Mr Darwin's Shooter Page 17

  ‘Covington!’ he tapped him on the shoulder.

  ‘Yoi?’ Covington turned and faced him again.

  ‘I know you understand what I say,’ he said, enunciating just a little more slowly and carefully than usual.

  ‘That I do,’ said Covington, with such simplicity it sprang tears to MacCracken’s eyes. ‘You swear oaths behind my back, and belittle me with cheap gibes.’

  ‘I shan’t betray your confidence on this matter,’ MacCracken swallowed, ashamed.

  Covington shrugged as if to say, ‘Well, if you did, it would be your conception of honour, not mine. And hang you for it.’

  Covington held an assortment of shells out to MacCracken. ‘See the differences between them? Wouldn’t you think, in their eternal variety, that God had printed these creatures, each and every one?’

  MacCracken had never looked closely at the common limpets before. To do so humbled him extremely. He saw that each had striations and lines as different from each other as the finger-pads of human beings. In their very dullness they were profound.

  ‘So if you were looking for bounty of God,’ continued Covington, ‘where would you look?’

  ‘Into these very shells,’ answered MacCracken, putting himself in the role of pupil to Covington’s hoary old philosopher.

  ‘Well, that is why I send them to my gent.’

  ‘So he can find God?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘Is he mad?’

  ‘It may be. But I fear not.’

  ‘Are you mad?’ was the next, unspoken question on MacCracken’s lips.

  They walked along through the heath together. ‘My Afghans are coming on Friday,’ MacCracken said.

  Covington wheezed with amusement. ‘Your “Afghans”,’ he smirked, and in that smile MacCracken began to like him again in the way of old friendship, where much is shared in common and easy dismissals are not so ready to hand. It was the same grin of delight MacCracken saw when Covington sighted Miss Georgina’s bare toes.

  ‘It is my turn to have the Afghans,’ MacCracken said, ‘and I want to do them proud.’

  Those Afghans. They were a quartet of good-humoured dining companions. Whenever they visited, MacCracken arranged for them to stay the night, retaining Mrs Franks, his Belgian housekeeper, to prepare them a great dinner, and organising a fishing-yawl for the next day. They had this in common: they had met on the Ballarat goldfields, and failing dismally at gold-getting had walked four hundred miles back to Sydney through a bushfire summer. On their arrival, smutted and bewhiskered, they plunged themselves into the cooling waters of the harbour, swearing never again to stray from metropolitan delights—nor from each other’s firm devotion. At their dinners they wore a variety of fantastical hats. Covington had seen them sitting on MacCracken’s verandah one evening, O’Connor (architect) as a Turk, Evans (bookseller) as a Scot, Forsyth (schoolmaster) as a Sikh, De Sousa (shipping agent) as a Malay—and MacCracken (sawbones) as a courtier in the days of Versailles.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Covington chortled. ‘What of your Afghans, MacCracken?’

  ‘Friday is the day. Can you get us some of your shellfish —fresh? You know, I rather fancy scallops,’ MacCracken said, terribly aware, at that moment, of an appalling breach of etiquette with Covington, whose face turned more purple than plums.

  ‘Scallops?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Scallops, are they the ones with twelve little eyes lookin’ at you?’ he sneered.

  ‘I believe they are,’ MacCracken lamely responded.

  ‘No, I will not get your scallops. That is not my meaning, Dr MacCracken.’

  ‘I see. Thank you.’

  ‘Just as your meaning,’ Covington thundered on, ‘is not to take a man’s leg or arm from off of his body, or remove his appendix, even, for the mere benefit of his asking.’

  So saying, Covington stood for a few moments in the bright sun of hot Australia, salt spray drying on his face like scaly skin. He put MacCracken in mind of a big clumsy insect that had just clambered from its chrysalis.

  ‘I am seeing the man for the first time and have misread him absolutely the whole way along,’ MacCracken thought. ‘He is not set or stubborn but twisted out of himself constantly.’

  Without further words Covington re-packed his gear and they followed their separate pathways home. MacCracken burned with shame as he watched the man pick his way through the bushes, and then, dropping below the wind-scorched plateau, enter a sheltered gully where he slipped from sight, neither raising an arm nor waving his hat to MacCracken as he usually did. MacCracken had treated him as a servant and got his reply.

