Bring Larks and Heroes (8 page)

‘Would he?' Halloran asked.

‘Ah-ah,' Hearn cautioned, ‘your coat's Hanover all over. You are the King's man, as they say.'

‘As they say,' said Halloran.

Drowned in the stench, he forgot it for seconds at a time. The long room sizzled with the consequential gluttony of flies, and that too he no longer adverted to. But to see in an instant and by surprise a seam in the boy's purple back and a herd of black flies, whose bite is maggots, drinking from it,
that
made him flee.

He fled fifty yards into the open. Ending under a smooth and tolerant eucalypt and jumping to snatch down some of the leaves from its high branches, he crushed them in his hands and sniffed up their clean astringency. They stung his brain, and he dropped the ones he held and jumped for more.

Hearn had followed him and watched him with sad forbearance.

‘Where do you come from, Corporal?'

‘Wexford Bay. Erriscombe village,' said Halloran, crumpling and inhaling.

‘Ah, Wexford's peaceful. There aren't that many Wexford men serving, army or navy.'

‘No. It might be their good fortune, mightn't it?'

There was silence, to fill which Halloran took a further three long sniffs. Then he said:

‘I despise that sort of talk.'

‘What sort of talk?'

‘The sort of talk you're trying to provoke. The sort
of talk that will end in my asking what you've done for the ruling powers, since you've got a good coat on and look so well.'

‘I'm government clerk here at the Crescent. I've had some experience in that type of work. That's how I wear a good coat.'

‘Transported, of course?' asked Halloran, meaning the yeoman, not the coat.

‘Yes, of course. With less good luck, I could be off in the forest somewhere, dragging timber.'

You could certainly have said that Hearn was honest. But he never laughed with his own honesty, and gave only an occasional half-smile when Halloran said anything sardonic. He failed to smile as he himself leant forward now and whispered.

‘Secret Society. Illegal oath.'

Halloran laughed unequivocally. ‘Three Christmasses back, I went to a meeting of a body called the Land Tenure Committee. I went with my father and shouldn't have, considering what I was.'

‘What was that?'

‘A scholar from the bishop's house in Wexford.'

‘Amazing! And they got the lot of you?'

Halloran nodded, but said, ‘Oh no, not everyone. The father got away by the grace of God. Besides, he's a lucky old beggar. German mercenaries. Ugly big fellows. A boot in the cods was their specialty.'

‘Was this in Wexford?'

‘The Wexford magistrates were the ones we ended in front of, yes. But I hardly remember Wexford jail. Inside a week an officer of Marines off one of the ships in the Bay came for me.'

While they had been speaking, the aspect of the world had changed. From the unknown south-east hove wet clouds of badly tarnished silver, keeping blockade on the harmless little port. The light was intimidated to thin yellow and gave a luminous fringe to the Irishman's shoulders. A wind had begun blowing, sluicing the hospital reek away. It gave a sharp sense of refreshment to Halloran to see crooked shrubs of yellow and olive on the layered cliff across the river, shaking themselves in the wind.

Of course, it all meant nothing, a show of leniency from the southern ice-regions from which came all that was sufferable in summer. Including this temporary vigour in the air. Halloran savoured it and looked up at the eucalyptus, thinking that now it might endow the yeoman and himself with some of its placidity.

But the yeoman was a hard one.

‘And with your young arm,' he said without notice, ‘you uphold the system which did for Mealey.'

‘No!'

‘Yes, oh yes! Indeed!'

‘And did you cry out when you recorded Mealey's sentence?'

‘He was never sentenced.'

‘Never sentenced, my foot!'

‘I said that he was never sentenced. He and four other men were heard to have spoken of pikes. The Irishman's cure-all, pikes. After church-parade on Sunday, Daker had them marched out under sergeant's guard. The sergeant couldn't do anything. Not against Daker the Mighty. The landscape was as usual. Empty of officers. Over there, on a hill behind Government House, Daker had them flayed to get evidence. The poisonous thing was that they had none to give, none of the startling stuff that Daker wanted. However, that's apart from our argument. I admit to you, Corporal, that had Mealey been sentenced, I'd have recorded his sentence without a whimper. This is how they have us divided one from another.'

