By seven o’clock, a quarter of an hour before the meeting was to begin, the whole group was assembled. Twenty-five men and all of them tense and angry.
Keig was out somewhere. He had left me a note saying he would be back at seven-fifteen. I looked at my watch. Thirteen minutes past seven, unless the cold had affected it again. Keig would come in at any moment now. Punctuality was strict with him, not as a fetish but because, he once said to me, ‘It makes it harder if you’re late.’
And, sure enough, our sentry near the back door could be heard calling a quiet challenge now, and a few seconds later Keig came in.
We were all assembled in the biggest of the three rooms of the lodge, part kitchen, part living-room. It was full to bursting with the twenty-five of us, a good many pretty hefty characters, but those nearest the door shoved themselves back a little to make a space round Keig. He stood in silence looking at us all as we sat on the floor or stood leaning against the walls. His face, I saw, was back to its old total impassivity. I wondered what he had been doing to be away so long.
The silence in the fuggily warm room grew. No one was likely to chat at a time like this.
But at last the wait had gone on so long that the hard-to-repress Fred Quiddie broke the silence.
‘Come on, Mr Keig,’ he said. ‘Tell us how we’re going to tear those bastards apart.’
‘We’re not,’ said Keig.
A blank silence followed his announcement. The men who had heard him were ordinary enough unsophisticated people, and I could almost see from their expressions brains whirring like machinery slipping its clutch as they tried to get to grips with what he had said.
There was going to be no counter-action after the appalling outrage the Keepers had committed against those four women. That was all there was to it. Keig’s words could have meant nothing else. But to those hearing him it was inconceivable that he should have said what he did.
Then the reaction began. It should, I suppose, have been Fred Quiddie who started it: his was the most eager mind there. But he worshipped Keig, for all his customary irreverence, and he sat now with every emotion wiped from his features in a howlback of contradictory feelings. And it was burly Pat Boddaugh who spoke.
‘We’re bloody well going to crucify them,’ he declared.
‘No,’ Keig said.
For a moment I was afraid he was going to say no more. But this was to be one of the occasions when he did give an explanation of a decision he had reached.
‘I know it’s hard, lads,’ he said abruptly. ‘But we’re not going to do anything. Nothing at all.’
No one moved so much as a muscle.
‘I was half the afternoon out there on the mountain thinking this out,’ Keig went on slowly. ‘And by the time I’d finished I was certain sure there was nothing at all for it but to leave it be. What that man Lewie did to Maria first off was past forgiving. And we punished him for it, and punished him justly. Well, the Keepers have taken a revenge for that. And the heart of it is they weren’t men enough to take their revenge on us.’
He looked round at the assembly of intent faces, listening hard but still not understanding.
‘When I heard the news from Boddaugh,’ he said, ‘I began from there out thinking on the best way to get back at every one of the Keepers who’d had any hand in it at all. I thought of half a dozen ways. Those men have wives, too, daughters and sweethearts. They could pay. And then I began to think beyond that. Those men pay, and what next? We don’t pay again but other folk pay, folk who’ve nothing to do with all this except maybe for showing us a bit of friendliness. They pay and pay double.’
The deep-set eyes came slowly to glowing-point as I watched.
‘No,’ he said, his voice for once rising loudly. ‘No, it’s got to come to an end. It’s got to stop somewhere, and it’s going to stop with us. We’re the ones strong enough to do it.’
And there he left it. He stood for several long moments more, certainly, in front of his hostile audience. But he did not say another word.
And reluctantly, like slab-ice breaking from the pressure of some warm flow beneath, they surrendered to him. Nothing was said. But it could be seen. In a face turned away, in the shifting of a pair of shoulders, in the inward-turning of an expression.
Keig had won. He had convinced them.
At last Fred Quiddie suddenly bounced to his feet.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I need a piss. I’m off.’