  So, MacCracken wondered, how to begin putting things to rights with Mr Covington? What was his meaning at all?

  It seemed that Covington wanted to tease MacCracken into an understanding of him bit by bit. So they were bound somewhere together. Mrs Dorothea Covington had said as much: I do my best, but he has such hopes for you, Dr MacCracken. Yet the man’s revelations, such as they were, resembled slabs of stone exploding from an ancient monument and crashing around his feet. There were long dusty silences at intervals. Meantime apprehension swam around his head like gnats in the evening. He was always demanding of MacCracken that ‘something more’ with his imploring, fate-smitten eyes—something he asked MacCracken to grant him that was beyond MacCracken’s powers as a doctor, or as a man, to furnish.

  Which was what? Release from something articulated inside him but unspeakable to the outer world? What a barnacle Covington was in himself. MacCracken felt only the outlines of Covington’s soul when he pressed with his mental instincts, feeling how it clung, sucked, wheezed, dripped, tightened. But also shone. That had to be said. When the tide fell, and life was left clinging, in the sunlight it shone—with persistence, sadness, puzzlement, ire. They were qualities worth gold in the man and not the gold of his commercial dealings either.

  What on earth was he to do, having done the physical part with his scalpel, making Covington whole in flesh from his brush with peritonitis? That, it seemed, had been the easy road. Now for the mental part: it would be harder. In relation to the soul—if it was the eternal soul that Covington’s anguish meant—MacCracken had come to a full stop in the dissecting room. He was the wrong man for the subject. He could give no assurances of eternal life—no, never—and though he was a declared Episcopalian the idea frankly appalled him of a bunch of angels in grubby nightshirts mouldering till the end of time with no prospect of change. It didn’t fit any picture of life MacCracken had. If life was eternal, wouldn’t it have to have life in it? And where was life, he asked himself, except in blood and breath?

  Yet it remained that he was chosen and it remained that he felt himself obliged, and it remained that he loved the old stager too. So MacCracken decided to make himself into a better man to do this thing that his friend demanded of him—emerge from his egg or his chrysalis or whatever it was that gave him his protection at the age of twenty-seven for pleasure-mongering in extremis and hollering ‘hang the rest’. It was time for MacCracken to seize his vocation of the mind and start hauling it in tight. ‘Old horse Mr Covington, old gristle-factory and barrel of pride,’ thought MacCracken. ‘You are going away from us all. And how do I know? Ask me if I know when the sun goes down.’

  That was the instinct MacCracken had now. And if he could he would follow Covington down.

  To Friday’s dinner—where Afghans ate like beasts and quaffed wines like water at life’s eternal springs. Whenever Mrs Franks entered the room they minded their manners and when she left they shed them again. She did them proud with her table setting. The smells coming from her kitchen made them groan.

  Once they had done a perish. As failed diggers the bunch of them had eaten scraps and roadside findings. They had tempted themselves with boiled thistles, pumpkin tops, pigweed-lettuce and the like on their march to Sydney and now they demanded their dues. They had eaten wombat, possum, snake and wild duck so devoid of flesh they o
nly sucked bones and were glad of it. Now they had candles on the table, crystal goblets, pewter bowls. They supped on calves’ feet broth. They had beef braised in cider, with a grand name in French, and hot pastry delights stuffed with silver trevally and small juicy prawns. They had salad balls with honey dressing, and this is what those delicacies were, said Mrs Franks: a concoction of butter, lemon juice, cayenne, curry powder, and cheese from Mrs Covington’s dairymaid, all rolled in chopped parsley and served on a bed of green lettuce. For their sweets they had hot sponge with lemon sauce and French jellies.

  Finally after Mrs Franks cleared the table for the last time, balancing plates in the dimpled crook of her arm and chirping about boys who believed they were men, they chose their headgear from a box of hats, and MacCracken passed around the port.

  De Sousa wore a black fez with red spangles. He asked about Covington. He’d spotted him during the week dining with officers at the barracks:

  ‘Quite a pack of fawning marines and naval men. I believe your Covington lends them money and affects up-country frugality—mends his own boots, and so on—but is all sham and pernickety side. He’s rich as a Rothschild and his one motive in life overriding all is to get his daughters husbands.’

