Bring Larks and Heroes Page 9

  Mrs Daker reeled.

  ‘Oh, what a waste of good wit,’ she cried, ‘to have you here, Ewers.’

  Her amazingly cordial giggles warned him it was time to let his yea be yea, his nay be nay, and to add few words to either.

  ‘What are you Ewers? I mean, what was your crime?’

  ‘Forgery, Mrs Daker.’

  In the ensuing silence, he wondered was she disturbed by his frankness.

  ‘What an interesting crime,’ she said at last. ‘Anyone can steal a beast or write a threatening letter. But forgery must take such skill.’

  ‘That I’m here, Madam, is an indication that I didn’t have quite the necessary skill.’

  Hand clenched on her forehead, Mrs Daker swayed. Ewers saw her amusement out of the corner of his eye, saw the yellow form doubling.

  ‘Droll is the word for you, Ewers. Yes, definitely! Droll.’

  ‘Uck!’ said the kingfisher. It had a talent for supplying affirmatives for Ewers, which was an admirable courtesy he had found in none of the birds of the northern world.

  At the midday drum, she left him alone. He had been painting and enjoying it, and had managed to mix exactly the right green, so that he didn’t stop work now. There was only short shade across the passive dust, however, and he felt bound in mercy to break some branches off the box-brush, one of the more tree-like trees of the region, and lace them through the top of the cage. As he worked at this the bird jigged up one of the uprights and struck at him with its beak. He stepped back frowning at a neat pit of blood in the heel of his hand. Back on its perch, the bird had adopted an air of perfect repose and inculpability.

  ‘You’ll get blood on your own silly portrait,’ Ewers told it.

  For it had pecked out a deep sliver of flesh, and Ewers’ good blood, sedulously free of scurvy, flowed too well. He bandaged the wound with a handkerchief and returned to the easel.

  During that noon hour, Daker visited him. The surgeon frowned at the bandage, was full of concern if not commiseration; and again ordered him not to rush the work.

  Ewers, not accustomed to such consideration, and feeling that the Arts were perhaps beginning to come into their inheritance in this colonial back-garden, smiled shyly at Mrs Daker when she returned later in the afternoon. She carried two blue tumblers, and a carafe whose contents were a secret inside raffia binding.

  ‘I have some lime cordial here, have had it since the last transport came in. I have had the bottle cooling in the river since I left you this morning. You must surely like a glass, Ewers.’

  Ewers surely did. He had been gaping at his work with his mouth open, since his shattered nose did not function. A westerly wind had come up and dried him right down into the pit of his throat; and as Mrs Daker placed the glasses on the chair and poured out the lime, he moved his tongue clumsily around his palate, feeling out the lay of his thirst now that it was about to be quenched.

  He had very nearly finished an excellent water-colour of the surgeon’s gem. But he lingered on it for Daker’s sake, to flatter Daker’s idea that here was so distinctive a shape, so individual a green and a sable hardly less so, that any artist would be indefinitely extended by them. Between sips from the glass which Mrs Daker kept for him, he pencilled in Daker’s fond name for this kingfisher somewhat far from being exactly beryl.

  Mrs Daker asked him questions, which he could scarcely refuse to answer in view of her kindnesses. She had never been to Scotland, she had never been beyond Winchester. Did they get great storms in Dumfries? No, she had never heard of Solway Firth. Could you see to Ireland on sunny days? What was Dumfries market like? Was he a Jacobite?

  ‘How is it possible,’ she asked, ‘that people will not tend to admire a forger, when the essence of his crime is his craftsmanship? In his art, the forger is superior to his judge.’

  ‘As I’ve said, Mrs Daker,’ Ewers amended, ‘not too superior; otherwise I would have remained free, though guilty.’

  Certainly, as he’d said before. Yet now he said it from motives of companionship, and because the lady was so canny. The officials of Dumfries Circuit Court though were not so canny. He’d been herded in with sheep-thieves, suffered the arrogance of the court to the same extent as sheep-thieves.