Part Four
1
The next day spring came, as if to put the seal of approval on that heroic decision of Keig’s. Or so I put it to myself for a brief period, though I found it too airy a notion to keep for long in the furniture of the mind. But it was the next day that spring did come, like a charge of wild horses as it does sometimes in the mountains. Sweet heavy rain fell. The snow disappeared in a morning. And within three weeks our whole struggle had been transformed.
This, however, owed nothing to the weather. It had been prepared, indeed, during the grip of the cold though we had known nothing of it. What happened was that Mylchraine declared through the creaky old Oceana Messenger—‘Yes, but where’s it taking the message to?’—that he was to be known not as Mr President (to which name, relic of the Rota, he had hitherto been entitled) but instead as Grand Master of Oceana.
In this he was staking a claim to something more than the dominance arrived at by the chance processes of power-seeking: he was decreeing for himself a spiritual overlordship, if an inverted one. All the nasty, only half-overt business of sabbats and esbats, of covens and their masters, of at one end of the scale a girl stripping herself for public flogging under Mylchraine’s own eye, and at the other end a plump village grocer receiving in all solemnity the Kiss of Shame—all this was now to be incorporated in the outward and everyday life of Oceana.
But to this claim there had come a vigorous and unexpected objection. It was from a man called Marcus Calo, an estate-owner whose lands lay in the southernmost part of the wolds. Up to this period Calo had tolerated Mylchraine as an eccentric departure from the way estate-owners ought to live. But a few days after the change-of-style announcement he had occasion to write to him and called him ‘My dear Mylchraine’. Mylchraine returned the letter, and a row developed which ended in Mylchraine sending a squad of Keepers to arrest Calo.
But he misjudged his man, as he would never have done in the days when he played on all the island’s weaknesses to climb to power. Calo was a man of genuine fearlessness. He took a riding-crop to the Keepers.
That was a declaration of war. And Mylchraine in fact used the war weapons he had imported to fight Keig, though in deference perhaps to Calo’s status he did not order the planes to drop napalm. Instead he sent them to buzz Calo’s big house not far from the little lobster port of Caloestown. I gather the machines scared the servants to fits, stampeded the cattle and altogether made it unmistakably clear who was top dog.
But here Calo played a masterstroke: he kept his patience. He appeared to do nothing, while with all the fierce energy he usually reserved for point-to-point steeplechasing, hawking and other Oceanan gentlemanly pleasures he sent his Overseer—the term is the island equivalent to bailiff—lickety-spit to Europe to buy one fully-equipped field gun. Just that.
It was taken to within range of Mylchraine’s airstrip. I do not know but I have always imagined that an observation party hid in the very same elm spinney where Keig, Fred Quiddie, Pat Boddaugh and I had gazed impotently at the hangar’s defences. In any case, in ten minutes’ work all Mylchraine’s planes were destroyed.
Having swept aside this apparently insuperable obstacle—though later I learnt that the napalm stock itself had been removed—Calo recruited an army of his own simply by riding round his estate and indicating with his never-absent riding-crop anybody that took his fancy. At the beginning of April, then, he launched himself at the Keepers, and by the middle of that month we in the north found there was only the scantiest force left to oppose
us. Keig was not slow. We swept out of the mountains.
For the first time in seven long months we were able to behave like men and not hunted animals. We took off our clothes. Indeed we burnt most of them they stank so vilely. And, if we did not take to collars and ties ourselves, at least the sight of other people wearing them, which at our first entry into the towns had seemed distinctly odd, soon became unremarkable. We ate, too. Regular meals of as much as we needed. And poor Fred Quiddie had almost to be forcibly held back from the girls.
By the end of that April we were back where we had been the previous summer, within sight of Lesneven. By that time too, of course, we had discovered what we owed our change of fortune to. It was something some of us greeted with mixed feelings.
‘Calo,’ Pat Boddaugh exploded. ‘What’s Calo ever done? He never spent a winter in the mountains longing for just one bite of decent grub.’
