The Nutmeg of Consolation (40 page)

'But surely this is not the way?' cried Martin. 'We had the great lagoon directly before us when we left the road.'

'I have the compass,' said Stephen. 'The compass cannot lie.'

After a while the compass, or their interpretation of it, led them through a prickly shrub they had never seen before and whose botanical nature they could not determine: they were following what seemed to be a path made by the repeated passage of some animal when Martin stopped abruptly: turning he said 'Here is a dead man.'

He was an escaping convict, and he had been speared a week or ten days before. At least they laid a symbolic branch over him before they walked on, forced to make some detours because of stretches of impenetrable bush, but still rising and hoping for more open country.

It was when the sun was as low as their hearts and they stood there in doubt with lyre-birds calling on either hand that they heard the ass's howl not a quarter of a mile behind them. In their agitation they had managed to cross the track without seeing it, and once they were on it again the whole landscape fell into place, direction was obvious, and the great lagoon lay where it ought to lie in relation to the rest.

They woke to the sweetest dawn - day in the east, still night in the west and a sky between them varying by imperceptible degrees from violet to the purest aquamarine. Dew had fallen and the still air was full of scents unknown to the rest of the world. The horses moved companionably about, smelling gently of horse; the ass was still asleep.

Smoke rising straight: the smell of coffee. 'Have you ever known a more blessed day?' asked Martin.

'I have not,' said Stephen. 'Even this uninviting landscape is transfigured.'

A lyre-bird called on the hillside within twenty yards and while their cups were still poised it flew right over their heads, a long-tailed pheasant-like creature, and pitched in the brush beyond. The horses brought their ears to bear. The ass woke up.

'Should you like to pursue him?' asked Stephen.

'No,' said Martin. 'We have seen one now, and if we want to dissect one, Paulton will I am sure oblige us with a specimen. They send dogs in to flush them and shoot them as they rise. I am of opinion that we should never deviate from the track and devote all our time to the waders. There must be hosts of them on the lagoons, together with what ducks the country can afford; and as Paulton said, the track skirts the whole series.'

There were indeed hosts of waders on the shore, long-legged birds stalking about in the water, short-legged ones racing about on the mud, formations a thousand strong wheeling all together with a flash of wings, and everywhere those fluting marsh- and shore-bird cries, often the same as those they had both heard in their boyhood and uttered by birds if not of quite the very species then wonderfully like - greenshanks, stilts, avocets, plovers of every kind. 'And there is an oyster-catcher,' said Martin. 'I cannot tell you, Maturin, how happy I am to be lying here on the saitwort in the sun, watching that oystercatcher through my glass.'

'He is so like ours that I am puzzled to say just where the difference lies,' said Stephen. 'But he is certainly not quite our bird.'

'Why,' said Martin, 'he has no white on his primaries.'

'Of course,' said Stephen. 'And his bill is surely longer by an inch.'

'Yet I believe it is not the difference that makes me so happy; but rather the similarity!'

This happiness, which inhabited both of them, received something of a check when the path, which had run by three successive bodies of water without ambiguity, divided into two equally faint arms on the grassy slope of a hill that separated the third body from the fourth, a grassy slope with a spring. They dismounted to let the horses drink and graze, and to consider the interminable complexity of shining water that stretched away and away before them under the vast bowl of sky, with clouds sailing across it on the south-east trade. They could come to no satisfactory conclusion: giving the horses their heads in the hope that instinct would succeed where reason failed did not answer - the horses gazed at them with patient, stupid faces and waited to be told where to go: the ass remained perfectly indifferent - so it was decided by the toss of a coin that they should take the right-hand arm. And after all, they said, even if it should die away, as paths so often did, so long as they kept down to the water's edge they could not get lost in the dreadful bush, since there was no bush down there; and so long as they kept generally northward, along the coast, they must necessarily come to Woolboo-Woolloo. Eased in their minds, they gathered several of the more unusual plants (the habitat was in itself most exceptional), some beetles and the almost perfect skeleton of a bandicoot, and rode on, startling a group of kangaroos when they came round the shoulder of the slope.

The theory on which they proceeded was sound, but it did not make quite enough allowance for the winding of the shores along which they travelled nor for the fact that many of the lagoons were not lagoons at all but deep and many-branched inlets of the sea. The path of course disappeared on an outcrop of bare sandstone, never to be found again - 'Could it have been made by kangaroos?' they wondered - but they carried on happily enough, plagued by mosquitoes early and late but enchanted by the birds, until both food and time began to run out.

