Bring Larks and Heroes Read online

  When Ewers came to the Government Wharf on that particular morning, he was dressed well enough to impart to Halloran and the other four in the boat, two Marine privates, two transport oarsman, that the Arts were not going to allow themselves to row up any little river on the butt-end of any earth. To convey this, he wore a corduroy coat with plenty of nap left on it, though short in the sleeves to show the long, friable forger’s wrists and hands. And he had a beaver on his head; mangey, but, beyond argument, a beaver. His equipment was carried in a golden-oak box. He found a space for it beneath the tarpaulin in the stern-sheets. Then he sat, more or less at Halloran’s feet.

  ‘You’re ready?’ asked Halloran, who was hampered by having nearly as much respect for an artist as Ewers himself had.

  ‘Yes. Thank you kindly, Corporal.’

  The fellow was a Scot, but somehow uncharacteristic, to Halloran’s eyes in any case. His great, horsy nose, broken for him by a Dutch constable at Capetown, predominated and was aimed straight down the boat. His eyes chose to stare down a factitious cleft in the air, whereas Halloran thought an artist would be all observation. Unless the fellow had some inner light. But there went the demure fingers of his right hand, doubling up the palm, caressing their own wrist. Not much inner vision in that type of thing, thought Halloran.

  He himself began to call orders like a regular boatswain. The nor-easterly thudded against the back of his head. They were afloat and all the world sounded thereby sharper and more innocent. The ample tide whipped past them with its noises of deep blue regret. Axe-blows and adze-blows and the rant of the cross-saw came to them clean and tonal. Seventy yards out from shore, Halloran was counties away from the timber-pits, where the sun lay kicking like a trapped bull-elephant, and the red dust of cedars lepered the sawyers over.

  ‘Slack on your starb’d,’ he yelled.

  The boat obeyed him, but once it had straightened out again, the two transports began to hiss like galley-slaves as they rowed. For they were regular boatmen, and Halloran was a company clerk who dimly knew the port and starboard of a desk.

  The artist’s gaze didn’t flicker as they began mocking Halloran. His sight ran aslant their skulls and rested on the olive skyline north of the river. It could have taken in two raw damned little men with sweat in their sternums and hairy navels and nubbly feet gripping the foot-hold either side of his boots. Halloran, who had seen some of the flabbergasting but redeemed ugliness in Leonardo’s sketch-book, tended to expect that these two would delight an artist, send him grabbing for his transforming charcoal.

  ‘Fourteen miles to dinner,’ said Halloran softly, to show the two and the smirking Privates that they might yet hiss and mean it.

  This morning he felt drum-tight, self-contained. He was a victor; he could foretell it. He would have his own house and wife on a sane coast. One day or night, he would drop in front of his fire the story, like a wolf cub that is vicious but manageable by a flick of the boot, of how he took convicts and an artist up a river beyond China, beyond anything.

  ‘Slack on your port,’ he sang, ‘haul on your starb’d!’

  After a time, they came into the main current. The land looked promising from the jolly-boat, the river went west quite royally, spangled with sun, miles wide. Before its massive kindliness, the coves and beaches, cliffs and islands stood back. Halloran sat beside the artist and saw that the man had begun to use his eyes.

  ‘What do you think of it?’ he had to ask.

  ‘It’s pleasant looking,’ Ewers murmured.

  ‘How does it seem to you?’

  Ewers frowned at him.

  ‘I think it seems the same to me as it seems to you, Corporal. Why do you want to know?’

  ‘I mean, would you feel moved to paint a picture of it?’

  Ewers smiled. He had long, very innocent lips.

  ‘Not today. I have no patience with it today.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Halloran. An artist was an artist to Halloran, as a poet was a poet; and when an artist said he had no patience with any given square mile of beauty, you didn’t argue.

  ‘If I painted this landscape,’ Ewers explained, ‘those who ever saw it would think that the forests behind the beaches were teeming with fruit and game. They would think that this river led to a kingly town, that Eden lay at the headwaters.’

  Eden lay at the headwaters was such a nice phrase that Halloran suspected he was listening to a recitation, perhaps part of the artist’s private journal.

