After they had eaten, Mrs Pope took Minil to bathe outside in the shed while Mr Pope poured out a basinful of hot water for Eyre on the kitchen flags. Mr Pope drew up a kitchen chair, and lit a pipe; and said, ‘As soon as you feel refreshed enough, we ought to take you to see some of our local dignitaries. It would hardly do for me to keep you to myself.’
Eyre turned his back on Mr Pope as he washed. Mr Pope puffed away for a while, and then said, ‘Some bad scars you have there, if I’m not being too personal, Mr Walker.’
Eyre looked down at his chest, patterned with the purplish welts of ngora, and at his circumcised and subincised penis. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We had some difficult times in the desert.’
He finished soaping himself, uncomfortably aware that although he had been welcomed back into white society for less than an hour, he had already denied his Aboriginal kinship for the first time.
Later, when he was washed and shaved, and dressed in one of Mr Pope’s Saturday suits, which felt impossibly huge and baggy, and which seemed to weigh on his body like a heap of woollen blankets, Eyre was taken to shake hands with the neighbours; and then Mr Pope suggested they visit Albany’s town hall, and make themselves known to everybody there. Eyre was tired, but curiously elated, and he agreed.
‘Minil should come with me,’ he said.
‘Well,’ said Mrs Pope, fussily tying her bonnet, ‘the poor lamb’s fast asleep now; and I think it better not to wake her, don’t you? And you are the explorer, aren’t you? The achievement has been yours; and yours alone.’
‘I couldn’t have done it without Minil,’ Eyre told her.
‘In that case, she should be proud to have had such an appreciative employer,’ smiled Mrs Pope. ‘Where are my spectacles, Frederick? Have you seen my spectacles?’
‘I wasn’t her employer,’ said Eyre, although Mrs Pope wasn’t really listening to him. ‘I was her—’
He looked away. Outside the front door of the house, some of the neighbours had already gathered, and he could hear them chattering loudly; and some of them were whistling and cheering. Mr Pope’s neighbours must have spread the news to all the surrounding streets, because the excitement sounded considerable; and there was the sound of running feet on the puddly road, and the rattle and creak of carriages.
‘You were her what Mr Walker?’ Mrs Pope asked brightly, staring at him with her milky-blue eyes.
Eyre said, ‘It doesn’t matter. I suppose things are rather different in the outback.’
‘I should say so,’ put in Mr Pope. ‘Now, listen to that hullaballoo outside!’
‘Come on,’ said Eyre. ‘We mustn’t disappoint them, must we?’
Mr Pope opened the front door, and there was a burst of cheering and clapping; and it looked as if the whole street was packed from end to end with people, tossing up their hats and singing and dancing, and waving Union Jacks. There was even a one-man band there, with accordion and knee-cymbals and a dancing monkey.
When Eyre stepped out into the Pope’s front garden, there was a deafening roar of welcome and enthusiasm; and he stood bewildered for a while until Mr Pope raised one of his arms for him, as if he had just won a fisticuffs match; and then the crowd screamed and whistled and cheered again. Two young burly men came in through the white-painted gate, and grinned, ‘Come on, Mr Walker, we’ll chair you!’ and between them they lifted Eyre up on to their shoulders, and carried him right into the middle of the throng, so that the men could grasp his hands and slap at his thighs and the ladies could blow him kisses.
Then, in spite of his shouts of protest, they bore him off down the street, and across the market-place, where more people came running out to see what all the cheering was about.
They took him down to the docks, where stevedores in their brown aprons and peaked caps put down their bales and their grappling-hooks and applauded him as if they were opera-goers at the finale of Cosi Fan Tutte. ‘He’s arrived! He’s alive!’ That was the cry everywhere. ‘He’s arrived! Eyre Walker’s arrived!’ And nobody seemed to care whether he had discovered the inland sea or not; or whether or not it was possible to drive cattle from Adelaide to Albany, or sheep from Albany to Adelaide. All they cared about was Eyre; and his extraordinary journey, and the fact that he had walked and ridden all the way across the treeless plains of Southern Australia to arrive here alive.