  By half-past four, he found himself about to look evenly at molten Mrs Daker and her running, molten laughter and her dusk-blue skin. Here was an incontrovertible friendship. Look, I cannot desire her, he told himself delightedly, flexing the muscles of whatever appetites he possessed. The piquancy of friendship with someone so distinctive, with what you could call a perceptive harlot, excited him, so that half that night he was to lie awake and think of areas of conversation for their meeting the next day. Now he was willing to put the full weight of his wit into the encounter and he felt a vigorous desire to expose Mrs Daker to Aunt Norris, a Madonna propitious even at a hemisphere’s remove.

  When she went away then, with her almost empty carafe, Ewers saw calmly her flecked brown eyes and their pouches grey from the heat of the afternoon watch the two of them had kept. He experienced a unique quality of gratitude, but all he used, however warmly, were the accustomed words. For, still, he found her awesome.

  The painting was finished. It behoved him to sit tautly, however, on his chair, as if Alcyone beryllus still taxed him. By concentrating on the scalding sun through almost closed eyes, he was able to terrify himself in a titillating way. He saw the hills list upwards into the bottom of his vision, he became aware of the movement of the earth like a lost child in the groves of heavenly darkness – an awareness which takes the gloss off the ermine of kings but exalts the lowly.

  It has also been known to give the lowly headaches.

  When Daker arrived, Ewers was rubbing his forehead and had his eyes fully closed. Against the reedy boredom of his birds’ voices, the little surgeon made his entry soundlessly.

  ‘Just what I wanted, Ewers,’ he said with, if anything, a hint of querulousness. ‘Just what I wanted.’

  He unfastened the painting and bore it and the wicker cage away.

  Ewers, despite the movements of the heavens and all the larger sanities, felt bereaved, being left at dusk without pay or praise. He had worked all day to demand, and now his work was appropriated, and even his subject was locked away. He shared the sunset with starlings, wheeling in to sift the futile dust for grass seed. He frowned at the raucous yearnings of the caged birds.

  Yet, incontrovertibly, he had a friend.

  ‘Let’s us attempt yet another one of our friend, Beryllus,’ the surgeon decided in the morning. ‘Take a higher view of him from the right, to show the solidity of his head.’

  The solidity of his head was no problem, Ewers wanted to tell Daker. Solidity, even the solidity of Halcyonidaes’ heads, happened to be the stock in trade of the artist. The lines of Daker’s creature bored him this morning: he had spent so long learning them yesterday. He settled down to make a number of sketches for Mrs Daker’s delight, if she should come that morning.

  She came. She had no parasol, the day being cloudy, promising neither rain nor glare. She had the carafe again, since there lay such a weight of hot cloud over the village.

  ‘Artists mystify me,’ she sighed, staring at his preparatory work.

  But she moved about in a desultory way and spoke fitfully. Her eyes never looked at him and she maundered around the bird-cages making effete noises at the captives. This mood of hers gave Ewers leisure to study her without any danger of misunderstanding.

  Her face had become intense to the point of pain, her pain. She impressed him, against his will, as being far beyond the limits of his understanding, and, therefore, of his talent.

  ‘Are you feeling ill, Mrs Daker?’ he felt bound to ask.

  He, master forger, hemisphere’s light of art, felt confounded by a face so shut in upon itself. The eyes
had no meaning as eyes; that is, they did not look to have been made for seeing. In the shade they seemed anthracite; in the open they held no image and threatened to consume themselves.

  ‘Are you feeling ill, Mrs Daker?’ Ewers called again, giving the alarm before her tinder face should go up in flame and singe Beryllus’s feathers.

  A small, sluggish fly was on her nose. She shook her head enough to be rid of it. Then she could see again, and seeing covered her face with astonishment.

  It could, of course, have all been merely a disorder of the eyes. So Ewers hoped.

  ‘What were you saying?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing very much, Madam. Perhaps Mrs Daker might want to go home? To rest.’

  ‘Why would I?’

  She eyed the dust and gave a private, bitter laugh, which meant that Ewers had presumed.

  ‘What were you saying?’ she insisted.

  ‘Nothing very much, Mrs Daker.’

  ‘Then tell me something.’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Daker?’

  ‘Tell me something. Something, anything. Tell me about your school of art in Dumfries.’

