Mr Darwin's Shooter Page 30

  The cumbersome camera equipment stood ready once more. Covington fitted his wide round hat and stood with his stockwhip rampant. The photographer’s assistant rumbled a scene to the back of them, a canvas frame on wheels, an oil-painted ridge of timber with sunbeams coming through and a team of thirty black bullocks straining to their limit.

  ‘My friend Mr Earle was a painter,’ declared Covington at large. ‘He was a scabrous hound,’ he added with great affection.

  He angled his face for the camera and peered into the stalk-like shining lens. A good material boast. It cheered him spectacularly. A colonist of means with cattle and land, beauty and brawn in his blood, and a spate of thinkers, too. He made a vow. His bones would be read when he was gone—forehead, cheek, jaw—with more intelligence than they were in his lifetime; and his entire existence, like the prehistoric megatheriums of the Rio Colorado that the two of them found in a low cliff when they first started their life of shooting, would live on in importance. ‘You don’t know,’ he muttered. ‘You can’t tell.’

  ‘Are you talking to me?’ said the doctor.

  ‘Nay,’ Covington answered, giving his friend a familiar look of disdain. ‘Not you exactly …’ Then shook himself and stared:

  ‘I am ready.’

  The photographer ignited the flare and the room filled with light.

  Covington’s hopes were present in the air like crystal. To get out of the room was like smashing a way through.

  Outside in the street the horses and dog-cart were ready, and Mrs Covington patted the cushions beside her, inviting MacCracken to ease himself up. Theodora, too, if it so pleased her—for the child was all indecision, and they were the three of them dependent on her decisions utterly, cravenly, bleakly, it felt. With Mr Covington riding there was room for the rest in the cart, Mrs Covington indicated, so very comfortable too, with a spring chassis, a taut canvas shade overhead, brass handgrips and rails, and strong ponies in the shafts fed on best stud-mash of Huddlestone’s Livery Stables (in which Mr Covington happened to own a share, and likewise MacCracken). Theodora stood on the pavement bumped by passers-by. She looked distraught as she adjusted her bonnet. It was a shade of apricot, and very ‘town’. They still weren’t travelling clothes she was in. The others’ trunks had gone ahead by dray, so there was plenty of space in the luggage-slide under the dog-cart. So would she please speak her mind?

  ‘Mr Covington!’ His wife tapped his shoulder with her whipstock, and he turned round to look at her.

  ‘Yea?’

  Please go to her! she mouthed.

  But he wouldn’t. Still couldn’t. Just made a show of quieting his saddle-mare, putting his hand to its neck and running it smoothly down her flanks. It was in his heart to give love a push, but he felt the drawing back in himself. A quietening in him. Let the flower blossom or wither as it might. Even here in these messy, dusty streets. It was like turning his back on talk and listening for the stillness of God. Like pricking his ears—hearing the cry of birds—a wren in a thicket—where?

  ‘My husband!’ shrugged Mrs Covington, giving up on him.

  MacCracken bowed to Theodora—she nodded briefly back—and they still had not spoken a word to each other, except for civilities, but addressed their every thought to the Covingtons.

  Were they both smitten?

  Neither thought the other so.

  So both acted the same.

  MacCracken climbed up beside Mrs Covington. She held the reins bunched in her hands, while the horses twitched away flies and stamped their feet, and asked, with their restlessness, if there was to be any get-going for them at all today.

  Theodora bit her lower lip, looked to left and right, raised her toes and peered over the heads of pedestrians, jabbed her parasol-tip between a crack in the cobblestones and took it out again. Then she flicked her parasol open and shaded herself, because even though winter was coming the Sydney sun had bite. The parasol with its red fringes and shiny blue canopy was a fair landmark in the street. Anyone looking for her would notice it, and quite a few, who weren’t looking for it, noticed it very appreciatively. MacCracken, owning a fair assessment of a lady’s mind, reckoned to himself that Theodora had made arrangements with a beau to meet her outside the studio, to settle her mind on the question of this journey—say with a passionate declaration, or whatever.

