Strong Man

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘Call someone to take your place. I want you.’

  I found him sitting with his orangey-capped bullet head bowed over the slate on his knees totting up figures by the light of a single oil-lamp. He told me briefly and without comment that Jane had failed with Calo.

  ‘You know his sort,’ he concluded. ‘D’you think he’d be different with another messenger, one of the lads?’

  I told him I doubted it, and went on to give my reasons.

  In the middle suddenly I faltered. It had flooded in on me that if Keig had happened to come right outside to find me a quarter of an hour earlier he might well have shot me as a sentry neglecting his duty.

  ‘Go on, man,’ he barked.

  I picked up the process of my reasoning by its coat-tails and quickly finished.

  Keig sat still for a few moments, eyes withdrawn. Then he stood up.

  ‘I’m going to Calo myself,’ he said.

  But it was not until almost a month later, after we had succeeded in ambushing two scout-cars together within ten miles of Lesneven, that Calo even agreed to a meeting. And even then he insisted it was to be at his own house and that only three of us were to come.

  ‘But, listen, Mr Keig,’ bright, loyal, cheerfully pleasure-loving Fred Quiddie had said, ‘what if old Calo wants to kidnap you or something?’

  ‘Perhaps he does,’ replied Keig tranquilly. ‘But I’ll be ready for him. And he won’t be counting on that.’

  So it was big Pat Boddaugh and myself who went with him, by bicycle for want of other transport. Boddaugh came because he would be a good man in a scrap, and myself, I suspected, because Keig still had some undealt with anxieties about meeting ‘a gentleman’ in his own house.

  And the house when, dusty and dishevelled, we arrived at it showed that any doubts he did have were going to be amply tested. It even had a butler, with a striped waistcoat that bellied out in front of him like a ship of old coming into port. By him we were put for a long heel-cooling period into some sort of tenants’ waiting-room, from which in due turn we were fetched by a tall sombre man who introduced himself as Faragher, Calo’s Overseer.

  He led us into what was obviously the main dining-room. It was a decidedly impressive place. The walls were panelled to the ceiling in dark shining oak, with at regular intervals round them glinting brass candle-sconces. Along its whole length ran a broad table as polished and as darkly gleaming as the panelling. Great leather-backed chairs were drawn up to this. Behind the one at the head there was a splendid marble fireplace, imported in the distant past from England or France, I guessed. Above it, huge but dim under thick varnish, hung a painting of some heroic hunting scene.

  But it was only later that I came to take all this in. What held my eye as we crossed the threshold was the array of men clustered round the head of the long table. There must have been fifteen of them, two or three sitting in the big leather-backed chairs, the rest standing loungingly about. And all of them were armed to the teeth, with sten-guns, pistols, and even knives and all wore the tight, long-skirted, shiny brown light jackets of Calo’s army.

  If it came to any sort of argument the three of us—Keig with his omnipresent axe, myself and Pat Boddaugh with revolvers—were going to look pretty silly. We stood now in a small defensive group near the door and stared across at the others while the sombre Faragher went over to join them. And what at once became apparent was that the big head-of-the-table chair was empty.

  No one spoke a word to us. We stood where we were in silence. The others talked amongst themselves in low voices.

  And then a door opened at the far end of the room and Marcus Calo was there.

  He was, I have to confess, a striking figure. Although he was nearer sixty than fifty, his slim and erect body was athletic-looking as a twenty-year-old’s. He wore breeches and beautifully-shaped and brilliantly polished riding boots, a short hacking jacket and, his sole touch of eccentricity, a black stock at the throat of his open-necked white shirt. And he carried that riding-crop we had heard about.

  He walked without a word along the whole length of the far side of the big table and took his seat at its head. Only then did he look at us, one deliberate glance with an eyebrow slightly cocked in his taut-skinned hook-nosed face.

  It was left to Keig to break the silence.

  ‘Would you be Marcus Calo?’ he said.