‘One from another be damned!' said Halloran. ‘And Daker had him flayed. Daker isn't the system I uphold with any young arm of mine.'

‘True enough,' said Hearn. ‘True enough, in a way.' He paused. ‘I don't suppose I have to worry about being reported to the authorities for what I've said this afternoon?'

‘What do you think? Do I look like Judas's young brother?'

‘No. In that case, you might want to know what Eris Mealey has said to me about the affair.'

The yeoman glanced easefully over his shoulder. Mum as Satan then, he stared into Halloran's eyes.

‘He's in a fever, of course, but he claimed that Mrs Daker rubbed poison into his stripes. Came to him where he lay and rubbed rust into his cuts.'

‘Gossip!' said Halloran.

‘If you think my motives are gossip, so be it. I neither believe nor disbelieve Mealey. But Daker
was
in danger. Now Mealey will die, and the Governor won't be seeing him or hearing his story, and the corps of gallant officers will tell their lies. And Daker will be safe again.'

Above the sound of the wind, Halloran could hear Hearn's bated, interrogative breathing. Hearn went on staring at him from under grey eyelids as big as hearty moustaches. The eyes said what Hearn's yeoman rigorousness would not allow himself to say:
Admit it. You know she looks a poisoner
.

‘I have to take the boat home,' said Halloran.

‘You have, too.' Hearn stood up straight. ‘I was pleased to meet you, Corporal Halloran.'

‘And I you, Mr Hearn.'

‘Thank you, but I don't think so.'

‘What don't you think?'

‘That you were glad to meet me.'

‘Because
you
were trying to recruit me.' Halloran smiled, and indicted Hearn with his finger. ‘I was recruited all the morning by a Scotsman, for his own motives. And now you . . .'

‘I hope I do a better job,' said Hearn, and blinked. He really did hope it. There was no whimsey in him.

‘Oh, I consider you a far more dangerous style of man.'

‘Dangerous? I am responsibility itself.' Hearn's disaffected eyes flashed. All that he said now was a recital of disenchantment rather than of pride of class. ‘I have held seventy acres at Roundwood, County Wicklow, in the days of my respectability. I was surveyor of roads and hired the gangs who remade the Roundwood to Rathdrum road. As well, I was county Alnegar, a post I held under Sir Andrew Price, Wicklow's Chief Magistrate.'

The final sentence would have been,
And I spit on it all
.
But it wasn't spoken – only, once more, conveyed by the eyes.

‘It's no use fishing for me,' said Halloran. ‘I have such a thing as the soldiers' oath to keep.'

‘Oath to whom?' asked Hearn, all deliberate bemusement.

Halloran smiled.

‘Oath to whom?' Hearn repeated.

‘Oath to God, Mr Hearn.'

‘No!' Hearn was just audible. The force of his vision did not make him shout, but reduced him to a pin-point of sound. ‘A God conscripted by a realm to give inhuman power to its purposes. A God conscripted, as you were, Halloran, to give binding magic to the links which chain each clod of human dust to its King. That is, no God at all.'

The top of the eucalypt flurried in dissent.

‘There is no god-forged chain of power from Daker to His Excellency to George to God. The true God is not coerced into anyone's army, the true God fills no navy's sails. To the true God, the House of Hanover is just a house. Therefore, Corporal Halloran, oath to whom?'

Halloran was mindful of the burning bush. ‘To the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, whether that was the God they wanted me to swear to, I don't know. But that's the oath they got from me. So Halloran, like God, is a little beyond recruiting.'

Prophets disgruntled him. He promised himself that the next time Hearn said anything at which some offence could be taken, he would storm away. The chance came immediately.

‘Why do you think that the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob comes low enough to hear your oath, Corporal?'