‘He’s fighting Mylchraine,’ Keig answered.
And fighting Mylchraine he was. He put every one of his brutally recruited men on to horseback, even dressing them in a uniform of tight long-skirted jackets of a hard-wearing material called brown holland used in the island to make overalls for schoolchildren, and then he ranged the island far and wide. Because in backward Oceana, if nowhere else, a force of cavalry able to move independently of the roads and the scout-cars that roamed them was still a notably efficient way of making war.
We even got the bitter-sweet news of Calo triumphs via our wireless link with the Revolutionary Council. Cormode was much struck with the man the papers soon began to call ‘the last of the cavalrymen’.
More galling still, it was my duty to type out such news on a cumbersome wooden-base typewriter with a curious purple ribbon that we had acquired and to make copies for clandestine distribution on an old-fashioned gelatine reproducing machine, enormously messy to the hands if somewhat satisfying to the spirit of a wedded journalist. And, oddly, it seemed that the wolds people, even from villages like the one where I was told ‘No one beyond a child, ever goes running here’, were decidedly dazzled by the dashing figure of Marcus Calo.
Not that we too did not have our steady stream of young girls offering themselves as recruits because of Keig. I had noticed a similar influx the summer before when we had had few tasks suitable for them. Now, however, with the increasing area under our control Keig accepted such offers by the dozen, perfectly oblivious that most came solely on his account, bright wasps determined to sacrifice themselves in a dish of jam.
I used to wonder a little at his monolithic indifference. I knew indeed he was capable of loving a woman. Yet I believe these girls, however blatant, meant absolutely nothing to him. From the moment more than five years before when Mylchraine’s Keepers had dragged him from his farm on the Kernel he had been a man unequipped for pleasure.
In fact, before long I was to receive dramatic proof of this steadfastness, a quality which incidentally he took for granted in the rest of us though I knew Fred Quiddie, for one, frequently failed to live up to it.
My proof came from one of the new recruits, though an unusual one, a bright twenty-one-year-old called Jane Ivens, just back from Trinity College, Dublin. I had rather more to do with her than with the others because she brought a whiff of the forgotten world of books and newspapers. But she had eyes only for Keig.
‘My God, Michael,’ she said once, ‘isn’t he marvellous? I mean, to believe in justice, to really believe. I mean, not just metaphysically but in an absolutely existential way. I’d do anything for him. You know that, don’t you? Anything.’
I smiled. She would learn.
Or, I wondered suddenly, would she? Had she perhaps a zest and a certain vigour of mind which might after all penetrate Keig’s rhinoceros hide?
A few days after this conversation it came out that she knew Calo—‘I mean, not exactly know. I can’t say I’ve got a great deal in common with someone like that. But I have met him. With Daddy.’
Keig decided to put this to use. Our attempts to achieve liaison with Calo’s forces had been up till now blankly rebuffed, and recently there had been an unpleasant incident when an attack that Fred Quiddie was to have led against a Keepers’ post at a little place called Rostrennan had been anticipated by Calo’s troopers. They had not only shot the Keepers but had been afterwards loosed in a riot of rape and robbery, even killing an old woman who had protested. This had been a Particularly bad setback for us since we had intended to occupy Rostrennan semipermanently.
However Jane’s mission failed. I heard later that Calo had been tickled pink at our envoy but had declined to take her at all seriously. He had even offered her a job as his ‘secretary’.
Outraged, Jane—she had read a lot of ethics but had kept untarnished the fairy-story morality of her childhood—had told Calo how badly he compared with Keig. He had laughed.
‘All right then, back you go to your son-of-the-soil hero, my dear. But don’t expect that sort of person to get the better of Rolph Mylchraine. That’s something that requires a bit of handling.’
