It was the village grocer. He was a man of about fifty, a tubby shiny-skinned individual, who was accustomed to part his hair very precisely in the middle and smooth it well down to either side. And he always wore spectacles too, a big round-rimmed owlish pair. They were there now—I caught a glitter from them against the plain cloth of the altar, carefully put in place before the obscenities had begun.
Somehow they gave a final touch of the comic to the whole affair. Only, one realized after the first surprise had worn off, it was not in fact a comic business at all. It was simply pathetic.
But, while I had been staring and assessing, Keig had taken in the scene and now acted.
‘Get out,’ he roared. ‘Get out the lot of you.’
He took a few steps further into the little church where every eye had fastened on him. The wildly waving torches faltered and dropped. The worshippers within easy distance of the doors made a scuttling rush for them, dodging and ducking low as if to escape being seen. At the altar the young man who had been about to give the Kiss of Shame swirled round on all fours and scampered helter-skelter sideways down the low steps. The grocer himself stood up and turned round. He put his round plastered-down head forwards and peered at us uncertainly. I suppose he must have needed those spectacles of his to see more than a few feet because he groped behind him for them on the plain surface of the green altar-cloth, found them, put them carefully on his big fleshy nose and then uttered a single, very loud ‘Ah’ before clenching fists together and bounding straight down the broad centre aisle and out of the open doors.
The last few Participants in the celebration hurried out after him. Keig and I followed, and before I turned to pull the big doors closed after us I saw the heavy night full of flat white bodies disappearing into the darkness.
I suppose that at some time most of them must have daringly gone back and gathered up the clothes they had discarded in the church, but all I know is that when we met any of them again next day they were fully dressed and in their usual apparel. Because meet them we did: the village was too small for them to avoid us. When I went to buy food in the village store it was the tubby shiny-skinned grocer who served me himself, bowing a little and rubbing his hands together hard. I thought after a bit that he was not going to make the least reference to the events of the night before. But just as I finished he turned slightly away and directed a half-bold half-oleaginous statement into the nearest corner.
‘It was Lammas last night.’
Just that. At first I failed to understand. Then bit by bit I pieced it together. Lammas, the ancient feast day. I recalled vaguely that it came from the words ‘Loaf Mass’ and was the celebration of the start of the harvest. August the first was the day, I looked it up later. I suppose the grocer’s single obsequiously stated phrase had been intended as a comprehensive excuse. No doubt Lammas was one of the occasions when people in Mylchraine’s Oceana expected to have one of their little orgies, and the villagers here had not been willing to forgo the new customary night of pleasure just because the Keepers were no longer about.
I found, thinking over the whole episode in such spare moments as I got, that I was in two minds about it all. My first reaction had been much the same as Keig’s: here was something wrong and it had to be stopped. But now I began to ask myself how wrong it really was. It was a weakening factor in the life of the village, certainly. People obsessed with that sort of business—and it is a sort that quickly converts interest into obsession—would not have very much time for anything else, especially not for the somewhat dull processes of a democratic life. Yet hadn’t each one of them after all the right to lead their own life? And I had seen no signs whatever of coercion in the church the night before.
I began to wonder about the way Keig had marched into that meeting and laid down the law. Wasn’t it pretty high-handed when you came to look at it? Who was he to say no one had a right to a little unusual sexual indulgence if they could square it with their own conscience?
I was thinking such thoughts, moodily tramping along beside Keig as we made the last rounds of the sentries, when to my surprise he voluntarily harked back to the incident.
‘It’s more than I bargained for, all that last night,’ he said abruptly. ‘Did you know that they’d keep on with it?’
The simple note of inquiry in his voice took me back to the Keig I had first known, the one who had asked me in his innocence for information on a variety of subjects I was quite unfitted to tell him about.
I gave myself time to think before replying now. The weather had broken and it was a familiar rain-soft Oceanan cloaky night. We stood there quietly getting wet.
‘I suppose it was to be expected,’ I answered in the end. ‘Give people a taste for that sort of thing, and they get addicted. That grocer fellow is probably drunk with the sense of power he got from it all.’
‘Yes,’ said Keig.
He stared at the ground at his feet.
‘When we have toppled Mylchraine,’ he said at last, ‘there’ll be a lot more to be done, though I’m damned if I can see how to set about it now.’
I had no contribution to offer. I have never been much of a one for sticking my nose into other people’s lives.
Beside me Keig straightened his barrel frame.
‘Well, time enough for that when it comes,’ he said. ‘Anyhow there’s no trouble knowing what we’ve got to do right now.’
He strode off towards the first sentry’s post. Tagging along beside him, I thought how different things were for someone like him. To me the thought that even with Mylchraine’s authority gone people were still going to be happy to wallow in the sloughs he had made for them was something that cast a twisted shadow over the whole of our enterprise. Questions, until tonight submerged under the swift flow of immediate events, loomed suddenly up like black and menacing rocks. Whom were we fighting for? How much right did we have to save people from something they had got into with their eyes more or less open?