  ‘Not exactly a school of art, Madam. It aspired to be a . . .’

  ‘Damn you, stupid Ewers!’ She clouted her own thigh. ‘Don’t hedge. Tell me straight!’

  ‘If you wish, Mrs Daker.’

  ‘Not if I wish, Ewers. You are a transported felon and my husband’s servant. I order you. Tell me something!’

  Ewers swallowed, despising frowsy womankind. Vivat Aunt Norris!

  ‘I made an engraving and printed five hundred oval cards on linen-faced paper. I distributed the cards throughout Dumfries, and even took three out to Lord Dunscore’s house in the Nithsdale. He had a daughter and two nieces, you see, who came to Dumfries at least once a fortnight.’

  It was such a heavy morning to take out those old hopes, and the dream of patronage from the feckless daughters of the gentry. The surgeon’s poor birds emitting their marrow-sucking squeaks made poor music to his nostalgia. So, too, did Mrs Daker.

  ‘Continue please, Ewers!’ she said, unaccountably sweet.

  ‘It is not hard to understand how, if even one of these girls had taken my classes, I would have been flooded with pupils. I waited until I knew how many young applicants I had before I hired rooms. I was wise. I had three applicants.’

  ‘How much was the charge, Ewers?’

  ‘A guinea, Madam, for two classes.’

  ‘My word, you were no cheapjack, were you Ewers?’

  ‘I was trying to attract a certain type of young lady, Mrs Daker.’

  ‘Ohhhh . . .!’ said Mrs Daker, prurient as a playgoer. ‘So?’

  ‘So I used Aunt Norris’s pleasant front parlour for the classes.’

  ‘Aunt Norris?’ asked Mrs Daker.

  Aunt Norris! Where were the words to tell this despicable woman and her mean hills of the heights and depths of Aunt Norris? He did what he could with workaday oratory and a few quotations from the Book of Proverbs. As he spoke, he dabbed indolently at his second portrait of that wearying kingfisher.

  The brush jerked with the awareness of a presence at his elbow. It was, of course, Mrs Daker. She had stood there for an undisclosed time, observing his paean from close quarters, no more than eighteen inches. His head felt quite tight with frightened blood. In mid-virtue, Aunt Norris faded on his lips.

  ‘I have guineas,’ babbled Mrs Daker. ‘I have pearls, silly Ewers.’

  And she spoke on. Her mouth stood open, her whoredom spoke out quite automatically from its dwelling. What was said had for Mrs Daker a validity like that of an established text of prayer for the devout. And like the accomplished worshipper’s, Mrs Daker’s face had once more become blind and closed upon itself.

  Ewers ran away from her, holding his head which swelled to splitting with disgust. His neck he carried stiffly, solid in its disbelief that any woman would blazon her goatishness, her deficit of male flesh before him, before his eyes, before his eunuch eyes.

  ‘The mouths of women beset me,’ he called out on the river bank.

  9

  One shoe off, Mrs Daker was found gibbering through the aviary. Her dress was piping red with blood which passed so satisfactorily for her own that, having found brain-sick Ewers by the river, they took him prisoner for it. To double the griefs of the Daker family, Beryllus, the kingfisher, was gone from his toppled cage. He was a desert bird, his liking was dry heat, a nest deep in spinous grass, and to peck at the dew of a morning. How many summers would need to pass before he would come back to the futile plenty of the riverbank?

  Ewers was brought back down the river. The Judge-Advocate’s court sentenced him to hanging.

  They had him in an all-but-underground magazine at the Battery. It was empty and had a grille in the roof. In the daytime the grille was opened. Thereby entered the steamy days of early March; and sometimes Ewers reclined thigh-deep in them by stretching flat-out from his wristlet on the wall. Not that the light wasn’t hot. But it was as if he were bathing himself in the river of life.

