It is difficult for me to describe George Bruce Barton with any kind of honest detachment. To conjure up his image is to conjure up such a host of vile memories that his features are instantly distorted by them—made monstrous and inhuman, like a savage mask. Nevertheless, I shall try to do him justice, however little he might deserve it. I shall concede that, in those days, he was not an ill-looking man, before the depredations of strong liquor were quite so evident in his mottled complexion and swollen lineaments.
He was fairly short, with a fine head of thick, light, wavy hair. Beneath these heavy locks his face was shaped like an axe-head, bisected by a slightly flattened nose. He had fair, freckled skin— heavily tanned—and blue eyes set in such a morass of seams and wrinkles that he could have been peering out of a pair of unmade beds. His teeth were crooked, but otherwise quite good—large and a little brown, like tombstones. When unshaven, his beard glinted gold and grey against the heavy line of his jaw.
There. I have set down my description, and it is not a bad one. It is reasonable. Objective. Yet my hand trembled as I wrote it; I felt ill and faint just contemplating those teeth—that nose. I know now why Louisa was so intemperate when she wrote her novel Myra. That was in ’64, a good twenty years after her final encounter with George Barton, but her feelings were still as strong as they had ever been. I saw this at once, the moment I came upon her villain, Guy Kershaw. ‘To others Guy Kershaw was repulsive; not bad looking, perhaps, but badly and coarsely featured; not stupid, but with low sharpness.’ This was a delineation from his early life; as the novel unfolded, Guy’s appearance did not improve. ‘A rather short man,’ Louisa wrote, ‘with a low, bloated face, a face on which gross sins and brutal selfishness had left their indelible stamp—such a drear waste of sin and vulgarity, with a glaring masquerade of gentility about it.’
It warmed me, to some extent—this torrent of rage and disgust. It confirmed me in my own beliefs. Louisa might have been young when the curse of George Barton descended upon our heads, but she wasn’t too young to remember. No doubt he haunted her dreams for years, much as he did mine.
But Louisa’s earlier memories must have been warped by her later ones, for George Barton was not so ‘badly and coarsely featured’ in that first year. Though his manner may have been wanting, his appearance was unexceptionable. Had it not been, I would have shown myself less eager to approach him with my good wishes for his improved health. I would have run from him, as I later did. I would not have thought him such a romantic figure.
Or perhaps ‘romantic’ is not precisely the word. Perhaps the word ‘pitiable’ is more correct. At eight years old, I had not yet stuffed my head with the rubbishy extracts to be found in journals such as The Mirror. I was not inclined, therefore, to cast George Barton in a role for which he was most ill suited: namely, the role of wounded hero. At that age, I pitied him for the hurt that he had sustained. I did not, however, see anything Byronic in his situation, nor admire the pallor of his cheek, nor regard his morose fits as in any way intriguing, or suggestive of hidden depths. An older girl might have imagined some sort of bush duel, or perhaps a brave act of chivalry. I did not. I merely felt sorry for Mr Barton because he was so evidently unwell.
He did not even rise from his bed until the day after his return—and then only for a short time. It was at about eleven o’clock. I was in the breakfast room with James and Emily, hunched over a botanical sketch, when Mr Barton appeared in the doorway. He looked ghastly: his face was rigid, his eyes were bloodshot, and his hands were covered in scabs and bruises. But he had taken some trouble with his clothes, and had combed his thick, wavy hair down flat.
‘Oh! Good morning, Mr Barton,’ said I, upon observing him. ‘Morning,’ he rumbled in response, his gaze flitting around the room uneasily.
‘Good morning, Mr Barton,’ James and Emily chorused, eager for any distraction that might present itself. George Barton did not reply. He seemed at a loss. Pushing an errant lock from his forehead, he finally said: ‘Is yer mother not here?’
‘Mama is unwell,’ I explained. It was true; my mother had spent the greater portion of the last day in her bedroom.
‘Ah,’ he said. Then he turned on his heel, and walked back upstairs. As he did so, I noticed something that was to haunt me for some time afterwards.
