Mr Darwin's Shooter Read online

  MacCracken rolled his eyes. They were back to their first way of dealing with each other, with Covington excluding MacCracken somewhat, yet demanding his attention—and always on the edge of a withheld confession.

  ‘MacCracken, can I trust you?’

  ‘As your physician and your friend? As your business partner? Aye on all counts!’

  ‘How wise are you?’

  ‘Wise enough.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said wise,’ MacCracken nodded and shouted, ‘enough.’

  ‘You tied a string to a tortoise and made it pull a rock.’

  ‘Thank you,’ croaked MacCracken into his chin. ‘So you hold my own writings against me. Thank you kindly. What a good proof of readership. Alone of all the faithful you kept the faith.’

  ‘Since we met I’ve been wondering about something.’

  ‘We never met, we collided, old barge.’

  ‘Is a man only ever to be as he seems? That is my point,’ said Covington.

  ‘And a good one, ancient Diogenes,’ remarked MacCracken. If he was only ever to be as he seemed, then he would be a flimsy sort of a fellow.

  They smoked their pipes and watched the shallow tide. When it retreated it printed white sand with mottled hearts of Port Jackson fig leaves.

  ‘Must a servant be always—just a servant?’

  ‘Jesus was a servant,’ said MacCracken righteously.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Nay, he was a master,’ said Covington.

  ‘Come up to the house,’ said MacCracken, clapping a hand on the shoulder of his brooding friend. ‘I have a fine old brandy from the Cape.’ Covington stared at him uncomprehendingly until MacCracken made the ‘snorter’ sign with his elbow, and then he leapt up and trotted at his side to ‘Villa Rosa’.

  ‘What do you think the brain is?’ Covington said, when they were settled with their snifters. ‘Does it have several organs packed into it, like lumps of clothing in a seabag?’

  ‘That is a pretty idea,’ nodded MacCracken. He was interested in the brain. He had dissected it into portions but found the process useless, philosophically speaking, leaving him always at the point he wished to start with—the mystery of being.

  Covington sneered into his swirl of spirits. ‘We must all have great heads or these qualities are small, trailing back on roots to be all fitted in like turnips or yams.’

  ‘Another?’ MacCracken held out the bottle.

  Covington declined, saying the brandy was ‘oily to his taste’. The comment irritated MacCracken extremely. It undercut his hospitality. Some friendships were better conducted through the mails, he swore to himself. In Covington’s letters from ‘Forest Oak’ there was never any innuendo, while face to face he was full of it. As Covington placed his glass on a shelf and readied himself to leave, grunting and cracking his joints, his eyes were caught by an arrangement of shells MacCracken had placed in a window recess. Among them was a saucer of sea urchin spines. They were slim, shaded in brown, about half an inch long and dotted with small marks like goose bumps. Covington held them to the light like a diamond connoisseur, making judgemental clicks of the tongue, saying he ‘owned these too,’ having found them on the same island where MacCracken teased the tortoise and smothered the bird. His noise of disapproval was typical. He seemed captivated by the souvenirs, and somewhat lost, and yet there was this disdain also.

  MacCracken cupped a hand to his mouth and shouted to be heard:

  ‘Chatham in the Galapagos? When were you there? When, old stager?’

  ‘When the world was young,’ was all Covington would say in response. And perhaps that was everything, thought MacCracken, that he would ever need to say. (MacCracken would come to think so when he was wiser.) MacCracken was struck by the swirls of feeling that Covington shot out at him. They were full of pain.

  Opening his diary that night MacCracken wrote his piece on friendship. ‘No, a man does not have to be just as he seems. He can be more, in the light of understanding.’

  Covington called another day, and they spoke of other things. Yet always with difficulty, one shouting himself hoarse, one scribbling figures, both barking replies. It was hard work, like playing a ball without bounce. It was all restricted to pounds, shillings and pence; to bullock wagons and weeks on the road; to sloops gone aground with their cargoes ruined and unwilling insurers. Covington carried a silver ear trumpet in a kidskin bag, but never used it. It was an advanced model, made to the latest design in London. He said he could have it manufactured in Sydney if he liked, and plenty would buy it, but had an aversion to forcing on others what was useless to himself.

  ‘Such as your tale of woe?’ MacCracken riposted.

  ‘What’s that you say?’

  ‘Have you never killed a small bird with a hat?’