  A Marine called Private Terry Byrne guarded Ewers here. He even came to see Halloran one night with a message from Ewers. Byrne was a wide-faced, boyish-looking man. His nose and jaws were made to be beefy and innocent; but beef and innocence were both out of the question in that far station on the earth’s rim. In fact, his large face looked pasty, his eyes more stupid than they thought they were, and cleverer than they would ever let on. Twenty-eight gormless years had gone to instilling in him an air of vague and fractious hunger. When with Halloran, he spoke out of this hunger and morbidly of scarcely anything else but Ann and hell (of a night he woke feeling damned, he said). He was hard to suffer after a hot day.

  Halloran had been resting on a bench under the eaves of his hut; nostalgic, waiting for a south wind. The night had swaddled him round and over-swaddled him. Sitting still, he sweated. You could smell the spent day particularly stale on Terry Byrne when he came up the street among the company hutments.

  ‘Corporal Halloran darling,’ he called from some way off. He always darling-ed his friends. He said nothing more till he was conspirationally close.

  ‘You’re a friend of that Ewers who tumbled Mrs Daker?’

  ‘I’ve met him.’

  ‘He sounds to have more than met you. He sounds to have great esteem for you.’

  ‘Aren’t you just a crafty one, Private Byrne? A person would never think you were trying for the whole story of Ewers and me. A person would never have an inkling. Let me tell you all about it.’

  ‘Good for you, Corporal darling!’

  Byrne put one foot on the bench and leant against the daubed wall. He was so crooked and avid waiting there that Halloran felt ashamed.

  ‘No, I’m only gulling you, Byrne. I’ve met him the once. That’s all.’

  ‘Well, he has the sort of message for you that’s only sent to friends of long standing.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He says read Genesis, Chapter thirty-nine. And for God’s sake come and see him.’

  Halloran sat back, watching high-up boughs supine across the face of the big, low moon.

  ‘Thanks, Terry.’

  Terry Byrne took his foot from the bench. But he wasn’t leaving yet.

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘Well?’ said Halloran. ‘What do you mean, well?’

  ‘Aren’t you going to read Genesis, Chapter thirty-nine?’

  ‘I haven’t a Bible. And he can wait till tomorrow.’

  ‘But they’re hanging the poor feller in two days’ time.’

  Indeed. They were building a high, five-sided gallows on the transport side of the Brook, a cedar frame nearly as high as forty feet, something to look mystic at night, a shape to stick in the m
ind of the wrong-doer. They would finish it in another day perhaps. Then it would perform its first exemplary hanging.

  ‘He seems to have earned hanging,’ Halloran said. ‘Almost my last words to him when I met him the once were to be careful of Mrs Daker. And then he goes off with his paint-box and rushes her like a bull.’

  ‘How do you know he did the rushing? That’s what occurs to me to ask. As a man of hearty yearnings myself, I ask that question. How do you know he did the rushing?’

  ‘He could have run away if he wanted to.’

  ‘Hadn’t you been told, Corporal darling? They don’t let felons run away, even from randy women. Why don’t you get your hands on a Bible?’

  ‘I don’t own one.’

  ‘I know a man who does. Come on, you have to help the poor beast by that much. You know the name of that narrow little Scots sergeant?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No. But he’s got a Bible, anyhow. Let me get it for you, Halloran. Give the feller a chance.’

  Even in that hot seam of night, Halloran felt a sturdy distrust of Genesis, 39.

  ‘I’ll get it myself,’ he said, standing up. ‘You can tell Ewers I’ll read it carefully. But I can’t come to see him. Tell him that.’

  Neither of them moved.

  ‘Well, goodnight Terry. And thanks,’ said Halloran broadly.

  ‘You said you didn’t know the Scot. I’ll go down with you as far as his place!’

  ‘I know him. His wife died on the water. He has his own hut over there near Sabian’s Barracks.’

  ‘Let me walk that far with you, anyhow.’

  Halloran shrugged, and they started off. As they walked, they heard the wind sluicing through the south end of the town, rattling in trees, blowing doors shut. Up their military hill it came in a surge, and men were out to their doors, anticipating it. Washing over Byrne and Halloran, it was one of those luxuries of creature-flesh which make men buoyant. Byrne began to sing.

  They found the hut, the spare old sergeant sitting in the door.

  ‘You wait here, Terry Byrne,’ said Halloran. ‘We don’t want the whole regiment reading that particular chapter.’