Corroboree (64 page)

‘Captain Sturt, Joolonga was a very cultured and intelligent man.'

Captain Sturt blew out his cheeks, and quickly shook his head, ‘Opinionated, yes, as most blackies are, but not cultured. They seem bright, you see, because you don't expect any kind of intelligible conversation at all out of a face as primitive and as ugly as that. An orang-utan would only have to say three words and we would say that it was cultured. The same with the blackfellow.'

He reached over and rang the bell on the table. He seemed to have settled down now, and to have forgotten his annoyance at Eyre's accusations. In fact, his little burst of temper seemed as far as he was concerned to have cleared the air altogether, and to have put him into a mood of rather sickly good temper.

His housemaid came in: a Kentish woman no more that five feet tall, with a hooked nose like Judy and a flouncy old-fashioned bonnet. One of her eyes looked towards the window and the other towards the portrait on the adjacent wall of Captain John Hindmarsh, the first governor of South Australia.

‘We'll have the pie now, Mrs Billows,' said Captain Sturt. The pie, Eyre? It's apple and cinnamon, with cheese pastry. Quite capital.'

Eyre said, ‘I don't think so, thank you. I'm rather tired.'

‘Ah,' said Sturt. ‘A man who is too tired to eat some of Mrs Billows' pie is tired of life itself.'

‘To paraphrase Dr Johnson,' Eyre retorted.

‘Well, yes,' said Sturt, uncomfortably. ‘I, er—I think I'll have mine a little later, thank you, Mrs Billows. Perhaps with some of the cheese and pickles, for supper.'

Mrs Billows allowed her eyes to revolve independently over the entire compass of the room. ‘I did ‘eat it up, Captin, like as what you required; ‘arf a nower in the huvven.'

‘Yes, and I'm sure that's very dutiful of you,' said Captain Sturt. ‘But I don't think either of us has an appetite just now. Why not ask Tildy to clear up now.'

‘Tildy? Tildy ‘asn't done a tap since brekfist; nor's likely too niver. Giv ‘er the ‘eave-'o, I would; ‘septing it's not my plice.'

After Mrs Billows had cleared up, very noisily, with a tremendous jangling of cutlery and a clashing of plates, Captain Sturt directed Eyre through a gloomy glazed conservatory, and then out into the unkempt garden, where there was a wooden seat situated under the shade of a stringy-bark gum.

‘I vow that you're a good fellow, Eyre,' he said, lighting a small cigar, and blowing smoke upwards into the wind. ‘You have your hasty moments, but anyone of your age can be liable to that. Speed's Disease, my father used to call it. He'd catch me running down the corridor, and seize me by the ear, and cry, “What's ailing you, young Charlie? Speed's Disease?” A wonderful man, shed a few tears when he passed over.'

‘This all seems so contrary,' said Eyre. ‘You think the expedition was a disaster; mainly because of me; and yet here you are telling me how much of a great chap I am.'

‘Ah, that's because I have an eye for opportunity. You have to, in business; and even more so in politics. We didn't find the inland sea; no. But you're a hero now, and we must make whatever use of you we can. George Grey suggested that we give you a rather special job.'

‘Job?' asked Eyre. ‘I was rather supposing that I would go back to the Southern Australian Company.'

‘Pfff, a man of your stature, as a shipping clerk? Think of it, you're a hero now. A great gilded hero. And in any case, we don't want you to feel that all of those months of traipsing through the outback went to waste. A man
achieves something, and no matter how disappointing it turns out to be in terms of pounds, shillings, and pence; well then, he must be rewarded.'

Eyre looked down at Captain Sturt, who was sitting with his legs crossed, confidently smoking his cigar as if he owned Australia.

‘You're buying me off,' he said, in a voice as clear as the afternoon wind.

Captain Sturt licked a stray fragment of leaf back into position. Then he glanced up at Eyre, and gave him a small, confidential smile.

‘You're going to be the Protector of Aborigines for the whole of the Murray River district,' he said. ‘Important job; suit your new understanding of the blackies. Pay you well, too. Seven hundred pounds the annum, with house. Dignified job enough for you to marry Miss Lindsay in style.'

‘You're buying me off,' Eyre repeated. ‘You did know about the
djanga
legend, after all.'

