‘I’ll attempt to cure the poor fellows,’ the surgeon said. ‘Then we’ll civilize them. His Excellency intends to ship two fully genteel natives home to England when the fleet comes in. These could be the lucky two, Ewers.’
He frowned. The frown was for whether they could be cured. About the civilizing part of the project he was quite blithe.
Halloran, hearing this, wanted to spit and slap his thigh. But his mouth was, of course, dry with heat and conflicts and his own and Ewers’ humiliation. Working as orderly of a day made a man soft to humiliation. Still he remained, without making a demonstration, at his skew-whiff sentry post. For comfort, he thought that to educate two savages to the surgeon’s level, to teach them to carry their backsides as Rowley carried his, should take the whole of one summer’s day.
‘There’s no doubt they’re very sick,’ said Ewers complimentarily, over by the long-boat.
‘How far now?’ said Halloran.
The river had become spacious again, but not in any classic sense. Spits of reeking silt ran out from the bank, peopled with mangroves and harsh birds, cutting the river into zig-zags. The four oars flapped up and down like the legs of a beetle.
‘Three miles,’ someone grunted.
‘It’s a grateful thing to live in an age of philosophy,’ mumbled Ewers, without consequence, reclining in the stern.
Halloran snorted, implored the sky, held up his left hand and shook it as if it contained a pomegranate. But he said nothing of what he wanted to say, that is, that they had both willingly abased themselves. Which was no disgrace in a relative way, but by the standards of absolute things was an abomination. He felt that they earned their salt meat by servility, but lost the right to deal in ideas. Therefore, Ewers should not mention such a sacred word as philosophy.
‘I didn’t mean what he thought. He’s a hard man for misconstruing,’ he had muttered when he came back from watching Partridge’s curiosities. He did not see any virtue in having made a small score against Partridge. Instead, he denied having intended to score; he did not seem to believe that it was wrong to be clouted for having an independent wit. But being clouted on suspicion of having an independent wit, that appalled him. So that now he was oblivious that he had forfeited any rights as regards sacred words.
‘Rousseau,’ he pressed on, recitative again, ‘makes a fashionable thing out of cultivating savages. Savages are us, it appears, unspoilt. It is the mode to be patient with them, as one is patient with the childishness of a saint. It is a pity that no one has a fashion of patience towards convicted men and women.’
‘Why tell us?’ asked Halloran over his shoulder. ‘We know. There are six of us in this boat, and we’ve all got a spirit of rebellion, and we’ll each of us keep it as big a secret as we can because not one of us wants to be flogged. So if you’re feeling rebellious – well, you might as well not talk about it here. It’s stale news.’
‘Maybe.’ Ewers sounded easeful; lolling on his back and looking here and there across the sky through nearly closed eyes, as if he were Michelangelo about to quote a price for illuminating the firmament. ‘However, Corporal, listen to this! All these petty men: Partridge, Major Sabian, perhaps even Rowley, are writing their diaries, observing, recording the quirks of this land in the hope that one day a putrescent weed, transplanted hence to Kew Gardens, will bear the name Flos Perniciosus Partridgensis.’
Ewers opened his eyes, raised his head, secure that no one had understood his Latin joke.
‘I see,’ said Halloran impatiently, but kept to his principle of not rebelling in private for some hours after he had grovelled in public.
‘Hah, yes. Partridge intends to publish a record of the colony, so too does Sabian, if an editor can be found to spell for them and to stand between them and the mysteries of the comma. And you, Corporal, would not have to be the Prophet Isaiah to tell who will prepare the plates for those sublime works and to foresee whose name will not appear on the title page. Well?’
‘I suppose the answer to both is your name, Ewers.’
Ewers’ blind skyward face waggled.
‘Yes. My name, Ewers!’
The smell of mud affected Halloran with indifference to Partridge’s schemes. Mangroves faced him with their lizard-skin front feet in the water. It was all millennia away from the printing presses and polite journals and medals struck by the Royal Society. In the zenith heat, on his way home to the town, Partridge might understand this and, in his lassitude, hurl the two poor blacks overboard.