  ‘Yet all it serves is to connect the world’s worst town to the world’s worst village, tyranny to tyranny, slave to slave.’

  No doubt about it; here was the starched-up rhetoric with which artists, apparently, treated of their subject-matter.

  ‘Corporal, as you were so kind as to ask me, I find this land a land of broken promises to the artist, as it is to the stomach.’

  Ewers’ pronounced lips rubbed together, very red, very much in need of each other’s fellow-feeling; both elbows went up on his knees, the fingers sought the wrists.

  ‘Of course, it’s useless for me to have ideas about the face of the land. I am under command to paint it, which solves the matter.’

  ‘Whose command would that be?’

  ‘Surgeon Partridge’s command, and Major Sabian’s. I am assigned to Surgeon Partridge, you know. I perform at his demand, and he loans me out to perform on demand for his friends. By God who made me, no wonder I perform badly.’

  ‘Painting’s a better business than hauling timber,’ Halloran suggested, ‘or the clay-pits.’

  This made the Scotsman’s cheeks go polemically hollow. He squinted at Halloran, trying to discern through precisely which pore of the flesh the barbarian in him had emerged.

  ‘That is not an argument,’ said Ewers. ‘That is the same proposition as commending patience to a man who’s been burgled, on the grounds that he may have been murdered also. Society couldn’t stand on the basis of such an argument.’

  So says the master-forger, Halloran thought. But he wouldn’t risk saying it yet. He had a dread of going into history simply as one of those abounding scoffers who appear in the lives of every artist, philosopher and saint.

  ‘In a civilized city,’ went on the master-forger, ‘you can hire a sawyer, you can hire a digger. But you cannot hire the Arts. You may patronize them and endow them; but you cannot hire them and have them at your command. Yet Surgeon Partridge is such a Goth that not knowing the Arts from, shall we say, a sow’s snout, he thinks that he can command them. He will see cloud-banks above mangrove trees, and he’ll say, “Paint that, Ewers!” Imagine!’

  ‘I’ll give you that in,’ murmured Halloran. ‘He’s the sublimest fool of a man.’

  Now the river had narrowed down between high timbered banks. There were some tenuous little beaches, much threatened by forest. Halloran was not at all sure of the way, and there were a number of inlets up which the two transports, if captious enough, could take him. But behold, they were hissing and meaning it! The Marines were reeling at their oars. He called a rest and poured water for the transports from the small cask in the stern. They gaped carefully, shipping their oars, which were of local timber and scarcely floated. One at a time, they drank lingeringly, nose in the mug. Halloran saw Ewers staring at a purple swelling on the shoulder blade of the man diagonally across from him.

  ‘I have something for that,’ said the artist.

  He leant over backwards to locate his paint-chest. It was under the tarpaulin with shirts, coats, four Phrygian forage caps, which he took upon himself to distribute by the way, three muskets and cartridge pouches. He lifted the box gently out of this alien mess and sat it on his knees. From it, he took a pear-shaped bottle that seemed to be full of claret.

  ‘This, my friend,’ he said to the transport with the swelling, ‘is the juice of the berry of a spiky shrub v
ery much like the broom. It grows all around the town. It seems that it’s a valuable antiscorbutic.’

  ‘A what-is-it?’

  ‘It stops you from getting scurvy.’

  ‘If it stops you from getting,’ the transport told him, baring his doughy gums for two solid seconds, ‘it’s a bit late to be dosing me on it.’

  The other one started snickering. His mouth wasn’t much better. One day soon, the two of them would wake up without the strength to swat themselves.

  ‘You’ll poison him, Mr Painter,’ the other one said. ‘He’s had it so long, it’s in him. He was bred on it and does a bit of breeding on it himself. His father was a sailor with a terrible hate for lime-juice. You could say, he is scurvy.’

  ‘Don’t talk rubbish,’ Halloran told them.

  They laughed together, brother oarsmen. Their peccant gums took too exorbitant a part in it for Halloran to join in.

  ‘You don’t want it?’ Ewers asked.

  ‘No,’ said the man who was scurvy. ‘Mr Painter, darling, you only come close to being what I want.’

