Mr Darwin's Shooter (13 page)

Word came of advancement. Covington was elevated to gunroom service, which was only halfway bad. It put him on the ladder to higher things and yet made him servant to those who once might have been his equals. He found himself running errands for midshipmen and the lesser officers whose social standing in the ship was a touch uncertain. His masters included King, the unreliable pal of his childhood, and so remotely detached from him now that he hardly looked up from squeezing his boils when Covington brought him a poultice one day. Covington had gone to great trouble to have it heated on the cook's precious coals, but King only said, ‘Lay it on my knee, and stand back. Thar she blows!' and dirtied the clean deck with his blood-riddled muck.

Off Brazil the lads were made hilarious by a school of octopusses, as they called them, though Covington, who had become prickly and challenging in his moods, knew they were squids, flopping through the water making a poor sight with their tentacles chewed and their bodies in a palsy. It was done by dolphins, who after their attack stood off as if they feared entanglement in the debris that gathered around the ship's hull. Men mulled about in the strange humour of what they saw, for entertainment was all their life on the wave at that time, as the rudest mockingly called, ‘
Them's
not octopussies, but whales' dicks bitten by
the moll of the deeps.' Mr Earle, the ship's draughtsman, smiled: he was a rare bird like all his artist-sort, and would play when boys played as if to be a child again, though he was the oldest man aboard. Covington had just begun to notice him—an easy, sickly, good-natured fellow with the knack of getting along with sailors and being as rude as they were if he chose. He thrust a pencil in Covington's hand one day and showed him how to draw two eyes, a nose and a mouth, then turned it over and the pretty young face was converted into a tree stump.

As for their gent, who had Joey lost to him as a servant barely before he knew who he was, he played at not knowing who he would have to replace him until the captain gave the word, and was blank to Covington's flirtations for the post. Their gent was a hard one to catch. He wasn't such a slug as he looked, even when he puked. He would dampen the wind, as they said, wipe his mouth with the kerchief he kept handy, and get on with his tasks forthwith. Could be he didn't need a servant at all. Sharp was the word and quick the motion with him, and he would not die laughing, as Mr Earle did almost, savouring every foulness he overheard. This Mr Darwin was something of a Scot in his dolour when the crew got going. There was just a deeper colour he turned at low banter—plum red as he sucked in his cheeks and went about his business. Yet his attention was constant. It made the hair stand up on the back of a young dog's neck.

It was good that Covington saw they were squids, for FitzRoy soon afterwards sent for him while he presided at a gunroom supper. Space was squeezed and manners cordial among these higher gentry. This captain was a great one for correction and often barbed his listeners with their ignorance.

‘What were those humps in the water?' he smiled at Covington, holding a bearing on Mr Darwin who slurped his soup hungrily—for there was no motion that week to
make a landsman peaky. ‘Those poor objects the men were so engaged upon. I heard them callin' them
octopusses
?'

Covington told him straight, ‘They were squids, sir,' as he backed out, collecting a dish. When he was gone, ‘What is its name?' Covington heard asked from around the hatch—and there returned the murmur, ‘Syms Covington,' confirmed among the company with yawns.

‘Odd job man.'

‘Fills in where needed and scavenges for what you will.'

‘Brains?'

‘An excellent copyist and a butcher's boy.'

 

One day Covington saw the captain moving along the rail towards him. From his manner, thought Covington, he might be one of those dolphins when it raised its snout, finning along steady with a round eye on the lookout. The gent followed him. FitzRoy went absently fingering the pigtailed scalps of sailors and gave no expression or indication of mood until he reached Covington's place.

‘A moment of your attention,' he spoke to the gent over his shoulder. Covington felt the pads of FitzRoy's fingers move across his skull seeking lumps and bumps. ‘Now this one for example. Covington, will you hold steady, lad?'

It was not a question that needed answering. FitzRoy's fingers were quick and spiky, jabbing and plucking at hairs.

‘Amativeness—full. Philoprogenitiveness—full. Concentrativeness—ditto. Adhesiveness—full. Combativeness—large. Destructiveness—very large. Constructiveness—small. Secretiveness—large.'

‘Am I a dumb ox,' thought Covington, still with his head down, ‘to be used like this?'

Then the gent had a turn at him and it was not such an unpleasant feeling—soothing and distancing, rather, as if one's own self had no case to argue. These hands were already well-used, such mighty golls for a young gent of
twenty-three, rough-grained and white with starching or whatever chemicals he contrived from his pickling jars and packets of arsenical powder.