  I felt a quick spurt of pride. Keig had not been overawed then by all the dramatic business. He was neither going to accept that he must know who the great Calo was, but neither was he going to get involved in any silly game of pretending not to know to whom he was talking. Perhaps the odds were not so uneven as I had thought.

  No doubt Calo too found more in Keig’s remark than he had expected, because he turned almost at once to the brown-jacketed mob behind him and said ‘I think we might have some refreshment, will someone have the goodness to pull that bellcord?’

  With only the slightest of delays a uniformed footman appeared at the door behind us.

  ‘Whiskey, Arthur,’ Calo said.

  When the man had gone Calo leant towards us.

  ‘Tell me, Mr Keig,’ he said conversationally, ‘how many men do you have at your command?’

  I reckoned that he probably knew pretty well that the disparity between Keig’s forces and his was much the same as the disparity between the three of us on our side of the wide table and the lounging mob behind him. I wondered how Keig would handle this demand for precise information. For a moment or two he simply said nothing, and I could tell by the withdrawn look of those dark eyes of his that he was giving himself time to think. Then he answered.

  ‘I’ll maybe tell you later,’ he said to Calo. ‘When I’ve more reason to trust you.’

  I thought the mild warmth which the meeting had taken on might vanish abruptly at this, but, perhaps luckily, the footman returned at that moment with a loaded tray and Calo stood up. There was a certain amount of toing-and-froing while everyone was served. None of the bodyguards behind Calo however made the least move to approach us.

  And then as the footman served Keig—‘Soda or water, sir?’ ‘What? Oh, water. Water.’—I realized that a new if minor dilemma was on us. It was more than two years now to my knowledge since Keig had taken any alcohol and his weak head was certain to be even weaker. How was he going to cope?

  Calo, standing now at the head of the long table talking earnestly to the sombre Faragher, abruptly raised his glass.

  ‘I give you a toast, gentlemen,’ he called down to us. ‘Mylchraine—till he’s been hunted down like a fat rat.’

  There was a roar of laughter from the men behind him and glasses were caught up and flourished. Calo emptied his own—and it was no small one—at a swallow. Taking a rapid sip myself, I watched Keig. He raised his glass to his lips. And then he put it quickly down again on the glinting surface of the table in front of him. I calculated that he could hardly have taken a drop.

  We continued to stand there in our two groups, with the footman very busy round Calo and his swaggering followers and also doing his best to create an equal amount of work out of Keig, Pat Boddaugh and myself by stepping up and refilling our glasses before they were a third empty. But I allowed this to happen only twice before putting my fingers quite frankly over both my glass and poor Boddaugh’s. All three of us were going to need to keep cool heads.

  Keig’s glass, I saw, remained so full that with the best will in the world no one could have got a flick more into it. And in any case before many minutes had passed he pulled back the chair he had taken before, sat down in it again and pushed the glass firmly away as if clearing a space to work.

  And, as I mentally applauded this little manoeuvre, he raised his head and gave something like a glare towards Calo.

  ‘I’m wanting to get well along the road back tonight,’ he said. ‘So I’ve no time to spare, if you please.’

  I saw Calo smile.

  It was a cold smile, and I was quite unable to tell whether it
meant that he was impressed by Keig or inwardly infuriated. Whichever it was, Keig simply ignored it and leant purposefully forward.

  ‘Four weeks ago yesterday,’ he said growlingly, ‘a party of your men rode into the village of Rostrennan and shot the Keepers in the post there. But that wasn’t all they did. They shot an old woman, too, an old woman who’d done no more than lay her tongue to them for what they’d done to her daughter.’

  Calo dropped back into his high-backed chair.

  ‘My dear chap,’ he said, ‘you’ll have to learn, you know, that when the hunt’s up a few hedges are bound to be broken.’

  Beside me I felt big Pat Boddaugh surge forward in an outbreak of quick mountain man’s temper. I gripped him hard by the forearm. With all that battery of weapons in the group behind Calo we certainly could not afford anything that looked like starting a roughhouse. In front of us Keig was sitting rock still.

  ‘I’ve seen innocent folk suffer often enough since I set up against Mylchraine,’ he said. ‘I know what that means. But this old woman needn’t ever have been killed at all.’

