The Widow and Her Hero

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Leo. His last consciousness is written not on toilet paper supplied by Hidaka but on the yellow ether there, in Reformatory Road. He knows something enormous has fallen on his neck, but mercifully not much more, no focus, no subtle thought. So I’m assured. The subtlety is bleeding out of him. Perhaps he thinks of it as a bludgeon, a mallet, something ponderous. He had been expecting something more exact than that.

Had he remembered the hymn from our wedding? He chose it himself, you see. It was one he sang at idle seconds: Oh Lord of all Being throned afar thy glory flames from star to star, and so on.

Did he remember where he was? Pitiably undistinguished ground to which I have been once since, on a trip to Singapore, and hope never to see again. It is dead earth baked solid that has never been built on, perhaps for fear of spirits, I don’t know. Near Reformatory Road. Scattered over with the tube-shaped weeds they call Dutchman’s pipe. They eat insects, those weeds. I remember mites and flies stuck half-digested in their mucus. Plants which grew all over this ground and came not from the hand of the God of mercy. They picked this and that man up after unsuccessful blows. I know that. Those clumsy, effete swordsmen. They who postured about being knights of the blade! They had, engraven on the haft of the sword, a quotation-cum-prayer invoking the divine wind. No such wind honoured this. Yet at least one of the Outram Road samurais had done well, because Pat Bantry’s head had rolled near Hidaka, and Hidaka claimed he could see some light still there. Captain, said Pat Bantry’s severed head, since the heads of the saints and martyrs certainly talk when sundered. Then, Mother of mine!

Judicial Sergeant Abukara, however, was not a knight but a butcher. But at last he extinguished. Leo Waterhouse. All confusion ceased. The cloud of unknowing came down for my beautiful captain, Leo. It was a lost mother’s kiss.

From The Devil’s Disciple: ‘All I can tell you is that when it came to the point whether I could take my head out of the noose and put another man’s into it, I could not do it.’

Lovely words make it just about OK, as Leo wrote.