A spot of blood had seeped through the back of his shirt.
That afternoon, two mounted police arrived from Bong Bong. They caused great excitement at Oldbury. James was almost beside himself, while many of the assigned men seemed to melt into the thick bush that cloaked Gingenbullen. In contrast, we children were not backward in coming forward, though I was slightly alarmed to learn that one of the policemen was Chief Constable Cheater. I had always thought it an odd name for a police constable, and was worried that James might laugh. James, however, did not see the irony of Mr Cheater’s name. He was far too engrossed in Sergeant Quigley’s pistol.
The two policemen were conducted into the sitting room, where tea was served while they waited for my mother. She finally came down with Mr Barton, who was a truly pitiful object. His colour was shocking. I noticed that his hands shook.
My mother also seemed distressed. Her voice was faint as she told me to take James and Emily off somewhere to play. I was most disappointed. But my mother would brook no argument; I could see it in the flint of her eye. So I obeyed, reluctantly, and heard nothing of what passed between the four adults in the sitting room. Eavesdropping was quite impossible, I fear, partly because James could not be trusted to keep silent, and partly because the wooden boards in the vestibule creaked so.
The policemen departed about an hour later. I did not see Mr Barton again until the following day, when I glimpsed him several times. I saw him talking to my mother outside the kitchen; I saw him smoking a Dudeen pipe on the veranda; and I saw him watching a team of assigned men yard the more recently acquired cattle. If you know anything about cattle, you will know that yarding them—and in particular, counting them through the gate—is an accomplishment that requires some skill and concentration. It is also a fine sight, in its way, and will often draw an audience. But I was struck by the intensity of the overseer’s regard. He did not attempt to direct or interfere with the proceedings. He simply stood there, motionless, watching with narrowed eyes.
Even I could see that his silent presence was having a bad effect on the men. Though they did not look his way, they seemed acutely conscious of him; they were tense and nervous. At the time, I assumed that he was merely doing his job as an overseer. Now I wonder if he was searching their faces for signs of guilt.
By the third day, Mr Barton was looking much better. He must have been feeling much better as well, because I heard him haranguing the assigned men at intervals throughout the morning. I realised, then, that the rough edge of Mr Barton’s tongue had been an integral part of Oldbury for some time—that his volleys of abuse were as familiar as the singing of magpies and the lowing of cattle.
He also joined my family for dinner. It occurs to me that this might not have been an unprecedented appearance. For all I know, he had joined us for dinner before, on occasions that have slipped my mind. If so, he cannot have said much. Or perhaps what he did say was of such little interest that I simply disregarded it.
This time, however, I paid more attention. I was even slightly wary. My mother was still recovering from her ordeal, and I had seen little of her. I was therefore reluctant to share her with any intruder, no matter how unfortunate he might have been. The very fact that Mr Barton was present, sitting at the other end of the table, meant that my mother’s attention was divided between her children and her guest. Indeed, her whole manner changed. She became skittish and distracted. As for Mr Barton, his manner was downright odd. Between long spells of silence, he would suddenly erupt into short bursts of what might almost be described as banter. When my mother asked him how he liked his pork, he replied: ‘I like it better now than I did when it was alive. For that pig was allus a vi
cious beast, and I’d rather eat it than it should eat me.’
Emily looked at our guest with a kind of horrified condescension.
‘Oh, Mr Barton,’ she said, ‘pigs don’t eat people.’
‘Do they not?’ he rejoined, in a jocular tone, but with narrowed eyes. ‘Then what of the fellow I knew in Sydney, who slept one night in a gutter, dead drunk, and woke up with half his face eaten off by stray hogs?’
‘Dear me,’ said my mother, with an awkward laugh. ‘I protest, Mr Barton, you will put us all off our food.’
‘No need for that, Mrs Atkinson,’ was his response. ‘For this pig on our plates was never fed a face in its life. Though there’s many hereabouts you might think had been sharpening its teeth on their heads, just to look at ’em.’