But to Keig things were not like this. To him it was utterly plain Mylchraine was evil and must be ‘toppled’. And the nearer he came to achieving this, I thought, the more certain he seemed that there was only one right way: his way.
I shivered.
But a couple of minutes later we came to the first sentry and at once when Keig began his usual abrupt and pointed questioning of the man I forgot all the doubts that had sprung up. This was what we had to do: be strong. Be strong and fight as absolutely well as we could. There was no more to it than that under the protection of that sturdy figure.
A fortnight later, after days of impotently watching Mylchraine’s scout-cars, on the very first night that we flashed the Morse letter K out into the night with a red-shaded torch from the beach at Hoddick, Cormode’s boat arrived.
The whole business went like clockwork. Just before midnight Keig and I assembled with a working party of eight men at the edge of the last field before the beaches began. Little Francis Crowe held a sheet of bunched red wrapping-paper in front of the most powerful electric torch we had been able to lay our hands on and, pushing assiduously at the tiny switch, flicked out the dash-dot-dash of the letter, which Keig, who it turned out had learnt Morse as part of his long self-preparation in Dublin, had taught him. And after less than ten minutes an answering light appeared suddenly out in the darkness at sea, flicking back at us briefly the same repetition of flashes.
‘Keep signalling, show ’em where we are,’ Keig grunted to Crowe.
We all peered into the dark until at last we were able to make out the blacker bulk of a small sea-going motor-boat. It was being rowed towards us now, very quietly, and before long the sound of the oars splashing gently in the calm sea floated to our ears. We hurried down to the water’s edge across the soft sand, Crowe still dutifully signalling as he trotted along with us.
When the boat was within ten or fifteen yards of the thin white line of foam at the edge of the sand Keig abruptly began wading out to meet her. I followed, cursi
ng myself for not having got hold of some boots.
At the side of the boat Keig wasted no time on eloquence.
‘How did it go?’ he muttered to the four men at the oars, peering at them to see if he knew them.
They were strangers to us, though I guessed they must be Oceanan from their voices as they told us in excited murmurs about their adventures on the way across. In fact they had had no adventures, slinking in as Keig had planned on the night of our telephone call to Cormode at the extreme range of the infamous Kernel searchlight and encountering no difficulties at all.
Keig cut into their story before we had even hauled them as far as the sand.
‘What’ve you got?’ he said.
‘Got?’ asked the man nearest him.
‘Yes. What weapons?’
There was a moment’s silence.
‘What guns, man?’ Keig demanded.
There aren’t any guns,’ another of the oarsmen said. ‘We never heard anything about guns. It’s a radio transmitter only we were to bring.’
We all stopped and stood still, with the boat tipping gently from side to side between us in a few inches of water. For all the others this must have come as a complete shock, and, though I had half-suspected something of the sort might prove to be the case, even to me hearing my fears confirmed brought a thud of heavy disappointment.
It was Keig who eventually spoke.
‘Get that wireless up to the house,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to Cormode.’
8
Keig’s anger at this setback—which I now wished I had prepared him for by mentioning the uneasiness I had felt after hearing Cormode’s veiled answers to our request on the telephone a month earlier—became more and more understandable in the weeks that followed the arrival of the almost empty boat. Whereas before we had not been too much put out by our lack of ability to deal with Mylchraine’s scout-cars, now as August became September and September grew towards October we found this powerlessness bitterly frustrating. With our continuing failure to hit the Keepers, each day brought in fewer recruits. Here was the simple measure of what Cormode had done to us.
Keig, I think, had seen himself as giving a fine old slanging to Cormode over the air. But the reality was very different. To begin with, the transmitter could send only Morse. Francis Crowe painfully learnt the whole code now as Keig had begun to use Jack Ascough, our proper signaller, as a leader for various small enterprises that we had in hand. But there was also another barrier between Keig and Cormode, and an even more effective one than Morse. All the incoming messages laboriously taken down one block capital after another began invariably in the same infuriatingly impersonal way: ‘The Revolutionary Council . . .’ A mighty shield.
So it did not take me long to be certain that Cormode, for devious reasons of his own, had decided not to let us have the guns. Curiously, it took Keig much longer to come to the same conclusion. That anyone could contemplate not sending the weapons that would hit Mylchraine where he was strongest was inconceivable to him. And for several weeks he went on poring over the ‘Revolutionary Council’ messages trying to see what strength there was to each of the varied reasons they produced for not complying with his blunt and repeated requests.
Then one day he saw through it all.
Quite suddenly he looked up at me from the message which he had been studying, sitting on the floor of one of the bare rooms in our ‘villa’ with his broad shoulders square up against the wall.
‘It’s Cormode,’ he said. ‘That man’s made up his mind we’re to have no guns. He hasn’t even the guts to fight Mylchraine through other people.’
It was a condemnation. No judge ritualistically putting on the black cap could have made it plainer.
And from then on we ceased totally to reply to any long-winded message about the guns—a decision which caused me a certain amount of private amusement as I contemplated Cormode’s bafflement at the other end.