An incautious kangaroo, up-wind in a misty dawn, an ancient tall grey kangaroo, perhaps senile, provided food of a sort; but nothing could provide them with time and when at last they found Woolloo-Woolloo, which they did from the seaward side of the lagoon, recognizing it with immense relief (their theory justified - ignominious death averted) by the cairn and flagpost that Paulton had described, and Bird Island just showing in the north, they could not stay more than that night with him in spite of his pleas, still less press on to the forests of the Hunter Valley.

'My dear sir,' said Stephen, 'you are very good, but we have almost outstayed our leave. I have promised Captain Aubrey to be back on the twenty-third, and with our horses in their present state and the ass so slow we must start very early tomorrow. If you would do me a kindness, you would see us on our way until even a very stupid fellow cannot miss the track.'

'Of course I will,' said Paulton, and he went on, 'Your cattle are being rubbed down and pampered at this moment by two dealers from Newmarket itself, great hands at preparing a horse.'

Observing his discretion, Stephen said 'May I ask you to show me the fruit-trees you have in front of the house?'

In the orchard, where some apple-trees were growing in a strange left-handed fashion, filled with incongruous cicadas and still bewildered by the reversal of the seasons, Paulton said 'I wish I were capable of expressing my sense of your kindness in this matter of my tale: it means freedom for me.'

'You expressed yourself very handsomely in your letter,' said Stephen, 'far more handsomely indeed than ever could be looked for: and I beg you will say no more, but rather tell me of Padeen Colman.'

'I think you will be pleased with him,' said Paulton with a smile. 'He came skin and bone, though that good man Redfern had almost healed his back - he came, by the way, labelled Patrick Walsh, which is I take it the registry clerks' way of covering their traces and confusing the issues to a hopeless degree - and he has been eating ever since. I have let it be known that he is infectious and I have put him by himself in the lamb-pasture hut. If you had come up the stream from the lagoon you would have seen it. May I lead you there now?'

'If you please.'

The meadow was true meadow, the largest stretch of grass that Stephen had seen in New South Wales; it was scattered with thick lambs, some of whom still gambolled heavily, and in the middle stood a cabin built of sods and thatched with reeds, the roof held down against the wind by stone-weighted lines. The reeds came from the beds at the far end of the meadow, where the stream ran into the lagoon, forming the little bay where the settlement's produce was shipped to Sydney. In front of the cabin sat Padeen, singing about Conn C� Cathach to two young Aborigines, standing there tall and thin before him.

'I dare say you would like to speak to him,' said Paulton. 'I shall go back and stir up the cook.'

'It will not take me five minutes,' said Stephen. 'I shall say no more than that I may be at the mouth of the stream in a boat on the twenty-fourth or two or three days later in case of bad weather; but never before noon. Brief I shall be: I do not wish to disturb his spirits; they have been so sadly racked.'

It did not take him so long; but in that time it was clear to his companions that his own spirits too had been much affected. 'Those black youths,' he said sternly as they sat down to their infinitely welcome meal, 'those black youths that ran away when I came near, do they belong to the place at all?'

'Oh no,' said Paulton. 'They come and go as they choose, in their wandering way of life; but there are nearly always a few of them in the neighbourhood. My cousin will not have them ill-used or their women debauched; he has a kindness for them, and sometimes gives them a sheep, or what they very much prefer, a cauldron of sweetened rice. He is trying to compile a vocabulary of their language, but since they appear to possess at least ten synonyms for everything, all of many syllables, while he has a most indifferent ear, the list makes little progress.'

They talked at random about the remarkable butterflies they had seen all the way, particularly along the last lagoon, and their lack of a net, left behind at Riley's; about the curved throwing-stick seen at the same place; about the Aborigines, and at one point Paulton said 'Do you really think them intelligent?'

'If intelligence can be defined as an ability to solve problems, they are intelligent,' said Stephen. 'For surely the very first problem is to keep alive; and in such a disinherited country as this the problem is enormous. Yet they have solved it. I could not.'

'Nor I,' said Paulton. 'But would your definition bear close inspection?'

'Perhaps not; in any case I am far too stupid to defend it.'

'Oh dear,' cried Paulton. 'You must both be dropping with weariness. May I recommend a warm bath before you retire?

The coppers will be on the boil by now; and as far as my experience goes there is nothing more relaxing for body or for mind.'

