to this.’
‘Oh, my dear fellow, you probably underrate yourself. I’m sure you would prove to have the necessary simple qualities.’
‘He hasn’t.’
It was Keig.
I must admit my first reaction was a sharp stab of resentment at his flat certainly, though I knew really he was perfectly c
orrect.
By now everybody was looking at him. Once more he had said the unsayable. But he did not seem at all aware of the general disapproval.
‘You’re right about needing to know the island,’ he said to Skillicorne. ‘It’s not like it used to be. Mylchraine’s changed it. Those Keepers of his are not the Watch, you know. They won’t play fair.’
I reflected that this was certainly true. And that Fayrhare, seen in this light, was certainly wrong as leader. Set him down in territory where you would never know whom you could trust and he would almost certainly walk straight into the first trap that offered. So who would lead the force?
Keig answered for me.
‘But I do know what’s been going on,’ he said. ‘I’m the one who ought to take charge.’
Cormode reacted quickest.
‘Mr Chairman,’ he began.
Then a slight buzz of whispering warned him. He took a quick glance round.
I too had been looking at the others, and I had come to the same conclusion as Cormode: in spite of everything people were rapidly coming round to Keig. Hadn’t he proved himself in action? I could almost hear them saying it. Cormode, who, I suspected, had been about to try for a snap vote, wisely left things alone.
But there never was any voting. Because at that moment Marshall Tear walked forward to the middle of the room.
‘My friends,’ he said, ‘your discussions have been most interesting. But I had long ago decided that I myself should head whatever liberating force first sets foot in Oceana, however small. Such is my duty and my privilege.’
3
The sea off the Oceana coast was flatly calm. Behind us as we sat on the oil-stained bottom boards of an old box-like landing-craft a round goldeny summer moon, slipping inch by inch under the horizon, sent towards us an ever-narrowing path of light splintered into jiggling diamonds by the tiny wavelets. Our engine had been switched off half an hour before, and we waited in silence.
In the strong pinkish moonlight I looked across the huddled ranks of the hundred-odd men in our craft at the easily identified, broad-shouldered, bullet-headed form of Keig. He was about as far from me as it was possible to be in the small area of the ship.
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