‘We’ll know we’re rotting,’ he said.
They were pushed out into the silver universe. Miles would be alone with the mad Irish all night. He cried rustily.
‘Sir,’ Halloran said, ‘anything for the woman?’
Rowley looked into Halloran’s corner. Halloran shivered and pulled the blanket straighter on his shoulders. Rowley shook his head, nearly like a real person, and went out.
They shut the door. It was so dark. The clumsy eaves cried in the wind, and Miles cried.
‘They’ve escaped nothing,’ Halloran said, but Miles went on despairing maladroitly at the far end of the hut.
‘I have killed you, my lovely bride,’ said Halloran very softly.
But no slow fire of time for them. Time would not eat Ann at the roots of her body so piecemeal, so daily, daily, that she would find with surprise that she was old, brown glue for her eyes, no traffic on the poor beaches of her lips. They would be eaten at one gulp, and when again she rose, she would be all olive skin, all brown gloss of the body.
‘They’ve escaped nothing,’ he called out, certain of it.
Someone jiggled his sleeping elbow. He stared, and it was true dusk. While, where his neck joined his shoulders, a shivery heat ran.
‘Hello,’ said Calverley.
‘I was asleep,’ said Halloran, simply as an explanation.
‘Tell me!’ The parson licked his lips, the better to swallow pride. ‘I take it you don’t wish that Ann Rush to die before a crowd?’
‘Is she there?’ asked Halloran. To himself, his voice sounded cavernous, he spoke out of a grotto like an oracle.
‘Where?’
‘In that hut.’
Calverley cleared his throat.
‘Yes. There’s no hope now except heaven. You must know that?’
‘What does she look like?’ Halloran asked, squinting.
‘She’s quite well. She even –’ (The chaplain inhaled) ‘sends her love. My wife is tending her.’
‘What does she look like though? Is she there? You wouldn’t lie?’
‘My poor boy, you have a fever. Luckily I’ve brought you a blanket each.’
Indeed, he had them over his right arm.
‘Here,’ he said, ‘I think you should sit on one of them. The damp comes up through the earth. Although, I suppose that I don’t have to tell a soldier that.’
‘Here!’ he said to Miles, simply throwing Miles the other blanket he’d brought, as if he and Miles were old, knock-about kinsmen.
It made Miles gape, of course, to have a clergyman give such laconic charity.
‘Don’t let the crowd see her,’ Halloran said.
‘I see,’ Calverley nodded.
‘What does she look like?’
‘My poor boy.’
‘I know she’s tall.’
Calverley shook him by the shoulder.
‘Listen. I’ll see His Excellency who is, after all, decent.’
‘Long sweat of indecency,’ said Halloran.
‘I know. That’s my very point.’
Halloran shrugged. Calverley would see His Excellency. But it would be like Hearn seeing the whaler, and Mrs Calverley being with Ann. Symbols.
‘Our Father,’ said Calverley unopposed.
30
In the morning, Mr Calverley came early to the death-hut with his hat off, and holding his head sideways, trying to make out Halloran’s face. He didn’t speak until he had it clear in view.
‘Halloran,’ he said. ‘It’s been done.’
‘Oh God!’ said Halloran.
He fell back into his corner in a clatter. He was all dead wood; his head hung loose from his neck, and his jaw from his head.
Now he believed. Almost.
‘Are you sure?’ he said. ‘Did you ask His Excellency? Did you ask in words?’
The chaplain would have liked to tell Halloran how hard it had been to invade a Government House dinner of celebration, especially as he was one of the few officials not bidden. The viceroy, full of the wine of brotherhood, had been appalled to see the little priest purple and roaring threats in the ante-room. ‘I will not preach for you or pray for you or chain God as a watch-dog to your gate-post.’ But His Excellency had been dull and lenient. Of course he thought the public death of a young girl an indecency. Of course she could be quietly executed. Ninety minutes early, say. No drums, no trumpets. No excess.
‘I persuaded His Excellency, and I tried to let you know of it last night. Did the Constable tell you?’