'I am afraid we were but dismal guests,' said Stephen, turning in his saddle to wave across the scrub to the disappearing Paulton, who chose this same moment to look back and wave before disappearing down the slope and into the tall bush, 'and even this morning I was somewhat chuff: I particularly wished to prevent him committing himself, so that he could always assert that he was not a party to my actions.'

'Morally he could not possibly do so. He knows perfectly well what we are about.'

'I mean legally. In the foolish rigour of the foolish law I wish him to be able to put his name to an affidavit that says "Maturin never said this to me" and "I never said the other to Maturin". Do you think that could conceivably be a peregrine?'

'I believe so,' said Martin, shading his eye. 'A tiercel. Lewin says they occur in New Holland.'

'That bird,' said Stephen, watching the falcon out of sight, 'is as great a comfort to me as your oystercatcher was to you.' Then returning to Paulton, 'What a good-natured man he is, to be sure; it is a pleasure to be in his company. I only wish his sight would allow him to distinguish a bird from a bat. Perhaps if he were given a microscope, a good compound microscope with a variety of eyepieces and an ample stage, he might take great pleasure in some of the smaller forms, the rhizopods, the rotifera, the parasites of lice themselves... I knew an old gentleman, an Anglican parson, who delighted in mites.'

Now that their wisdom was wholly superfluous, the track being almost a carriage-road, the mares looked quite intelligent, stepping out with a confident pace for their distant stable, so briskly that in spite of several stops for botanizing and shooting odd parrots and bush-birds, they reached Newberry's, an inn on a drovers' road some way north ,f the Woolloo-Woolloo track, with daylight and to spare. It was in this daylight that Stephen saw the boomerang at last. A dissolute black, wrecked by his contact with the whites but still retaining his skill, threw it for a tot of rum. The boomerang did all that Riley had said of it and more: at one point, having returned, it rose and floated above the Aboriginal's head in a slow circle before descending into his hand. Stephen and Martin gazed at the object in astonishment, turning it over and over in their hands.

'I cannot understand the principle at all,' said Stephen. 'I should very much like to show it to Captain Aubrey, who is so very well versed in the mathematics and dynamics of sailing. Landlord, pray ask him whether he is willing to part with the instrument.'

'Not on your fucking life,' said the Aboriginal, snatching the boomerang and clasping it to his bosom.

'He says he does not choose to dispose of it, your honour,' said the landlord. 'But never fret. I have a dozen behind the bar that I sell to ingenious travellers for half a guinea. Choose any one that takes your fancy, sir, and Bennelong will throw it to prove it comes back, a true homing pigeon, as we say. Won't you?' This much louder, in the black man's ear.

'Won't I what?'

'Throw it for the gentleman.'

'Give urn dram.'

'Sir, he says he will be happy to throw it for you; and hopes you will encourage him with a tot of rum.'

In the clear morning, much refreshed, they rode on, Stephen with a genuine horning pigeon across his saddle-bow, Martin with a variety of cloth bags full of specimens attached to his, for the ass was already overloaded.

As they dropped down towards Port Jackson the number and variety of parrots, and their discordant noise, increased: cockatoos in flocks, cockateels, lories, and clouds of budgerigars. And when they first looked down into Sydney Cove they saw no frigate moored there, where they had left her. 'This is the twenty-third, is it not?' asked Stephen.

'I believe so,' said Martin. 'I am almost sure that yesterday was the twenty-second.'

They both knew Captain Aubrey's iron rigour where the time of sailing was concerned, and it was with a more than usual anxiety that they gazed at the empty cove. 'But there goes our launch, passing South Point,' said Stephen, his spy-glass to his eye. 'I can see it has a flag in front.'

'And there, ha, ha, ha, is the ship, tied up against the side where we used to be,' cried Martin, joy and relief overflowing. 'And there is another one tied up just behind it: an even larger vessel.'

'I have a feeling it may be the long-foretold ship from Madras,' said Stephen.

This impression was much strengthened as they came into the town, where tight-turbanned Lascars could be seen contemplating the iron-gangs with satisfaction, and where strange uniforms walked about the streets, staring as newcomers stare. They rode straight to Riley's now crowded tavern, and while Stephen prepared to settle accounts with the landlord Martin went down to the ship with two blackguard boys, wheeling a hand-cart loaded with their specimens.