  ‘Nay, not with a hat,’ said Covington sourly. ‘Not flippantly like you, doctor.’

  ‘What—is—it—about—you?’ MacCracken demanded, in a voice that made his brandy balloons ring.

  ‘I am afraid to know,’ replied Covington. There were tears in his eyes. MacCracken dropped his irritation, and embraced him as he farewelled him at the door. ‘I have been a collector in my life,’ said Covington. ‘Birds and insects, small and large. Fossils. Mammals. Corals. You get so you forget what is man. You start to think, “Man? Why, he is just a stack of bones.”’

  ‘Dear Mr Covington, dear broken old heart,’ said MacCracken. ‘Tell me your tale. Trust me.’

  Covington made a sound like a bull-seal smacking rubbery lips. ‘Hmm?’ Whether the plea reached him was irrelevant. Because the leaden door of deafness slammed shut. Because he tugged a lock of hair in ironical farewell. Because he trotted off into the dusk, a swirl of insects around his head, and gave those bothersome gnats all his attention.

  Nurse Parkington urged on Covington a walking cure after giving him a good pummelling using pungent oils and the power of her mannish arms. Going about on his long, strong legs, Covington in a wide hat was like a patch of cloud-shadow on the headlands, trailing small boys who brought him bugs and rocks and other interesting finds. He could not stop himself peering, and MacCracken thought he was like someone hoping to find gold, he was so persistent in his hobby. What did he keep in his pockets? There was often a reek of raw spirits about him. He clinked and clanked like a bottle-oh. MacCracken saw him on the sandstone escarpment plucking at beetles. He saw him crossing the heath. He saw him up on the roadway, near the lighthouse, beating shrubbery with a stick and stirring up butterflies. He saw him coming down.

  Steadiness and accumulation of effort defined Covington just as lightness of mind and quick snobberies defined MacCracken. Black boys threw pebbles on Covington’s back to get his attention. Those narrowed eyes, all their shine burned out, turned upon miscreants and were calm the way a coral lagoon is calm in a ring of storm.

  You may wonder why MacCracken thought Covington’s collecting activities unremarkable in the man, even after his outburst at the door, and confronted with Covington’s confessions still didn’t know what he was talking about. The answer is that he ascribed them to fashion. Beetles were the wonder of the day in the Australian colonies through every class of immigrant. Stark wonder was the mood in the forest and in the house, with every piece of bark and every cookpot lid and plate left lying around lifted to reveal a creature never sighted before by civilised man and waving its feelers. There was a special pride among the takers of the place, because the plants and animals were so strange. Everything so queer and opposite. There must have been a separate act of Creation, it was maintained, and as Darwin had said on visiting there, to bring them into being. Swans were black. A mammal, the platypus, laid eggs, although nobody had ever seen one do it except the black fellows, who were not to be believed, so much of their lives being fanciful.

  So it did not astonish MacCracken as much as it might have when Covington, holding a few struggling wrigglers in his outdoorsman’s palm f
or MacCracken’s admiration, gave their names in Latin. ‘Leptosomus, a weevil. Ontiscus, a seed bug. I was first to catch these,’ Covington croaked triumphantly, ‘in this very place where we are.’

  MacCracken believed that Covington meant he was first between the two of them, referring to their mutual competitiveness. The doctor went on his way chuckling over Covington’s clumsy pretensions. He was ‘off’ the fellow today. MacCracken had seen Covington’s type at operatic concerts, men who had made their pile ‘up country’ clutching their programs as if they would strangle them, and popping their eyes from the effort of enjoyment and mouthing a few words of libretti taught them by daughters and wives. As with opera so with bugs. MacCracken put Covington in a box labelled ‘Old Stager’, smiled at him, shook his hand heartily, slapped him on the back, and made noises Covington would never hear.

  Covington’s other task on this stay was to attend to their business together. This suited MacCracken fine. After studying his ledger books Covington snarled, ‘You need boxin’ around the ears, young fella,’ and took the books back to ‘Coral Sands’ and tidied them into columns. Then, without much ceremony, he was gone.

  Thus MacCracken became Covington’s beneficiary before he ever knew him at all. Covington’s generosity fell upon the lanky Bostonian like spangles of light on the brow of a child. Covington’s word was his bond in all his dealings, with everything down to the most niggling percentage point committed to memory. Not once did MacCracken question this generosity’s foundations by asking himself what motive Covington might have beyond gratitude. As well question the loyalty of a dog when it came licking his hand, transferring its affections. The idea that Covington was looking for more meaning than a soul could bear and that MacCracken was the agent of that meaning would have struck him dumb.