‘Well, my dear fellow, that's what
you
say. But then you've spent several arduous months with the sun baking your brains and the sand roasting your feet, in the company of savages and other assorted riff-raff. Who's going to take the word of a fellow like you, for all that they admire you?'

‘You're buying me off,' Eyre repeated, with even greater sharpness.

Captain Sturt lounged back, and smoked, and smiled at him. ‘Yes,' he said. ‘But you will never force me to admit it in any court of law; or in front of any inquiry; or within earshot of anybody save yourself. If I were you, my dear fellow, I would enjoy what I had. The name of a hero, and a comfortable job for life. Oh yes, and a pretty wife, too; won at the expense of some considerable chagrin from poor old Lathrop Lindsay.'

Eyre covered his mouth with his hand. He didn't trust himself to answer; and besides, he needed to think. Somewhere along the terrace, in a neighbouring tree, a kookaburra
began to laugh at him. The sun waned behind a cloud, and the garden looked for a moment like a daguerreotype of a day already gone by; colourless, cold, and half-forgotten.

‘You say that Midgegooroo survived,' he said.

Captain Sturt nodded, without taking his cigar out of his mouth.

‘But, crippled?'

‘Won't walk again. But you can thank your friend Christopher Willis for saving his life.'

‘Hm,' said Eyre. ‘Not that it will be much of a life, will it? A blackfellow, unable to walk? What will a poor soul like that be able to do?'

‘Beg,' smiled Captain Sturt. He paused, and knocked a little ash off his cigar. ‘But then, you know, we all have to beg at times; in various ways. It's the way that life happens to be.'

He stood outside the house on Hindley Street for almost ten minutes before he climbed the steps to the front verandah and knocked at the door. Below him, already rusted, its wheels entwined with weeds and creepers, his bicycle was propped against the wall. Dogger had promised to look after it for him, but of course Dogger was gone.

He could see her approaching the front door through the frosted glass panes; a dark shadow, with rustling skirts. She opened the door without asking who it was, and stood there, white-faced, black-bonneted, dressed in
black satin, with a necklace of jet and ribbons of black velvet.

‘Constance,' he said.

‘I knew you'd come,' she said, stiffly. 'You'd better step inside.'

He followed her into the parlour. The curtains were half-drawn, and it was musty, and smelled of pot-pourri, and camphor.

‘Sit down,' she said, and he did so, holding his hat on his lap. She sat down opposite him, arranging her skirts, and clasping her hands together in a gesture of piety and disapproval.

‘When did you receive the news?' he asked her.

She lowered her eyelids. They looked like crescents of white peeled wax. ‘A gentleman came from Albany. He said that he'd spoken to you; and that Mr McConnell had been murdered near Woocalla by savages.'

Eyre nodded. There was a very long silence. The clock on the mantelpiece whirred, and then chimed eight.

‘You must be very tired,' said Mrs McConnell.

‘Yes,' said Eyre. ‘I think I am.'

‘Then, you may stay here tonight. But tomorrow, I must ask you to go. I would also ask you to take all of your possessions; your pictures; your clothes. I want no trace of you here, nothing.'

‘Constance—' he began.

She opened her eyes and stared at him sadly. ‘He wasn't very much, Eyre. He was cantankerous and awkward and usually drunk. But he was Dogger, and he was all that I had.'

‘I know,' said Eyre.

‘He died—quickly?' asked Constance. ‘There wasn't any pain?'

Eyre shook his head. ‘It was all over in a flash. He only had time to shout one word. He sat in the saddle and lifted up his arms and shouted just one word.'

Constance was waiting. The clock had finished chiming now, and was ticking onwards towards nine o' clock, and
the end of another day without Dogger. Eyre said, ‘He shouted, Constance! And that was all.'

Constance clutched her arms around herself. In the gloom of the room, her eyes sparkled with tears.

‘He called for me? His very last word?'

‘Whatever his first word was, when he was born; your name was his last when he died.'

‘Oh, God,' wept Constance. She covered her face with her hands. ‘Oh, God, he called for me. He called for me, and I wasn't there. I'm his wife and I wasn't there. Oh God forgive me.'

Eyre knelt down on the carpet beside her and took her hand. She shook and shook, and her sobs were so deep that they sounded as if they were tearing her lungs. But at last she raised her head, and took out a black lace handkerchief, and wiped her eyes.