My mother smiled. Emily, however, was not so amused. Seeing her puckered brow, I declared: ‘You must not worry, Emily. If pigs are properly fed, they will not eat people. And our pigs are properly fed.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ said my mother. ‘Your dear father raised his experimental peas here solely as pig food. And of course they receive all our scraps.’
‘But not the pork scraps, Mama!’ Emily exclaimed. ‘We do not feed them to each other, surely?’
‘Never fret yerself, Miss Emily,’ Mr Barton answered before my mother could. ‘A pig’s flesh is more tender than its feelings. It’ll not jibe at week-old horse, so why should it turn up its snout at its own dear mother? Given the chance, a pig would eat off its own tail. That’s my experience. You’re wasting your pity on a pig.’
Perhaps he was right. Perhaps a pig’s flesh is more tender than its feelings. But the same could not be said for my sister Emily—nor, indeed, for the rest of us. My mother had seen to that. From our earliest years we had been taught Dryden’s little rubric ‘Take not the life you cannot give/For all things have an equal right to live’. In obedience to it, we had often carried beetles away from carnivorous ants, and placed them in the boughs of small trees.
As a consequence, we were not at all happy to hear Mr Barton speaking thus.
‘Why, a farrowing sow will eat her own offspring,’ Mr Barton continued, almost with relish. ‘Is that not so, Mrs Atkinson?’
‘I believe it has occurred,’ my mother was obliged to concede, for she had a great respect for the laws of Nature. ‘But I hardly think it a topic suitable for children.’
Whereupon Mr Barton subsided, with a rather graceless shrug. It seemed to me that my mother had put him in his place. Later, however, I saw them pass each other on the stairs. As they did so, Mr Barton stopped to whisper in my mother’s ear, and press her arm above the elbow. She responded with such a long, earnest, compliant look, before nodding, that I felt a pang of something very like jealousy.
The following day our overseer went to Swanton, but returned in the late afternoon. And on the fourth of February he was present at our house to welcome Mr Charles Throsby, who was then a local magistrate.
You should understand that my family had been acquainted with the Throsbys for some years. My father had also served on the Sutton Forest bench. In 1826, he and my mother had crossed to New South Wales on the same ship as Mr Throsby’s sister. It was only a few hours’ ride to Throsby Park up the Old Argyle Road from Sutton Forest, so the Throsbys were our neighbours, in a manner of speaking. Mr Throsby was even a Trustee of the Sutton Forest chapel, though he later built his own church at Bong Bong. I was distantly acquainted with his children, and with their governess, Miss Mary McRae.
Since my father’s death, however, there had been less communication between our two families. The Throsbys did not much care for my mother. At the time, I did not quite know what to make of this, and wondered if the Throsbys’ objections had to do with my mother’s outspokenness. It was not until much later that I discovered the truth behind my mother’s cool relations with the Throsbys. Here was yet another subject that she refused to discuss, except in the most general terms. ‘Mrs Throsby,’ she said once or twice, in her most ironic tone, ‘is very much taken up, these days, with all her children and her Sydney guests.’
This is not to accuse the Throsbys of being uncivil. Mr Charles Throsby, in particular, was never cold or snubbing. It was not in his nature to concern himself with social pettiness of that kind, for he was a very active, busy man, morally upright and practical-minded. In those days, before his stroke, he was still fit and able, though slight of build; his large mouth and wideset eyes were enormously expressive of good sense and determination. When he arrived at Oldbury that Thursday morning, he positively leapt from his horse, and greeted all the children by name—even Louisa. He was short with the servants, but not impolite. His movements were swift and contained as he removed various writing implements from his saddlebags. One got the impression that, while concerned about my mother’s state of mind, he could afford to waste no time on idle chit-chat.
Within minutes he had summoned Mr Barton, accepted an offer of tea, and disappeared into the sitting room with my mother—who impressed me as being rather reluctant to accompany him. There was a short discussion on the veranda about the necessity of her presence. ‘Mr Barton,’ she protested, ‘was the injured party.’
