Corroboree

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Why, that’s Mr Lindsay’s place,’ cried one young Narangy, who was hanging on to Eyre’s carriage by the folded-down hood. ‘He’s going to be as mad as a cut snake if you parade past him with this lot! He’s your worstest enemy; allowing for what he’s been saying about you, since you’ve been gone!’

  ‘Well, we shall see about that,’ Eyre declared. He leaned forward, tapped the coachman on the shoulder, and told him to draw over to the side of the road, and stop. The driver did as he was bid, and then Eyre stepped down from the carriage, and waited while Captain Wintergreen and his marching-band caught up with them. They were playing ‘Sons of Caledonia’, one of the most stirring marches they knew, with plenty of drumstick whirling and cymbal-clashing, and their trumpets and bugles were wildly off-key.

  Eyre neatly stepped in, right in front of Captain Winter-green, and led the parade alongside the white fencing which surrounded the lawns of Waikerie Lodge, until he reached the front gate. Then he cried, ‘Right—turn!’ and held out his right hand, and marched confidently up the path to Lathrop Lindsay’s front door.

  Every window of the house was flung open; and at every window an astonished face appeared. In the drawing-room window, Lathrop Lindsay himself, in his emerald-green smoking-jacket, his mouth wide open. In the day-room window, Mrs Lindsay, her hair awry, clutching her tatting. Upstairs, in her parlour window, Charlotte, in a sugar-pink afternoon gown.

  ‘Around the house!’ Eyre cried to Captain Wintergreen; and with a flourish of bugles the marching-band split right down the middle into two columns, one parading smartly around the left-hand side of the house, and the other parading around the right. Each of these columns was followed by a stream of cheering, dancing, applauding people, some on horseback, one or two on donkeys, but most of them on foot, swarming and swelling into the gardens of Waikerie Lodge, hundred upon hundred of them, until the house was completely besieged with people, none of them knowing why they were there, but all of them festive and happy, and ready for a great celebration.

  The marching-band appeared from around the back of the house, and formed up on the front steps, marching on the spot, and playing ‘Scotland The Brave’; which in less apoplectic times was Lathrop Lindsay’s favourite tune.

  ‘Mr Walker!’ screamed Lathrop.

  Eyre raised his hand to Captain Wintergreen, and the band died away in a few raggedy hoots, toots, and jingles.

  ‘Mr Walker!’ screamed Lathrop, again. His face was plum-coloured with wrath.

  Those nearest to the house heard him screaming, and cried ‘Oooooh!’ in response, like a music-hall audience.

  ‘Mr Walker!’ screamed Lathrop, for the third time.

  ‘Mr Walker!’ cried the crowd, in huge amusement. ‘Mr Walker! Ooooh! Mr Walker!’ And then they burst out cheering and clapping and laughing again, and shouted, ‘Mr Walker! Speech from Mr Walker! Let’s hear him! Come on now, Mr Walker!’

  Eyre climbed up two or three steps, and raised both hands. There was more applause now, and somebody let off a tremendous chain of fire-crackers, that jumped and spat and frightened all the horses.

  ‘Listen!’ Eyre shouted. ‘Listen!’ And at last, still hooting and laughing occasionally, the crowd quietened down. Lathrop stood in his drawing-room window shaking with disbelief and rage, while Mrs Lindsay had clapped both hands over her mouth, as if she were suppressing a high shriek.

  ‘I have travelled as far north to the interior of Australia as a man can go!’ Eyre cried. More shouting, more clapping, and some cries of ‘bravo! bravo, that man!’

  Then Eyre said, ‘I have travelled westwards, all the way from the spring called Woocalla to the town of Albany, through desert and scrub, over a thousand miles!’

  Now the cheering was so loud that Eyre found it almost impossible to think. His blood was racing and his face was flushed; and even though he had been given nothing to drink, he felt as if he were intoxicated.

  ‘I have travelled all that way,’ he shouted, his voice becoming hoarse from the strain, ‘I have travelled all that way… just to claim the hand of the most beautiful girl in Adelaide, Miss Charlotte Lindsay!’

  The crowd screamed their delight and approval. Hats flew up into the air again, even umbrellas and bonnets, and the band rushed into one of those little pieces called a ‘hurry’, which were usually used to accompany a variety player on to the stage, or off again.