Halloran started to wave his head sinuously, making a low wail. After some time, Calverley half-knelt and took the head on his knee. He held it very firmly. His fingers were quite tense. If ever he wanted to infuse something of the Master through his priestly fingers, he did now. As if he had imparted something of worth, the head revived in his hands. Halloran sat up.
‘Was it hard for her?’
‘It was the right thing, whether hard or not. But no. She did not find it hard.’
‘Is that the truth? Tell me.’
‘Yes, it is the truth, Halloran.’
‘I’d be calm now if I knew it was the truth.’
‘Halloran, I stood not ten feet from her. You know how these things are unmistakable. I heard the noise. Her neck broke immediately.
Halloran turned his head away and vomited. He finished, but stared at the floor of clay and rubble, at the insensate little downs of clay. He felt divested for good of his belly, of his stupid, loud, first-hurt and inconsolable belly. He wiped the bitterness of his lips – there was something in him that was discomforted by the bile taste and didn’t know that the romp was finished. To it, the cataclysm would come as a thunderclap.
When Halloran looked up shivering and the tongue still flicking round the acrid mouth, Calverley suffered a thunderclap too. For he saw that here was what was called the moment of grace; that now he might be able to sell God as a cow is sold, and that if he tried to, God would spit him out. He felt liberated suddenly from his vested interest in brotherly love. He could be kindly, just kindly, without motives, good or bad.
‘Chaplain!’ Miles was calling.
‘You will have to wait a little longer,’ said Reverend Calverley, staying by Halloran.
But Halloran told him to go to Miles, and before long, he did go. When he returned some minutes later, he was used to the dark and could see Halloran’s face from yards away, very white in its corner.
‘Was it the right thing to do?’ Halloran said, before Calverley had even reached him. He was wondering who had the right to say that Ann should enter the furnace even two hours before her time. Yet he had said it.
‘She couldn’t have been more grateful,’ said Calverley. ‘She was very quiet – upset, as you can imagine. But she was indeed grateful to die modestly.’
‘She should have cursed me.’
‘She indicated the gallows and said to tell you she was sure they would be a type of wedding for you. There. I carried the message quite faithfully, without qualification.’
‘Thank you, sir. Thank you. Why didn’t I thank you earlier?’
‘You are not to worry about that,’ said Calverley.
He did a hard thing then, for any man of the cloth to do. He did not commentate on the tragedy, he not try an exegesis of the girl’s agony, of Halloran’s bereavement. He remained silent by the boy, and at last said that he must go but would be back.
‘Have some breakfast, it will settle your stomach,’ he said in parting.
From politeness, Halloran agreed, although, mindful of Ewers, he would not eat anything.
Calverley went out. Halloran, who could not consistently remember that Ann was hanged, thought what a strange delight it must be to walk out of doors of
a morning.
Likewise early, Mrs Blythe limped to her window to have one look at the gallows through the trees on the west of the house, intending then to go back to her chair and pray for Ann. She saw a woman already swinging dead on the gallows. A man on a ladder was mounting towards the woman slowly, carrying a sailcloth to cover her.
Mrs Blythe clutched her mouth and began to sweat. Her chair stood five yards away. Now she wondered if she could reach it. Without being aware of her efforts she managed to find it and sat shivering.
Some time later, disgraced Mr Blythe knocked.
‘Go away,’ Mrs Blythe called.
‘I would,’ said Mr Blythe. ‘But you have the only westward-facing window in the house.’
‘The door is locked.’
‘I have a key.’
She heard the key scraping in the socket.
‘I forbid you,’ she shrieked.
But hopefully, she had her black-thorn by her. She would raise lumps on that blatant ear of his.
This hanging day, Mr Blythe, who came straight in, wore a suit of blue serge. He wore it as neatly as a man who had someone to impress.
‘Are you at peace?’ he said dismally. ‘Or were you taken by surprise too? It should be twenty-two minutes to noose-time. Still, there she is.’