Halloran picked up his flint-lock and his disputed vows.

‘Who are you to say I live in a pit?' he said with a good show of anger.

Downhill stood a fringe of very dry she-oaks for which he made. He stopped before disappearing amongst them.

‘I'll ask about Mealey whenever the boat comes in,' he called. ‘I'll sweat on his death, as they say.'

‘Corporal,' said Hearn. ‘I meant low enough to hear my oath, your oath, anyone's oath.'

Halloran turned his back.

‘You won't sweat for long,' said Hearn after him.

As he came down around the corner of the vegetable garden, he wondered to what a degree the true God, the transcendent God,
I am Who am
,
was involved in the listless faith he kept with George R. Beside this, Mealey, Daker, the fat orderly, the sick and the hale in Daker's hospital, all were minor puzzles.

7

The three o'clock drum called Hearn back to his work in the cramped ante-room of Government House. For his rarefied place there, amongst decent, marbled ledgers, he felt improperly grateful. He could remember being grateful in a similar way on the day he'd seen a petrified skeleton found by a slip of the spade in the side of a chalk hill. He could have touched the clean shape of the bones, he came so close to them. They had been no more than the numerals, the ciphers of a man; and this had consoled him, that from them the mountainous frenzies of living and of the last gasp had been eroded.

Similarly rinsed clean of frenzies were the returns he was handed every Tuesday. They came from the Surgeon, the Surgeon as Magistrate, the Commissary clerk, the overseers at the brickfield, quarry, gardens,
farm, timber-pits. He recorded these and made skilful abstracts of them; and when he had finished, his masters had something as adequate and as sterile of
human
truth as were those bones in the chalk hill.

For being grateful to deal with the settlement and system in its most innocent form, in numerals, he judged himself. He judged himself unfavourably, because of his diffuse pride. When his patron, a Sir Andrew Price, had shown him how a mere evasion under oath would lead to his acquittal, he was not too conscience-stricken to be evasive. He was too proud. Yet he took no pride now in his pride then. It may have been because he had allowed Sir Andrew to buy him a berth in the bosun's mess, so that he voyaged the thirteen thousand miles as a freeman in his own coat. He had not had to survive the hold and was too proud again not to feel ashamed of being shielded from that testing.

Yet there would have been nothing diffuse about his concern had he known that someone so raw or cumbersomely wily as Ewers had arrived in the Daker household.

A fortnight before, the Commandant, Captain Howard, had warned Hearn that Mrs Daker had applied for an interview, would arrive at half past nine in the morning, and that he himself would be
out
to all other visitors. The following morning, at the given time, Hearn opened the front door on a furnace-breath westerly, and a white town so tenuous amongst the
blowing dust that it threatened to vanish if you ceased to believe in it. Hearn believed in it though, too well.

It was a rigorous day for lovers, but there stood Mrs Daker with a slight dew of sweat on her upper lip. She sported a very ripe purple and a fichu of black chiffon, loose enough to show her black chiffon collar, girlish at her neck. There was no subtlety in the meeting of her gipsy skin and deep purple. It took the eye by main assault. The ruffled chiffon was at odds with her, just the same, and needed a woman of a more delicate mouth and reputation.

‘This way, Mrs Daker,' Hearn said loudly, calling to the entire hillside of witless little huts to be witnesses of her flagrancy.

Her face was impervious to Hearn as in she came. Somehow her skin had grown smooth over the memory of the Daker of less than four years ago; of Daker on half-pay and drinking most of it, trapped with her in a room above a riotous barber's in Exeter; of the grey tumulus where they two lay all the night, back to belly, in answer to the imperatives of the cold and never of tenderness.

‘Through here, Ma'am,' said Hearn, averting his eyes, and took her into the ante-room to find Captain Howard side-on in the doorway of his office. The lady brushed past him, and the door closed on Howard's avid mumblings.