  Eyre raised his hands for silence once again. Some of the women in the crowd were openly weeping, and two girls and an elderly grocer had fainted, and had to be laid under the wattle-bushes.

  ‘There is one thing that I must do before I can claim Miss Lindsay’s hand, however,’ Eyre announced. ‘And that is to ask the forgiveness of her father, Mr Lathrop Lindsay; whom I have caused embarrassment and pain, not just once, but several times; and each time worse than the last. I admit to him that there was a time when I was a brash, ill-mannered, and incontinent young man, and I can only ask that he can find it somewhere in that generous heart of his to forgive me.’

  Eyre slowly turned towards Lathrop, and held out his hand, as dramatically as Adam holding out his hand towards God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Lathrop, framed in his window, stared at Eyre in complete horror.

  ‘Forgive him!’ cried a wag, in the front of the crowd. But then the cry was taken up again and again, more seriously, until nearly a thousand citizens of Adelaide were standing in Lathrop’s garden, trampling his wattles and his orchids, crushing his carefully rolled lawns, roaring ‘Forgive him! Forgive him! Forgive him!’

  Lathrop disappeared from the window and eventually appeared at the front door. Behind him, halfway down the stairs, Eyre could see Charlotte although her face was hidden in shadow. Until he had conquered Lathrop, however, he didn’t dare to look at her. She had meant so much to him for so long that if he were to lose her now, when she was almost within his grasp, he would rather not remember her too sharply.

  ‘Mr Lindsay,’ said Eyre, ‘I come to you today not as an impertinent young clerk who was too ebullient to mind his manners. I come to you as a man who has crossed a whole continent; and who has been matured and humbled by his experiences. I come to you as a man who has nurtured his love for your daughter through indescribable exploits, through starvation and thirst and terrible loneliness. I come to you as a man who is ready to apologise to you; but also as a man who has gained strength, and courage, and also a lasting reputation.’

  At that moment, Captain Sturt forced his way through to the front of the crowd. Lathrop was about to reply to Eyre, but whatever he was going to say, Sturt raised a cautionary and advisory finger to him, and he swallowed the words before he had spoken them, as if they were liver-pills. He stepped heavily forward, and stared at Eyre with the expression of a man who cannot believe the persistence of his personal ill-fortune. There was sweat on his forehead, and his lower lip juddered with all the emotion that Captain Sturt had forbidden him to express.

  He knew that he was beaten. The crowd was so enthusiastic about Eyre; Eyre was Adelaide’s darling of the day; and if he were to slam the door in Eyre’s face and refuse to forgive him, the consequences for his business and social life would be disastrous, at least for the next few months, if not for very much longer. Adelaide took warmly to its heroes; but treated its villains with unrelenting disfavour and scorn.

  Captain Sturt was not even a friend of Lathrop’s. In fact, he despised him. But Sturt was anxious not to see an important municipal businessman sent to Coventry; and he was also anxious to seek Eyre’s favour too. There was much unfinished business between them, Eyre and Captain Sturt; and Captain Sturt was not particularly relishing the idea of settling it especially if Eyre was in an uncompromising mood.

  Eyre held out his hand, and Lathrop took it. His grip was like cold moulded suet. ‘I accept your apologies,’ he said loudly, looking around at the crowd, and attempting a smile. ‘Though God alone knows why,’ he muttered, under his breath.

  And then, loudly again, �
��I will also consider giving you permission to marry my daughter Charlotte, if she is so disposed. Obviously, we shall need a little time to consider the matter more seriously, away from this… circus.’

  The roar that rose from the crowd made the sash-windows rattle in their casements; and two horses threw their riders, leaped over the picket-fence surrounding Lathrop’s garden, and bolted down the road. The band played ‘Here Comes the Bride’ in double-time, and Charlotte ran down the last few steps of the staircase, and came running out on silk slippers with her arms wide, her blonde curls bouncing and be-ribboned, as deliciously pretty and as small and as soft as ever before, and threw herself with a squeal into Eyre’s arms, and hugged him tight, and kissed him, and wept and wept.

  ‘I thought you were dead!’ she cried, ‘Oh, Eyre! My darling! I thought all this time you were dead!’