He peered out the window quickly, rid himself of a small yelp whose meaning he gave no hint of, and faced back indoors.
‘You hot old fool,’ she said.
‘You flatter me, Mrs B. My blood’s full of polar bears.’
‘You’re laughable.’
‘I might well be.’ He seemed to have no interest in the question. ‘What a letter to father you can write now! So much to tell.’
Prodigal of pain, Mrs Blythe slammed her shoulders against the back of her chair.
‘I’ll tell you straight, sir. My father never rose before a court and claimed and argued that he’d got a servant broody with child.’
He sat himself down. There was a remarkable pallor around his mouth. It seemed to have been painted on, as on a clown or actor.
‘You are the total of all the riots of his blood?’ he asked her, sighing and closing his eyes.
After a silence, Mrs Blythe laboured upright on her left leg, which she considered a quarter or even a half good. She had her stick and hopped towards him and struck him on the shoulder. It hurt him, she could see that much. It shocked him out of his chair. He grabbed the stick and kicked at her shins, tripping her. She seemed to herself to be a long time in falling, to be striving back from the brunt of the floor for a very long time. Her teeth bit when she fell.
She lay neither greatly hurt nor in great pain, and could have risen of her own accord; but her mode of life forced her to pretend to be as helpless as an upturned beetle. For form’s sake, she groaned, playing at pain, and didn’t rush to speak her mind, didn’t risk to any chance words the new stature which, being flat on the floor, she had achieved. While she waited, someone knocked on the outside door.
‘Beware the ravisher, Madam,’ said Mr Blythe, stepping over her to answer the knock. ‘I can see at least four inches of your delightful leg.’
He let somebody in with warmth and was soon back, ambassadorial in the door, his right heel tucked into his left instep and one shoulder inclined.
‘It’s just like Christmas day, Mrs B.,’ he told her, ‘and all our old friends come to visit us.’
‘Somewhat more like Good Friday, Mr Blythe,’ she said.
‘Good Friday indeed. Betrayer and all.’
Mrs Blythe frowned, but not for long. She was no fool.
‘Terry Byrne?’
‘Yes.’
She made a face.
‘Help me up, thank you!’
‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘Come in, Private Byrne.’
‘How dare you! When I’m in this state.’
‘State my eye, Mrs B.,’ Blythe said, and was ready then to go back to the window, though not yet to look out again.
Terry came in dressed as he had been in court.
‘Look at the silver braid, Mrs B.,’ the Commissary called lightly. ‘Look at the greenness of the green and the redness of the red.’
Terry cowered within his hard, regimental clothing, and could be heard hissing from the pain of his interrogation according to the Spanish.
‘Yes, Terry?’
‘Could I help you, Mrs Blythe?’ Terry offered.
But his eyes were not willing. One could understand it, given his new state of life. He had traded his kith for the discontinuance of pain. Even the pain of politeness to a felled lady proved that the bargain was a bad one; even the pain of politeness was insufferable.
‘It is Mr Blythe’s place to help me,’ said Mrs Blythe. ‘What do you want?’
Byrne began to shrug, but decided against it, for the same reason that he had decided against manners.
‘It’s nearly time for them to start beating the drum,’ he said. ‘Do you mind if I stay, since you’ve been so kind before. I’m so sorry, and there’s nowhere else to go.’
At least he sounded very urbane, as if the beating had done him the world of good.
‘You could shoot yourself and go into the pit,’ Mr Blythe suggested.
His wife cautioned him from the floor.
‘The smouldering flax, Mr Blythe. The smouldering flax and the bruised reed.’
‘He certainly is the bruised reed. They tell me you’ve been beaten with green wands, Terry.’
Byrne stammered from the pain.
‘Yes,’ the Commissary nodded, ‘it must sting you. You poor Judas-faced bastard!’
‘No,’ said Byrne, not hard enough to smart though, ‘it was that Hearn had us bewitched to the back-teeth.’
‘Don’t blame Hearn,’ said Mrs Blythe. ‘Blame yourself, like a good man.’
