Bring Larks and Heroes, Page 3

  Despite that it is Dean Hannon, Halloran’s teacher in the Wexford days, who states the rule on priestless lovers; despite the canon lawyers of the God-binding Curia, who proposed the rule, and the Supreme Pontiff, who ratified it, it is not possible, except on the most sanguine days, for Halloran to believe beyond doubt that he is a husband and has a bride. He is sanguine today. Corporal Halloran, poet and husband; and nobody knows. His poetry is safe in the back pages of Captain Allen’s orderly book. His married state is safe in the back pages of Dean Hannon.

  2

  His elation on what, for the sake of starting the story, we have called today and this afternoon is buried now beneath a cairn of years. So his today is not ours; his today is that day to us, and we are, after all, the people for whom the story is being told. Keeping sight of him, let us nevertheless say that that day, he arrived elated amongst the blighted turnips at the backdoor. He had his hand up on the trellis which Mr Blythe’s nascent vines had no chance of covering for many a summer.

  ‘It’s General Caesar,’ he called in a gusty basso, ‘come for his Mistress Cleo.’

  Ann Rush, the Mistress Cleo, snorted. She was scouring a pot in which the midday beef had been boiled. The pumice grated, and she comforted this or that on-edge tooth with the tip of her tongue.

  ‘Is it time?’ she asked slackly.

  ‘It certainly is time. It’s just on three.’

  He whistled low through his teeth, jigged like a clown or a young animal. He hissed, ‘Let your roaring old lover in!’

  ‘If you want me altogether damned . . .’ she said.

  ‘Oh, I see, altogether damned?’

  What he saw was that she had felt half-damned about their marriage all morning, and that complete damnation would be to lose her place in the Blythes’ home and to enter the beggared limbo of women felons, whose little huts grazed on the east bank of Collett’s Brook.

  ‘You stay there,’ he said gently. ‘I’ll keep this side of the wall warm for you. That’s my especial destiny.’

  ‘Dear God,’ Ann called out, ‘he’s pitying himself now!’

  Halloran rolled his eyes. Ann, frightened, would never tell you that she was frightened. She would make ferocious remarks, such as, ‘Dear God, he’s pitying himself now!’ She was still afraid of what he had told her last week about his Wexford studies, and of how they had left him rather in pieces as a lover. In this way. Dean Hannon used to ask, ‘What is love?’ He could actually write up all the answers in chalk on the wall and stand back unabashed, beaming at all the chaste Latin tags, the names of all the human faculties involved, the geography of the human spirit. Love is a fusing of the mind and will to God, said the Dean, all other loves are good only in so far as they flow from this love. From this source came the love of Jonathan and David, the love of Queen Blanche for her son, King Louis. Of course, there is some sort of dull but steady affection between spouses, aimed at the dull and steady begetting of children. And then, you descend to what is love only in a debased sense of the word, love by analogy only, love execrable in a tipsy ditch with a dirty, racy vagrant woman.

  All this, Halloran had tried to explain to Ann the week before. He had said that his aim, whenever he lay with her, was to keep matters as close to God and as far away from the vagrant woman as he could. When Ann showed herself as racy as any vagrant woman, he would be delighted but baffled. His mind would intervene as an arbiter and try to reorganize his motives according to the rules as laid down by Dean Hannon. And his ardour would die, and he would see doubt all over Ann’s face.

  Last week, she had said plaintively at the end of the afternoon, ‘Don’t turn into the scholar on me at this stage, Halloran’. She meant, as well, ‘Now that you’ve despoiled me’. He had then soothed her for all he was worth; and, apart from the monstrous aspect of their not seeing each other for another week, she was happy when he left.

  Today, he intended to show some wisdom. The trap would be to rant about how he didn’t pity himself, but pitied her seven days a week. As if she really wanted to argue about pity! He did not fall into the trap. He did not even glance around the doorway, but stood listening zealously to the clatter of the big pot, and all but seeing her brown tall woman’s arms battling it. Thinking of her arms, he came close to the undressed cedar walls, and put his mouth to one of the cracks which they had left in drying.

