Bring Larks and Heroes

by Thomas Keneally

  For being grateful to deal with the settlement and system in its most innocent form, in numerals, he judged himself. He judged himself unfavourably, because of his diffuse pride. When his patron, a Sir Andrew Price, had shown him how a mere evasion under oath would lead to his acquittal, he was not too conscience-stricken to be evasive. He was too proud. Yet he took no pride now in his pride then. It may have been because he had allowed Sir Andrew to buy him a berth in the bosun’s mess, so that he voyaged the thirteen thousand miles as a freeman in his own coat. He had not had to survive the hold and was too proud again not to feel ashamed of being shielded from that testing.

  Yet there would have been nothing diffuse about his concern had he known that someone so raw or cumbersomely wily as Ewers had arrived in the Daker household.

  A fortnight before, the Commandant, Captain Howard, had warned Hearn that Mrs Daker had applied for an interview, would arrive at half past nine in the morning, and that he himself would be out to all other visitors. The following morning, at the given time, Hearn opened the front door on a furnace-breath westerly, and a white town so tenuous amongst the blowing dust that it threatened to vanish if you ceased to believe in it. Hearn believed in it though, too well.

  It was a rigorous day for lovers, but there stood Mrs Daker with a slight dew of sweat on her upper lip. She sported a very ripe purple and a fichu of black chiffon, loose enough to show her black chiffon collar, girlish at her neck. There was no subtlety in the meeting of her gipsy skin and deep purple. It took the eye by main assault. The ruffled chiffon was at odds with her, just the same, and needed a woman of a more delicate mouth and reputation.

  ‘This way, Mrs Daker,’ Hearn said loudly, calling to the entire hillside of witless little huts to be witnesses of her flagrancy.

  Her face was impervious to Hearn as in she came. Somehow her skin had grown smooth over the memory of the Daker of less than four years ago; of Daker on half-pay and drinking most of it, trapped with her in a room above a riotous barber’s in Exeter; of the grey tumulus where they two lay all the night, back to belly, in answer to the imperatives of the cold and never of tenderness.

  ‘Through here, Ma’am,’ said Hearn, averting his eyes, and took her into the ante-room to find Captain Howard side-on in the doorway of his office. The lady brushed past him, and the door closed on Howard’s avid mumblings.

  On his way back to his desk, Hearn discovered that between the porch and Howard’s office she had put a sting in his flesh, right enough. He possessed a rugged, monarch will, of the type for which European religions seemed to be tailored. It ruled him under God, it quashed small, futile ructions in the provinces. Yet he was faint from his glimpse of jollied-up Mrs Daker. In conscience, he worked standing, till her raw image faded down the corridors of the blood. When he was next aware of himself, it was of pen-cramp in his wrist. A whole man, a united kingdom, he slid inadvertently into his seat.

  A little after ten, Surgeon Daker arrived.

  ‘I have astounding news for the Commandant,’ said the little, deathly face as soon as Hearn opened the porch door. Daker’s strabismic eye was aimed utterly unastounded at the lintel.

  ‘Astounding by my standards,’ he corrected himself. ‘Perhaps only important to Howard. Tell him!’

  Daker carried a wire bird-trap in his right hand. It was still disguised with wisps of porcupine-grass, and a kingfisher of some kind sat companionably in it. A rich green glorified the bird’s back and wings, yet it had hunched itself like a cold navvy and looked sideways at the heat and dust blowing from the west. Red dust had scurfed the shoulders of Daker’s blue coat.

  ‘Go on,’ said Daker. ‘Tell him!’

  ‘He’s out to all visitors, sir.’

  ‘If he’s in at all, he’ll be pleased to see me. Go on. Tell him!’

  Hearn went indoors, furious with Howard for making him into a farce-figure. There were immense dangers, too, in being hemmed in by an unholy triangle between the front door and the door of Howard’s office, when points A, B and C would all see him as smeared with their own guilt or stupidity, and could have him chained or flayed or damned to labour.

