‘You must learn to smile again,’ he told her, lifting his glass.
‘I do try,’ she said.
‘Were you so very upset about your engagement?’
She nodded. ‘I loved Peter enough to want him for my husband. But after he lost all that money, father forbade it. Most of the money had been lent to him by my uncle; some by my mother. He said he was going to invest in a mining company, and that we should all be paid back a hundred times over.’
‘And instead, he put it on horses?’
‘I don’t know why,’ she said. There was a sparkle of tears in her eyes. ‘I suppose he wanted to impress me, and win my father over.’
‘Fathers can be a problem,’ said Eyre. ‘Especially fathers who worship their daughters, and want only the very best for them.’
May sipped her punch, and glanced up at Eyre, and tried to smile. Eyre didn’t know if it was the effect of the heat, or the noise, or the music, but he suddenly began to think that he might have taken quite a fancy to May. There was something about her cupid’s-bow lips, something tempting because they looked so sweet, and naive. And he found himself admiring her breasts, and imagining what they must look like when they were uncupped from her gown. And he thought of her body, too, white-skinned and chubby, with fleshy hips and thighs between which a man could happily suffocate. A virgin, too. Well brought up and well protected; and sentimental to a fault.
‘May,’ he said, ‘you and I must dance. We must endeavour to be happy together, even though we are both feeling sad. Just for tonight, we must forget what might have happened, and try to think of what could happen.’
May sipped a little more of her drink, and twiddled the stem of her glass around. ‘Daisy said that you’re a vicar’s son.’
‘Well, Daisy’s quite right.’
‘She said that you’re very religious, when the mood takes you; or so Christopher told her.’
‘Religious? Well, I believe in God, and the sacrament of Holy Communion, if that’s what she meant.’
‘Well, I don’t know. She said that you could be rather dogged, at times. I hope you don’t mind my saying that.’
Eyre stood up, and walked around the verandah. ‘Dogged? I suppose I can be rather dogged when I feel seriously about something. But I don’t count that altogether wrong, do you? Doggedness in the defence of what is right, and what is just, and in the upholding of Christian principles—well, you can hardly call that a vice.’
‘Daisy said something about an Aborigine boy; how you wanted to give him an Aborigine funeral.’
Eyre nodded slowly. ‘I do. That’s one of the reasons I’ve come here tonight.’
‘But Aborigines are savages.’
‘You may think so. Most people do, and I suppose that they can be forgiven for it. The government does nothing to help us understand them. But it seems to me that the Aborigines are one of the most magical and religious of peoples on the face of the earth. Just because they live in innocence and nakedness, that doesn’t mean that they’re savages. Adam and Eve lived in innocence and nakedness; and far from being savages, they were the most divine of all human beings ever; nearer to God than anybody today could imagine. It could very well be that Aborigines are the results of God’s attempt to start again: to create for a second time a perfectly innocent society. If that is so, and it could be so, then I believe that it is our duty to protect the Aborigines and to prevent them from losing their innocence. Perhaps the Garden of Eden now lies here, in the unexplored centre of Australia. Perhaps the significance of this strange country is divine, as well as geographical. Whatever it is, I believe that we should be cautious, and respectful, and that we should be very wary of imposing our own way of life on the blackfellows. We, after all, are the descendants of Adam and Eve: we are the sinful children of sinners. The Aborigines know no sin; and to that extent we should envy them. To that extent, they are our superiors.’
May stared at him. It was quite plain that she could hardly believe what he had said.
Eyre stopped pacing, and reached out his hand towards her. ‘Don’t let’s talk of such serious matters tonight; why don’t you dance with me? They’re playing Le Pantalon.’
‘I—ah—I think I’d rather not,’ said May, considerably flustered. ‘Really.’
‘Because of what I said about Aborigines?’
‘Well—how can you possibly suggest that an Aborigine could be your own superior? Or mine?’ She was flushed, and she didn’t know what to do with her glass of punch.