  He held her close to him, feeling her warmth, breathing in her perfume. Then, very slowly, very strongly, he kissed her; until her eyelids trembled and closed, and her little upraised hand started to clench itself involuntarily into a fist.

  Behind her, Lathrop snorted in disgust, and loudly blew snuff and phlegm out of his nose with an extra-large handkerchief. Captain Sturt watched with his arms folded and his face quite flinty.

  ‘Thirty-three cheers for Eyre Walker and for Charlotte Lindsay!’ cried one of the narangies. ‘And thirty-three cheers for Captain Sturt and Mr Lathrop Lindsay!’

  The crowd cheered and cheered and cheered again; until, defeated and despondent, and very close to angry tears, Lathrop Lindsay had to turn away and go back inside his house. Eyre stood with Charlotte on the steps, raising his hands again and again, and kissing Charlotte to show the whole of Adelaide how much he loved her.

  At last, as the crowd began to disperse, and make their way back towards the river, and to Government House, where George Grey had promised band music and free drinks for everybody, Eyre took Charlotte into the hallway, and held both of her hands.

  ‘I’ve asked your father,’ he said. ‘Now I want to ask you.’

  There were tears in her eyes, but he wouldn’t release her hands so that she could wipe them away.

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I will.’

  Thirty-Six

  They lunched very late, and neither of them were particularly hungry. They ate a little cold mutton and beetroot salad; and shared a bottle of ‘37 claret, which had either travelled badly, or been bad to begin with. The afternoon light filtered through the lace curtains as weakly as the light from half-remembered days gone by; and somehow it made Captain Sturt look even older, and tireder.

  ‘George said that he’s planning a proper municipal reception for next Thursday,’ said Captain Sturt. ‘Dancing, tables out on the lawns, even races. I won a three-legged race you know once, when I was in France, with the Army of Occupation. They gave me a goose. Well, that was the prize.’

  ‘You were telling me about Christopher Willis,’ Eyre reminded him. Captain Sturt seemed to be ready to discuss almost anything at all, except Eyre’s expedition.

  Sturt sniffed, and helped himself to more wine. ‘Your friend Christopher Willis, yes. From what I gather he acted with considerable fortitude. That’s the word. He arrived back here in Adelaide only six days after he had left you out on the salt lake; and he was in very good spirits, though anxious, of course, that you and Mr McConnell should not come to any harm. He set off the very next morning with the boy Weeip and five other blackfellows to leave you those provisions. I gather that he even waited out there for a day, to see if you would appear. But, well, you didn’t, and so he came back.’

  ‘Did he tell you anything about Arthur Mortlock?’

  ‘Only that he had become grievously sick, and died.’

  ‘What about Mr Chatto and Mr Rose?’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘Those two bounty-hunters who came looking for Arthur the day we left.’

  Captain Sturt shook his head. ‘What about them? They left Adelaide, didn’t they? That’s the very last that I’ve heard.’

  ‘Then nobody’s been looking for them?’ asked Eyre.

  ‘Should they have been?’

  ‘No. But I wondered, that’s all. They seemed like very persistent fellows.’

  ‘Persistence is not always a virtue,’ said Captain Sturt.

  Eyre looked at him over the rim of his wine-glass, and then said, ‘I hope you’re not trying to suggest that I have been unduly persistent.’

  ‘You were persistent enough to travel all the way from the salt lakes to Albany.’

  ‘Yes,’ Eyre said, warily.

  ‘An expedition of great heroism. A journey of remarkable courage. An achievement which will no doubt be recognised for generations yet to come.’

  Eyre said nothing, but watched Captain Sturt get out of his chair, and walk across to the window with his hands thrust into his trouser pockets, and the tails of his coat cocked back. Sturt frowned out through the curtains at the muddy prospect of North Terrace, and the gum trees which bordered the Torrens River.

  ‘Unfortunately,’ he said, ‘nothing of what you did was of any practical or commercial use whatsoever. Of course, I dare not say so. Isn’t that ironic? I financed an expedition, and sent it off to discover a way through the continent and whatever riches might be there for the taking; and when it failed, with considerable loss of life, and abandonment of irreplaceable equipment, I have to appear to be cheerful about it, and shout ‘huzza’ along with the rest of the hoi polloi.’

  Eyre said, ‘It was scarcely my fault that the terrain was impassable.’

