Bring Larks and Heroes (7 page)

‘That depends,' said Halloran. He said it severely since there was something too unctuous and full-blown about Ewers' misery. Within the system, he had little enough space in which to conspire humanely. Ewers' aunt in Dumfries could ascend into heaven for all he cared; and might, if there wasn't a girl in Scotland to reproduce the range of her virtues.

‘No, it's fruitless, soldier,' said the artist. ‘It is too much to ask of a stranger. Besides, it could put you in a bad light with your superiors.'

‘That would be dangerous,' Halloran glibly assented. In the next seconds, he was shown the benefits of having plenty of skin on your face. Ewers sucked grief in through the right side of his long, peculiar
mouth. Then he let the upper lip overlap the lower; and in the end looked immensely more pitiful than a round-faced, tight-featured man ever could.

None the less, he still had much to say.

‘What I had intended was to find in you the person who would vindicate me when Sabian and Partridge published their work. I must have someone in Britain to speak out for me, to claim that the plates have been done from the work of a forgotten Scot and to demand that that Scot's aunt should receive justice for her lost nephew's work. If that someone in Britain is importunate enough, not only may the aunt receive a small fortune, but the nephew, grown mildly illustrious, will be pardoned, with an assured future and much to reward his champion with.'

‘But you told me a pardon was useless,' Halloran objected.

‘I was being excessive.'

Over the river and through the sun, three symbolically large and easeful crows went flapping. They made receding sounds of disbelief, rough as horse-hair, until they became motes in the north-west. Perhaps they were what Ewers merited. For Halloran could all but smell the unreliability of the man. Ewers' grand scheme for his own ransom seemed very chancily put together. It might have occurred to him only in the flush of promise with which the day had begun, or as the result of his humiliation by Partridge.

‘I realize now,' the artist nodded, ‘that I was beforehand with my request. But perhaps it is not too much to say that you may some day be my champion.'

‘I'm afraid it's far too much to say. I've too much to champion as it is,' said Halloran, smartening up the collar of his coat to show what a prosy boy he was, and how unfit for the job. The next time Partridge disciplined Ewers, and the artist exploded into a tantrum, Halloran didn't want his name hurled like some kind of doom in the surgeon's face. God knows, he wasn't a doom. Not with his simple anguish and his simple plans.

‘Urrugh!' cried one of the rowers. Because they had come in sight of three open hills. By the standards of summer in the netherworld, they were very green hills. Up one climbed a small white town in column of two. At the top of the town stood a Government House whose thatch roof was being replaced by shingles of blackbutt. Transports moved in and out and about the hole in its distant roof with the effective indolence of maggots in a skull.

There was a hawk above the town, skating the air currents. It hung taut with desire, its eye on minuscule prey in the grass on one of the hills. Halloran pointed to it.

‘That's one they'll never get for their aviary,' he said. ‘And while we're on the aviary, the word is you'd
get a ready ear and no mercy from Mrs Daker. The word is she's viper.'

But Ewers was looking over the side, deep in specious disappointment.

6

Under the box-trees by the river, Halloran and his two Marines ate their bread. With it, they had their weekly quarter pound of cheese, and drank from their canteens a watered-down Tenerife wine, very laxative, one of Mr Blythe's wise buys. It was perhaps one o'clock, and the shade was very deep.

In sight stood Surgeon Daker's long hospital, clapboard windows propped open, drinking the cool off the river. To Halloran, drowsing in the shade, some minute shift in the air would occasionally bring the thick, excremental smell of the place. The smell and the flies that rode it gave the three of them no rest.

‘Let's go and collect our sick man,' he suggested at last.

They approached the doorway with their heads
back. ‘Hew!' they said constantly in a note of discovery. ‘Hew!'

The door was open. Bronze flies sizzled in the daylight on the steps, wavered like the black spots in migraine. Perhaps they too were partially afflicted with disbelief. Faced with one of those things which have to be done quickly, Halloran ducked his head under the lintel and sniffed the dimness. He blinked up the length of the unscreened inside. Somewhere towards the centre, seemingly robust laughter broke out.

The hospital had been fitted out with bedsteads and pallets, but mostly pallets. Men dozed, blankets down, shirts up, legs apart, letting the air to their crutches. An owlish consumptive stared across the room, not to be taken unawares by Halloran or by death. His two stubborn nodules of shoulders were propped against the wall, giving fair promise to remain, stanchion-firm and stanchion-bare, when the rest of the frame had finished wasting from them.

‘Good afternoon,' called Halloran. ‘Surgeon in?'

The consumptive shook his head, pointing down the hut.

‘Orderly,' he suggested, and paid for it with a coughing-fit like axe-blows. The little body jiggled, and Halloran, in decency, waited the spasm out.

There was a clear aisle in Surgeon Daker's hospital, water buckets along the aisle, privies along the walls. All else was random, a melee of bodies and
ills. Halloran passed stray charcoal-burners in which something resinous smouldered. A man with lupus face, being a wise monster, stayed close to one to keep off the flies.

‘Did you see that, Corporal?' whispered the fool of a Marine behind Halloran.