‘May—what I said—it’s only a theory. But Australia is such an extraordinary country that you can’t close up your mind to any possibility. Why does it exist at all, this peculiar continent with foxes that fly but birds that won’t? We know hardly anything of it, especially the interior; the very centre of it; how can we make any assumptions at all? It’s a work of God; there’s no doubt of that at all. But what a work!’
May said, ‘Please, don’t talk like that. It upsets me.’
‘Why? Because it could be true?’
‘It makes me feel … uncomfortable, that’s all.’
Eyre knelt down beside her, on one knee. ‘In that case, forgive me. I brought you here to enjoy yourself, not to feel uncomfortable. I know that I might sound rather odd, but the truth is that I adore Australia and all of its mysteries; and I truly believe that there’s a meaning behind it being here; and a reason for its existence.’
May was just about to answer him, when they were interrupted by a spattering of applause from the garden. Eyre turned around in surprise, and saw a tall man in sidewhiskers walking towards him across the lawn, clapping his hands as he came. The man had an intelligent, amused face; and eyes that were bright with self-confidence and pleasure. Nobody could have called him handsome. But his plainness was commanding in its own particular way; and as Eyre stood up to greet him, he knew at once that here was a man both to trust and to like.
‘You must accept my apologies for eavesdropping on you,’ the man said, warmly. ‘But you are the first person I have heard for many a long month who has dared to question the very being of this continent; and to acknowledge what it has to offer us now as well as what it may surrender in the future.’
The man stepped up on to the verandah, bowed deeply to May and kissed her hand, and then shook hands with Eyre. His handshake was very firm and strong, and Eyre noticed that there was a white scar across the base of his thumb, and another scar across his forehead.
‘Charles Sturt,’ the man announced himself. ‘I believe I was supposed to be guest of honour here tonight; but I’m afraid that my nerve rather failed me.’
‘I’m honoured to know you, sir,’ said Eyre. ‘My name is Eyre Walker, and this young lady is Miss May Cameron.’
Sturt took May’s hand again, and kissed it; allowing himself a closer inspection of her creamy-white cleavage. ‘Charmed,’ he said, richly.
Sturt dragged over a chair, and sat himself down on it, uninvited. ‘I’m supposed to be the most social of creatures; but believe me that’s only a façade. I enjoy applause, and general admiration. Don’t we all? But the thought of spending the entire evening recounting my expeditions to endless numbers of open-mouthed ladies and their sceptical husbands … well, it’s been almost enough to give me a headache.’
‘You surprise me, sir,’ said Eyre.
‘Well, I often surprise myself,’ Sturt replied. He reached into his pocket, and took out a silver cigar-case, and opened it. ‘But I consider that to be one of the essentials of a worthwhile life; to keep on surprising everybody, including oneself.’
He said, ‘You won’t mind if I smoke?’ and lit up a small cigar. ‘I have a particular weakness for the indigenous tobacco. One of the tastes I acquired on the Murrumbidgee.’
Inside the reception room, another fierce quadrille had struck up; and the floor was drummed by dancing feet.
‘I must say that I think your theory about Australia has some merit,’ remarked Sturt, leaning back in his cha
ir, and blowing out strong-smelling smoke. ‘Whatever seems to hold good in the northern hemisphere seems to be quite reversed here; and I have wondered many times whether there is any divine logic behind such a reversal. The very essence of this land is its upside-downness, if I might call it that; and to discover its secrets one must first of all invert every interpretive facility that one possesses.’
‘I read about your expedition of 1829,’ Eyre told him. ‘I was much impressed.’
Sturt’s exploration of the Murrumbidgee and Murray Rivers was already legendary. He had set out from Sydney with a 27 foot whaleboat carried on horse-drawn drays; and in this and in another boat which they had hewn out a giant forest tree, he and his companions had rowed for six weeks along the Murrumbidgee and Murray Rivers, until they had reached the coast of the Indian Ocean, thirty minutes south of Adelaide at Lake Alexandrina. When they had arrived there, however, there had been no ship to meet them, and with their supplies dwindling, they had been obliged to row all the way back to where they had started from, over 800 miles, upstream.
