A Treacherous Country Read online

  ‘I am not in the whaling business, sir,’ I said. ‘I do not need to buy a station. I do not mind telling you I do not know what a whaling-station is.’ True, but I had already begun to form an impression of it in my mind. I had a vision of a great floating Platform, loaded with all manner of tools and supplies, frequented by great whaling-ships, which would moor and be loaded with every necessity before sailing out over the rugged seas upon their hunt.

  ‘Come and see it, sir, and you may find yourself convinced.’ ‘You say this station of yours is a day north of here—by what means? By boat?’

  ‘Yes, if you have enough men to row, but I do not. I had intended to walk.’

  ‘I cannot walk so far, with my harpoons, and my things,’ I said.

  ‘I know a man who will sell you his horse for a good rate,’ said the Irishman.

  ‘Well, besides this, I have business in town, sir. I must visit the Bank.’

  ‘Have you no ready money?’

  ‘Only a modest sum.’

  ‘You will not need any more than that.’

  ‘But you would have me buy a horse! And purchase the station! Surely money is required—although I maintain I have no use for it, nor the funds exactly to spare …’

  ‘What, do you think Mr Heron would take cash in hand? It is a large purchase, and would be solemnised here in town, with the participation of—Bankers, and so on.’

  ‘And the horse?’

  ‘Modest horses abound, in this place, for modest sums. The fellow I know will have just the thing.’

  ‘There is something else, and this is the thing we really must consider, for it is more pressing than the—admittedly also pressing—matter that I do not want a horse or a whaling-station. My purpose in Hobart-town is not to sell the harpoons. This matter is entirely peripheral to my true purpose here, which is to find a woman called Maryanne Maginn.’

  He repeated the name with a contemplative tone, and said, ‘And you are sure she is not at the station, or somewhere along the way there?’

  ‘My friend,’ I said, deciding we had conversed long enough, ‘I thank you, but I must decline.’

  ‘Aye, that is prudent,’ he told me. ‘However, I will ask you—you with the look of the lost—whatever shall you do instead?’

  YOU TOLD ME WE WOULD BE EATEN ALIVE

  The road north was winding and beset by hills, which well suited my perturbed spirit. We emerged from the wood and from the rain into a singing land of frosted fields and softly undulating valleys, dense with distant green canopies, all cupped by ancient peaks and ridges. It struck me as quite bewildering that in the southern reaches of the world these hills brooded quietly on over their forested Isle, while farther north the Greeks fell and the Romans rose, and then fell, and before them the Etruscans did whatever they did, and so on and on right up to modern English society. No doubt, too, these southern hills were looked upon by countless generations of Men unknown to the Romans, who perhaps cycled through their own great rising and falling and rising!

  One or two lonely wooden farmhouses nestled in the bosom of the fields, but I had not yet seen a soul abroad.

  I remarked to my Cannibal that I had not seen a stone house since we had left Hobart-town.

  ‘There are more trees than stones here,’ he told me.

  ‘Who counted?’

  He laughed. ‘An expression, merely,’ he said, affecting an accent close to my own, for the sake of comedy, I presumed. ‘You will see stone houses by-and-by,’ he added.

  The air was so clear and thin that I was able to see straight into the kitchens and bedchambers of the farmhouses, and to count the leaves of the trees on the distant hillside. Great shadows of clouds skimmed across the landscape, sliding down the hillsides and rippling over the green. I could count the drops of rain in the clouds themselves. Sheep and cattle ruminated upon the grass, little green circles in the white all around them—hoof-prints in the frost.

  So far removed was I then from the stormy passage to the Isle, tossed upon indifferent seas, the foulest human Fluids slick on my boots, and my entry into little Hobart-town under cracking clouds and rain like shards of glass! I could scarcely believe the change a day had brought. I am from the countryside, and it is the place I love, and this place was so very nearly like it. I felt a lifting in my heart, and an emptiness, that I was of no significance at all. And indeed I was not, I the third son, with the pure liberty of he who does not matter.