  When, in the ante-room, he heard male and female laughter indifferently jumbled, he glanced over his shoulder and saw that Daker and the dead-pan kingfisher had followed him down the hall. The back of his neck, the rims of his ears began to burn. Though he refused to hide his eyes from the Surgeon’s face, the gesture had no meaning, since Daker’s left eye looked through a person, and the right looked at the roof. Brow-to-brow manliness was lost on this little fellow.

  What was astounding, however much Hearn expected it, was that nothing happened to Daker’s face. Not even the resignation of a practised wittol. The lips didn’t curl, the attenuated features of his suet-and-freckle face were quiescent as ever. When he pushed Hearn aside from the office door and left him grasping an empty insult with hands open and chest-high, it was an act of ill-breeding rather than of anger.

  So Captain Howard and Mrs Daker saw the surgeon standing ghostly with indifference on the threshold, and Mrs Daker’s involuntary yelp and scurry came to Hearn as assurance that the stale comedy had begun. He could not see into the room or tell what state the lovers were in, and he hoped, of course, that they had not got beyond token endearments.

  At a loss but respectably shirt-sleeved, Howard came up to the doorway, nodding and alacritous, glowering sideways at his fool of a clerk. Officer and gentleman, I abominate you, thought Hearn, word by word, so hard-headed was his enmity.

  ‘This fellow didn’t want me to see you,’ Daker told Howard. As if all things made a balanced and orderly world, even the fact that his wife couched of a morning at Government House, except for Hearn’s disrupting unreasonableness.

  Bless you in your maniacy, thought Hearn genially.

  ‘Yes . . .’ said Howard, keeping his mouth open, but finding that there was nothing else he could say for the moment, even to the surgeon, without losing some brand of honour.

  ‘I have a matter of no small scientific importance to consult you on.’

  ‘Yes, Surgeon.’

  Howard urbanely closed the office door and transformed the ante-room into the seat of government.

  ‘Hearn, you can leave. I shall see you after Mr Daker has gone.’

  ‘Let him stay,’ the surgeon contradicted. ‘There’s no use pretending we have any privacy in this settlement.’ He leaned fraternally towards Howard and jabbed his thumb at Hearn. ‘They find out everything, you know, Captain.’

  The Captain was not in a position to argue. He composed himself and crossed to Hearn’s desk.

  ‘Would you care to take a seat, Surgeon Daker?’ he said, picking up foolscap. It was easy to tell he was as pleased for the polite formula to fill his mouth as he was for the paper in his hands.

  Daker ducked down into the chair, lunatic quick, and put the wire trap, with its sable and green bird, on the desk.

  Howard coughed.

  ‘What splendid colour,’ he said. ‘Is it native?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Daker. ‘Last summer I had a glimpse of him in flat country five miles beyond.’ He thumbed carelessly over his shoulder at the inland. ‘There were other kingfishers, too, that had eschewed the river-banks and spent the summer in dry country, but I have been laying the traps all summer long for this one.’

  ‘I see. Congratulations are in order.’

  ‘Thank you, Captain. But I believe I have three other birds in my aviary, all of them captured earlier this summer, which have been hitherto unknown to ornithologists.’

  He sat forward and took on more of the look of a feeling organism.

  ‘Two of them are members of the Cuculidae family; two of them, this one included, are Halcyonidae.’

  Howard wagged his head knowingly, as if he were acquainted with Halcyonidae from of old.


  ‘This superb fellow I have named Alcyone viridis, the Green kingfisher. Provisionally, that is. I hope to hit on a more imaginative name before long. I want that you should be kind enough to inform His Excellency of all this. It is news which, I feel, deserves a –’

  Here Daker shoved his fist hard in under his own cheekbone, so that the mouth, twisted open in the left corner and showing black rot in the back teeth, laboured for the right word.

  ‘– a vice-regal letter.’

  On an undemanding blank page, Howard, the viceroy’s viceroy, wrote with fraudulent energy, Daker. Aviary. Four birds unknown hitherto.