Sturt had gone temporarily blind during the last days of the expedition, and some of his companions had collapsed in delirium. But all had survived; and when Sturt returned to Sydney with his stories of the spectacular cliffs and idyllic lakes that they had seen, and the sweeping floods on the Murray, and the ‘vast concourse’ of Aborigines who had followed them, clamouring and shouting and shaking their spears he had immediately been fêted as a hero, and a great explorer.
His eyes were better now; although Eyre noticed that they still had a slightly stony look about them. His enthusiasm for exploration, though, was as fervent as ever.
‘I long now to open up the interior,’ he said, smoking in quick little puffs. ‘If there is an inland sea there, I want to sail on it before I die. If there is a Garden of Eden there, as you suggest, then I wish to walk in it, close to God. It is one of the last great mysteries of the globe; a secret that only the Aborigines know; and perhaps even they have never succeeded in penetrating to the very core of the continent.’
Eyre said, ‘It was about Aborigines that I wished to speak to you.’
‘Well, I’m not sure that I’m your man,’ said Sturt; still affable, but suddenly and noticeably less interested. ‘Your Aborigine is a sad and particular creature, and there are many who know him better than I.’
‘But you encountered so many of them when you were exploring the Murrumbidgee and the Murray. You said so in your reports.’
‘I read them, too,’ ventured May. ‘They sounded an extraordinarily warlike people to say the least.’
Sturt coughed, and brushed ash from his trousers. They were threatening, and raucous, the first time we saw them. They lined up on the banks of the river, and up on the cliffs, and chanted war-songs at us; and for a time I must admit that we were very alarmed. They were shining with grease, and they had painted themselves like skeletons and ghosts. Their women appeared to have capsised a whole bucket of whitewash over their heads. But, in the end, they did little more than stamp at us, and shout, and then retreat. They didn’t hurt us; not once; and when at last we did manage to make some kind of contact with them, and talk to them by signs and gestures, we found that they were a very unfortunate people indeed. Rich in superstition and myth, no doubt of that. But scratching a living from food that would horrify you, if I were to tell you of it, and wandering from place to place with a restlessness that totally precludes the development of any kind of civilisation. They were riddled with syphilitic diseases, even the very youngest of them; in fact some of the sufferers were so young that I can only pray that they were born in that diseased condition. I agree with you, Mr Walker, that the Garden of Eden may indeed be found in the centre of this continent; but I must say that I doubt very strongly whether the Aboriginals are the truly innocent people whom God intended to dwell there.’
May, who had been listening to this with some discomfort, took Eyre’s arm and said, ‘Shall we dance now? I really would rather dance.’
Eyre said, ‘Of course. But please let me first ask Captain Sturt if he knows how a particular Aborigine might be found.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ asked Sturt. ‘A particular Aborigine?’
‘That is what I wanted to ask you. I have to find a chief, a Wirangu I think, whose name is Yonguldye, The Darkness.’
‘Now then,’ said Sturt, ‘that may present some problems. The blackfellow will stay in each location for only a limited time, according to the season, and according to what magical and traditional obligations have brought him there. In September, for example, many of the Wirangu will be seen at Woocalla Rock; where they will hold a corroboree to mark the victory of Joolunga over the Lizard-Man, long ago in the time they call the dreaming. Then, they will be gone. All you will find of them will be their ashes and the bones of the animals they have eaten.’
Eyre said, ‘It may seem curious to you, Captain Sturt; even a little desperate, perhaps, but I recently made a promise to a dying Aborigine boy that I would ensure his burial according to Aborigine custom. He told me before he died that I should look for the one they called The Darkness.’
‘Eyre,’ said May, tugging at his arm again, ‘can’t you speak of this later? They’re playing ‘Dufftown Ladies.’
But Eyre held back for a moment, and waited for Sturt to answer him. After a while, Sturt looked up with a mixed expression on his face; as if only Eyre himself could resolve how Sturt was going to feel about him.
‘Why should a young man like yourself feel obligated to a blackfellow?’
‘I made a promise, sir, that’s all. And I have to confess that, in a way, I was responsible for his dying.’
