Troubles - James Gordon Farrell [94]
Before getting into bed that night the Major doused the candles and stood for a moment at the window looking out towards the invisible cornfields. In an hour or so, perhaps, men would appear out of the shadows like rodents out of the woodwork, and set to work reaping Edward’s corn by the dim, intermittent moonlight. Perhaps they were already out there. He yawned and got into bed. In a way it was pleasant to fall asleep thinking of the men working out there—silently, a faint swish of reaping sickles, a soft whisper, the muffled creak of a cartwheel. But of course by now they would know that Edward was on to their game and they would not come. It was pleasant, the summer night. A silent gale of sleep blew over the dark countryside, inclining the corn in waves, now this way, now that. He was happy, in spite of everything. Edward had been about to tell him, waiting for the twins to appear wearing Angela’s clothes, about the one time in his life that he had been really happy. “I must ask him,” the Major told himself as he fell asleep.
The Major was asleep on his back in a stiff military posture, feet together, hands by his sides, dreaming of Sarah. Later he lay on his stomach and for a while was almost conscious. The room was dark but there was a pink glow on the wall opposite the window. He sat up. There was a scraping sound by the dressing-table.
“Who’s there?” he whispered.
A match flared and dipped towards the branched candle-stick, lighting first one candle, then the other. It was Edward, haggard, in a dressing-gown.
“Ah!” exclaimed the Major joyfully. “I was just going to ask you something...” He stopped, unable to think what it was.
Edward threw open the window. With his hands on the sill he leaned out. Gradually coming to his senses, the Major sleepily pulled on his bedroom slippers and reached for his dressing-gown. Even before he reached the window he had begun to realize that something was wrong. He had not been asleep long enough; it was too dark for it to be dawn. He stared past Edward’s head at the distant lake of flame. The cornfields were blazing furiously on each side of the valley beyond the sloping ridge. All around them the blackness was perfect and impenetrable.
“Did you do this?”
“Don’t be a damn fool!”
“But why should they?”
“How the devil should I know?”
By now there was nothing to do but watch it burn. It took hardly any time at all.
Now in the Prussian officer’s field-glasses there was no waving corn to be seen, only an expanse of blackened earth. Here and there, where the corn had been still a trifle green, the stalks had not burned to the ground but stood up in scabrous rings and patches, making the Major think of the worm-eaten scalps of young boys whom he had seen trailing round the golf-links. “The wanton burning of food,” he thought. “As senseless as the plague.” Word had spread in the neighbourhood that Edward had burned the crop himself so that the country people should not have it. The Major guiltily remembered that this had been his own first thought and would have liked to make amends, particularly as Edward had taken on his disabused air.
“Naturally everyone thinks me capable of burning my own crops,” he said wryly to the Major. “Why, I’ll burn the blessed house down out of spite one of these days, I shouldn’t be surprised.” And he went off chortling grimly.
But if Edward had not set fire to the field, who had? Surely not the peasants themselves, they needed the corn too badly.
“Brendan, you’re not listening!”
“Yes, I am. I’ve heard every word you said. It’s about a bathing-costume.”
And still, it could have been an accident, a dropped match, perhaps, or a smouldering cigarette. Or perhaps it was one of those spontaneous fires that sometimes occur in hot weather, a fragment of broken glass catching the rays of the sun, or some such thing.
“Brendan, do you understand, we want eightpence. You’re not listening again!”
“Yes, I am. What