He was finally allowed down to the ground outside the steps of the civic hall, where he was greeted by one top-hatted official after another; shaking hundreds of hands; and where even the loudest of speechmakers was unable to make himself heard over the cheering and shouting. From out on King George’s Sound there was a dull, pressurised booming; one boom after another; and that was Her Majesty’s naval supply ship Walrus Bay according Eyre an eleven-gun salute, followed by four ruffles on the drums.
He was showered with flowers; and then taken inside the civic hall for champagne, and more hand-shaking, although the crowd outside refused to go away; and after a while an impromptu silver-band struck up with ‘My Lily and My Love’ and ‘Dragoons’.
The editor of the Albany newspaper came up at last, in a tight-fitting blue coat, and a yellow-checkered waistcoat, with chestnut moustaches perfectly waxed into points.
‘Well, Mr Walker, my name’s William Dundas, of the Albany Mail. What an achievement.’
Eyre felt battered and out of breath, and said, ‘You’ll excuse me if I sit down.’
‘Of course,’ said Dundas, and drew him out a chair. Eyre sat down, and a smiling man in a very high collar poured him some more champagne.
‘I’m surprised that I seem to have excited so much interest,’ said Eyre.
‘Well,’ said Dundas, taking out a small cigar, ‘You’re a hero now. A genuine hero, in a country that’s rather short of heroes. You mustn’t blame us all for making rather much of you.’
‘There is no route from Adelaide to Albany suitable for stock,’ said Eyre.
‘Bad country, hm?’
‘The worst. Desert, mallee scrub, mud. No running water for over eight hundred miles.’
‘Then how on earth did you survive? What did you drink?’
‘I’m beginning to wonder. But, there are springs if you know where to find them. Muddy pools of water that you have to dig for. In extremes, you can dig for frogs.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I never had to do it; but I was told about it. There are certain frogs that retain water in their bodies. You can dig them up and squeeze them out, if you’re really thirsty.’
Dundas reached into his pocket for notepaper, and a pencil. ‘Did the Aborigines teach you how to do that?’
‘They taught me many things,’ said Eyre.
‘And what would you say was the most important thing that they taught you?’
Eyre lowered his head. The champagne had already begun to make him feel drunk; what with the noise and the jostling and the music, and the sudden sense of suffocation he felt, enclosed inside a room after months of living in the open air.
He said, haltingly, ‘The most important thing that they taught me was that the white man’s way of life is blind, greedy, and completely lacking in spiritual values. They taught me that there is magic in the world, and mystery; if only we can be humble enough to commune with our surroundings, and to respect what God has given us.’
Dundas tapped his pencil against his thumbnail. Then he glanced behind him to make sure that nobody was listening, and leaned forward, and said to Eyre in a cologne-smelling undertone, ‘Listen, Mr Walker. You must be very tired after your journey. Perhaps a little lightheaded. I think it might be a good idea if I made sure that you got back to wherever it is that you’re staying; and that you didn’t say very much more about magic or mystery or spiritual values. You’re a hero now. If I were you, I’d take full advantage of it; and play it for what it’s worth. And if I were you, I’d think twice before I upset people. You won’t change them, after all, no matter what you discovered in the outback. Tell them ho
w you were taught to squeeze frogs. Tell them how you roasted emus, and how you ate lizards. That’s all very fine. Guaranteed to make the gels shudder. Good dinner-party stuff. Fine newspaper copy. But don’t try to convert them with all this talk about greed, and blindness, and whatnot. Doesn’t go down well.’
Eyre was silent. A fat woman with a coarse English accent and a very purple dress came up and kissed him, without being asked, right on the nose. ‘You’re a hero! she squealed.
Eyre raised his eyes and looked at Dundas with tiredness and resignation. Dundas shrugged, and twiddled at his moustache.
‘Yes,’ said Eyre. ‘I’m a hero.’
When a carriage returned him at last to the Pope’s house, Mrs Pope greeted him on the doorstep with the news that Minil had gone. There was no message; nothing. She had told Chucky that she had gone to see her relatives at Swan River.