At the time I was simply rather tickled over this and still furious with Cormode. But later I began to see at least half the reason for the man’s evasiveness. And that was simply that he could not believe what we had told him about our successes. He was never able to bring himself entirely to discount Mylchraine’s steady assertions, in response to the stories in the papers, that there was no trouble of any sort in the island beyond the sporadic activities of a few hill bandits.
After Keig had uttered that flat condemnation of Cormode he relapsed into his habitual silence, the last discarded ‘Revolutionary Council’ message lying beside him on the bare boards of the empty room. He sat there for, I suppose, a quarter of an hour. Then he looked up at me again.
‘Is Quiddie anywhere about?’ he said.
‘He’s somewhere,’ I replied. ‘He was trying to get that old lorry to go when I saw him last.’
‘Fetch him, would you? There’s something he can tell me.’
Duly I went and found tubby cheerful Fred where he was ambitiously trying his considerable mechanic’s skill on an abandoned lorry with the intention of providing us with some transport. And as soon as he came into the empty echoing room beside me Keig put his question.
‘Quiddie, is there any way we could shoot Molotov cocktails into those cars from a fair distance off?’
And it turned out that there was a way. The solution was not arrived at there and then by any means, but after a fortnight of trial and error Fred, unrelentingly urged on by Keig, produced a device which could send a Molotov cocktail soaring through the air on to a marked-out target the size of a scout-car. It was simple enough. It used a shotgun as its basis and fired its Molotov cocktail from this on one end of a short straight rod, on the other end of which a cartridge had been jammed. The gun was fired upside down with the top of its barrel supported on two crude homemade legs, forming altogether a moderately stable tripod.
‘Blast it,’ Fred said heedlessly when the last experiment worked, ‘that’ll fry ’em up in those old scout-cars of theirs. Fry ’em up a treat, it will.’
It did not ‘fry up’ anyone, but it did work the very first time it was used. It set a car on fire and so frightened the Keepers in it that they came running towards us with their hands up begging to surrender. In this they were, incidentally, disappointed, since Keig had given orders that we were not to encumber ourselves with prisoners but to let anyone we captured go—another instance of his freedom from the conventional approach.
Our small victory here provided us also with an opportunity we had long been waiting for, the chance to slip a group of ten men through the prowling wall of scout-cars and into the soft untouched country south of Lesneven.
Jack Ascough, who had led the group, brought us excellent news after he had guided them at night back through the Keepers’ defences. Mylchraine’s panic decision after our crippling attack on the camping column to elevate his campaign against Keig into a full war had resulted in even sharper depredations than before on the people in the countryside. They had been expected to billet groups of Keepers, and the Keepers had in turn expected the best of everything to eat and drink, complete subservience from the men and, as often as not, the freedom of the women. Resentment was smouldering now like the sprawled embers under a heap of peat. One kick, scattering a corner and bringing to the red glow beneath a touch of cold air, would start a fire indeed.
We learnt, too, of the dozens of tempting targets for offensive action that were to be seen scattered all about the unprotected south, long dumps of ammunition piled up only yards from the roads, stored cans of petrol just asking to be fired, Keepers in training leaving piled weapons under the guard of just a single sentry.
Jack Ascough’s eyes took on a positively hurt look in his sandy face as he told us this.
‘What those Keepers need,’ he said, ‘is a little military discipline. I’d like to get at ’em for just a week.’
‘I’d like to get at ’em for just five minutes,’ Keig replied, with the heavy humour that he rose to more and more often now.
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And in the last part of that September—a period of wonderful weather as it often is then with long days of unbroken goldeny sunshine extending right up to the beginning of October—it looked as if we could indeed ‘get at ’em’ very soon.
That we were not to do so we discovered just two days before that long spell of calm sun-endowed autumn weather eventually broke up. It broke up two days late.
We were on the point of taking the decisive step forward which our new weapon had made possible and Jack Ascough’s foray into the soft south had made look so promising, repeating that operation but on a much larger scale by ambushing every scout-car out on patrol at the same time and pushing a considerable force through the gap this would make.
The scheme had presented problems. Mylchraine had his spies as we had ours, though we certainly had more and better ones. So getting together a large number of men in one place was liable to attract unwelcome attention and bring down a swift scout-car attack, which might not only inflict heavy casualties but also cause the regular car patrols to be withdrawn and spoil our long-planned ambushes.
However we thought we had hit on a solution to this difficulty. We had chosen as a point to assemble both the striking force of fifty men and the double quantity of arms they were to take for distribution to new recruits a small shallow slate quarry long since worked out. Round its edge grew huge clumps of intertwined brambles forming a high irregular hedge blocking off the old track that led into the quarry and leaving only two or three narrow paths forced by straying animals or blackberriers of past years. It formed an ideal place of concealment and for over a week before the key day we secretly built up a supply of arms there.
This raiding party too was under Jack Ascough. I was a little surprised in fact that Keig had not decided to lead it himself, but it was sensible to entrust what was essentially a diversion, though a major one, to some lieutenant. Looking back later, I saw that this was the first time he had brought himself to delegate a large enterprise of any sort to somebody else.
Strong Man Page 22