  ‘My bride in Christ,’ he murmured when the pot took a rest. ‘My bride in Christ.’

  He did indeed suffer a rush of tenderness for her, Ann, overhung by the large brass and copper cruelties of her kitchen.

  ‘I’m dizzy from waiting to see you,’ he felt justified in saying.

  ‘I hope so,’ she muttered.

  She was squinting into the boiler. You could tell that from her voice. And very soon, the big pot clanged with a certain finality, conveying that it had had all the cleaning she meant it to take.

  Halloran nuzzled his head against the clammy cedar. The red clay mortar, which tried to fill the wall cracks in this hard climate, rouged his forehead.

  ‘My bride, my bride, my bride. Moriarty, being a real lad, is up and about for you.’

  This was the fanciful name he had for the flesh; and he chuckled now, as if Moriarty and all his kin were well-worn friends of his and not the dark strangers they were. Ann was usually diverted by Halloran’s fables about this buffoon within his own walls; but she said nothing today. He heard the little rasps of cloth as she rubbed her hands dry, and scrapings of her skirt against furniture. She poured out some water from a kettle. Some spilt, and the querulous old hearth she served snorted savagely back at her.

  ‘Do you think I’m coarse?’ asked Halloran, to bring her out.

  ‘Not very much,’ she said negligently.

  She continued to give three-quarters of her attention to placing utensils and pouring water.

  ‘Forget what I said last week about God and the woman in the ditch!’ he persisted. ‘It means nothing. It’s a minor confusion, that’s all, and it’s no news to anyone. The damned scholars have been talking about it for thousands of years. They call it the battle between sacred and fleshly love – and the beggars are on to a truth for once. But it doesn’t matter. It’s commonplace. You’re rare, and I’m not so big a fool as not to know it.’

  ‘I have to go and see Mrs Blythe,’ Ann told him, coldly ducking the flight of his metaphysics or theology or whatever else it was.

  ‘Hey,’ he called at top whisper, ‘you do believe, don’t you? That you’re my bride? Dean Hannon wouldn’t be wrong. He had a sharp mind. Too sharp.’ He paused, and then, in an attempt to force her into making positive conversation, he talked on. It was a mistake. ‘As for me, it isn’t likely a man would turn into some kind of church-lawyer to get his desire. Not in a town like this, where you can have nearly anyone for a shirt or a shred of tobacco.’

  That’s an apish thing to say, he was telling himself before he’d got as far as shred of tobacco. He could not believe that he’d said anything so apparently slighting to Ann. However, the words stood, far too barefaced for him to try to tone them down. All he could do was to cock his ear and hope that she was as preoccupied with the kitchen as she pretended to be.

  No chance.

  She brought her anger close to the wall beyond which Halloran waited.

  ‘You could never have me for a draper’s full of shirts.’

  ‘I didn’t mean you, Ann.’

  ‘What do you want, Halloran? An angel or a whore? Which? You talk about what you learned in Wexford. In what town do they teach men wisdom?’

  ‘I know, I know. I should go there. I’m sorry, Ann. You’re all things to me. In my confusion’ (he punched his forehead) ‘I can say that. You’re all things.’

  But the dead kitchen creaked. The hearth grunted. She had left him alone in his windiness.

 
; He now had an image of himself as he must seem, flustered amongst the Blythes’ decaying vegetables, butting the wall, expounding, jabbing at himself. On the slope behind him stood a leering, entirely disreputable hut. It belonged to the male felon who did the wood-hewing and water-carrying for the house. It stood like a wrecked collier, and the rocks holding on its bark roof seemed the result of a collision rather than of design. In its bay of scabrous timber, it was altogether a poor comment on Halloran’s vehemence.

  Now, because he was certain of the old lag’s ironic presence behind him, he made a late attempt at dissembling. With studied mannishness, he stared through the slaty trees at the very still indigo water. He stared with the patronizing eyes one kept for porpoises or native canoes. Breath on a mirror, a land-breeze stippled the face of the bay, but preluded nothing. In the thin forest behind him, one insect voice burred the edges of afternoon and, without turning to the hillside, Halloran could see, could hear in the noise, the dearth and drought and straggled bark.