‘I haven't cried much,' she said. ‘I was dreading you coming back, because I knew then that I would. I knew then that I would have to admit that it's really true, and that he's gone.'

‘Constance,' said Eyre. ‘Let me fetch you a sherry. Or a brandy perhaps. Come on, something to calm you down.'

‘Oh, I'm calm enough,' she sniffed. ‘I'm calm, don't worry. Why shouldn't I be calm? There's nothing to get excited about any more, is there? Not even an old dingohunter who snores.'

Eyre spent the night in his old room but scarcely slept. He heard Constance walk down the creaky stairs in the small hours of the morning, presumably to make herself a cup of tea. But she didn't disturb him; and when he woke in the morning and went down to the kitchen, he found hot meat porridge waiting for him on the stove, and a note saying that she wouldn't be back until late in the afternoon, and could he please have left the house by then.

He packed the few things that were left in his wardrobe; his carriage clock and his pictures of his mother and father; and these he took across the road to the little notions store
run by Mrs Crane and her sister, two ladies who had emigrated to Australia in search of husbands and ended up selling ribbons and needles instead. They agreed to keep his cases in their back room until the evening, and blushed when he kissed them both and promised to tell them about his adventures in the land of Bunda Bunda. Then he went back and retrieved his bicycle from underneath Mrs McConnell's verandah, tugging the weeds out of the wheels; and cycled slowly off towards the racecourse, and Christopher Willis' house.

It was a strange still day; not very hot but humid. As he pedalled out along the racecourse road, between the thick rainy-season bushes and the tall green grass, he heard no jacks nor finches, not even an insect chirruping. He felt as if he had cotton packed in his ears.

Only the monotonous squeak of his bicycle reminded him that he could still hear. That, and his panting. He had forgotten, after months on horseback, how strenuous it was to ride a bicycle.

Christopher was sitting on his verandah drinking tea and reading the Adelaide
Observer
. He was wearing a large floppy calico hat, and from a distance he looked very thin. Eyre dismounted from his bicycle when he was about twenty yards away from the house, and wheeled it the rest of the way over the damp earth.

‘What ho, Christopher,' he said, propping the bicycle up against the steps.

‘What ho, Eyre,' replied Christopher, without looking up.

Eyre climbed the steps and walked across the boarded verandah to stand right next to him.

‘What do the newspapers have to say?' he asked.

Christopher shook the paper and peered towards the editorial column. ‘They say that Adelaide is one of the filthiest cities on God's earth. Most people's basements are flooded with filthy water, and that there are open cesspools, dung heaps, and pig's offals lying everywhere.
The population are drinking unfiltered water and dying like flies.'

Eyre sat down on the verandah rail. ‘Anything else?'

Christopher looked up. Eyre was startled to see how old he seemed to have become, how wrinkled his eyes were, and how washed-out.

‘Yes,' said Christopher. ‘They say that an erstwhile shipping-clerk of the South Australian Company has returned to the city in triumph. A great hero, after travelling all the way from South Australia to Western Australia, with only an Aborigine girl for company. They don't even mention the Aborigine girl's name.'

Eyre said, ‘You didn't come to meet me at the dock.'

‘Is there any reason why I should have done?'

‘I thought we were friends.'

‘Well,' said Christopher, ‘we were.'

‘Are you jealous?' asked Eyre. ‘Are you jealous because I rode all the way to Albany and you didn't? Are you jealous of all this fame; all this public hoo-ha?'

‘No,' said Christopher.

‘What is it, then?' asked Eyre, softly but insistently.

Christopher said, ‘I'm over you, that's all,' He looked up, with a challenging expression on his face.

‘Is that a good thing or a bad thing?' Eyre asked him.

‘I don't know,' said Christopher. He folded up the paper and laid it down on the table. ‘It's just a fact.'

‘Does that mean we're not pals any more? Not even pals?'

Christopher shrugged. ‘I think I would really have preferred it if you hadn't come.'

‘Don't you want to hear what happened?'

Christopher picked the paper up again, and dropped it. ‘I can read it all in here, thank you. They say they're going to publish your entire account of the journey. “With Eyre Walker Through The Outback.”'