  Calo simply went on smiling.

  ‘Mr Keig,’ he said, ‘if all you’ve come here for is to bring me a lot of caterwauling stories of that sort you might as well go straight back where you came from—since you’re in so much of a hurry.’

  ‘I came for a great deal more than that,’ Keig answered, still managing to keep calm. ‘Let me tell you something. When your men left Rostrennan they left every soul in the place believing in Mylchraine. Now, it’d have been damn useful to me to have had men of my own staying quietly thereabouts. But after you’d been in it there was nothing at all to do but keep well away, unless we wanted the Keepers told of every last thing we did. So who gained from all that?’

  He seemed to expect Calo to reply to this accusation, which was an unusually long-winded speech for him. And when nothing was said he lifted up a heavy fist and banged it down on the polished surface of the table.

  ‘Mylchraine gained,’ he said loudly. ‘Mylchraine and none other.’

  Calo seemed perfectly unimpressed.

  ‘My dear fellow,’ he said, ‘I hope you’re not suggesting that I can’t deal with that unpleasant person’s followers as and when I please.’

  ‘If I’d known you intended to deal with the Keepers in Rostrennan,’ Keig replied, baffledly sticking to his point, ‘I’d have used my men on some other job, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘You know, Mr Keig,’ Calo said, in an infuriating tone of reasonableness, ‘it doesn’t much concern me where you use your men, or what you use them for—so long as they don’t start trying to preach morality to my lot.’

  Again I put a warning hand on Pat Boddaugh’s sleeve. Keig still sat there calm enough to all outward appearances, but I thought I detected barely checked fury when he spoke.

  ‘But you want to see Mylchraine finished, don’t you?’ he demanded of Calo.

  ‘The fellow does need teaching a lesson, of course.’

  ‘He needs more than teaching a lesson,’ Keig broke in. ‘He needs to be toppled. Just that. And if you’ll only listen to reason he can be toppled all the faster.’

  ‘Toppled?’ Calo said. ‘I’m not sure I like that sort of talk.’

  ‘It’s the sort of talk you’ll get,’ Keig retorted. ‘It says what’s plain true. Mylchraine’s got to be toppled, and the sooner I can get some guns to match those scout-cars of his the sooner I can fight my way into Lesneven and get at him.’

  ‘My dear chap, I don’t think you need worry your head about that. Enough good men on enough good horses and I’ll be dealing with Mylchraine in Lesneven the moment it suits me.’

  There was a murmur of boastful barking laughter at this from the over-armed crew in the background. Keig looked up and glared at them and then returned to Calo like an obstinate bulldog.

  ‘You’ll not get to Lesneven without guns,’ he declared.

  Calo’s taut-skinned face moved slowly into another cold smile.

  ‘Shall we see about that?’ he replied.

  ‘We should be seeing about getting guns in from Dublin through the harbour at Caloestown,’ Keig shouted.

  I looked over at Calo now with double intentness. This was where we might learn what Cormode in Dublin was doing with all those funds of his.

  But the fleshless face betrayed absolutely nothing.

  ‘I don’t think you need concern yourself with guns, Mr Keig. I’ve told you: Mylchraine won’t cause me all that trouble.’

  He stood up now, in one lithe movement that made him seem twenty years younger than he was. He picked up the riding-crop which had been lying on the table in front of him.

  ‘You know,’ he said, looking at Keig with one eyebrow just a little raised, ‘you and I are not generals, my dear chap. I’m—Well, I’m a hunting man. And you?’

  He paused for a moment. The armed men behind him suddenly stiffened.

  ‘What shall I call you now I’ve had a look at you? A game-beater, I think. Yes, that’s your job. You just go on making a lot of noise up at your end of the shoot, and you’ll be doing well enough. And now good day to you.’

  Keig sat quite still. But it can only have been for a couple of seconds. Then he stood up. He shoved back his big chair with an awkward scrape and marched out of the door.

  We followed him. There was nothing else to do.