  ‘You tell us that it was impassable.’ Captain Sturt retorted. ‘That’s what you say. But terrain that is impassable for one man may well be quite easily negotiable for another.’

  ‘Are you trying to suggest that I didn’t do my very utmost to find a way through to the inland sea?’ Eyre asked him, sharply. Even as he spoke, he could picture in his mind the horses wallowing and struggling up to their chests in grey, glistening mud.

  Sturt pouted, and rocked on his heels. ‘I’m only suggesting that my expedition might have been better served by a leader who was less dogged, and more astute.’

  Eyre leaned forward in his chair, his spine as tense as a whalebone. ‘Captain Sturt, just because a discovery is not to your personal liking; just because it doesn’t help to line your purse; that doesn’t make it any less of a discovery. My companions and I found out that the land due north of here is nothing but miles and miles of treacherous salt lakes; and that the land to the west of here is treeless desert; both completely unsuitable for the driving of cattle. Now at least we know that there is nothing we can do but cling to the coast of this continent, and raise our livestock as best we can, and leave the interior to the lizards and the Aborigines.’

  ‘You didn’t even find opals.’

  ‘We were given the name of a site where opals can be found.’

  ‘You were given the name of a site where opals can be found!’ parroted Captain Sturt. ‘My dear chap, how naive you are! It’s astonishing that you weren’t killed on the spot, by the first Aborigine you met with a sense of fun. Of course you were given the name of a site where opals can be found! What was it? Bugga Mugga, or Mudgegeerabah? That’s eastern Aboriginal for the place of lies.’

  He leaned forward and stared right into Eyre’s face, his eyes bulging and bloodshot. ‘Could you ever find this place, if you were to set out to look for it; or if anyone were to be foolish enough to finance you? Of course not! It’s a mirage. An illusion, partly caused by the desert heat; partly by exhaustion. But most of all, it is caused by vanity, irrationality, and an immature impulse to make a hero out of yourself and a fool out of me.’

  Eyre stared back at Captain Sturt for a moment or two, and then leaned back in his chair again and folded his arms.

  ‘You’re being more than unjust, Captain Sturt,’ he said, as quietly as he could, although his voice was on the very brink of trembling. ‘I personally believe that the
discoveries we made were quite considerable, when you think how small our party was, how inexperienced, and how hastily prepared; not to mention the fact that our sponsors sent us off in complete ignorance of the mortal dangers that we would eventually have to face; if and when we achieved our goal.’

  Sturt frowned at him. ‘Mortal dangers? What mortal dangers? What are you trying to imply?’

  ‘You knew about the legend of the djanga, the spirit returned from the dead.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know what a djanga is, surely; you know enough about Aboriginal mythology by now.’

  ‘Well, yes of course I do,’ blustered Sturt, ‘but—’

  ‘Captain Henry told Joolonga that I was the djanga, and Joolonga told you.’

  ‘My dear Eyre—’

  ‘Is there any use in denying it?’ Eyre snapped at him. ‘Well, is there? I know everything about it; why and how. Joolonga told you how long the Aborigines have been looking forward to the appearance of the djanga, for more centuries than anyone can count. And he also told you how desperate their prayers have become ever since the white people began to trample over the sacred places, and how they have been hoping against hope that the legend should at last come true. A saviour will come, and give us the magical knowledge, and set us free from the white man! And how callously you traded on that belief, didn’t you? and on my life; and the lives of all my companions. Not for glory, though, or patriotism. Not for any greater purpose than to balance the books of South Australia to the satisfaction of the London Commissioners, and to make sure that you yourself did not become a candidate for the green bonnet of bankruptcy.’

  Captain Sturt stood with his mouth ajar. His face was the colour of fresh calves’-liver.

  Eyre said, in a more controlled voice, ‘I have not yet been able to discover whether you knew that Yonguldye would murder us all; or, to be fair, whether Yonguldye was really thinking of murdering us or not. There was a misunderstanding of language; whether to eat a man’s brains means literally to eat his brains, or whether it simply means to acquire all the knowledge within him. But when I was out at Yarrakinna, surrounded by hundreds of Aborigine warriors with spears and knives and clubs, I didn’t see much wisdom in waiting to find out. Nor did those poor souls who were with me.’