  ‘Forget the gold rushes and the delights of land-taking,’ MacCracken confided to his friend Evans, the bookseller, as he placed an order for anything brand spanking new in natural history, ‘if such friends as Mr Covington stumble into your days and bring you good fortune.’

  After New Year Covington was back once more. They had their anniversary of meeting to celebrate with their eyes stinging in the month of smoke and cinders. Covington’s visits became even more frequent, as curious to MacCracken as they were profitable. MacCracken brushed up his beetles and moths to compete with him, but had no chance of besting him—yet gained pleasure from the contest all the same. ‘We have a good laugh and rub along,’ he told his friends. Covington was an acute observer in entomology, just as in commerce and trade. MacCracken came away from their comparisons of beetles and wasps with a firm assessment of Covington’s brainpower. When it came to birds he was incomparable, not just noting variations in plumage and beak-shape, but expounding anatomy as well. He knew the skull and breast-bones of skeletons by sight. MacCracken felt that whatever Covington turned himself to he was able to master, but at the same time felt a limitation, in that Covington was unwilling or unable to speculate from the foundation of the natural world into other realms of thinking.

  ‘What is man?’ was the old repeated question. ‘What is life?’ ‘Where are these creatures from?’ were others.

  MacCracken wondered at the top of his voice, ‘And what is their relation to the Great Flood of the Bible?’

  ‘To the what?’ The idea seemed to put Covington in a rage of stony deafness and ill-humour. ‘What have pepper-pots to do with anything?’

  ‘Did the Flood reach to all corners of the earth?’ continued MacCracken. ‘And if it did, look at the way these bugs float on water and climb to the tops of trees, and squat under rocks flat enough to stop their breathing but still emerge pretty fit, old Covington.’

  ‘The sun is hot,’ said Covington.

  One day MacCracken showed Covington a seed bug, a leaf beetle, and a native bee—holding them cupped wriggling and buzzing in his pink palm—three random specimens that Covington stared at thunderstruck.

  ‘What made you choose these—’ he spluttered— ‘Darwinii?’

  He reached out and dashed them from MacCracken’s hand. MacCracken collected the same insects up, put them in an envelope and resolved at his next opportunity to have an expert tell him what in the world was offensive about them. Their discoverer’s name? They had a pungent smell all together. He thought it was that. Deafness sharpens the remaining senses and drives an old walrus mad.

  There came a day when Covington knocked on MacCracken’s door ready to say something, and—so it chanced —MacCracken had something more important on his mind and was embroiled in literary composition, and told his housemaid to have Covington call at a different hour, or even better, the next day, if it so pleased him and goodbye.

  Covington turned instantly away. From that day the tone of the friendship changed. MacCracken began to feel its greater pull despite himself. Something more was expected of him and he knew not what. It made him grind his teeth in frustration.

  On his next return, in April, Covington’s mood of offence preceded him all the way up from Tathra to Sydney, and he declined to announce his arrival at all. When MacCracken went swimming at the end of his day’s work he found Covington sitting in a rock-shelter smoking his pipe.

  The next day, at the hour when they usually met, MacCracken found Covington engaged with the blacks of Watson’s Bay, studying their fishing nets, employing their sign language (as they needs-must with a Covington), poking into their smoky fires with a stick to see what was sizzling there: oyster, mussel, pippi, scallop or abalone. In the dusk his great laugh told MacCracken his whereabouts. ‘Do I care that you’ve found me?’ that laugh implied. ‘Rain on you, Dr MacCracken—I’ll sleep under the stars.’

  MacCracken peered into Covington’s past as best he could. There were diffuse shapes down there like shadows in the tide. De Sousa, a shipping agent who was a rival to Smith and Elder, who handled Covington’s cargoes, told MacCracken that Covington had a patron who gave him his start in Australia by sending him there in the first place.

  ‘A Spaniard, was it?’ MacCracken asked. ‘By the name of Sia Di?’

  ‘That’s no Spanish name I ever heard,’ replied De Sousa.

  ‘Nor I,’ MacCracken reflected. ‘But that is what he calls the man of his life. After which he gives a rueful grunt. There is a feeling of pride around the name, but Covington would rather spit than boast, so all I get is the annoyance.’