  We passed a graveyard, perched upon a rise as we skirted below. A little island of the lost, for which I could see no attendant church.

  ‘Is that a Church of England graveyard?’ I asked.

  ‘I do not know, for there is no church, and I have not been to look at the graves,’ said my Cannibal.

  ‘I asked merely with the presumption that you might know because you are acquainted with these parts.’

  ‘Well, it may be Church of England,’ he conceded. ‘There are many such types who dwell here.’

  ‘Here—in the graveyard?’

  ‘Here—in the valley, man.’

  ‘I imagine you are not amongst this number.’

  ‘Certainly not. I do not dwell here, but farther north, and to the east.’

  ‘That was not my meaning, sir.’

  ‘You meant I am not Church of England? Why ought I be? Foreign institution that it is!’

  Why had I asked? Of course the man was not Church of England. Why should I care about such a thing? I looked at the crest of land below the graveyard, and imagined all the soil dropping away to show me the corpses therein. I had once tried to engage Susannah in discussion of Religion, but she was not very interested in the subject, or, at least, she was not interested in my thoughts on the subject. I was not very interested either, but had thought she would be, because I saw her in Church every Sunday.

  ‘But you are always there, too,’ said she. ‘It does not signify anything, other than that we both adhere to the convention of attending Church.’

  I’d felt a little saddened that she had not noticed I was occasionally daringly absent on Sundays. ‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘but, Miss Prendergast, I am not always present at Church.’

  ‘Well, you may have the freedom to absent yourself, but I do not,’ she said. ‘I do as I am told to do.’ She said this with a smile I could not quite interpret.

  There on the forested Isle, the road wended down before us to a settlement far below.

  ‘It is quiet to-day,’ my Cannibal said.

  Smoke came like tufts of wool from the tiny chimneys and, marking the northernmost border of the village, a black river slithered here and there out of the trees. A gull circled overhead, although there was no sea in sight. And everywhere—beyond the village and the fields, dominating every hill and slope, everywhere I could see—an impenetrable wilderness of silver-green leaves. Brave little settlement, huddled amidst indifferent Nature.

  ‘You described these roads as treacherous, sir, but they seem quite tranquil,’ I called ahead to my Cannibal. My voice cut sharply through the thin air. As I made my remark, however, I felt anew my sense of strangeness: that the black river below or the green wilderness stretching in every direction, just beyond the civilised town and fields, might hold any curiosity, or wonder, or horror.

  ‘Treacherous is as treacherous does,’ he told me over his shoulder, then paused to stretch his back. ‘There has been many an attack along this way.’

  I halted Tigris as she drew level with my Cannibal and looked out at the very image of the Pastoral Ideal. ‘On this matter, you are better informed than I,’ I said. ‘Is it the Black Men? Shall we meet roving bands with spears?’

  ‘No, it is not the Black Men,’ said my Cannibal.

  ‘No?’

  ‘Your countrymen have been upon this Isle near forty years, now, Englishman,’ he said.

  ‘Indeed, I believe that is true.’

  ‘Forty years!’ he said, and gave me a look of deep Irishness.

  Why was every damned—I
do not care, damned be damned—conversation in that place like trying to see a figure through a window on a dark night in a storm, while blindfolded?

  ‘Do you speak Irish, sir, as your native tongue?’ I asked. I thought in a flash that perhaps his obtuseness might be explained by some imperfect translation.

  ‘I speak it, yes, concurrently with English—that is, English is as native to me as Irish.’

  I looked at the man’s hairy face and made to investigate further his remarks, but was stymied rather by the delicious scent of roasting meat on the breeze.

  ‘Oh, look at the sun! It is noon,’ I said.

  ‘I also speak French,’ he told me.

  ‘Oh—very good,’ I said. In fact, I was in particular need of someone with French. Mamma made a remark to me in that language when we parted, and I had been unable decipher it myself. But when I tried to find the words to ask my Cannibal to translate for me, I found that I was quite suddenly upon the very brink of tears. I shook my head and put that matter away for another time, when I would not weep while asking.