  He pulled his eyes from the page to utter, with immense fervour,

  ‘I’m sure His Excellency will be most gratified to receive news of the results of your work, sir.’

  Results of your work. Hearn thought of the complicated horrors of the hospital which was, under G III R, Daker’s work.

  ‘Yes, well, in the – vice-regal letter, I would like you to request His Excellency’s permission for me to name this kingfisher after himself.’

  The bird waited unblinking within its green coat. That it might have His Excellency tacked adjectively to its plumage didn’t seem to touch it in its essence.

  Request H. E. permission to name one after H. E., the officer wrote, wondering, as Hearn wondered also, how a man like Daker had come by the technical knowledge to discover a new animal and name it rightly, so that men of science would call it by that name until the sun fell. There was no doubt that Daker was capable of this small, immortalizing trick, for he had performed it more than two years earlier, and sent embalmed creatures off to England. Nine months past, the last transport had brought a letter of praise from the Royal Society.

  ‘These are the names which, subject to His Excellency’s approval, I intend to give the new species.’

  He took a list from his waistcoat pocket and handed it to Howard, who received it almost as heartily as, an hour previously, he had received Mrs Daker.

  ‘I’ll draft the letter immediately,’ promised Howard.

  If there were a smile, bitter or otherwise, stored up in Daker, now would have been the time to bring it forth.

  But ‘Thank you,’ said Daker; and left.

  The solid enigma of the man remained, and Howard was, of course, disturbed by it. He roared threats at Hearn, promises of things which would result to Hearn’s backbone, shoulders, liver, tripes. Hearn kept a straight head, pricking with fury just the same. At last, Howard felt a fool and abated; so that Hearn was able to speak reasonably and save the backbone and whatever other parts of him were in jeopardy.

  ‘If this ever becomes known . . .’ said Howard, white in the face, red in the neck.

  But refuse profane and old wives’ fables, thought Hearn from 1 Timothy. He could have said it aloud, had he been free.

  Howard returned dazed to the lady, knowing now that love in the morning shows too much contempt, even for obtuse cuckolds like Daker. Against the mid-morning shabbiness of his position, the Captain made no progress apparently; for after a very short time, he opened his door again, and with convinced, neutral politeness, guided the lady to the front porch. Hearn could have turned in his seat and watched her going down the hill. But, of course, he would not. If he had, he would have been surprised to see with what an air of solid rectitude she plodded through the ferment of orange dust.

  8

  Ewers had never painted for an ornithologist before. He had thought that such work was done from embalmed specimens. But Daker would not risk embalming the creatures of his fame yet; not until winter, anyhow.

  He showed Ewers the kingfisher, which drowsed in a wicker cage.

  ‘Alcyone beryllus is his name,’ the surgeon explained. (His Excellency had forgone the pleasure of being the creature’s godparent.) Daker spelt out the name three times. ‘Paint him first! He is a gem. You must get his colours absolutely accurate, and as for his stance and the line of his head and body, they must all be exact. Have him on a branch. A branch of peppermint or cedar would look excellent. Show him from the front, but slightly to the left. It doesn’t matter to me how long you take, so long as you carry my breath away, as he did.’

  How do you carry the breath away from a Lazarus-like man?

  For a start, you take a close view of the subject – or Ewers did, anyhow. He worked standing, with charcoal and cartridge-paper, about eight feet back, and, despite the intervening slats, tried for perfection of line. When the bird fidgeted or turned his back on him, as kingfishers will in a small cage of cane, he chased it until he saw it from the front and to the left again. He stared at the line he wanted and carried it like a cup of brimming vitriol, that is, perilously, back to the easel.

  At first, he had a sense of working well. The day was not intolerably hot, and he had shade from a box-brush. Only feet away, a cageful of finches extolled him, Caledonia’s sublimest limner in the nether-world.

  But, as was fated to happen, Mrs Daker came walking in her garden by mid-morning. Like a decent mother of some parish, she wore a dissonant yellow and a straw hat and carried a parasol.