On his way back to his desk, Hearn discovered that
between the porch and Howard's office she had put a sting in his flesh, right enough. He possessed a rugged, monarch will, of the type for which European religions seemed to be tailored. It ruled him under God, it quashed small, futile ructions in the provinces. Yet he was faint from his glimpse of jollied-up Mrs Daker. In conscience, he worked standing, till her raw image faded down the corridors of the blood. When he was next aware of himself, it was of pen-cramp in his wrist. A whole man, a united kingdom, he slid inadvertently into his seat.

A little after ten, Surgeon Daker arrived.

‘I have astounding news for the Commandant,' said the little, deathly face as soon as Hearn opened the porch door. Daker's strabismic eye was aimed utterly
un
astounded at the lintel.

‘
Astounding
by my standards,' he corrected himself. ‘Perhaps only
important
to Howard. Tell him!'

Daker carried a wire bird-trap in his right hand. It was still disguised with wisps of porcupine-grass, and a kingfisher of some kind sat companionably in it. A rich green glorified the bird's back and wings, yet it had hunched itself like a cold navvy and looked sideways at the heat and dust blowing from the west. Red dust had scurfed the shoulders of Daker's blue coat.

‘Go on,' said Daker. ‘Tell him!'

‘He's
out
to all visitors, sir.'

‘If he's in at all, he'll be pleased to see me. Go on. Tell him!'

Hearn went indoors, furious with Howard for making him into a farce-figure. There were immense dangers, too, in being hemmed in by an unholy triangle between the front door and the door of Howard's office, when points A, B and C would all see him as smeared with their own guilt or stupidity, and could have him chained or flayed or damned to labour.

When, in the ante-room, he heard male and female laughter indifferently jumbled, he glanced over his shoulder and saw that Daker and the dead-pan kingfisher had followed him down the hall. The back of his neck, the rims of his ears began to burn. Though he refused to hide his eyes from the Surgeon's face, the gesture had no meaning, since Daker's left eye looked through a person, and the right looked at the roof. Brow-to-brow manliness was lost on this little fellow.

What was astounding, however much Hearn expected it, was that nothing happened to Daker's face. Not even the resignation of a practised wittol. The lips didn't curl, the attenuated features of his suet-and-freckle face were quiescent as ever. When he pushed Hearn aside from the office door and left him grasping an empty insult with hands open and chest-high, it was an act of ill-breeding rather than of anger.

So Captain Howard and Mrs Daker saw the surgeon standing ghostly with indifference on the threshold, and Mrs Daker's involuntary yelp and scurry came to Hearn as assurance that the stale comedy had begun.
He could not see into the room or tell what state the lovers were in, and he hoped, of course, that they had not got beyond token endearments.

At a loss but respectably shirt-sleeved, Howard came up to the doorway, nodding and alacritous, glowering sideways at his fool of a clerk.
Officer and gentleman, I abominate you
,
thought Hearn, word by word, so hard-headed was his enmity.

‘This fellow didn't want me to see you,' Daker told Howard. As if all things made a balanced and orderly world, even the fact that his wife couched of a morning at Government House, except for Hearn's disrupting unreasonableness.

Bless you in your maniacy
,
thought Hearn genially.

‘Yes . . .' said Howard, keeping his mouth open, but finding that there was nothing else he could say for the moment, even to the surgeon, without losing some brand of honour.

‘I have a matter of no small scientific importance to consult you on.'

‘Yes, Surgeon.'

Howard urbanely closed the office door and transformed the ante-room into the seat of government.

‘Hearn, you can leave. I shall see you after Mr Daker has gone.'

‘Let him stay,' the surgeon contradicted. ‘There's no use pretending we have any privacy in this settlement.' He
leaned fraternally towards Howard and jabbed his thumb at Hearn. ‘They find out everything, you know, Captain.'

The Captain was not in a position to argue. He composed himself and crossed to Hearn's desk.

‘Would you care to take a seat, Surgeon Daker?' he said, picking up foolscap. It was easy to tell he was as pleased for the polite formula to fill his mouth as he was for the paper in his hands.