‘You are a blessed man,’ Ewers continued, having an option on Halloran’s ear despite the mangroves and slow, silty water.
‘Do you think so?’
‘Yes. You have quick eyes and you respect the Arts. You’re the type of man who should be free of the restrictions of the service.’
‘Aren’t we all?’
‘In two years, you will be back amongst your people. If I could say the same . . .’
For half a minute and without warning, Ewers wept, still flat on his back, and his split, navy-style sleeve clamped against his eye-brows. The corners of his long mouth had drawn back prodigiously to show tall, grimacing eye-teeth.
Halloran leant over and nudged his right elbow gently.
‘Man, there are pardons you know. I’d imagine you’d be amongst the first to be pardoned.’
‘A pardon is useless.’ He sat up. ‘If I had the decency, I’d die here of shame. Because I’m known as a forger in Dumfries. Even in Edinburgh.’
‘Hah!’ said Halloran, going gusty and bluff and gesturing over his right shoulder with his thumb. ‘There are worse crimes against man and God. Down the river and not so far, there are far worse.’
‘I forged four bank-notes on the Bank of Scotland. The Bank’s engraver said at my trial in Dumfries that their qualities as forgeries astounded him. I was proud. I can still remember my pride. I was proud, I can remember, and my aunt sat up in the public gallery, and people pointed her out behind her back.’
He turned his face to the north bank and with his hand over his mouth, whimpered or giggled. In that heat it was anybody’s guess.
At last, his long face turned back to his brother-boaters. It was stained with grief, not at all its clean-shaven self.
‘Let me tell you about my aunt,’ he implored.
In common mercy, ‘Yes,’ sighed Halloran.
This will be as good, he thought, as one of those fruity sermons on the crucifixion. On two and a bit pounds of meat every week, he had no emotion to spare for Ewers’ aunt in Dumfries.
At this moment Ewers began to doubt himself. As if from a great distance and painfully, he peered at the two transports. He was gratified to find their eyes rolling, their ears full of their own rhythmic exhaustion.
‘Her name is Miss Kate Norris. I went to her when I was three years old. I became her life, as you’d expect with a spinster.’
He’ll say next that there was never a better woman, thought Halloran.
‘There never lived a better woman,’ said Ewers. ‘Every woman whose company I ever found myself in, I observed closely, to see if she had the qualities of Aunt Norris in however immature a form. None of them ever did reproduce the range of her virtues.’
‘I see,’ said Halloran. He spoke, not out of enthusiasm for Aunt Norris, but because he felt it within him one day to make Ann’s fortune by writing a farce called The Master-Forger Chooses a Wife.
‘The thought that she rebuffed a number of suitors for my sake is one which I eat with ashes every day.’
There and then, he began to eat it with ashes again and wept for a full minute with most of his face hidden behind his sleeve, his sobbing hidden by the groan of the boat and the slowly plangent river.
‘I want you to assure me you’ll do a thing for me. For her.’
‘That depends,’
said Halloran. He said it severely since there was something too unctuous and full-blown about Ewers’ misery. Within the system, he had little enough space in which to conspire humanely. Ewers’ aunt in Dumfries could ascend into heaven for all he cared; and might, if there wasn’t a girl in Scotland to reproduce the range of her virtues.
‘No, it’s fruitless, soldier,’ said the artist. ‘It is too much to ask of a stranger. Besides, it could put you in a bad light with your superiors.’
‘That would be dangerous,’ Halloran glibly assented. In the next seconds, he was shown the benefits of having plenty of skin on your face. Ewers sucked grief in through the right side of his long, peculiar mouth. Then he let the upper lip overlap the lower; and in the end looked immensely more pitiful than a round-faced, tight-featured man ever could.
None the less, he still had much to say.