  ‘On to a more pressing matter—shall we rest, and eat, and warm ourselves in the village below? Or is it treacherous also?’ I asked, and the weeping feeling melted away.

  ‘You are not surprised that I speak French?’

  ‘No, for the world is a large place, with many possibilities in it. I salute you—I am afraid I did not bother much with French.’

  This seemed to satisfy him. ‘I concur with your remark about the size of the world. It is large, that is true. As to your question,’ he said, ‘the village is friendly enough to travellers. Why should it not be? They bring money, and sometimes Wives. But we ought not stop. We won’t reach the station by nightfall if we do.’

  ‘Is there no inn where we might warm our bones, at least for a moment?’ I heard the plaintive yearning in my own voice.

  ‘Oh—aye, there is an inn,’ he said, and set off once more.

  ‘Is it a better place than that in which we met?’ I asked, urging Tigris to go along with him, side by side.

  ‘Who can measure such a thing?’

  ‘Well, a man such as I, who has passed the night in a bed more akin to the Rack, after a supper most indifferent, can measure such a thing,’ I said.

  ‘You are accustomed to greater comforts than travelling on a cold day without rest, and sleeping on a bed akin to the Rack, and eating badly—and mixing with unsavoury sorts,’ said he, with what I took to be a good dose of personal insight. ‘Yet it will be a discomfort such as you have not yet experienced if we must pass the night in the Wilderness, without the proper gear, and are eaten alive, or else freeze. If you wish to stop at the inn, you must stop there, and pass the night, and set out again to-morrow. But I will not wait for you, and you must find the way yourself,’ he told me. ‘Why not simply press on with me, and save yourself the trouble, and the cost?’

  ‘It is expensive, then?’ I asked.

  ‘No—quite cheap, in terms of money.’

  The day stretched before me like a Wasteland of Starvation and Torture, and the breath of roasting meat on the breeze danced like a Siren’s call to my nose.

  ‘What is it that would eat us alive?’

  ‘What say you now?’

  ‘You told me we would be eaten alive in the Wilderness. What Creature would do such a thing?’

  ‘Why, the tiger-wolf, for one,’ said my Cannibal. ‘And who knows what darker and subtler Beast slinks yet undiscovered amongst these trees?’

  ‘You echo my own thoughts, sir, with your latter remark.’

  The man smiled. ‘We are more and more in agreement.’

  The forested slopes rose ever higher around us.

  ‘It occurs to me that I do not know your name,’ said I.

  ‘Indeed not. Nor I yours,’ said he, and left it at that, for a cart and horses driven by a woman with flame-red hair had rattled into view. Two red-haired children leant over the sides of the cart from amongst the covered baskets lashed therein, watching me with great sharp eyes.

  ‘Good morning, madam,’ I called, with an appropriate salute, as this party drew nearer.

  ‘’Tis afternoon,’ she said, and gave me a look that indicated she had said too much, and urged her two horses on. Such speaking faces the people have here! If only I could understand the language of their expressions.

  ‘Cautious matron,’ said my Cannibal approvingly.

  ‘Would you care to ride a little?’

  ‘Perhaps when we are past the village.’

  A black stallion stood silhouetted for a moment against the crest of the hill as we wound our way down. Is this the substance of Life? A series of images, some fine, some foul, most humdrum, interconnected so minutely and transitioning from one to the next with such smoothness one might blink and find oneself catapulted from a humble life as a third son in England and into the boots of some harpoon-clanking lunatic quite upside down in weird Barbary looking at a horse on a hill? And one a helpless visitor, as a person in an art gallery who has no appreciation for Painting?

  The prismatic vagaries of thought are ever subject to the more secular matter of the Stomach, like the gross Anchor of an airy ship. My hopes for breakfast that morning had not been high, but were nevertheless disappointed. We had departed too early to be served, although I had paid in advance. I had had an apple, and plenty of water, but I made my approach of the village in the valley with hunger roaring through me like the tiger-wolf. I had been lulled by his easy companionship into forgetting my Cannibal’s penchant for man-flesh, but my own longing for meat returned this thought to me. I stole a glance at the hairy head, picked out with eyes and a pink nose and a mouth which opened from within. There was within my breast the stirrings of sympathy for the desperation which might drive a man to eat another.