  As people will when they’re embarrassed, he found himself speaking aloud, though covertly. He was thinking, And what if Ann doesn’t come back out to me this afternoon? ‘We had hoped for a more generous spring,’ he found himself saying. He spoke in a low throatiness in which he had first heard the ironic sentence spoken by His Excellency on the parade-ground ten weeks before.

  ‘We had hoped for a more generous spring.’

  But a disappointing spring had given way to the malign summer in which Halloran, aware of his sweat, no longer sanguine, waited now. December had come rampaging amongst the carnations along Government Road, had trampled on the last blooming of expatriate stocks. It had crushed the title Advent, which the two parsons tried to lay upon its back, until every hint of juice and fruitfulness had been ground out. In dutiful vegetable gardens, the leaves of carrots and turnips had tettered and split, shot full of holes by antipodean summer. The grain had already rusted hard beside the little creek called Collett’s Brook; and there would be no harvest at Government Farm, where muddied stooks of young corn stood like the camp wreckage of a beaten army.

  At the time of his parade-ground speech, the Governor had devoted fifteen minutes to the sentiment that, although nothing but the worm of death seemed to flourish in this obdurate land, it was the duty of those who served the King not to accept things by their seeming, but to out-stubborn the wayward earth. Yet the officers, their regimentals fibrous from three summers’ sweat, had squinted at the sky with flat hatred. There was very little assent in their hearts.

  And Halloran felt this hatred too, and he was somewhat short of assent. Yet he knew that this was a summer of unequalled promise. He had begun it with such a welter of emotion that, after the torpor of barrack life at Chatham and the dumb pain of shipboard and colonial service, he felt reborn. This was partly because he had no doubt that he was living in a legend, because he underwent all the fervours set down in legends and in poetry. It was as if he actually felt, above himself and Ann, the mercy of a story-teller. However, a French sage asked once, ‘How many men would never have loved, if they had never heard of love?’ Halloran began to suspect that he was basking in the emotions of other men, and not only that, the emotions of other men as tempered by art and decency, metre and rhyme. By this time, Ann had become the substance of his life.

  ‘Mrs Blythe says you’re to take good care of me and remember your obligations.’

  She had come into the garden without his hearing. She stood business-like against the skeletal tracery of her master’s sick vines. Her dress underlined her thinness; it was abnormally high-waisted and draped all but the toes of Mrs Blythe’s cast-off shoes. The dirty green fabric was so very thick that it seemed to be supported by its own hem. It wrapped her hunger round plentifully, to give her the look of one of those Christ-child statues that are enveloped in vast copes and are pink and lost in their kingship. Already, Ann had her hat on, one of those small top-hats which ladies wear to riding; and once more, Mrs Blythe, who had come thirteen thousand miles to stay indoors, had given it to her.

  She frowned. But the dull petulance of the kitchen had drained out of her already. Halloran saw this, with gratitude. The next instant, the oblique sun fetched him a clout on the side of the neck. His mouth flew open for a second or two in the terror of fainting. But he didn’t fall down. In the freezing sweat of sunstroke, he saw how the dark-green of her dress had imposed itself on her. He felt his soul sliced neatly down the middle by a barbarous desire to be poured out like milk, to flow around her ankles and soften that hard hem of rubbish. Soon, though, he began breathing evenly again.

  He came two steps closer to her and laughed. All counterfeit roguishness, he asked, ‘Did you tell Mrs Blythe that I’d already taken care of you a few times?’

  ‘No,’ she mouthed, and her head went down. Halloran shrugged, softly, you could say. He caressed her elbow. In the shade of the Blythes, he could do no more; but his fingers staggered daft with pity on her arm.

  ‘Halloran,’ she said, ‘I don’t think there’s ever been two such hopeless people. You with your confusion and me with mine.’

