The Life and Surprizing Adventures of Archibald Kerr, British Diplomat

‘Well, son, you have your way, follow it. But do not forget the old truth: walking on the bones of your loved ones, you will reach your own bones…’

He didn't want to go home after school. The city had recently started trams, and he rode around the city until late at night. He had seen many wonderful things.

He drove to the huge tea warehouse on the riverbank, walked across the bridge to the southern part of the city, sat for a long time on the parapet, waiting for a passenger train to crawl over the next bridge. A small locomotive with a long chimney usually pulled six or seven cars. The windows of the first two glowed with lights, it was first class. Kerosene lamps glinted in the windows of the next cars. And at the end of the train were the prisoners. The barred windows of their cars were dark, and armed soldiers stood on the platforms.

Archie would take the tram again and go all the way to the turnpike, skirting the city on the other side. There were endless wharves and warehouses, ships and docks. It was a different life where the tram brought him. There were no tall houses or clear streets. Here were the tents of the newcomers in search of happiness, and across the road, in a deep ravine hundreds of convicts were washing gold.

They stood in a solid wall, shoulder to shoulder, on either side of this ravine, at the bottom of which flowed a small river. They scooped clay earth into the trays and passed it down the chain to those who stood knee-deep in water and washed the trays, and then passed them to the other side, above. There they were received by the same slaves, and already they poured into bags what was left in the trays, and loaded the bags onto carts. Horses, camels, oxen were waiting for their draught fate…

It was a ghastly sight, hundreds of people in the wild crowding and utter silence swarming like ants in the muddy ground. And from above, armed British soldiers in red uniforms looked down on them and grinned merrily.

‘Hey, boy, what are you so interested in here?’ one shouted. ‘You want a uniform and a rifle, too? So you go ahead and sign up, we need volunteers!’

The soldier began to whistle what sounded like a “Moonlight Sonata”. Archie walked away in silence. He got on the tram and went home. Every soldier is a Beethoven, he thought, secretly envious of the red coats.

The return journey took more than two hours. His father didn't look for him – didn't even ask where he was. And Martha had never had the right to ask.

The next time he also saw the amazing: a whole herd of strange birds rushed past him with wild speed. They weren't exactly ostriches – he had seen ostriches in the zoo. But they did not look like swans either – for their short black necks protruded from their powerful bodies, which were covered with yellow-straw feathers. These creepy monsters grunted louder than adult pigs. They went like a train, leaving a cloud of dust behind them.

And the next day two red kangaroos fought beside Archie. About ten of them were grazing peacefully behind the outermost huts, when suddenly another animal flew over the fences jumping, found the main one in the peaceful family-and began to beat him at once with both front paws. And then, leaning on its thick tail, it raised its hind legs and swung them so that it almost ripped open its opponent's stomach.

‘He'll kill him!’ Archie cried, grabbing a thick stick from the ground, rushed to separate them.

‘Stop!’ somebody's rough hand grabbed him by the collar.

Archie twisted, but didn't drop the stick. Before him stood a bearded man in a turban, looking like a camel driver.

‘Hey, drop the stick!’ the bearded man said. ‘Don't you know they can cripple a man?’

‘He's going to kill him!’

‘You're not local, are you?’

‘Local! They even call me Australopithecus at school!’

‘This is a different conversation!’ laughed the camel driver. ‘But I'll tell you it's more of a game than a fight.’ They both realize that the freedom to swing a fist at someone else's nose ends where that nose begins. See, the old kangaroo won't fight back? And young only pretends to be at war. He tests the old one: will he give up the slack, will he give up the main place in the herd. If the old heroically survive the attacks of the newcomer-the test will end with the victory of the old…’

‘And if he retreats, he loses?’

The bearded man laughed again.

‘Kangaroos don't know how to back up, that's something our army should learn from them. And let's get down to business-do you want to help me?’

For three hours Archie helped the bearded man load the sacks. As the camel-train started, the bearded man said:

‘Come here tomorrow – make more money.’

It was the first shilling earned in the life of Archibald Clark Kerr. He would no longer steal change from his father. He grew up.

Then he had to work part time on ships in the harbor and with gold miners. He graduated from school among the best. His father tried to talk to him about further studies, but the conversation again failed. Archie just drove across the river in silence and came home in the dark. That night he had his first taste of whiskey with the longshoremen.

Days, weeks, months passed. He wanted a change – and the change was not long in coming.