  ‘I am a touch peckish,’ I ventured, as the iron fist of starvation clenched my guts.

  ‘Good kangaroo steamer awaits us tonight,’ said my Cannibal. ‘There is a woman at the station, Mary, who cooks well with what little she has.’

  ‘I do not know what that is,’ I said. ‘Kangaroo steamer, you see.’

  ‘Then warm yourself with the expectation of a pleasant surprise at journey’s end.’

  I gave a weary sigh. The man was as opaque as a brick wall. ‘As we are sharing the road, sir, and have thrown our lots together, even for a short time,’ I said, ‘why do we not converse a little of ourselves, and see how Fate has so drawn us here?’

  ‘Fate?’ he said. ‘I do not believe in it.’

  ‘Ah, no—an expression, merely.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘What, then, do you believe?’

  ‘What a question! A large question for a small day.’

  ‘How is the day small, sir?’ asked I, looking about me at the generous land.

  ‘It is small because it is quite ordinary.’

  ‘Not to me, sir! I do not think I have passed an ordinary day since I departed England. Here I am, riding along upon balding “Tigris”—whose sire was a Lake—to a whaling-station!—to eat Steamed Kangaroo!—I ask you—’

  ‘Man, you are raving.’

  The Voice of Reason! That was rich, coming from the mouth of the man-eater.

  He cast a smile into the heavens, or bared his teeth at them, anyhow. ‘Ask me something, then, something I can answer, and I will tell you, and you will know me better.’

  ‘What is kangaroo steamer?’ I asked him.

  ‘It is akin to jugged hare, but it is prepared with the flesh of the kangaroo. It makes a delectable repast.’

  ‘Ah! Very well. I will make another question, as that one was not about you, and if the purpose is to better know you, I do not know you better for knowing about kangaroo steamer. Sir—have you a wife?’

  ‘Yes, one or two.’

  I suppose I do not truly believe that Bigamy is a sin worse than Cannibalism, but to my light-headed and unbreakfasted self, Cannibalism did seem the lesser evil. Do allow me to be clea
r: I am a Fool, perhaps, but not, medically speaking, an Idiot, and the more I discoursed with this unlikely Fellow, the better I perceived that he was a man of some wit and humanity, and perhaps was not the Vile Figure I had at first taken him to be. Nevertheless, evil is a scourge at all levels of Society, and his teeth, when the fur parted to show them, were exceedingly yellow.

  ‘Do you know any women called Maryanne Maginn?’ I asked him.

  ‘Oh, I imagine so,’ he said. ‘Half a dozen, at the least.’

  I paused. That was not useful. ‘What is your … favourite food?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing can surpass old Mary’s kangaroo steamer, taken with bread and butter,’ said he.

  We had come to be somewhere: as we climbed a little rise in the generally downward road, we found a charming house set back from the thoroughfare. It was a wooden cottage with tidy hedgerows and a Goat tethered amongst flowers of some description, which therefore had mostly lost their heads. There was also a cabbage-patch evidently more loved than the flowers, for it was well enclosed against the Goat. The hearty redolence of roasting meat flooding from every window assaulted my senses and I drew Tigris to a halt.

  ‘Not there,’ said my Cannibal. ‘Press on.’

  I saw a feminine face peering at us from a window.

  ‘Note the cabbages,’ he added.

  ‘Yes, I see,’ I said.

  ‘So it is certainly winter.’

  ‘I see that, my friend.’

  The woman at the window watched us as we departed.

  ‘Comely face,’ said my Cannibal.

  ‘You may be correct, but I am unable to offer any comment on it. I know of only one comely face,’ I said. When he did not ask me to elaborate upon this, I volunteered: ‘I was to marry. Susannah is her name.’