Then the hands were gone and the attention of the pair was elsewhere. FitzRoy murmured thanks but Gent said nowt.

Covington knew this much already about the one who treated him deaf as a mainmast. Naked life was his subject in nature. Rocky islands and stones from beaches were living materials to his eyes, likewise skeletons of fishes and birds from which he conjectured former existence. With his geology hammer it was knock and it shall be opened unto you. Whereas their captain saw weather in the skies, their gent saw weather in the ground, and in the rocks of the islands, and talked of changes to the earth as if what was placed by God in enduring stability was a theatre of sorts. The thought opened the eyes of anyone who cared to consider it. Covington was one: it increased his amazement at creation. Phipps was another, and smiled in wise agreement. God's book was a fatter volume than he had conceived. All earth spoke God's praises.

When Covington heard that his adventure on St Helena island was known to the gentry, and he was said to be advanced with the opposite sex, he noticed the gent's eyes on him more often—though without much interest in engaging him in conversation. Indeed there was a stronger shyness about him then, a withdrawal, if that could be said of a gent who barely came forward in the first place, whose attention clamoured from a distance.

They found themselves becalmed. It was hot weather, thick as steaming flannel. Passengers and crew mingled, seeking every patch of shade. Men jumped overboard and swam around the vessel to wash themselves. Covington played the fool and acted sick for Miss Devil's Horns every time he saw her. He had a bad cough just then and was somewhat feverish. Horns was the female of the Patagonians, Fuegia Basket being her Christian name, fourteen years old and sitting on the deck hoping for a breeze. Covington made out he could not keep his young dog's eyes away from her. The lads said he was lost in Fumbler's Hall, and clearing his throat he said, ‘Sure and I am struck in the philoprogenitives real hard,' hitching the crotch of his trousers.

Then he had a dream that made him look at her twice. In the dream she reached out a hand and drew him to her. It made it seem she was the one who would rise from the water some day, riding in a seashell in all her Sunday School finery and savage guile. It made him go around looking at her closer when he got the chance. One day when he stood near the dame, and roughly catarrhed his lungs, getting her attention, Revd Matthews came by and spoke of Miss Basket having a
novio
, as if underlining his words.

Covington raised one eyebrow and said, ‘Who is that
intended you mean?' and Revd Matthews nodded in the direction of Yorker, another of her tribe, who played with his knuckles as if he would pull bones from them, and was glowering at Covington something fierce.

‘They shall be joined under holy law,' said Revd, who called Capt ‘his Nazarene' and made listeners retch. It would make Covington fling a punch if ever anyone took
him
for a Methodist.

They longed for a breeze, a diversion. The dolphins returned. The lads named the leader that still followed the bark Malty, from his drunken cavortings; another was called Do-Little Sword, after a midshipman's dirk; there was Pin-Buttock and Quatch-Buttock, on account of their thin arses; and the smallest that lingered behind was called Come Out of That.

‘He is a right shallock, a dirty, lazy fellow,' said Covington. ‘Malty is the one I like best.'

‘I'll put my shirt on Come Out of That,' said Mr Earle, with his sketchbook held open on his lap. ‘He suits my style.'

‘
Your
fish,' said Covington, ‘is lazy as the tinker who laid down his budget to fart.'

MacCurdy and Door started putting tobacco and rum on who would gallop around the ship first—it was always Malty, slick as a fist in a muslin wave.

Earle did a likeness of MacCurdy, a fearsome seaman bared to the waist and wearing sailcloth trousers with a careless sashband. He was first done in outline and then Earle rattled his brushes and gave him colour, and it was like a rainbow filled MacCurdy in, while the waves and decking around him stayed dim.

Something in Covington's thoughts turned his head around. The gent was at it again, assessing a person while seeming vague. He looked at Covington, who was without his shirt also. Gent dropped his gaze forthwith, getting an eyeful of pustules that were still in their last stages of
healing (and giving the boy lumps under the arms from the poison in them). Covington would not let his gent go so easily, and with wheezy lung baited his eye.

‘Would you have somethin' for a cough?'

The gent nodded, then turned on his heel and made for the lower deck. He returned with a phial of eucalyptus oil. ‘Try this on your handkerchief.'

Covington produced a rag, ‘My thanks,' and trickled the stuff on, and inhaled it deep.

