by Clare Clark
Major Burke met Maribel at the small side gate to the Wild West through which he had once smuggled the Princess of Wales. When the cab pulled up, he stepped forward to open the door for her. He wore his usual wideawake hat and, beneath his coat, a waistcoat of scarlet silk decorated in appliqué with a lurid pattern of orange and purple. Maribel gazed at it in astonishment. A hat could not help being wideawake in the company of a waistcoat like that.
‘I am delighted to see you, ma’am,’ Burke said, lifting his hat. ‘We feared that perhaps you had forgotten us.’
‘Of course not. Thank you for accommodating me.’
‘Please, it is our privilege to have you here.’ He bowed. ‘It is not every day we play host to glamorous lady photographers.’
Maribel smiled. His courtesies were almost as shameless as his waistcoats.
‘Then let us both make of the most of it,’ she said.
‘Amen to that. Now where do you wish to start?’
The translator’s name was Molloy, an American originally of Irish extraction who, according to Burke, spoke more than ten different Indian dialects. Molloy was a lean, sharp-faced man with a gold watch chain and a derby hat. His eyes were set slightly too close together. When Burke introduced him to Maribel he bowed, doffing his hat, and kissed her hand. The wet press of his lips put Maribel in mind of egg white, which in turn made her think of Mr Webster. The association did not favour Mr Molloy.
Molloy, Burke and Maribel walked together slowly around the Indian camp. The wind had dropped and a thin sunlight strained through a muslin of cloud. From behind the rock-strewn embankments came the submerged rattle and whistle of trains entering the Earls Court cutting. The camp was much smaller than Maribel remembered, no more than fifteen tepees for the approximately one hundred Indian performers and their handful of children. Only those squaws with a role in the show had been permitted to travel with the company.
The Indians were drawn from a number of tribes, not only Sioux but Cheyenne, Pawnee, Kiowa and Arapaho. In the past these tribes had sustained their own enmities. Now they squatted together outside their tepees or sprawled on benches hewn from split trees. The men’s black hair fell in hanks over their shoulders and their naturally harsh features were further brutalised by slashes of vivid paint in every shade and hue. One face was bright yellow, the eyes outlined in blue and the nose adorned with a brilliant red streak. Another was blue, yet another green with yellow stripes across the cheeks. Beside the men, two tangle-haired infants scratched in the dust with a stick. A few of the women sewed, garments of fabric or leather piled in their laps, their beads bright drops of colour in the flat white light. The rest stared ahead of them or down at the ground, their hands slack between their knees.
‘They are grown rather accustomed to visitors,’ said Burke.
The tepees were arranged in a circle, their sides elaborately decorated with patterns and pictures of buffalo and birds. The ground about them was hard and dusty, the grass worn away, and the canvas was stained with soot. And yet there was none of the usual detritus of camp life that she had seen with Edward in Mexico, no smoke-blackened pots and pans, no stone circles or raked-over fires.
‘They eat in the dining tent,’ Burke explained. ‘We get through six hundred pounds of fresh meat a day.’
‘It is as though they are waiting for a train that will never run,’ Maribel said.
‘That is the life of the travelling show,’ he agreed cheerfully.
‘What exactly is it you are looking for?’ Molloy asked her. It was the first time he had spoken. His voice was high-pitched, slightly nasal, and he drew out his words like elastic, stretching the vowels and pressing down into the inflections. Like a whining child, thought Maribel, or a woman wheedling a favour.
‘For what’s there,’ she answered.
The men took her to the stables, where several Indians and many more white-skinned men busied themselves with horses, and to the blacksmith’s forge. The blacksmith too was a white man, his eyes blue in his dirty face, but several Indians squatted there, watching him as he went about his work. Another held the head of a wild-eyed bay, murmuring something unintelligible under his breath as the blacksmith nailed a new shoe to the horse’s nearside back hoof. Behind the forge men unloaded wagons full of straw and animal feed. Not one of them was a redskin.
‘The Indians do not do work of this sort?’ Maribel asked Burke.