Daker ducked down into the chair, lunatic quick, and put the wire trap, with its sable and green bird, on the desk.

Howard coughed.

‘What splendid colour,' he said. ‘Is it native?'

‘Yes,' said Daker. ‘Last summer I had a glimpse of him in flat country five miles beyond.' He thumbed carelessly over his shoulder at the inland. ‘There were other kingfishers, too, that had eschewed the river-banks and spent the summer in dry country, but I have been laying the traps all summer long for this one.'

‘I see. Congratulations are in order.'

‘Thank you, Captain. But I believe I have three other birds in my aviary, all of them captured earlier this summer, which have been hitherto unknown to ornithologists.'

He sat forward and took on more of the look of a feeling organism.

‘Two of them are members of the
Cuculidae
family; two of them, this one included, are
Halcyonidae.
'

Howard wagged his head knowingly, as if he were acquainted with
Halcyonidae
from of old.

‘This superb fellow I have named
Alcyone viridis
,
the Green kingfisher. Provisionally, that is. I hope to hit on a more imaginative name before long. I want that you should be kind enough to inform His Excellency of all this. It is news which, I feel, deserves a –'

Here Daker shoved his fist hard in under his own cheekbone, so that the mouth, twisted open in the left corner and showing black rot in the back teeth, laboured for the right word.

‘– a
vice-regal
letter.'

On an undemanding blank page, Howard, the viceroy's viceroy, wrote with fraudulent energy,
Daker. Aviary. Four birds unknown hitherto.

He pulled his eyes from the page to utter, with immense fervour,

‘I'm sure His Excellency will be most gratified to receive news of the results of your work, sir.'

Results of your work
.
Hearn thought of the complicated horrors of the hospital which was, under G III R, Daker's work.

‘Yes, well, in the – vice-regal letter, I would like you to request His Excellency's permission for me to name this kingfisher after himself.'

The bird waited unblinking within its green coat. That it might have His Excellency tacked adjectively to its plumage didn't seem to touch it in its essence.

Request H. E. permission to name one after H. E.
,
the officer wrote, wondering, as Hearn wondered also, how a man like Daker had come by the technical knowledge to discover a new animal and name it rightly, so that men of science would call it by that name until the sun fell. There was no doubt that Daker was capable of this small, immortalizing trick, for he had performed it more than two years earlier, and sent embalmed creatures off to England. Nine months past, the last transport had brought a letter of praise from the Royal Society.

‘These are the names which, subject to His Excellency's approval, I intend to give the new species.'

He took a list from his waistcoat pocket and handed it to Howard, who received it almost as heartily as, an hour previously, he had received Mrs Daker.

‘I'll draft the letter immediately,' promised Howard.

If there were a smile, bitter or otherwise, stored up in Daker, now would have been the time to bring it forth.

But ‘Thank you,' said Daker; and left.

The solid enigma of the man remained, and Howard was, of course, disturbed by it. He roared threats at Hearn, promises of things which would result to Hearn's backbone, shoulders, liver, tripes. Hearn kept a straight head, pricking with fury just the same. At last, Howard felt a fool and abated; so that Hearn
was able to speak reasonably and save the backbone and whatever other parts of him were in jeopardy.

‘If this ever becomes known . . .' said Howard, white in the face, red in the neck.

But refuse profane and old wives' fables
,
thought Hearn from 1 Timothy. He could have said it aloud, had he been free.

Howard returned dazed to the lady, knowing now that love in the morning shows too much contempt, even for obtuse cuckolds like Daker. Against the mid-morning shabbiness of his position, the Captain made no progress apparently; for after a very short time, he opened his door again, and with convinced, neutral politeness, guided the lady to the front porch. Hearn could have turned in his seat and watched her going down the hill. But, of course, he would not. If he had, he would have been surprised to see with what an air of solid rectitude she plodded through the ferment of orange dust.