  Halloran felt on his face their moist laughter.

  ‘Take no notice,’ he told Ewers. He stood up, beckoning to the two Marines. ‘I’m sorry, you’ll have to row Mr Ewers. I know it’s bad for an artist, but we’ll never get there if you don’t you see.’

  Halloran soon found however, that they’d never get there if Ewers did. The artist’s style with an oar was to dig it feet-deep into the river. The boat would slew upon itself, the oar would come close to being lost or pulling him off his seat or pushing him flat.

  ‘Send him back to his anti-score-what’s-it, Corporal,’ one of the scurvy oarsmen begged Halloran humourlessly, as if Ewers by his clumsiness were bringing their day of collapse forward; which, beyond doubt, he was.

  Boating was hard work by ten o’clock. The river held them in a cleft amongst rocks, away from the wind. At each bend the woods applied the weight of their numbers and brought within hearing the dementia of summer insects.

  Then, on the northern side of the river, stood a beached long-boat. There were five men near it, waist-deep in the river, dabbling after mud-oysters. Four Marines were busy at the boat itself, taking pains to store something, under the supervision of two others. One of these two others was in shirtsleeves, and the second wore an improbably spruce parade uniform of an officer of Marines. A voice from the beach hailed the jolly-boat and ordered it into shore, saying that an officer wanted a letter taken to the Crescent.

  Halloran found his coat in the muddle in the stern, and joined battle with it. The sleeves seemed to have melted into one piece with the heat; he mumbled and grabbed for a cartridge belt.

  ‘It’s that young Rowley fellow,’ he muttered to the artist. ‘Look at the silly bugger, ornamental in the wilderness.’

  The officer waited for them, dressed like a recruiter, molten at the throat where his gorget took the sun.

  ‘Beside him,’ Ewers remarked, aggrieved quite independently of Halloran, ‘is the buffoon of the sciences, Surgeon Partridge.’

  ‘Might as well take my weapon to show him I know I’ve got desperate men aboard.’

  ‘My dear God in heaven, you have a desperate man! My God in heaven you have!’

  Carrying a flint-lock, Halloran grunted and stumbled down the middle, through the warm reek of sweat and the leaden smell of half-salt, muddied water. In the shallows, the oyster-gatherers stood up and eyed the boat past as if it bore watching. Lieutenant Rowley eyed it too, waiting in scandalized elegance, back bent as ever with the mere weight of his own grace, above buttocks which seemed opulent enough to support any load.

  ‘Beach it,’ called Halloran, running up the sand to report in canvas shoes and no gaiters, but the rest of him regimental enough for the circumstances.

  Rowley was nineteen, but he had seventy-year-old grey eyes as a pledge of the Lieutenant-General or chairman of corporation that he would become. He had full lips and jaws born to become the jowls of a dominant old man.

  After Halloran had presented himself, the boy said nothing for a wearing time, waiting, with his mouth characteristically pained, for some arcane malaise to leave him be. Piles, hoped Halloran. Angry, he hoped.

  ‘It is normal,’ the boy said at last, ‘to answer an officer when you are hailed. When I failed to hear you answer me, Corporal, I thought, perhaps there is a ferryman in charge of that boat. Eh?’

  I won’t fawn on your ehs, roared a voice in Halloran’s belly.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he said.

  ‘You have – how many transports in your boat?’

  ‘Three, sir.’

  The lieutenant tapped Halloran’s flint-lock with his cane.

  ‘Are you loaded?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  The pain of this made Rowley close his eyes and nod.

  ‘Why not?’ A small perilous voice. Just the thing to frighten shit out of Irish yokels. But not out of this one.

  ‘Begging your pardon, sir, the quartermaster asked us not to use the cartridges. There are only three rounds for every Marine in the garrison.’

  ‘I know that, Corporal. Yet you have three desperate men and a boat which could, at a pinch, sail to the Dutch East Indies. Sense, Corporal, sense!’

  There was no doubt about it. Halloran’s lack of sense had brought anguish into the corners of Rowley’s eyes, and he would bear it only by calling on his reserves of good-breeding.

  ‘Load now, please!’