Then, without warning, they were amongst healthy men. The insanity of the long hospital gained much from these, who stood inert by the windows or rested on their beds in silence. They were watching an acutely craggy woman, shift up around her armpits, on her back on the floor under a small well-fed man. She frowned at the handful the man tried to make of her fruitless little paps. They were people, even separately, ugly beyond telling. A preacher like John Chrysostom would have delighted to have them mate beneath his pulpit as he preached on the viciousness of the flesh, on the death-sweat and -bed of love.

And even there, on the floor, things seemed insanely inert.

Just the same, lust, the size of a hippopotamus, flopped over in the tropic swamps of Halloran's belly. Oh, it alarmed him to have his bowels yearn out towards that sort of oblivion.

‘What are you all doing here?' he asked with a severity intended for the hippopotamus. ‘Where's the surgeon's orderly?'

They all began to laugh at him. It was the worst type of laughter possible. Their mouths flew open like
vents; the laughter came out like a snatch of laughter out of a mine.

They
'
re all possessed
,
he thought, and went cold.

They pointed at the poverty-stricken woman and her portly burden.

‘Don't break him off now,' one of them said. ‘You'll never get him started again.'

Halloran could then have kicked the orderly's grey buttocks. They presented themselves, and it would have been befittingly gross to lay his boot to them. But more than that, there came over him a queasy urge to mash both people with his feet and rant against them, text and fury. Yet all of this would have been no more than a device to join himself to them in their sad fever. So he managed to hand his flint-lock to one of the privates, and dragged the orderly upright by the shoulders. As he was hauled up, the man roared and struck at Halloran's waist, and Halloran, exultant, let him go with one hand and knocked him out of the other with a punch flush on the ear.

‘Christ, can't do that!' said a satanic Welshman in a shirt.

‘Hold hard!' they all said.

But he was not going to be made ashamed before them. He approached the orderly, who looked piteous in his shirt, shaking his little scarified head, blinking.

‘I have a warrant for somebody here,' he said.
He made a few parade-ground threats, the sort of thing nobody believes in anyhow.

Time to see things straight again was what the orderly needed. He stood shaking his head, making a speech to himself, but couldn't see Halloran. Meanwhile, the woman remained flat on her back, doing nothing about her sad, angular nakedness. The orderly's sweat and her own lay round her throat, on her breasts, in the pit of her navel. There was a peculiar stiff questingness about her raised head which Halloran saw but could not interpret, until one of his Marines said, ‘God she's blind!'

‘Having a try yourself, General?' called the Welshman when Halloran knelt on one knee beside the woman. She stank, which was no novelty. Over her odious and unwelcoming body he made a poor attempt to pull down the shift. She ground her gums and struck his arm away and laughed drily, as if she had just then got a picture of the proceedings. She was perhaps thirty, utterly desert; her laughter was the dry-leaves laughter of very old women. She had no teeth at all to modulate it. It prolonged itself, regardless of the demands of breathing, until her face was blue. Then she took a great swallow of air and started to laugh again. The others laughed too.

‘Whore's got her pride, General,' called the Welshman.

‘Get dressed!' Halloran told the orderly.

One of the patients threw the man a pair of trousers, and he throttled them and put them on. But he was still dazed and still had odd-ends of words to say to himself. In the end, he turned to Halloran and said, full of business, ‘Who's your warrant for?'

Halloran pulled the warrant out of his pocket and found the peasant name amidst the classic gardens of verbiage.

‘Eris Mealey,' he read.

‘I thought so,' said the orderly, very gratified about the eyes. ‘You can't have him. His back's gone rotten. Daker's left a letter you can take to the Governor.'

‘But I'm supposed to hand this to Daker himself.'

‘Daker's somewhere out in the hills trapping birds.'

‘When will he be back?'

‘Tomorrow afternoon.'

‘What about the hospital?'

‘Hospital looks after itself. You just take this letter and keep your nose out.'

He led Halloran resentfully to the end of the building, to the surgeon's office, an eaves-high partition of wood with a locked door. The orderly opened it with a key which, clearly, he kept tied round his neck no matter what the occasion. Inside was a table and chair and two hospital registers in suede covers bearded with dust. There was a letter also, which said in a tiny hand that it was from Surgeon Daker,
Magistrate and Medical Superintendent, the Crescent, To His Excellency the Colonial Governor, concerning the Irish felon, Eris Mealey. Halloran read all this and pocketed it.

‘Mealey was flogged?' asked Halloran. ‘You said his back was rotten.'

‘I said his back was rotten,' the orderly repeated in Halloran's rather moist East coast accent. ‘See for yourself!' He pointed to the corner across from the office.

Halloran peered, the other two peered.
What's it like to have death on your back, death triumphant already?
the three of them thought.
Show us, in your face, why you can't will your back unrotten again.

Naked and stomach-down on a pallet by the wall, with his own water bucket by him, Mealey seemed to have a heavy shadow on his back and buttocks and upper legs. The smell of him, the mass of the smell and its tart edge of dreadful sweetness, stood out above the routine stenches of Daker's infirmary, and once Halloran had linked it with the shadow on Mealey, he stumbled away across the aisle to find a waste-pail and be sick in it.