But Mr Throsby held firm, and the three of them were soon closeted away together. Once again, I heard nothing of what was said. Not that I really needed to. What was said soon became widely known, and even now I cannot tell you why. I understand why the statement was taken, for Mr Throsby had a job to do. Presumably, the document was required by the Colonial Secretary, to whom it was eventually dispatched. My question is: why did it end up in the Sydney Herald? And for what possible reason was my mother’s name included at all?
I still think that Mr Throsby could have exercised discretion, with regard to my mother. Had he really no idea of the scandal that would follow?
Or was it that he simply did not care?
Five
My uncle, John Atkinson, arrived in this country just two years after his older brother. For a while he and my father lived in the same house. Then my father put at his disposal a portion of the Oldbury estate, which John renamed Mereworth. A house was built on Mereworth, but after my father’s death there was some confusion as to Uncle John’s entitlements. His grant had not been made final, you see. The whole business had been conducted with a carelessness that was uncharacteristic of my father. What’s more, both brothers were known in the relevant documents, ambiguously, as ‘J. Atkinson’. Therefore Mereworth was returned to my father’s estate, leaving Uncle John in straitened circumstances.
I know all this because my mother explained it to me, years after the fact, when we were living in Sydney. She described herself as ‘perfectly blameless’ in the affair, and my uncle as ‘unreasonably intransigent’. According to my mother, the villains of the piece had been her co-executors, Mr Alexander Berry and Mr John Coghill. It was they, she said, who had thrown up objections to Uncle John’s inheritance. She herself had always regarded John as the true owner of Mereworth. ‘And yet he took against me,’ she declared, ‘believing that I wanted it all for myself. When I could not have been more sympathetic.’ Thanks to Messrs Berry and Coghill, my mother lost forever the loving support of her brother-in-law—or so she claimed.
Perhaps it was the truth. I really cannot tell. For all I know, my uncle never liked her, and was freed from the obligation of dealing with her when my father died. Or perhaps his relations with my father were already strained. (This would account for the sloppy handling of my uncle’s grant, and the fact that he was not appointed executor in my father’s will.) It is also possible that my mother disliked Uncle John. She was certainly outraged when he built an inn near Mereworth, and secured a licence for it. On the one hand, it is possible that there was a family history of jealousy and bad feeling with which I am entirely unacquainted. On the other hand, Messrs Berry and Coghill were just the sort of men who, upon finding someone objectionable, would have worked tirelessly in the pursuit of that person’s utter ruin—
as my mother soon came to realise on her own account.
Whatever the cause of the estrangement between my mother and my uncle, it had already occurred by February 1836. As a result, I only ever saw my cousin John at church on Sundays. He was four years my senior, and far more worldly: his confidence far outstripped mine, for he was already imbued with a certain kind of authority that stemmed from long acquaintance with the stockhorse, and with stockmen. Perhaps you are not familiar with this peculiar brand of confidence, which displays itself less and less, nowadays, as the wild interior of this country is progressively parcelled up and covered over. Once, you would have come upon it at every station, inn and waterhole; the colony was then well supplied with innumerable young men—the sons of settlers and squatters both—whose lives were entirely devoted to pursuits that revolved around the driving, yarding, tracking and branding of cattle.
Louisa was always ready to condemn such an existence. In book after book, she warned against its perils: against the ‘mere animal existence’ of constant activity and motion; against the development of physical as opposed to moral strength. While she acknowledged the stockboy’s ‘iron power’ and skill, she deplored his want of spiritual culture, which restricted him to conversations about wise dogs, brave horses, sturdy bullocks and fierce bush cattle. ‘Their one enjoyment a race, their occupation stock-keeping, their conversation horsey, their social value nil,’ was how she put it.
In this last instance, she was speaking through the mouth of a concerned father, as delineated in Tom Hellicar’s Children. But I recognised Louisa’s voice—or rather, I recognised the voice of my mother, who had nothing but contempt for the sort of mind that found stock work congenial. They used to tire me, the pair of them, with their talk of ‘hurrying lads to ruin’ and ‘monotonous occupations removed from all thought’. As if cutting out a couple of head from the drove could be accomplished just as easily with a carved block of wood in the saddle!
The Dark Mountain Page 5