‘What I had intended was to find in you the person who would vindicate me when Sabian and Partridge published their work. I must have someone in Britain to speak out for me, to claim that the plates have been done from the work of a forgotten Scot and to demand that that Scot’s aunt should receive justice for her lost nephew’s work. If that someone in Britain is importunate enough, not only may the aunt receive a small fortune, but the nephew, grown mildly illustrious, will be pardoned, with an assured future and much to reward his champion with.’
‘But you told me a pardon was useless,’ Halloran objected.
‘I was being excessive.’
Over the river and through the sun, three symbolically large and easeful crows went flapping. They made receding sounds of disbelief, rough as horse-hair, until they became motes in the north-west. Perhaps they were what Ewers merited. For Halloran could all but smell the unreliability of the man. Ewers’ grand scheme for his own ransom seemed very chancily put together. It might have occurred to him only in the flush of promise with which the day had begun, or as the result of his humiliation by Partridge.
‘I realize now,’ the artist nodded, ‘that I was beforehand with my request. But perhaps it is not too much to say that you may some day be my champion.’
‘I’m afraid it’s far too much to say. I’ve too much to champion as it is,’ said Halloran, smartening up the collar of his coat to show what a prosy boy he was, and how unfit for the job. The next time Partridge disciplined Ewers, and the artist exploded into a tantrum, Halloran didn’t want his name hurled like some kind of doom in the surgeon’s face. God knows, he wasn’t a doom. Not with his simple anguish and his simple plans.
‘Urrugh!’ cried one of the rowers. Because they had come in sight of three open hills. By the standards of summer in the netherworld, they were very green hills. Up one climbed a small white town in column of two. At the top of the town stood a Government House whose thatch roof was being replaced by shingles of blackbutt. Transports moved in and out and about the hole in its distant roof with the effective indolence of maggots in a skull.
There was a hawk above the town, skating the air currents. It hung taut with desire, its eye on minuscule prey in the grass on one of the hills. Halloran pointed to it.
‘That’s one they’ll never get for their aviary,’ he said. ‘And while we’re on the aviary, the word is you’d get a ready ear and no mercy from Mrs Daker. The word is she’s viper.’
But Ewers was looking over the side, deep in specious disappointment.
6
Under the box-trees by the river, Halloran and his two Marines ate their bread. With it, they had their weekly quarter pound of cheese, and drank from their canteens a watered-down Tenerife wine, very laxative, one of Mr Blythe’s wise buys. It was perhaps one o’clock, and the shade was very deep.
In sight stood Surgeon Daker’s long hospital, clapboard windows propped open, drinking the cool off the river. To Halloran, drowsing in the shade, some minute shift in the air would occasionally bring the thick, excremental smell of the place. The smell and the flies that rode it gave the three of them no rest.
‘Let’s go and collect our sick man,’ he suggested at last.
They approached the doorway with their heads back. ‘Hew!’ they said constantly in a note of discovery. ‘Hew!’
The door was open. Bronze flies sizzled in the daylight on the steps, wavered like the black spots in migraine. Perhaps they too were partially afflicted with disbelief. Faced with one of those things which have to be done quickly, Halloran ducked his head under the lintel and sniffed the dimness. He blinked up the length of the unscreened inside. Somewhere towards the centre, seemingly robust laughter broke out.
The hospital had been fitted out with bedsteads and pallets, but mostly pallets. Men dozed, blankets down, shirts up, legs apart, letting the air to their crutches. An owlish consumptive stared across the room, not to be taken unawares by Halloran or by death. His two stubborn nodules of shoulders were propped against the wall, giving fair promise to remain, stanchion-firm and stanchion-bare, when the rest of the frame had finished wasting from them.
‘Good afternoon,’ called Halloran. ‘Surgeon in?’
The consumptive shook his head, pointing down the hut.
‘Orderly,’ he suggested, and paid for it with a coughing-fit like axe-blows. The little body jiggled, and Halloran, in decency, waited the spasm out.