‘Our Indians are performers, not labourers. We hire navvies for the heavy work.’
They circled the warehouses, following the path to the Medicine Tent, a kind of sweat house filled with steam made by pouring water over heated stones. When she asked if she might go inside, Burke shook his head. The Medicine Tent, he said, was for the use of men only.
‘In the old days the Indians would take a sweat as a ritual purification before battle,’ Molloy explained. ‘Here it is a place for them to relax and unwind. The Sioux call it inikagapi.’
They walked around the dining hall. The sides of the hall were rolled up. On the beaten earth floor battered trestle tables were set out in rows, like a school.
‘The tent behind the mess tent there is the sanatorium,’ Burke said. ‘Mercifully we have had little cause to use it.’
Maribel looked at the tent. She could feel her pulse in the roots of her teeth.
‘Your doctors,’ she said. ‘They work there?’
Burke raised an eyebrow.
‘That is the idea.’
She hesitated.
‘If I wished, needed – for my work – to meet your doctors, might that be arranged?’
‘You’ll be disappointed, I’m afraid. We feared a red-skinned medicine man might cause more trouble than he cured so we hired them here. Both our men are English.’
‘You can say that again,’ Molloy said.
Burke grinned.
‘Nothing wrong with pride in your homeland,’ he said. ‘If it weren’t for that we’d not have made a dime.’
A little later Burke excused himself. It was Molloy, the translator, who remained with Maribel as she set up her equipment in the corner of a small tent provided for her use. He leaned against the table and watched her as she worked, his arms crossed over his chest, his foot swinging backwards and forwards.
‘Do the children go to school?’ she asked him as she polished the plate cover.
Molloy shrugged.
‘The kids are in the show, them that are old enough. It don’t leave much time for schooling.’
‘And how old is old enough?’
‘The youngest’d be Master Bennie, I guess. He’s coming up five and plenty grave enough for adulthood. It’s one of them peculiar things with Indians. Born ancient, the lot of ’em, yet even the wizened-up ones stay kids their whole lives.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Damned if I know,’ Molloy said.
Maribel looked up, startled by the coarseness of his language. He saw her looking but he did not apologise. He hummed under his breath and his leg swung like a pendulum. Maribel busied herself with her plates, stacking them in their cases in her battered satchel.
‘You ready?’ he asked her.
‘Not quite.’
Molloy drummed his fingers on the table.
‘Major Burke tells me you speak a dozen Indian languages,’ Maribel said to distract him.
‘Something like that, I guess.’
‘Where did you learn so many?’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘The best ones always are.’
Molloy fished his watch from his pocket, studied it, shook it. He held it to his ear and, frowning, wound it, rubbing its face on his waistcoat before setting it back in his pocket again.
‘I ran away from home,’ he said at last. ‘When I was a kid. A Lakota chieftain accepted me into his tribe.’
‘You ran away to live with the Indians?’
‘I ran away because I couldn’t stay where I was. Unless that’s happened to a body he ain’t never going
to understand it but it’s what happened to me. I was thirteen years old and a runt too. Not so much as a hair on my chin. The Indians took me in, taught me to fend for myself.’
Despite the chief ’s kindness Molloy had not stayed long with that first tribe. He had drifted from place to place, and from tribe to tribe, learning their customs and their languages. The Indians he met taught him to ride and to hunt. He grew skilful with a bow and arrow. When he was old enough he joined the US Army as a courier. They gave him a gun, for protection. It was not long before his language skills were noticed by senior officers and he was promoted. He acted as guide to the soldiers and as an interpreter. It was a better job with better pay.
‘So you went over to the other side.’
‘A man’s gotta make a living.’
‘But you turned informer. You betrayed the very people who had taken you in.’
‘It wasn’t that way. The old life was over by then. The West was as good as won. The Indians were promised that if they ceded their tribal territories they’d be given land, rations, schools. A future. The way I saw it, it was the best chance they had. I didn’t know the government’d end up treating ’em like dogs and half of them starving to death for lack of food. How was I to know that? If they’d ended up with one quarter of what they’d been promised they’d have been just fine.’