Eyre opened the door of the bedroom where Minil had been sleeping that afternoon, and stepped inside. The bed was crumpled, the sheets twisted. He sat down on it, and traced with the palm of his hand the wrinkles that her sleeping had made.
‘Minil,’ he whispered to himself, in the dusk of that room. He looked towards the window; and outside, in the blueness of dusk, he saw a gum-tree dipping and waving in the north-westerly breeze. She had left nothing behind, only these twists and wrinkles on the bed. He sat there for a few minutes, trying to think of her; but somehow he couldn’t quite remember what her face looked like, or how she felt, or even what she had said to him, the very last time they had spoken.
He got up at last, and went to the window, and looked out. Mr Pope came into the room, smelling of tobacco, and stood there for a while, and then said, ‘Is everything all right? Mrs Pope tells me that the blacky girl’s gone.’
‘Yes,’ said Eyre, without turning around. ‘Everything’s all right. And, yes,’ he said, ‘the blacky girl’s gone.’
‘You’ll want some supper, then,’ said Mr Pope. ‘Chicken casserole do you, with dumplings? And how about a beer? I’m glad of the excuse, to tell you the truth. Mrs Pope doesn’t usually allow me a beer, not until Saturday. But, you know, seeing as how it’s a special occasion.’
‘I suppose it is,’ said Eyre. ‘Yes, you’re very kind. I’ll have a beer.’
Thirty-Five
He arrived back in Adelaide three weeks later on the merchant-ship Primrose; which was laden with grain and ironware from England. The people of Albany had given him everything he might possibly have needed; from a constant supply of French champagne to shoes and shirts and tailor-made coats. When he had left King George’s Sound, more than half the population had turned out to cheer him and wave him goodbye, and sparkling maroons had been fired into the grey July sky. Now he stood in the wind on the Primrose’s poop, dressed rather formally in a black tail-coat, with dark grey britches, and a two-inch collar, with a black tie, and a pearl stud which had been presented to him by the Albany Commerce Club.
The Primrose leaned against the stiff north-westerly, her timbers creaking like the stays of an elderly woman. Then, across the ruffled waters of the Gulf of St Vincent, he saw the foaming outline of Henley Beach, and the outer harbour; and the masts of all the vessels that were moored there.
As the Primrose slowly rounded the point, her sails flapping against the wind, a rocket was fired from the end of the new McLaren wharf; and as soon as she passed the harbour entrance, Eyre saw that the water was clustered with scores and scores of small boats, lighters and bumboats and skiffs, bobbing and dipping, all of them flying bunting and pennants, and crowded from stem to stern with waving and cheering people. There was a sharp crackling noise as Chinese fireworks were let off all along the quayside, and then there was a roar of welcome and approval from the wharf where the Primrose would tie up; as hundreds of excited people poured along it from the direction of the Port Road.
‘Well, seems as if they’re anticipatin’ you,’ remarked the Primrose’s mate, hawking loudly. He himself had never been further ashore anywhere in Australia than Kermode Street in Adelaide for the British Tavern, or the worst alleys off George Street, in Sydney, for the boozers and the cribs, and he understood nothing of what Eyre had achieved. ‘They’re on one button here,’ Eyre had heard him say to his captain, two days out of Albany. ‘A fellow like that takes a stroll in the countryside, and they treat him like he’s God-Amighty.’
Eyre said, ‘You should be proud of your seamanship, to have got us here on the due date. They sent the Ellen on ahead of us, to tell them that we were expected to arrive today, and so we have. So take some of these cheers for yourself, master-mate.’
‘Oh, bung it,’ said the master-mate, irritably; although Eyre could tell that he was quite pleased by the compliment.
The Primrose was towed in by rowing-boat, and tied up, and from his place up on the poop, Eyre waved his hat and acknowledged the cheers and shouts from the huge assembly below. He saw Captain Sturt standing at the front, looking severe; and next to him a tall man with silver hair and deep-set eyes who looked important, but whom Eyre was unable to recognise. There was no sign of Christopher, nor of Lathrop Lindsay.