  ‘Ah,’ she said, seeing the number of very fine sketches Ewers had done, ‘when do you mean to start using your colours?’

  ‘Almost immediately, Madam.’

  He became occupied then with a bogus coughing fit. For women alarmed him proportionately as their bearing and manners departed from Aunt Norris’s. It behoved a woman to bear her womanhood as a curse, as Aunt Norris bore it. The nausea, the pallor, the pains in the head, the loutish insolence of nature. She was an incarnate, indelible, unsearchable, valiant smile, sitting above an arrant obscenity. Therefore he froze before a woman into whose face the fust of her desires had worked, the fust, if you like, of all the closed rooms and open secrets of her career. He could not find her desirable in any way. Because of a peculiar bemused squeamishness, he could not look at her. He could talk with her, but not anything like adequately.

  ‘Does he behave himself, this bird? Does he sit still?’

  ‘Yes, he’s quite passable, Madam,’ said Ewers.

  But at that moment the kingfisher turned its back on him, making sharp, indolent notes with its throat. Ewers rushed to the bird’s new front.

  ‘Why don’t you simply turn the cage whenever that troublesome thing turns his back?’ Mrs Daker wanted to know. The voice was edged with laughter. On Ewers’ account, she thought artists such endearingly silly people.

  The artist’s prerogative was not to answer, even not to answer ladies. He went on frowning at the green shape. ‘Well, why don’t you?’

  ‘It would make me come in too close to the bird, Madam. It would confuse my sight.’

  His sight was clear now, but though he began to tread back to the easel, he knew she was about to nudge the corner of his mind, to make him spill his vision.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s an indifferent bird, Ewers?’ asked Mrs Daker, between pouting twice at the cage.

  ‘You know my name, Madam?’

  How it disturbed him that she had approached him as a person with a name which she knew. It impressed him, rightly or wrongly, in the same way that a lightning manoeuvre impresses an old-fashioned general – more or less as an unfair trick.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s a very poor bird?’ she asked.

  They both looked at its hunched back. Ewers wished it to turn. It wouldn’t be wished into turning.

  ‘It’s far too stocky a bird to bear the grand name, kingfisher. Its stance is not handsome at all. It’s hardly a true green at all, is it? Except by the standards of this country.’

  He felt infallibly that the lady would applaud him if he said, ‘They tell us, Madam, that an ugly stance and a greenness of complexion are not altogether unknown amongst kings.’ To take offence at slighting remarks about the monarch wa
s almost certainly not within the perimeter of her vices.

  So he said, ‘They tell us, Madam . . .’

  The lady applauded him, and he blushed and darted away to take another sight on the bird.

  ‘I had an uncle,’ the lady remarked at last, under the general topic of art, ‘who was a famous draughtsman. He worked at a shipwright’s in Portsmouth. He was marvellous with ships. Of course, that is far more just a matter of lines.’

  Coming back to his easel, Ewers thought that so was this a matter of lines, if only people wouldn’t blur the lines with talk.

  ‘Madam,’ he realized all at once, ‘would you care to sit in the shade?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Her faded yellow whispered as he let her down into the chair he had not been using.

  So positioned, they must have seemed a caricature of the Pastoral landscape. The sky was so enamel, so hard, so high, so bald. Well within this firmament, brown hills rose, worn teeth in an old jaw, perhaps a dead jaw. There was no deep, moist shade, and the leaves on the evergreens flapped rather than rustled, flapped brown side, grey side, brown side, grey, fruitlessness showing both its faces. And amongst half a dozen poor coops of wire and a few wicker cages like lobster traps, Mrs Daker and himself, both vestiges of the northern world, centred their attention in a chunky member of the Halcyonidae family.

  ‘Uck!’ muttered the kingfisher, and sidled along his perch like a parrot. ‘Uck!’

  ‘He can’t sing, either. Neither can these others. There is hardly a good note between all of them. What sort of a song is Uck for a royal bird?’

  ‘Once more, Madam, it has been known for kings to be guttural as well as a sick shade of green.’