  A count to the sum of ten, or fifteen, no more, and Theodora nodded and snapped her brolly shut. All it took, then, was a moment of exasperated twirling and Theodora was done.

  ‘I am coming,’ she declared.

  MacCracken would remember this about her and not get that flash of dismissal aimed at him. He could feel its quality and nothing had begun with them yet! He thought, if her green eyes settle on mine I’ll snap, for I have no shield.

  Theodora tucked her brolly under her arm and went to speak to Mr Covington. Practical business they had together; talk of horses; stables; trunks; hat boxes; and Covington smiled; kissed her cheek; Theodora laughed; took his hand; let it go; and in a moment Covington was up in the saddle, reaching down; and in a moment Theodora was up there behind him, sitting side-saddle, pillion-style, and laughing in high spirits.

  ‘I know this laugh,’ Covington was heard to say as he felt it vibrating through her arms.

  ‘I wonder that he does,’ muttered Mrs Covington. Theodora’s mother, that Mrs FitzGerald, was a cat, she would have had a high, excited laugh that was full of the suprises of life, you could be sure.

  ‘We are off to the stables to get Theodora a fine horse,’ Covington announced, addressing the whole street it seemed and not just the occupants of the dog-cart in his loud pride. ‘She will ride along with me, and you are to go to the shipping offices, m’dear, and fetch her trunks. Then we go to Liverpool town, clippety-clap, where there is a surprise waitin’.’

  Thus dismissed, MacCracken and Mrs Covington looked at each other and raised their eyebrows. Mrs Covington gave a practised flick of greenhide, and the horses began wending their way along.

  Early breakfast on their second day out. Misty sunlight through eucalyptus trees, the trunks a substantial yellow-gold and pale creamy blue, their bark curling down in copious scarves, the harsh cackling call of kookaburras marking their territorial districts in the trees, the twitching of wagtails in close, the drift of camp-fire smoke and the smell of new bread baking in the camp oven.

  Mr Covington knelt at his devotions as he made a practice of doing each day, longer on Sundays, thanking God for his blessings and then getting up and brushing sticks and leaves from his knees.

  Covington called them kooka burrows—he could faintly hear them, they were so raucous. He was excitable in boasting bush lore to the liveliest of the party (Theodora). It was a process that MacCracken found tedious when it got going, much of it rather too well known to him from his goldfields’ tramps and other rural outings. It also denied him Theodora. But Theodora loved everything she learned. She was charmed by the new. How long would it last? he thought, and caught her eye. She held his in return, but only for a moment, and as if she had only a passing interest in him—not nearly so gripping as her fascination with a native beehive in a hollow limb, for example, when Covington reached up and jabbed it with a stick, causing the insects to fly out in a cloud. Or a lion-ant trap, when Covington led her by the hand, and they knelt in the dust examining it. Darwin had found one of these dusty cones, and said it was so like the European one that it steadied his faith in God. After their time in Sydney he had come back to the ship full of it: ‘Now what would the disbeliever say to this? Would any two workmen ever hit on so beautiful, so simple and yet so artificial a contrivance? I cannot think so. The one hand has worked over the whole world.’

  While Mrs Covington made breakfast over the fire, deftly managing pots, pans and cast-iron ‘ovens’, MacCracken propped himself on a trunk and delved deeper into Darwin’s book, which he had grabbed back from Covington when they came into camp last night. It was a subject hardly begun between them. His
concentration was only lightly on the ideas before him. He heard a dove calling in the paperbark trees, near the slow creek where they watered their horses, and thought about Darwin’s use of pigeons as a breeding guide. He went back over a paragraph on the importance of large flocks for breed improvement. Then he jumped to the reason for lack of variety among donkey herds: they were kept by poor people, who lacked the leisure for seeking upward change. He peered at the draughthorses at the other end of the glade. Those carriers must be wealthy, he thought, to get them to such great perfection. Theodora came to the fire and helped Mrs Covington. She wore an open-collared shirt, a leather waistcoat, men’s trousers, and an oval-crowned felt hat with the brim turned up. MacCracken was sick with love. Theodora had a manner of dealing with her father that MacCracken observed over the top of his pages, dropping his eyes whenever she glanced in his direction (but if she looked in his way he dropped his eyes indifferently). Hers was a warm, enthusiastic involvement with whatever Covington said, with whatever he proposed. ‘Sugar in the fire sets it roaring … bush honey is good for drawing boils … use beeswax and mutton suet to waterproof your boots … if you swallow a fishbone, mind, take a raw egg …’ When his excitement touched Theodora she doubled it. If a puzzle was put—‘How to boil water without a vessel?’ ‘Which way is south by the stars?’—she immediately set to working it out.