There was a clear aisle in Surgeon Daker’s hospital, water buckets along the aisle, privies along the walls. All else was random, a melee of bodies and ills. Halloran passed stray charcoal-burners in which something resinous smouldered. A man with lupus face, being a wise monster, stayed close to one to keep off the flies.
‘Did you see that, Corporal?’ whispered the fool of a Marine behind Halloran.
Then, without warning, they were amongst healthy men. The insanity of the long hospital gained much from these, who stood inert by the windows or rested on their beds in silence. They were watching an acutely craggy woman, shift up around her armpits, on her back on the floor under a small well-fed man. She frowned at the handful the man tried to make of her fruitless little paps. They were people, even separately, ugly beyond telling. A preacher like John Chrysostom would have delighted to have them mate beneath his pulpit as he preached on the viciousness of the flesh, on the death-sweat and -bed of love.
And even there, on the floor, things seemed insanely inert.
Just the same, lust, the size of a hippopotamus, flopped over in the tropic swamps of Halloran’s belly. Oh, it alarmed him to have his bowels yearn out towards that sort of oblivion.
‘What are you all doing here?’ he asked with a severity intended for the hippopotamus. ‘Where’s the surgeon’s orderly?’
They all began to laugh at him. It was the worst type of laughter possible. Their mouths flew open like vents; the laughter came out like a snatch of laughter out of a mine.
They’re all possessed, he thought, and went cold.
They pointed at the poverty-stricken woman and her portly burden.
‘Don’t break him off now,’ one of them said. ‘You’ll never get him started again.’
Halloran could then have kicked the orderly’s grey buttocks. They presented themselves, and it would have been befittingly gross to lay his boot to them. But more than that, there came over him a queasy urge to mash both people with his feet and rant against them, text and fury. Yet all of this would have been no more than a device to join himself to them in their sad fever. So he managed to hand his flint-lock to one of the privates, and dragged the orderly upright by the shoulders. As he was hauled up, the man roared and struck at Halloran’s waist, and Halloran, exultant, let him go with one hand and knocked him out of the other with a punch flush on the ear.
‘Christ, can’t do that!’ said a satanic Welshman in a shirt.
‘Hold hard!’ they all said.
But he was not going to be made ashamed before them. He approached the order
ly, who looked piteous in his shirt, shaking his little scarified head, blinking.
‘I have a warrant for somebody here,’ he said. He made a few parade-ground threats, the sort of thing nobody believes in anyhow.
Time to see things straight again was what the orderly needed. He stood shaking his head, making a speech to himself, but couldn’t see Halloran. Meanwhile, the woman remained flat on her back, doing nothing about her sad, angular nakedness. The orderly’s sweat and her own lay round her throat, on her breasts, in the pit of her navel. There was a peculiar stiff questingness about her raised head which Halloran saw but could not interpret, until one of his Marines said, ‘God she’s blind!’
‘Having a try yourself, General?’ called the Welshman when Halloran knelt on one knee beside the woman. She stank, which was no novelty. Over her odious and unwelcoming body he made a poor attempt to pull down the shift. She ground her gums and struck his arm away and laughed drily, as if she had just then got a picture of the proceedings. She was perhaps thirty, utterly desert; her laughter was the dry-leaves laughter of very old women. She had no teeth at all to modulate it. It prolonged itself, regardless of the demands of breathing, until her face was blue. Then she took a great swallow of air and started to laugh again. The others laughed too.
‘Whore’s got her pride, General,’ called the Welshman.
‘Get dressed!’ Halloran told the orderly.
One of the patients threw the man a pair of trousers, and he throttled them and put them on. But he was still dazed and still had odd-ends of words to say to himself. In the end, he turned to Halloran and said, full of business, ‘Who’s your warrant for?’
Halloran pulled the warrant out of his pocket and found the peasant name amidst the classic gardens of verbiage.
‘Eris Mealey,’ he read.
‘I thought so,’ said the orderly, very gratified about the eyes. ‘You can’t have him. His back’s gone rotten. Daker’s left a letter you can take to the Governor.’