  ‘Never have I seen a maid,’ Halloran recited to soothe her, ‘oh half so fair as that Spanish lay-dee. I’ve been waiting all the week to see your Spanish skin again. Without a lie.’

  ‘Can’t we go now?’ she asked, without looking up. ‘I can’t be myself here.’

  He collected Captain Allen’s miraculous rifle with which he was often sent hunting and hitched it over his shoulder.

  ‘My bride,’ he said. ‘Come on, then.’

  They did not take to the clay road which ribboned up a bunch of officials’ homes on the south point. Instead, he led Ann by the elbow up the hill behind the Blythe home, away from the clutter of stale brick cottages. They sidled past the crazy hut. Beyond it, they were aware of being in a sack-cloth forest, in a forest that mad, prophetic, excessive, had heaped dust on its own head.

  In no time, the gangling trees had them cut off from the town. Halloran was impressed by the sly antiquity of the place. Glossy shrubs, smelling like a cemetery a week after All Souls, took the spotted light on their tongue and tipped it brassy in his tracks. Rocks smelt of dry age. Here all things went on easily, mercilessly germinating, convinced of their inevitable survival. For some distance, he was more aware of hostility than he was of Ann. It seemed that in these poor scrubby woods, all his judgements on what a forest should look like were being scarcely tolerated by the whole pantheon of the gods of this, the world’s wrong end.

  When they were beyond doubt hidden in the forest, Ann stopped. She leaned against a tree-trunk the colour of old iron seamed with vertical corrosion. A honey-coloured ant, one inch from her shoulder, reared up polemically on its abdomen, but seeing that she was, for the moment, invulnerable, it galloped off drunkenly across the gullies of bark. Ann was transmuted by something very close to the pure animal joy of being released from that God-abandoned hutch at the back of Blythes’. Here, in nobody’s country, in thin shade and thick heat, she became visibly young again.

  Halloran found himself holding on to her head so tightly with both his hands, that he could feel the skull-case, dear and mortal, beneath her hair.

  ‘Do you want to walk, Ann?’ he asked her, implying that she probably didn’t want to. ‘We can find a shady place here and rest, because you need a rest.’

  ‘I need a seabreeze, Halloran darling. It isn’t far to the seabreezes.’

  Halloran went on to say many trite things for a man who fancied himself as a poet. Just as they separated, he said, ‘My bride in Christ.’

  But, by the time they had crossed over the hill and come, slipping in the leaf-mould, to a dry stream-bed, Halloran felt again, as he had earlier in the day, that they were patently man and wife. It was about a quarter of a mile behind them that a rather Calvinist deity and the House of Hanover were the names by which contr
acts and marriages, baptisms and hangings were solemnized. Four hundred yards from the town, on untouched earth, they seemed as much fated, each to each, as two people in a fable.

  3

  Halloran knew that he would not sight any game. The full-time game-killers, three men chosen from amongst the transported felons, had not brought in anything since New Year. Even so, it was fitting to carry some symbol of your superiority through this knock-kneed forest, every stick of it a sacrament of antiquity and rebuke. Halloran carried not a Bible nor a book of sonnets, but a breech-loading Ferguson, a wonder of its times, capable of downing three men a minute.

  They would see no black people, Ann and he. Somewhere between the skirting-board and carpet-edge of the land, the black race, with the secrecy of moths, was dying of smallpox. Or, perhaps, dying out.

  One day at the beginning of spring, the disease had struck two people in the town. One of them, the sixteen year old son of Rev. Mr Calverley, died. The boy was an outstanding scholar, and could, as de Quincey later claimed to be able to do, translate news-sheets into Greek at the age of thirteen. Over twenty-five degrees of unredeemed latitude and thirty degrees of longitude that had not bent the knee, his father was parish priest; and lured by this grand and meaningless concept, the boy had been enjoying an empire-building holiday with his parents.

  After his death, there were a few other but not-fatal cases within the town. Then, against all the rules which the disease itself had established over centuries in Europe, and in the stewing December heat, it left the settlement. The surgeons were amazed; but it had found a better mark.