  There was nothing unusual about obscure patrons in that colony. If you lacked one you invented one. A letter of introduction was all that was needed to change things around for a hopeful. There was no better place on the planet for correcting reversals of fortune and ill-birth, and none worse for sucking the spirit from an overreaching hopeful, either. Origins were made to be muddied as a matter of course. The next man you met could well be a lord, though he dressed in tatters and affected a colonial style.

  So far Covington had told MacCracken nothing about his early life except that he spoke of a stepmother, a Mrs Hewtson of Mill Lane in Bedford. ‘She had a loving affection for me, I believe.’

  When MacCracken wanted more he got that lick of the lips, that beginning of words, that ducking away from straightforwardness:

  ‘I am a man of no importance. Ain’t that plain?’

  The sarcasm was extreme.

  MacCracken pictured Covington coming to his door the time of the offending rejoinder. He sensed the chance he missed. He could see the rectangular shadow looming, the hand raised to the knocker, the door opening, Covington’s mouth opening, Covington’s thunder beginning to rumble, and the words spoken by MacCracken’s housemaid sounding—‘Go away, come back later, come tomorrow, Doctor MacCracken is thinkin”—and then the jaw closing again, and the shadow creeping back, curled smaller than a beaten cur’s and gone into silence again, to be held, to be held in hurt.

  They carried on their negotiations in the open air, Covington with his hands hanging between his legs and a cowhide portfolio open on the ground. His knuckles grazed their
receipts. Those disdainful lips were always half-smiling, even in a temper. That strong nose, with its powerful, flared nostrils, was a rudder to all Covington’s mercantile instincts.

  Percentage cargoes of cattle, red cedar, mutton fat and whale oil were the currency of the friendship in that time, before Darwin’s The Origin of Species lifted a veil on MacCracken’s understanding. They discussed the breeding of sheep and dogs, of which Covington knew plenty. He brought MacCracken a terrier pup named Spearmint, to replace brainless Carl who jumped from a cliff while chasing a kangaroo. He showed MacCracken how various defects in an earlier litter were improved in the terrier by a few simple expedients involving, said Covington, ‘the wringing of small necks’. MacCracken gave Covington, as a gift, a shell collection he had made while crossing the Pacific. It made Covington smile.

  To MacCracken’s utmost surprise a day arrived when Covington bought ‘Coral Sands’ at the end of the row and came there to live. At this MacCracken discovered a Covington-like emotion knifing into him. Offence. He steamed and rolled his eyes. Covington?! If he ate raw potatoes and washed them down with earth MacCracken was ready to believe it. They were barely a village, a picturesque outpost of the great harbour. Yet they had their tone. ‘To be attracted thither was to make a declaration of an artistic hue.’ MacCracken’s was a dalliance haughty in origin. Having scorned the Europe of his fellow-Bostonians he had found something superior. Call it his own Amalfi-like cove among the tumbled cliffs of an ancient land.

  And was that Covington’s motive, too—recuperation of ill-spent youth and convalescence of spirit? MacCracken thought not! He believed Covington a nobler creature— something like a horse. His move, MacCracken thought, had nothing to do with his own delicious ambience of face and manner. By his diary it was the twenty-fifth of March 1860. MacCracken itched around the house and ranted into his breakfast (fried schnapper, fresh rolls and newly roasted coffee). Did he want Covington as an acolyte? Was Covington in love with a doctor as with an all-knowing God? What about Mrs Covington and the children MacCracken had never met? Were they to fend for themselves in the black starry nights of Pambula, where tribesmen built fires in hollow trees, and danced their corroborees clicking spears as Covington had told him, within sight of the substantial residence (with attic windows) named ‘Forest Oak’? It was where Covington wanted to be buried, on a nearby headland, but, ‘Not too soon, MacCracken, if you don’t mind.’ What about the corn flats and the seven hundred head of horned cattle being driven down from a high plateau to those grey box-log wharves that Mr Covington had built himself? Half MacCracken’s cattle they were! His risk, too! And what about the high plateau itself, where the Covingtons had a farm they all loved, and where the Covington children, older boys and younger girls, lived a natural life of horse-galloping and calf-chasing, and despised the idea of ‘town’ and their father’s ‘retreat’? Mrs Covington apparently felt the same and hated to leave her brooding hens, her milking cow and her pet cockatoo.