  ‘Could be,’ MacCracken murmured, giving nothing away, for he had nothing much to give when it came to talk of daughters. Covington rarely spoke of them. MacCracken tugged the strap of the overlarge policeman’s helmet he wore, and announced a list of fines to be charged for various misdemeanours at table.

  ‘“Indecent speculation”—sixpence. “The betrayal of eternal friendship”—one shilling.’

  ‘Daughters, where are they?’ O’Connor interrupted. He twirled his 1844 Penfold’s muscat to the lamplight, and spoke from under the shade of a coolie’s hat, wide as a wheel, that was whisked from a Chinaman’s head at a roadside camp and favoured by all of them ever since.

  ‘Ah, the daughters,’ said De Sousa. ‘Fearsome ugly, I’d say. No-one has seen them.’

  ‘MacCracken? Come on with you—what gives on Caliban’s isle?’

  Forsyth, wearing a shako with the Russian insignia of rampant eagles rising from the crown, interpolated vaguely: ‘Covington? I don’t think I know him. Is he the duffer I saw at your wharf, MacCracken, with busted veins in his hams and a tooth missing, and a pugilist’s nose? He tried to sell me a cod!’

  ‘He goes around,’ MacCracken smiled, ‘a bit sarcastically.’ The selling of fish indeed. He felt stung. Why not scallops? MacCracken wanted to be thought wiser on Covington than he was in fact, an interesting vanity considering his whim to have him fall from a cliff just the other day.

  A lull fell over the table. The matter of daughters was endlessly compelling. The Afghans were sunk in thought.

  ‘Can’t be ripe ’uns,’ said O’Connor. ‘The MacCracken would be the first to pluck fruit if they were.’

  ‘He is lickin’ his lips, though,’ said Forsyth, ‘and thinkin’ lascivious thoughts. Fine y’self sixpence, MacCracken.’

  MacCracken pelted Forsyth with almonds and O’Connor pulled his chair from under him, leaving him collapsed on the floor.

  MacCracken knew that Covington’s daughters, underage children both of them, were in the mountains beyond Twofold Bay, where Covington’s four sons, Syms junior, Charlie, Eddie, and Alf (who was barely ten years old!) rode wild horses, hunted kangaroos, and trimmed the Covington estates of their beef and timber. It seemed such a conventional colonial picture, and as the Afghan rule was to be ‘interesting’, MacCracken munched on a dried fig and said nothing.

  ‘Look at old “Mac-a-cracker”, he knows more than he’s sayin’.’

  ‘Roll over Miss X?’ murmured Evans. He wore a Mongolian fur with ear flaps, though the night was balmy.

  ‘Back off,’ MacCracken snarled.

  ‘Sorry, dear chap,’ said Evans. It was an awkward hiatus. MacCracken feared he offended Evans but dammit he offended himself. Out of five bold Afghans MacCracken was the one with a mistress, or dolly, as the word was with them. There was too little reality about MacCracken sometimes. He knew that Lizzie was twelve and Emaline was six, that the older made a fierce protective mother to the younger, and that when the time had come for Mrs Covington to bring them to Sydney they had outright refused, and gone hiding in the bush.

  ‘Daughter, singular,’ said another. ‘Her name is Theodora. Covington’s been taking her around, walking the gardens. I haven’t seen her, but they say she’s a catch, red hair, high cheekbones, emerald eyes, and a graceful walk—a dancer?’

  ‘Theodora?’ said MacCracken, trying out the sound of the name and keeping his emphasis neutral. He knew nothing about any Theodora.

  The eyes of the Afghans switched back to MacCracken. Having so recently penetrated Covington’s defence against deafness he was now learning of another matter he’d kept from him all this time.

  ‘You are all scallops,’ he said, confronting so many beady stares. ‘Shut your shells.’

  The conversation passed to other topics, all of them muddled, hilarious, pugnacious and sentimental by turns, as was commonplace with their tribe. Later Evans attempted healing their tiff with gossip, and mentioned that his bookroom had a standing order for ‘anything new in natural history’ not just from MacCracken, but also from Mr Covington. A new volume had just arrived, The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. ‘I have it in my bag,’ said Evans.