Maribel was silent. She slipped the leather strap of her camera around her neck, feeling the weight of the camera against her belly.
‘I didn’t know,’ she said.
Molloy shrugged, brushing dust from his lapels. Then he jammed his derby hat a little lower on his head and stood up.
‘You ready now?’ he asked. ‘Then let’s get this show on the road.’
17
IN THE DARKROOM SHE watched as the first of her photographs bloomed in its bath of developer. When the exposure was complete she extracted it, the tips of her gloved fingers touching only the very edges of the glass, and set it in the stop bath for a moment before sliding it cautiously into the tray of hardening fixer. She leaned forward, peering in the low light at the submerged plate. Her breath stirred the fixer, causing the dark shadows of the picture to shimmer and separate on its surface like droplets of oil.
She moved a little, shifting the gloom of her own faint shadow, and tried not to breathe. The surface of the bath steadied. Beneath it, as though through cheap glass, two men squatted in front of a tepee. Their faces were unpainted, their hair loose. One wore a striped blanket around his shoulders, the other a woollen overcoat, its arms empty flaps at his sides. Both men looked directly at the camera. Their dark faces were grave, almost stern. Their mouths turned down and there were deep shadows beneath their cheekbones. They might have been carved from wood. The tepee behind them was decorated with pictures of buffalo. Behind the tepee the rocky embankment rose steeply, and behind the embankment, crenellated against the white sky, stretched a row of chimney pots, one tipped with a twist of dark smoke. In the corner of the photograph, just visible, was a railway signal, its striped arm raised in salute.
It would not make a beautiful photograph. The day had been overcast, the light flat and insipid. There was no mystery in the picture, no grace, nothing to lift the image from ordinary representation into the realm of art. There was no connection between subject and observer as there was always in the photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron, no tension, no intimacy. The scene was not even picturesque. On the ground beside the Indians was an abandoned Wild West programme, its cover tattered with use. But it was a good photograph. She had managed somehow to capture in it something she had not previously understood. A people on the brink of extinction did not look different because there was anything different about them. They were as they had always been, their grief and their gravity and their primitive instincts as old as the earth. They looked different because the world for which they had been made no longer existed. They were bewigged judges evicted from their courtroom, sleepwalkers who had woken to find themselves on a busy street in nothing but their nightgowns. They were actors in their costumes and their greasepaint, riding home on the Clapham Omnibus.
It had taken some persuading to convince Mr Molloy to lend the taller of the Indians his coat. It was clear that the brave shared Molloy’s reluctance. Flatly refusing to put his arms in the sleeves, he slung the coat around his shoulders and muttered something Mr Molloy omitted to translate. It was Maribel who had found the Wild West programme and put it in the foreground of the shot, Maribel who had calculated that, if she stood upon a trestle, the chimneys would be visible above the embankment. The result was an image that, if not strictly true, had the weight of truth about it.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
It was nonsense of course, a great deal of Keats was nonsense and never more so than when he attempted aphorism, but all the same Maribel felt a prickle of anticipation as she slid the plate into the wash tray. Photography might not be among the higher arts, might not, to some, be an art at all but only a chemical reaction, a scientific tool whose place was in the lab oratory. Still, it would be something, she thought, to open people’s eyes, to make them see, so that, like a theatre-goer in one of the boxes too close to the stage, they found themselves looking not only at the stage but into the half-light of the wings.
Hurriedly she set about the next plate. Even if she worked quickly the process of development would take her several hours. Major Burke had warned her that time was limited, that the first of the day’s two performances began at three o’clock and the Indians would be required to get ready, so, with Mr Molloy’s assistance and a boy from a refreshment stall pressed into help with the props, Maribel had worked like a demon, contriving to pack the work of several days into as many hours: a brave in front of the bookstall, surrounded by brightly covered cowboy adventures; a herd of buffalo with pelts like mothy carpets grazing in their enclosure over which towered an almost-finished mansion block, its roof cross-hatched with scaffold; a squaw gingerly holding a borrowed safety bicycle. She had had Molloy ask the squaw to straighten her arms, to frown at the new fangled contraption.