  The eyes remained close if not closed, as Halloran rigmaroled the butt of the flint-lock to the sand and swung his thin legs apart, trying to achieve the rangy indolence of the good driller, of the soldier never flustered. He allowed himself to be rebellious to the extent of not fumbling. When he’d bitten the cartridge and poured the charge down, he took a moment or two to flick grains of powder from the muzzle, reminding himself inevitably of the priest cleaning the paten before the Purification of the Mass. The ironic image stayed in his mind.

  Chins skyward, the men in the opaque river slopped at their industry, but everyone else was quite rapt at the small melodrama. Attending to the priming pan, Halloran thought, Sure to go off before we’re round the next bend, and cure that boatman of his scurvy. He followed the rubrics of getting the weapon to his shoulder and himself to attention.

  ‘The surgeon here,’ said Rowley immediately, ‘wants a message taken to the Crescent.’

  He took his elegance back a pace. It was a placid elegance now, his back to a hill-side whose cicada-voice roared its indifference at him. Pointlessly, since only Halloran was aware.

  Surgeon Partridge moved in. After Rowley, he seemed studiously affable.

  ‘You’re carrying some letters to Surgeon Daker, Corporal?’ he asked.

  Halloran said he was; to deny was not within his duty, though he knew that His Excellency meant to purge Daker from office, while the gentlemen meant to bolster him.

  Partridge sent a Marine to get his coat out of the shade at the top of the beach. He took from it a letter marked ‘Of Great Importance’. Whatever was a threat in the letters from Government House, this of Partridge’s was the antidote. While brash Rowley, His Excellency’s aide-de-camp, stood by without blinking.

  ‘You’ll deliver this one with it. You won’t forget?’

  The surgeon watched Halloran pocket it, Halloran feeling smeared by the meanness and discontent of all the officers.

  ‘Good!’ said the surgeon, and took no more notice of him.

  ‘Ah, Ewers,’ Partridge called then. ‘Ewers, old fellow. Come up here! I’ve something amazing to show you.’

  Ewers left the boat and came up the beach stooping. Whether it was petulance or humility or petulant humility, no one could have told. He murmured good-mornings and bowed to both gentlemen.

 
‘Ewers, I’ve done what armed detachments have failed to do.’

  ‘You have, sir?’ Ewers paused. ‘What particular thing is it which armed detachments have blundered in yet you’ve brought off?’

  ‘Ha,’ said Partridge, clipping Ewers’ ear and grinning, ‘these gentlemen-convicts, Rowley. They’re bastards!’ He slapped Ewers a second time. ‘Bastards!’

  Ewers bowed his head. From where Halloran stood, the forger’s nasal, mortified breathing could be heard.

  ‘Come on, Ewers!’ The surgeon grabbed the man’s coat-sleeve and moved him towards the long-boat. Without a glance from Rowley, Halloran was left ridiculously at attention in the midst of the beach. But even in this barren situation, he knew it would be deadly to dismiss himself or stand easy. He did not enjoy, however, being a monument without import, straight on to nothing, overlooking and flanking nothing, in line only with some mystery of pride and idiocy in that lily of a boy’s mind.

  Near the boat, Ewers was coughing; for he could tell there was some pungent rot in the bows and dreaded to be brought abruptly upon any monstrosity.

  ‘In the tarpaulin there,’ said Partridge.

  It seemed that an immense baby had been wrapped in canvas, with a peak for its head. The surgeon pulled the peak aside. Ewers saw two native heads nodding. They were blind with the blind, mouthing purposelessness of snails. Their faces had the same marks as Mr Calverley’s savage, and their hair was fibrous with muck and hung in ropes. Days before, before the smallpox found them, they had corded strips of raw fish around their foreheads, and the sun had fried them, and the runnels of fish oil had caked them against insects. Surgeon Partridge now saw fit to lean down and cut these cords away with a pocket-knife, saying, ‘It’s the sting of death that’s the only sting they’ll be worried by now.’

  ‘What do you want them for, sir?’ asked Ewers. He tried not to voice his numb incomprehension, not wanting to be cuffed again for his sensibilities. The man of talent, if that was what he was, stood and waited for an answer as for a crust.