Hearing him, the man who knelt by Mealey, continually wiping the neck and the side of the face with a wet handkerchief, glanced up.

‘Well,' he said, ‘there's one pair of sympathetic bowels in the damned place.'

There was no time for him to do more than glance
up, because Mealey whimpered in a querulous soprano if the sponging stopped for a second.

Shaking his head, Halloran returned to the enigma of man flogged three-quarters to death. He nodded to the man with the sponge, who was a yeoman type in a grey, high-collared coat only a year or two past its best. The fellow's nose Halloran had seen on other men in Wexford; beaky, pugnacious, it was often found on large, strong, melancholy men. Here, by Mealey, you had a bear-like, strong, melancholy man, who snorted gently but continuously in comment on the patient.

‘I was supposed to be taking him back to Partridge's hospital,' Halloran told the yeoman.

‘No chance of that.'

The yeoman nodded at Mealey's unspeakable wound. It was so huge an injury that you needed to verify your first sight of it, were compelled towards it, pushing your nose through its solid reek. But it was very dim in the corner, and the putrefaction got in behind the eyes and fogged them. You got an impression though; at least that. Halloran's impression was that from neck to knee Mealey was half-way wrapped round by a fat, black, vampiring slough.

‘He has entirely the wrong sort of skin,' the yeoman said. ‘One of those blue, girlish skins. Haven't you ever met a boy with that type of skin and neat, straight nose and wished his sister had come with him, she'd be such a beauty?'

The boy gibbered at his pillow. The message came out in silvers of sound, as if the mirror of his mind had smashed; only the urgency was intelligible.

‘He has none of the blue skin left here, as you can imagine,' said the yeoman, gesturing with the sponge towards Mealey's back. ‘On Sunday, in fact, you could see the shoulder-blades, the white bones themselves. This that's so rotten and stinking is junked muscles and jellies. What's your name?'

‘Halloran,' said Halloran, with small patience for anything but Mealey.

‘Mine is Robert Hearn.'

‘Then why are you preaching anger, Mr Robert Hearn?' Halloran asked shortly. ‘What damned difference does it make whether his skin is blue and whether his sister's lovely? Who's going to ever tell anyhow, with his sister across the world and his skin in this state?'

The yeoman acknowledged the point with a lift of the eye-brows.

One of the Marines had gone outside, hiccoughing. Halloran sent the other one now to collect him and take him down to the boat. Then he himself sat on the floor and wept.

‘Don't ask me to weep,' said Hearn, dipping his handkerchief into the water-bucket and padding it under the boy's mouth. ‘With the first tear, a person starts to forget. I won't ever forget.'

‘Hurrah!' said Halloran flippantly through his tears.

Yet there was a force somewhat greater than bombast about the yeoman. Halloran's mockery did not touch him, and he spoke off-handedly, his words incidental to the work of getting moisture into an upside-down man. And without doubt, he was right about tears. Having wept for Mealey, the mind felt justified in reducing him to an anecdote, a parable, a ballad; or something else digestible.

‘What was he punished for?'

‘Nothing!' said Hearn so lightly but with such finality that Halloran was limited to asking,

‘Will he be taken soon?'

‘Taken.' Hearn blinked. He despised the timid word and deliberately played upon it. ‘He'll have to die first.'

But he swallowed and shook his head then.

‘No, I am sorry. I'm not an irreligious man. I cannot see though that when God bears the blame for so much he must bear it for Mealey too. I'll say this. Mealey is burning to death. Surely he'll burn out during the night. Please God.'

‘Please God,' said Halloran. ‘Did he confess to you?'

‘To me? No. I'm a Wicklow Presbyterian. Eris Mealey makes me think there's something to be said for a religion one carries in here,' he punched his own chest, ‘as against one which requires ritual even in the hour of death.'

‘You understand, I'm not being bitter,' he went on to explain with a certain rueful care, ‘but grateful. If a man doesn't happen to be grateful for his religion, where's his good faith?'

‘Don't worry yourself,' said Halloran. ‘
The kingdom of God is within
,
even in Mealey's case.'

‘I see,' said the yeoman politely.

A solid cheer and a whistle came from the middle of the hut. There someone had achieved something ironic. Perhaps the orderly.

Hearn drenched another cloth in the pail and replaced the one the boy was sucking on. While one was taken away and the other put down, Mealey whimpered, certainly. Yet it was not the whimper of a flayed man but, instead, of a man whose meat has burned or who's been given small beer instead of spirits. It was hardly more than a whine of petty complaint. The young fellow's mind, wherever it waited, at a place remoter from Halloran than Moscow, did not believe in its own torment. Which was a hint, a genial one, that a person would drown without believing in the gagging waters; go black with typhus and wag his head in disbelief; get the lead in his belly and find it harder than the Trinity to give credence to.

‘You'd think the magistrates would have arranged to have him pressed into the army or navy,' said Hearn. ‘He'd have been better off. Wouldn't he?'