‘Has he been buried already?’
‘So I understand; but according to the Christian service.’
‘But are you not a Christian yourself?’
‘My father was a vicar, sir, in Derbyshire.’
Sturt sucked at his cigar, so that the tip of it brightened like a red-hot cinder. ‘There is more to this, don’t you think, than simply a promise of burial to one unfortunate black boy?’
Eyre stared at Sturt carefully. ‘There may well be,’ although he didn’t fully understand what Sturt was implying.
Sturt nodded. ‘I had with me two or three young men like you when I rowed down the Murray. You, Mr Walker, have the calling. You know that, don’t you?’
‘The calling, sir?’
Sturt raised an arm, and swept it around to suggest the far and unseen horizons of Australia. ‘You have the calling of the great and terrible interior. You may be a new chum; you may be fresh to Australia; but you are not a coastsquatter, like so many; afraid even to contemplate the Ghastly Blank that lies to the north of us. Ah, you have the vocation my boy! I can sense it! All you have to determine now is whether you have the strength.’
Eyre said nothing. Sturt had touched too many silent strings inside his mind; and for the first time played for him the inaudible but irresistible music of real ambition. He began to see that his promise to Yanluga may have been far more significant than a simple commitment to one dying boy; it may have been a promise to himself, and to his future life, and to the unknown continent of Australia.
His life of girls and bicycles seemed suddenly frivolous; and without any purpose or satisfaction. But even when he had been cycling, and flirting, and drinking home-made beer with Dogger McConnell, something must have been happening within him; some deep and vibrant change. Why had he felt so responsible to Yanluga? Why had he agreed to let Arthur Mortlock go free? Perhaps he had sensed in them, as Captain Sturt had sensed in him, that they were true children of the Australian continent, and that it was they and their descendants who would reveal at last the frightening and mystagogic significance of Terra Australis Incognita.
At that moment, Mr Brough stepped out on to the terrace, and cried, ‘Why there you are, Captain Sturt! We’ve been a-hunting for you everywhere! Do come inside, the ladies are all agog to meet you.’
>
Sturt took a last suck at his cigar, and then tossed it glowing into the acacia bushes. ‘Very well,’ he agreed, trying not to sound too resigned about it. Then he took May’s hand, and kissed it again, and shook hands with Eyre, and said, ‘We must discuss this some more. Where do you think I might find you?’
‘I work at the port, sir, for the South Australian Company.’
‘Well, that’s capital, for I shall be down at the wharf tomorrow morning. If you can persuade the company to allow you a few minutes’ spare time; there are one or two matters we could discuss. And I might be able to assist you in locating your mysterious Mr Darkness.’
Sturt went inside, to be greeted by spontaneous applause, and a quick burst from the orchestra of For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow, immediately followed by The Rose of Quebec, which Eyre supposed to be an obscure acknowledgement of Sturt’s military service in Canada, just before Waterloo.
‘Now then,’ he said to May, ‘perhaps we can dance. I’m sorry to have spent so much time talking about exploration, and Aborigines.’
‘Well, it was a pleasure to meet Captain Sturt,’ said May. But then she squeezed Eyre’s hand, and added, ‘The only trouble is that men like you and he, well, you perplex me.’
Eyre ushered her in through the open French doors. The room was hot and crowded and even noisier than before, with a new and shriller chorus of voices now as the men drank too much punch and the women tried to attract the attention of Captain Sturt.
‘You mustn’t let such things worry you,’ Eyre told May. ‘Men like Captain Sturt and I, we perplex ourselves.’
Ten
Inexplicably, Christopher appeared to be bitterly put out that Eyre had already been speaking to Sturt, and that Sturt had done nothing to dissuade Eyre from going in search of Chief Yonguldye. To show his annoyance, he stamped his feet furiously as he danced a quadrille with Daisy, and glared at Eyre with such wrath that a dear old lady in a pearl head-dress rapped Eyre’s elbow with her fan, and said, ‘I do believe that gentleman is trying to attract your attention, young man. Do you think he might be in pain?’
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