As soon as the gangplank went down, Captain Sturt and the tall man with silver hair were escorted aboard by marines; and up to the deck where Eyre was still waving and smiling. Flowers flew through the air and littered the planks all around Eyre’s feet.
‘Well, sir,’ said Captain Sturt pushing aside some of the blossoms with his shoe. He was wearing a black jacket and a crimson satin waistcoat that was far too tight for him, and although he was grinning he looked particularly displeased; as if he had bitten into an apple and found it unbearably sour.
Eyre carried on waving, and nodding, and smiling. ‘Well, yourself, Captain,’ he replied.
‘It seems as if you have made something of a name for yourself,’ said Captain Sturt. ‘Allow me to congratulate you.’
‘I don’t think I really deserve your congratulations, do you?’ asked Eyre; and Captain Sturt did not fail to miss the sharp double meaning of what he was saying.
‘You have undertaken and completed a great journey of discovery, Mr Walker,’ put in the tall man with the silver hair. His voice was deep and rich as plum-pudding, and his chins bulged over his necktie. ‘You have crossed a desert that no white explorer has crossed before. That in itself is worthy of praise.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Eyre, indicating that he had no idea who this gentleman might be.
‘This is Governor George Grey,’ said Captain Sturt.
‘Then Governor Gawler is no longer with us?’
‘He returned to England in May,’ explained Governor Grey. ‘Let us say that it was simply a matter of having drawn a little too enthusiastically on the London Commissioners. Although, of course, one has to acknowledge that in his short time here he achieved great things.’
Eyre shook hands with Governor Grey; but somehow he and Captain Sturt contrived not to.
‘You must be tired,’ said Sturt. ‘Perhaps you would like to come back to my house and take some luncheon.’
‘Yes,’ said Eyre, ‘I think I’d like that, thank you. But not right away. First of all, I think a procession is called for. That is, if I have your permission, governor.’
‘By all means,’ nodded Governor Grey. ‘It isn’t every day that we have such cause for celebration. Today you are Adelaide’s most celebrated son, Mr Walker. It is only befitting that we should fête you.’
Eyre went to shake hands with the Primrose’s captain, and to wave to the crew, and then he slowly descended the gangplank to the wharf, with both arms raised in acknowledgement of the crowd’s tremendous applause.
As he had been in Albany, he was lifted off his feet by enthusiastic young swells, and carried shoulder-high along the wharf, while flowers flew all around him, and fireworks popped off, and so many black top-hats were tossed into the air that the crowd looked for a while like a bubbling, spitting tar-pit.
A carriage was waiting for him outside
the port, decked with shrubbery and flowers; and then with seven or eight young men clinging on to the sides, it was driven ceremoniously towards the town centre, followed on either flank by cheering riders and rattling gigs and running children. Eyre turned around and looked behind him, and saw to his amazement and delight that there must have been well over three thousand people following him, hurraying and laughing and waving flags.
At the western end of North Terrace, where the road from Port Adelaide ran at a sharp diagonal into the city, they were met with a fanfare by Captain Wintergreen and his musicians, who had formed themselves into a marching-band, twenty-five strong, especially to celebrate Eyre’s arrival. The driver of Eyre’s carriage had been told to proceed straight to Government House; and so had Captain Wintergreen; but Eyre shouted to the driver, ‘Left, left, over the bridge!’ The carriage turned left and rumbled over the bridge, and behind it came Captain Wintergreen and his band, drumming their drums and blowing their trumpets and clashing their cymbals. Behind them, still cheering, still waving their flags, came the first of the riders who had followed them from the wharf; marines and dragoons and cocky young gentlemen in plumed hats. Then the gigs and the broughams and the rest of the carriages, crowded with Adelaide’s prettiest girls, in their yellows and pinks and bright blues, spinning their umbrellas and singing like birds. Then the great rush of people on foot: children and farmboys and clerks and shop-assistants and Aborigines, skipping and clapping and chanting.
‘Now, make for Waikerie Lodge!’ Eyre instructed his driver, and with a nod of his head the fellow turned the carriage along the street towards Lathrop Lindsay’s house.
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