‘That Hearn was Satan,’ Terry insisted. He shuddered like a demoniac.
Blythe laughed and pointed to his wife, saying, ‘And meet Queen Mab. Or perhaps the Lady of the Lake.’ He peered. ‘After fifty years drowned in the river of life, the features coarsen.’
‘Mr Blythe,’ said the lady. ‘I am waiting. In considerable pain, I might tell you.’
Mr Blythe turned his back. Whether he intended to stare at the gallows, they were his only alternative to the other two, both of them so insistent to be put on their feet, both in the same degree incapable of profiting from that particularly mercy.
‘You had better go, Terry,’ Mrs Blythe decided, withdrawing her eyes to show there was no court of appeal from her decision.
‘Like this? You can see how the Sergeants have been dressing me.’
‘You must face the world, Terry,’ Mrs Blythe said grandly. ‘Let it be a friendless world. God is your friend. Out of these despised ruins, Terry, the new Zion!’
At the window, Mr Blythe had a laugh to see that her canons thundered forth just as irresponsibly now that she was on the flat of her spine.
‘Remember to grunt now and then, Mrs B.,’ he called. ‘Remember to be pained.’
Terry began sobbing.
‘They won’t let me take my meals in peace, Mrs Blythe. They won’t let me go for a walk or lie on my belly in my hut. They’ll have me carrying the corpses if they can find me. I know the beggars.’
‘Face them if necessary, Terry, and do it.’
‘With a tow-row-row-row-row-row-row,’ said Mr Blythe, ‘to the British grenadiers.’
‘If I could stay here till this afternoon . . .’ Terry hoped. ‘There’s a lot I still haven’t told you about the quaint habits of home.’
The lady shook her head and crawled a foot closer to her black-thorn. Achingly, Byrne sank to his knees to retrieve the stick for her. What occupied him when he had got that
far was how to move ever again.
In any case, ‘Don’t touch it, Terry!’ said Mrs Blythe. ‘You have to go.’
‘Go on, you Judas bastard,’ the Commissary at the window said. ‘Get on your way. I’ll give you a few good English pains to go with your Spanish ones.’
‘Where, Mrs Blythe?’ Terry whispered, swaying on his knees.
‘Outside,’ she told him. ‘There’s nowhere else. You have to learn to face the world.’
‘Just an hour or two.’
‘Oh, get out when you’re told!’
‘Ah,’ Mr Blythe said over his shoulder, ‘they have her all tricked out in canvas.’
‘Get up, Terry, you stupid boy,’ said Mrs Blythe. ‘Sir, I am waiting to be helped up.’
She stared when her husband snorted, turned away from the window, away from Mrs Blythe, hiding his face.
‘Tears?’ she asked. ‘You old fool. There’s no fool on earth like a hot old fool.’
He could be heard sobbing now, but not because she had called him a hot old fool.
‘Get out, you Judas bastard!’ he said to Byrne, who found his feet quickly and by accident.
‘I am not one of those people who think that tears mean grief, Blythe,’ the lady explained. ‘People can cry in theatres, where tears no more mean grief than do belly-rumbles.’
But he clearly didn’t care what they meant, and he clearly wept for the pity of things. It shocked her to see him weeping for the pity of things.
‘Oh, stop it and help me up!’
‘Mrs Blythe,’ Terry said gently.
‘Go away, Terry!’
‘Where?’
‘That’s not the point. Go on now, go on! Don’t you have an excellent piece of gossip? Didn’t you see Mr Blythe strike me down? Most days you couldn’t have got outside quickly enough with news like that.’
‘That’s not being fair to me, Mrs Blythe,’ Terry said.
‘Get out!’ she said.
Productively; because he went, though it may have been that he had suddenly despaired on his own initiative of the poor comforts of her parlour.
‘Now,’ said the lady when he had gone, ‘assist me please, Mr Blythe.’
Yet Mr Blythe was still much embarrassed by grief.
Bring Larks and Heroes Page 25