  Their journey was to take longer than expected—sixteen days! There was to be no roughing it in wayside inns. There was a ladies’ wagon and a men’s wagon. The men’s was loaded with farm supplies and Covington and MacCracken slept under it, with blankets wrapped round them and their heads ‘on stones’ as Covington boasted, though in fact they had small comfortable pillows stuffed with down, and their bed rolls, sheathed in canvas, were filled with bracken and most comfortable indeed.

  But the ladies’ wagon was more than delightful. It had two iron beds with mattresses, a sideboard with a mirror, washbasins, lamps, and a carpet on the floor. When they reached their destination the equipment would be put in the house. For now, it was a life afloat, for what was a wheeled wagon if not a boat on land?

  Covington called MacCracken over to the camp fire, where Mrs Covington, sitting on a three-legged milking stool, doled out portions of breakfast. They stood around eating it. Drinking tea. Crunching on bacon. Tearing at mutton chops. MacCracken’s jaw was much improved, but would words come out? Unlikely.

  A pattern was set for the days ahead. There were two saddle-horses, two ponies for the dog-cart, and eight draughts, four to each wagon, driven by the taciturn carriers. These men were like sailors, giving a feeling of being friends of Covington’s from some enterprise in the past when they had become sworn adherents of each other, after which they never needed to speak at length of anything again, just smoke their pipes, nod wisely in agreement, and play hands of cribbage when they got the chance, keeping score on stringybark shingles drilled with nail-holes, marked by twigs.

  By nine they were on the road. Next morning they would make an earlier start. The air was chill, but on corners of the road, where dusty beams of sunlight poured through the trees, they felt a rising warmth. Covington rode with Theodora, MacCracken with Mrs Covington. Then they changed around. MacCracken and Covington sat in the ladies’ wagon, comfortable on cushions, while Theodora and Mrs Covington took to the saddle-horses and cantered ahead, being found later walking them, Mrs Covington in a fine sweat but stimulated to the depths of her country heart; Theodora with a fine flush, her hair lying in sweaty strands on her lovely white neck.

  ‘Your turn with Theodora, now,’ boomed Covington, giving MacCracken a rather obvious nudge.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said the doctor. ‘Really, I am most companionable.’ He held up Darwin’s book, ‘I’ve a power of reading to do. Did you know, Covington,’ he said, turning his back on Theodora and taking the man’s arm, leaning on him a little as he limped through the dust in the wake of the creaking wagon, ‘that beetles near a sea-coast, if they are non-flying, have less risk of being blown to sea, and so thrive better?’

  ‘I did not know that,’ grumped Covington. ‘If you won’t sit with Theodora you’re a damned fool, man.’

  ‘Then I am a damned fool,’ said MacCracken.

  ‘Aren’t you enjoying our ride at all?’

  ‘There is nothing in the whole wide world I would rather be doing,’ said MacCracken, passionately sincere.

  ‘I think you mean it,’ said Covington, looking hard at his friend and feeling that MacCracken might have depths as yet unplumbable.

  ‘Well, what am I to make of Darwin’s book?’ said Covington, then, lowering his voice a little, gripping Mac Cracken’s arm, ‘Is it proven?’

  But just then he saw Theodora reach up from the saddle and tear a strip of bark from a tree.

  ‘Hrrumph,’ said Covington in a pleased though critical fashion, and went to Theodora, helping her down from the horse and giving her a lesson in nature study. He fetched in his pocket for pill boxes. He had known from the start, he told her, not to stuff material in pockets and bring it back in a jumble. So he’d been an advantage to a naturalist often faced with toads flattened by cartwheels and nightjars devoured by ants and wrapped in leaf-litter. His Mr Darwin, he meant.