When he was quite well again, with tropic air and salt water doing their part, he went to the ship's library in the poop cabin where officers were told to go before eight-thirty in the morning, if they wanted a loan of books. There were hundreds of volumes close-packed, among them the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
in twenty volumes which Mr Stebbings pulled down for him with good humour when Covington said there was a wager going on over who was the greatest fool among them.

‘Bumpology, is that what you want?' asked Stebbings, and Covington said, ‘Yoi, whatever'll do'—and he conned the entry quick smart. It was like the brain had several parts, each representing a faculty of thought, such as love, morality, veneration, greed, preferment, lasciviousness. He knew that his own head was a lumpy job. He knew which qualities gave him an itch in the belly, and which made him whistle with hope and pleasure when he woke in the morning and jumped to his duties after saying his prayers. Between the bumps on his head and the blood in his veins there was this third capacity making him glad. It was the spirit of the Lord, the joy of being alive. He would be robbed of his meaning without it.

 

The night was close. Along the deck sailors sprawled in all manner of comfort, some snoring, some singing. The
officers were drunk. The bark swayed as if at anchor on the smooth plain of the sea. When a breeze wafted across the water the officers scrambled on deck and cooled themselves, flapping their shirt-tails like chickens, and then they marched below again, spouting nonsense.

Covington waited by a hatchway for orders, and he slept. Then his name was called and he was in the galley and into the gunroom smartly.

They were getting up a good chatter in there. Four of them were close-packed dining and gossiping. Covington took up a post within earshot. Soon enough he came round as a topic of conversation, for he dropped a pan, spilling haricot beans, and made a bother of himself. Mr Earle knew Covington as one who liked to draw. Mr Wickham, the first lieutenant, traded on the merit of Covington's eye for ‘that fiendish little bit of frock'—he was, said Wickham, ‘admiral of petticoats'. All laughed. FitzRoy hurrumphed. Darwin said nowt. FitzRoy then said words that sparkled in Covington's ears: he said he knew Covington as one who might serve any man as a clerk—that Capt King had taught his boys Penmanship and Style as he surveyed La Plata waters amid eddies of weed and mud, and King would often test them with spelling and grammar, and this
admiral
came up trumps. ‘The
Adventure
, why, she was a very Dame School,' FitzRoy brayed, somewhat competitively.

This was all very good. But then there was something more, for there was always something more on that
Beagle
, a mood of taking every small thing to bits. It happened when Capt's voice softened and he said for Covington to hear—when he pressed himself against the dark, crouching doglike in the companionway—that while the boy had a clever hand, and cunning wits,
there was something about him incorrigibly rough
.

He heard Earle protesting, ‘I very much like him,' and another: ‘Not at all, not at all,' though whether for or against, or who it was who spoke, he was not certain.

Covington marked FitzRoy down for his loveless snipes. He was a man who knew everyone between those timbers, down to the last cockroach riding the last scampering rat. He had a greedy eye for weather and all manner of terms for noting it down, so that every cloud had its own description. If the breeze, God send them one, raised the brim of a hat from the deck or tapped ever so gently in the rigging, it got a name and a number, as if it had appeared again, and was not a new minting of creation, but had only been out below the horizon awaiting its turn to be shewn to them once more like a shy bride returning.

One night Covington entered the mess with jam roly-poly, and they all four fell upon it with cries of sport in the nursery manner that spelled their liking for fun. Capt, gone on Madeira, cried in his piping voice, ‘I had a black mammy who baked this sticky mess bedad I loved her!' Covington nipped back and told Pinchgut of his triumph, he should try this jam more often, and the cook clipped Covington on the ear, for it was every day that he baked it. Covington was new to his duties in the toffs' corner of the bark, he wailed, where they told all manner of tales to pass the time.

‘What manner of tales?' Pinchgut sniffed advantage, holding back his hand. He was not attracted to rumours of how the world was made. He wanted a quiet time among his smoking coals and greasy griddles.

Covington smiled and licked his fingers, wiped them in his hair, said, ‘Wouldn't you like to know,' and went and fetched his Polly Pochette. She had not been called for those many weeks of the voyage, but he would show his spirit a chance in an atmosphere that melted to butter.