I suppose these may have been the very words that fired poor Jane’s passionate generalized admiration for Keig into something more directly personal. But whatever it was, she came back north as fast as she could on the farm horse that had been all the transport we could provide in our petrol-starved territory. She had had a bad journey too, having to hide from patrolling Keepers once full-length in a water-filled ditch while her mount innocuously grazed. But, of course, danger served only to make Keig a yet more wonderful figure to her.
When she arrived at the farm we were making our headquarters she was passed on to me as I was that evening the inner guard. Standing in a clump of overgrown lilacs to get some shelter from a cloaky night, I pointed out to her across the farmyard the empty loose-box where Keig was at work.
She looked at me as if she was going to say something then, but instead suddenly turned away and crossed the farmyard at a run. I heard her tap at the loose-box door and then out of the corner of my eye saw, as I went back to watching the sloping pastures in front of me, a faint spash of golden light when the two halves of the door were opened one by one.
I must have got Particularly absorbed because it was only after some ten minutes that I became aware that Jane had not come out after making her report. With anyone other than Keig this would not have been unduly long, but Keig’s way with reports was invariable. He listened, perhaps put a question, said ‘thank you’, nodded dismissal and retired into himself to consider.
So ... So that had been what Jane had half-wanted to say to me. I allowed myself a quiet smile.
And just at that moment the two half-doors of the loose-box were flung back with a sharp clack-clack in the quiet of the night and a figure shot out and crossed the miry farmyard like an arrow.
It was Jane, of course. She was running straight towards me and I guessed she had forgotten that I was sheltering there in the bushes. I was still wondering if I should step even farther back when she came cannoning right into me and gave a little, instantly suppressed, squeak of shock.
‘Here,’ I said, putting an arm out to stop her falling, ‘steady on.’
She looked up at me. Her face—she was one of those pale girls whom you see to have a delicacy of complexion only when you are right up close to them—was an oval blur of whiteness in the dark under the lilacs.
‘Michael,’ she said.
She gave a little sob.
‘I’d completely forgotten you were there.’
And then it came, the outpouring.
‘Michael, I did it. I offered. Michael, I never have—and, damn it, I stripped for him. I went and gave him my report. Thank you, he said. And he turned back to that slate of his. I stood there. I was trembling. In the front of my legs. And I thought “I must do it now.” So while he sat there I did. I took off my clothes, every stitch. And I waited and waited. But he just went on working. And then I said “Mr Keig” and he looked up. “Please,” I said. Michael, he
didn’t move a muscle. He just looked at me, like he always does. And then he said: “I want you to leave for home at six tomorrow morning.” Just that. Oh, Michael.’
She buried her head on my chest and in a moment I felt the warm wetness of her tears gradually seep through my shirt. And then after a while she stopped sobbing and looked up at me again.
I saw that she had Parted her lips and held them under my face just a little too far away for me to kiss without the move coming from me. It’s a way some women have, done often without realizing just what they are doing, I think. And now it placed a dilemma before me. Should I bend my head down to hers, with the inevitable consequences? Or should I not, remembering that however she felt I was here as a sentry, guarding Keig and the rest of them? And yet ... And yet I, who had in my London days gone from one girl to another, never without when I really badly enough wanted one, I had now gone for more than two years, ever since Keig had re-enlisted me in Dublin, without so much as a kiss, and for much longer without any regular liaison, here was I being offered that sweet sensuous brief oblivion. Shouldn’t I take it?
And for once indecision, my ineradicable vice, proved the right course. Suddenly Jane reached up and kissed me, warmly, pleadingly, cravingly. I pulled her deeper into the lilacs. Keig might be always above human weakness: I was not.
I had just said goodbye to her—‘Michael. Sorry. Thank you. Oh, damn, one never thinks of the ethics of things till it’s too late’—when I caught sight of the band of golden light spreading across the yard behind me as the top door of the loose-box opened and Keig leant out.
‘Quine. Is that you on guard there?’
‘Yes.’
Strong Man Page 26