  The days passed. The road climbed, wound, and emerged onto the frosty, sun-bright tablelands to the far south. Theodora and MacCracken knew what was to happen with them. When their backs were turned to each other they privately smiled, an inward, knowledgeable discovery—that this thing Covington wanted, as between two selected kinds, was what they wanted too. But wouldn’t admit such a thing. Not to each other. All time was spread before them for the unfolding moment of love. ‘Time vaster,’ reflected MacCracken over their camp-fire evenings, with the cold stars bright overhead, ‘than any of us have reason to know.’

  They saw Covington at his prayers.

  ‘Or that he knows, either.’

  And was that what Darwin set out to prove—that limitless time made all things possible—once their voyage was over and they were settled at 36 Great Marlborough Street? Where sooty rain streaked the windows. Where daylight never showed, and it was full gloomy inside, but they had their many visitors—nitpickers, lady novelists with ear trumpets, geologists with horrible breath, and makers of infernal adding machines. They disturbed specimen trays behind Covington’s back as if they had every right. They leafed through specimen lists and shifted labels from their rightful places, and said they ‘hadn’t meant to’ when Covington roared them out, an apparition wearing a black dustcoat and a green eyeshade. They were the greats of English science and had no idea what Darwin was proposing. But Covington did. Just the two of them did: That species replaced each other in both time and place. That creatures occupying their various stations on earth had evolved from those that had gone before by a process of ‘natural selection’. That species were living relatives of those that had gone before, just as they were of those still living nearby. That Noah, whose Ark was often compared with their cramped old vessel as a preserver of creation, was nothing but a bearded braggart whose tale was woven from hempen homespun.

  ‘Seems I was some kind of South American fossil myself,’ said Covington to MacCracken, coming back to their camp fire, ‘and did not know what-for at all. I was smart as a carrot new-scraped and that was the best of me. I loved my scriptures and I lived my happiness to the full, but the more I was one thing, the more he was the other.’

  It was a headache that pierced to the marrow of Covington’s brain. It came from staying up late with a smoking lamp and reading his Darwin, which he kept at his elbow with confused pride for a good few months after MacCracken and Theodora were married, and sailed for the States. It came from knuckling his eyes in the morning and going back over the passages again, and being rendered futile by understanding. It came from outbursts of anger—‘It cannot be!’—‘I will have the man flayed!’—‘He sneers overmuch!’

  It came from the effort of holding one book in
his mind and remaining true to its texts while considering the rule of another. No amount of soothing from Mrs Covington’s poultices helped, although when the pain receded, as it did for a time, he made a vow—he would have Christmas at Pambula, by the sea, and enjoy fresh corncobs from the crop he planted in spring.

  So they came down the ridges from their upland acres with the cockatoo in a cage dangling from a dray, with Covington walking with the aid of a stick, demonstrating sure-footedness, don’t you see—although secretly knowing that if he put too much weight on his left leg at the wrong moment he would go artichoke over turkey, as the saying was. He stumped along with a peg-leg motion and did his best. There was a numbness probing his senses like sea-urchin spines. When his headache returned it came writhing and shimmering like a sea-jelly in the shallows. When he took to his bed, at last, in a shaded room of ‘Forest Oak’, he felt easier in his mind, and rested his brain.

  Then it came to Covington that his agitation was coming to an end, and he had better summon his spirits to him or there was no knowing what. For he was leaving home for ever, and doing it courageously, blindly—as such leavings were mostly done.

  So it was in his memory that he ran to get first in line following John Phipps on a path leading south and westwards. They eased into a good rhythm along reed-fringed by-ways and cow-pads, soon climbing into rolling, chalky country where their feet were not constantly plunging into the mire. Phipps shouted questions, and his boys shouted back:

  ‘“Is this the way to the Kingdom Come?”’

  ‘“We are just in our way.”’

  ‘“How far is it thither?”’

  ‘“Too far for any but those that shall get thither indeed.”’

  ‘“Is the way safe or dangerous?”’