  2

  Poor naïve high-tempered Pat Boddaugh tried to say something to Keig about it all when we had mounted those humiliating dirty bicycles of ours and had pedalled down the long beautifully kept drive of the big house, out through the heavy double ironwork gates and away down the summer-dusty road till we had felt comparatively free.

  ‘What’ll you do to him, Mr Keig?’ he burst out, hauling up at the handlebars of his machine as if he wanted to lift it bodily off the road in front of him and hurl it at someone.

  Keig simply made no reply.

  Pedalling toilingly along behind those broad shoulders of his, I thought over and over our whole meeting with Calo. One thing about it all was crystal clear, try to get round it how I might: Keig had suffered a defeat. Yet, I thought, what could he have done other than what he did? With that armed pack standing insolently behind Calo we really did have to take any insults we were given. And if Calo chose to pay no attention to sensible suggestions about co-operating in the fight against Mylchraine, then he chose to pay no attention. We could not make him do what was best.

  So we had to accept the defeat. Yet a good many questions remained to answer. I wished I could ask Keig them, but plainly I could not.

  He had adopted the solitariness of the man who leads, and to try to share his thoughts would be perhaps to deflect him, even to weaken him fatally.

  So I said not a word. But I wondered. Would he eventually try to take on Calo as well as Mylchraine? The distant lonely man would never tell me till the time to do whatever it was that he had decided on was near.

  Yet just how distant and lonely Keig was I had not even then fully taken into account. I was to do quite soon however, and in a way which shook my faith in him to its foundations.

  First, we arrived back to bad news. The Keepers had retaliated with a new ferocity to our successful attack on the two scout-cars which had earned us our doubtfully worth-having visit to Marcus Calo. Retaliation, of course, we had expected. Our struggle was in those terms now: for each strike we made the Keepers would strike back and strike terror too, and then it became up to us to show people in our part of the island that we had not been intimidated.

  But on this occasion the Keepers’ retaliation had been at a new peak of savagery. They had made a sudden descent on the tiny hamlet where the men who had conducted the attack on the cars were hiding and they had destroyed every living thing there, fighting men, whole families and every creature down to the chickens. And, worse, it looked as if this had been made possible because a girl from the destroyed hamlet had been going out with a Keeper.

  Keig
then sent express orders to every one of our groups to avoid all places where there was any doubt about women in a position to betray us—and equally on our part to avoid, above all, similar contact with women who might have links with the Keepers, which in the close-knit communities of the island was a fairly likely occurrence. It was, I think, the first general directive of this sort Keig had issued. He distrusted all the trappings of military life but circumstances make some sort of militarist of any man who takes on himself a general’s role—as Keig, for all Calo’s derision, had certainly done.

  But a worse blow, far, was to fall before long. And it fell all the harder for coming out of the blue.

  Almost indeed it seemed to come literally out of the blue because we had entered again one of those long periods of magnificently fine weather that characterized all that summer in Oceana. We were, it goes without saying, in yet another headquarters at the time. This was an unusually grand one, part of one of the island’s big houses. The owner had either preferred to stay in Lesneven, or more likely had taken himself off to England where a good many of the estate-owners preferred to stay while Mylchraine cleared up the mess they saw the island as having got into. And Keig had taken over various Parts of the house in his absence, not without punctiliously ordering accounts to be kept and leaving a letter addressed to ‘The Occupier’ saying that any claim made would be met on its merits. For his personal quarters, both dormitory and command post, Keig used the house’s old conservatory.

  It should have been steamily hot with the fineness of the weather but the palms in their pots and the long juicy-leaved creepers had become so overgrown that the place was in fact the most comfortable part of the whole big house. In it Keig sat every day under an obese miniature palm, scaly-trunked and thick, with beside him two small tables on which rested one of our prize captures, a large map of the whole of Oceana. I remember with extraordinary vividness even now the irritating way in which the two tables were not exactly the same height so that there was an awkward area in the middle of the map—it fell just south of Lesneven—where one could not point to anything without sending any markers put down elsewhere skittering out of place.