Riley, who knew everything, told Stephen that the Waverly had indeed come from Madras, but that she brought no official packages from India, still less any overland civilian mail; but this was no real disappointment, since she had never been expected to do so. She had however brought out a number of officers, and Stephen sat in the parlour, more or less filled with them, until Riley should be free to deal with the horses.

As he sat there, gazing at the tavern's boomerang and trying to find some plausible reason for its behaviour, he became aware that one of the officers, a Royal Marine near the doorway, was looking at him with more than ordinary attention. He reflected upon the perception of eyes focused upon one - the gaze felt even when the gazer was outside one's field of vision - the uneasiness it caused - an uneasiness felt by many creatures - the importance of not looking directly at one's quarry - the exchange of glances between the sexes, its infinite variety of meanings; and he was still reflecting when the officer came over and said 'Dr Maturin, I believe?'

'Yes, sir,' said Stephen, reserved, but not repulsively so.

'You will not remember me, sir, being so busy at the time, but you was good enough to save my leg after Saumarez' action in the Gut. My name is Hastings.'

'Certainly: a patella. I remember perfectly. Sir William Hastings, is it not? May I roll up your trouser leg? Yes, yes: beautifully knit. And that scoundrelly charlatan would have had it off. To be sure, a neat amputation is always a pleasure, but even so... And now you have a perfectly sound limb rather than a peg. Very good,' - patting its calf gently - 'I give you joy of it.'

'And I give you joy too, Doctor.'

'You are very good, Sir William. Do you allude to the patella?'

'No, sir. To your daughter. But perhaps you do not think that a subject for congratulation. I am aware that there is a prejudice against daughters: portions, wedding breakfasts, vapours and so on. I beg your pardon.'

'I have not the pleasure of following you, sir,' said Stephen, looking at him with his head on one side, but his heart beginning to beat faster.

'Well, no doubt I mistake. But when I was in Madras, Andromache came in. One of her officers lent me a Naval Chronicle, and running through the promotions, births, deaths and marriages, my eye caught what I took to be your name: though perhaps it was another gentleman altogether.'

'Sir William, what was the month, and what did it say?'

'As far as I recall it was last April: and it said "At Ashgrove Cottage, near Portsmouth, the Lady of Dr Maturin, of the Navy, of a daughter."

'Sweet Sir William,' said Stephen, shaking his hand, 'you could not have brought me kinder, more welcome news. Riley! Riley, there, d'ye hear me now? Bring us the finest bottle that ever you have in the house.'

Riley's finest bottle had no effect on Stephen: joy alone brought him skipping across the brow to the frigate's deck - a care-worn deck with what looked like the whole ship's company busy upon it, though this could not have been the case, seeing that a great many hands were banging away far aft amidst the sound of echoing orders. While he was gazing about at the decorations, the bunting, the meticulous coiling of ropes, Captain Aubrey appeared, accompanied by Reade with a tape-measure in his only hand. Jack was looking thinner, yellower and worried, but he smiled and said 'Are you back, Doctor? Mr Martin tells me you had a splendid time.'

'So we did too,' said Stephen, 'but Jack, I cannot tell you with what eagerness I look forward to going home.'

'Aye. I dare say you do. So do I. Mr Oakes,' - directing his powerful voice at the foretopgallantmast - 'is that garland to be shipped this watch, or should you like your hammock sent aloft? Now, Doctor, we are about to give the Governor and his people a farewell dinner: that is the cause of all this merriment. You will have time to change, but I am afraid Killick will not be able to give you a hand. He is busier than any hive of bees. Mr Reade, hold the tape exactly there, and do not stir until I give you a hail.' With this he hurried aft, where all three cabins were being thrown into one, and the harassed carpenter was fitting still another leaf to the table.

Although at this moment his wits were not at their sharpest, Stephen grasped the situation - the unnatural cleanliness of all hands, the more than ordinary brilliance of everything that sand or brick-dust could induce to shine, the widespread and deep anxiety that was usual before naval entertainments on a grand scale, which in his experience were prepared as though all the guests were old experienced seamen, censorious, hostile admirals, likely to inspect the blacking of the highest yards and look for dust under the carronade-slides. He went to his cabin below, his mind still somewhat confused by happiness, and found that in spite of everything Killick had laid out all the clothes that were proper for him to wear. He slowly dressed, taking particular care of the set of his coat, and came out into the gunroom, where he found Pullings, sitting carefully in the gold-laced splendour of a commander.