They saw it, the winking curves of walnut wood. And presto Covington was enjoined to render a tune, a merry jig played in the inn near the crowded kennel where Spit and Polish were fart-daniels in his Pa's litter. Pelting over the bridge Covington bowed, raising a fine dust of resin. Soon
his four were fox-hunting, with all the tally-hos and taran-taras in their tiny State Room, their sweaty shirts and stitch-busting breeches jerking around in the close air, the smells of their guts thickening the tropic night. Mr Earle went leapfrogging over the back of the gent with neither room to bend nor turn, and Capt deep in his cups was obliged to render Covington invisible to his emotion. He asked for his shoes to be wrenched off, and Covington hated doing it, but lo he fulfilled the task, the green insides slick with personal moisture. When Covington met his eye he looked startled. A scurry of shy brides again. It was better that Covington was not there. He went up on deck, out under the stars. The commotion continued under his feet; he could feel it through his flat foot-soles.

Any time such rumpus was heard from the gentry the crew took no notice, except to grumble, ‘They should have a flogging for being so drunk,' and really it was as if their betters were farther away than the stars dusted through the cross-trees.

Covington was unlike that crew. When Covington found his betters at play he felt a longing to know the cause of it. He was one of those who conspire with their own fate, or else bewilder themselves to death. In this he was unlike the men. He was without the fatalism of the born sailor. And in this the crew sensed his difference, his longing for preferment. Meantime the gentry repulsed him as being dissimilar to their kind absolutely, an upstart catechist with the instincts of a jack donkey.

Covington threaded his way to the bowsprit and hung over the oily waters, watching the figurehead in black reflection. The carpenter had him scrubbing the beagle-hound till her wood was white and hairy, and then painting her up. He hung over one hundred fathoms deep. He inked her eyes in the shining black that Mr Earle called
cachou de Laval
.

They broke with the Doldrums and entered the Trades. Midshipman King got beside himself on the booms.

‘We have a wind, now, Covington-chappy, a wind.'

‘Aye, and thanks to ye,' thought Covington, ‘I would not have felt it if ye had not said so!'

Now air bubbles twinkled in the
Beagle's
wake, ocean hissed against the side. Covington's wooden bitch went smiling as she angled her nose against the slippery deeps. Mr Earle could be seen sketching down the length of the deck, always at his pencils and keeping his hand in. Covington was doing a hard think. He had located more bumps on his head, smaller than split peas, cavities and corrugations. What did they mean, that he was wiser than he knew? For the Patagonians' heads were round as coconuts and they were foolish as horses. Likewise Volunteer Musters, his skull was simple as a plumseed.

MacCurdy saw Covington plucking his scalp and gave him a jab. ‘There got he a
knock
, and down goes poor Cobby.'

He carried plates, cleaned up bones and gristle that had fallen to the deck. His watch was that of a dayman, an idler: by rights meaning he should sleep the night through, except he was called any hour to fix what was easy, running with a tar-bucket to stop leaks in the decking from wetting men's heads, and mending the seats that hung above the water on either side of the stem, that they called the Spice Islands, or heads, where they did their grunts.

A whistling came from the rigging as they heaved down a wave and counted the days till landfall. They made good speed. On such days they seemed to be motionless, or falling, yet FitzRoy crowded on sail. It was effortless, you might say, yet there was their commander on the quarterdeck with his legs planted firmly apart, his eyes narrowed and his gingery eyelashes watching every move the crew
made. He spoke from the side of his mouth to Mr Wickham, who passed the orders along. At the far reach of his word men twitched every angle of sail and spread the vessel's wings like a bird.

Mr Wickham called Covington up and said, ‘Make a good copy of the captain's weather notes, he wishes to see what you can do.'

‘I don't find my captain “uncongenial”,' thought Covington as he savoured the duty. ‘I never had such thoughts and would never use such a word.' A grin fixed on his face till it hurt. Why, Capt had brought him righteous punishment just in time. The result was as he wished, his grief for Joey being calmed, making him merry and willing again. The Lord acted through Capt, God bless 'im.

Covington whistled as he dipped his pen and made his curlicues of d's and y's. FitzRoy loved all weather and had a lexicon for describing it. It seemed that FitzRoy had a great hero. It was William Dampier, in whose voyage to New Holland there was a mine of meteorology with respect to winds and storms. Covington saw Dampier, a buccaneer, somewhat like him, crusted with salt, burnt black at the eyelids, hard, observant, and as it were the devil's adversary in his law.

When all other duties were done, Covington cleaned. He whistled while he cleaned. Even the passengers cleaned.

‘Open all hatches,' quoth Wickham, ‘and let the ship air. Do your washing. Clean your bodies. We are not dirty in this navy, like Nick Frog's.' There would be the added matter of foul air and fevers once they reached their mooring, for which Bahia was famous. ‘Let the ship smell sweet.'