‘So that the bicycle almost falls over, yes, just like that. The more uncomfortable she looks, the better.’
Now, in Mr Pidgeon’s darkroom, she thought of the advertisement she had seen recently on the end of a terrace of houses, ‘PEARS SOAP’ painted in curling letters several feet tall, and underneath, more soberly, ‘MATCHLESS FOR THE COMPLEXION’. She imagined two dark-faced squaws standing beneath it, their faces sexless and unsmiling, dark-faced papooses in their arms, and wondered if Burke might permit her to take the squaws to Hammersmith.
They had been packing up when Molloy accosted a slight gentleman in a dark suit. His narrow face was trimmed with dark side whiskers that curved towards the corners of his mouth and on his nose he wore a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles.
‘Hey, Doc,’ Molloy called out to him. ‘There’s someone here wants to meet you.’
The gentleman cast a glance in Maribel’s direction and his face twitched, an almost imperceptible frown. He walked towards them slowly. He wore a sombre suit of black cloth and around his hat a band of black silk.
‘Mrs Campbell Lowe, this is Dr Coffin, medical director here at the Wild West. Didn’t you want to ask him something?’
‘Dr Coffin,’ Maribel said faintly.
The doctor gave a peremptory bow. He was hardly taller than she was. On the chain of his fob watch he wore a grosgrain mourning ribbon.
‘Madam.’ His voice was startling, a rich baritone much too large for his body. ‘What is it you wish to know?’
Maribel moved her lips but her voice did not come. The doctor frowned at Molloy, not troubling to conceal his impatience.
‘Are you unwell, madam?’ Molloy asked.
Maribel shook her head, moistening her lips with the tip of her tongue. Her head swam.
‘No, thank you. I just – I suppose – I
wondered – do the Indians suffer from distempers unknown to white men?’
He answered carefully, the words rumbling in his chest, but Maribel hardly listened. She held tightly to the handle of her satchel, battling to maintain an expression of polite curiosity.
‘I hope that answers your question?’
‘Why, yes, yes, thank you.’
‘Then good day, madam.’ Once again he lifted his hat. ‘It was a pleasure to meet you.’
Maribel nodded. The doctor turned away.
‘My sympathies,’ she blurted. ‘For your loss.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Was it – I don’t mean to – it was not a close relative, I hope?’
A shadow passed over Dr Coffin’s face.
‘My daughter,’ he said ‘She lived only a few days.’
‘Oh God.’ Covering her mouth with her hands Maribel stared at the doctor and the tears in her eyes spilled over and fell down her cheeks. Reaching out, she touched the doctor very lightly on the sleeve. He flinched and turned away, nodding at Molloy.
‘If that is all, perhaps you would excuse me –’
Maribel thought of the tiny white coffin, of Ida, her fierce little face shrunken with grief, and her heart twisted.
‘I lost a son,’ she said. ‘He was six weeks old.’
‘Then you know our grief,’ the doctor said stiffly.
Maribel shook her head, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No one could know that.’
There was a silence. Beside Maribel Mr Molloy sucked his teeth.
‘Well,’ the doctor said. ‘Good day, madam.’
‘Good day, Doctor. May God grant you peace. You and your wife.’
In the gloom of the darkroom Maribel fumbled one of the plates, her fingers clumsy in their canvas gloves, and again tears pricked behind her eyes. At breakfast Edward had asked her if she might be coming down with something. She had told him only that she was tired, which was true. Whenever she closed her eyes she saw Ida. When they were children Ida had made coffins for dead birds and mice and rabbits that she found in the fields and woods. Edith had wanted to conduct burial services with prayers and hymns and solemn readings from the Bible but Ida had refused. She buried them with handfuls of stones and wild flowers and lit fires on the turned earth.