  ‘Then give it to me,’ MacCracken said.

  ‘Now that’s a bit awkward. I brought it over for Mr Covington.’

  ‘You brought it over for Mr Covington?’ carped MacCracken. ‘So much for friendship. You are fined a shilling, Furry Ears.’

  ‘Look,’ said Evans, ‘I must be truthful. Your Mr Covington specially asked for the book by Darwin, “the one about everything” he called it, whereas your order was vague as mud. Therefore Covington has priority, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Then give me another of it.’

  ‘The whole stock of the title was spoken for before the ship unloaded. The last went to Krefft, the new man at the museum. He calls himself a Darwinist, whatever that is. Something German, I suppose.’

  Darwin’s book came up through MacCracken’s thoughts like an object released from the seabed and defining itself ever-faster as it wallowed to the surface. It would answer why Covington was so insistent the night he tapped on the window, when MacCracken sent him away. In the style of their dealings MacCracken wanted an advantage over him in the matter.

  ‘Let me have it, and I will pass it on to him.’

  Evans went to get the book but changed his mind. It was too neatly wrapped in a rare, expensive paper and tied with knotted string. Damn him—why should MacCracken get his way in every department of life as he always seemed to? Evans yawned drunkenly and fell asleep in his room.

  It was late, with the deepness of many stars overhead, when the rest of the Afghans staggered away to their rooms, swearing to be up early and fishing. De Sousa was the last to go and he plucked MacCracken’s elbow. ‘A final cigar?’ The two of them sat on the verandah steps. The winking of native fires could be seen across the harbour. Water lapped the rocks at the foot of MacCracken’s garden, and he heard—constantly against his back like a giant snoring— the sustained roar of the ocean.

  A light burned late at ‘Coral Sands’. With the clarity of imagination intensified by inner preoccupation MacCracken knew for an absolute certainty that Mr Covington was awake and touching the walls, listening to the amplified world vibrating in his bones. Indeed he had his proof of it the next day, when he found himself absorbed into Covington’s dome of echoes, becoming part of it in much the same way that food becomes part of a body by being digested, and we are able to live.

  Meantime, when MacCracken turned to his companion, he found that De Sousa had taken himself off to bed, and the cigar that MacCracken had thought was only just begun was a smoking stub in the grass. Time seemed to be moving erratically, like a firefly—here bright and then gone,
and then over there again flaring up, with MacCracken lost in the intervals.

  In the middle of the night MacCracken rolled over in his bed and came half-awake. He had his boyhood favourite, Charles Darwin’s Voyage Round the World of HMS Beagle, on his shelves. Covington had seen it there and said that he ‘owned’ a copy. Then he had quoted from it by rote, making a special point over the word ‘obtained’. With MacCracken the Voyage had played its part along with Melville’s White-Jacket in inspiring him to take to a life of foreign travel, to bid his unbending father a fond hypocritical farewell, and so on and so forth. Thus when he left Boston he shipped down the coast of South America as Darwin had, tasting Patagonian gales in his teeth like so, and stopped at the Galapagos, and sailed the Pacific making his shell collection on the way. Looking back it seemed that Darwin was the reason and not gold-fever or character failure as he mostly thought.

  MacCracken sat up in bed, a sorry grin on his face. He had Mr Covington at last. His Don Sia Di.

  He sank back on his pillow, his head thumping somewhat from wine and his tongue tasting sour.

  How could he have been such a fool? Through all this time MacCracken had thought of Covington’s Don as a Spaniard, though Covington had never exactly said so, had only stated, plainly and in his own understanding of the matter, the identity of his patron—who was Spanish in his treachery—and linked him to the book containing revelations that frightened him.

  So if there was something about Covington unseen, thought MacCracken, sinking back into his pillows, it was not through Covington’s hiding it away. It was through dullness in MacCracken’s instincts and his lording it over a deaf man.

  MacCracken’s own secret, that he was a dunderhead and slow-witted in taking time to twig to anything much, he would hide from the world until such a time as he set his own narrative down.