…Of course, and so you can start a novel about an interesting man, Archibald Kerr, a British diplomat. But all that has been said above is invented. In fact, his life and adventures do not need speculation. All that will be said below is true. If not, the author will have to apologize. Everything described below is based on real events, and discrepancies in names, dates, facts and phenomena are most likely accidental.

Part I

Chapter 1

Who to thank for happy childhood?

The future English diplomat Archibald Kerr was born on St. Patrick's Day, March 17, 1882, in the suburbs of Sydney (South Wales, Australia). He was the penultimate child of eleven children born to John Kerr Clark (1838–1910) and Kat Louise Robertson (1846–1926). The Clarks lived on their ancestral Scottish estate, Inverchapel, and they had all been successful farmers for centuries. The name of our hero has changed many times: before becoming Lord Inverchapel, he tried several options, until in 1911 he stopped at the simplest. So he will be called below – Archibald Kerr.

Archie's paternal grandfather, James Clark, did not finish his studies at the University of Edinburgh, got a job in a trading firm, where he quickly married the owner's daughter Margaret Kerr. This short marriage ended with the birth of their only son, Margaret died in childbirth. The heartbroken grandfather returned to Inverchapel, and the child was named John Kerr Clark – he will be the father of the future diplomat.

After graduating from the local school, young John Kerr Clark traveled a lot in Europe. His father's wealth allowed it, though he had three other sons and several daughters by his second marriage. Of long-distance travel, John returned to the family, which every year became more and more strange. He was in his early twenties when he decided to seek his fortune abroad.

He went to Australia. Two hundred miles from Sydney, he and his uncle had bought property, and then they had acquired adjoining lots, so that in a few years they had more than two hundred thousand acres and forty thousand sheep. A few years later, the wealthy John Kerr Clark married Kat Louise, daughter of the neighboring landowner John Robertson, former Premier of New South Wales.

To say that his Scottish father – in-law was the head of the Australian state government is to say nothing of such a unique personality as John Robertson. In thirty years, this Australian grandfather of the future diplomat became Prime Minister five times. On the face of the terrible, he kept at bay the whole of the South-Eastern part of the Australian continent. There were two passions boiling inside him: for alcoholic beverages and to coarse language. By the end of his life, titled sir, he did not change these passions, and if someone loved more, it was his own numerous children, especially girls.

Kat's eldest daughter Louise was married to wealthy neighbor John Kerr Clark, and her youngest daughter to Robert Clark. Two families, so to speak, became related twice. But the youngest daughter's marriage was short-lived: at twenty-one, Margaret-Emma Robertson-Clark became a widow and returned to her father's house.

The house was gigantic. A wide wooden staircase led up to a huge veranda, where a long table on holidays gathered numerous relatives. On weekdays, the children were fed here, which every year became more and more. Children in the Robertson-Clark family were named after grandparents, so the names Margaret, James or John, for example, were answered by several people at once. Archibald in this sense was lucky.

He remembered his Australian grandfather John for life. And his Scottish grandfather James died before he was born. So Archie's childhood memories were the most vivid: a formidable grandfather, a huge house with many bedrooms on the second floor, a lawn in front of the main entrance and fun games with brothers and sisters in the Indians.

One day my grandfather brought with him a thin, bearded guest. He looked like an Egyptian, or even an Indian, but not a Scotsman or an Australian.

‘Here are my Penates, my dear Nicholas!’ Grandpa John said, trying to avoid strong language. ‘Come, women, we'll have a table in a jiffy! Do not make a mistake before the Russian scientist, and then I will…’

Guest – Russian! Wow! From that far and wide country where there are no roads at all, and bears easily approach doors, as if postmen. The kids immediately clung to the table, opening his mouth, looking at the strange guest. But grandfather drove them away:

‘All of you get out!’

The three of them remained: the owner himself, the Russian scientist from bear's corner, and Aunt Margaret-Emma. That's how it all started. Five minutes later the visitor had nothing to say to the chief Minister of state. He and Aunt Margaret looked at each other and asked and asked and told. She talked about what she had read recently, about wanting to study singing in Italy, about her last trip to London. He talked about the construction of a biological station not far from here, about traveling far from here, about what he had seen in distant countries and where he was going to go again.

Then they laughed that they had double surnames: she had Robertson-Clark, he had Miklukho-Maklay. Then they gasped that they had a mutual acquaintance in London- the eldest daughter of a famous Russian revolutionary. They did not know yet about the tragic fate of this delicate nature: Natalia Herzen will put an end to the intricate love triangles of her father and his faithful friend, confessing her love for Ogarev, and soon she will go mad.

There was much they did not know, young Margaret and Nicholas. Only six months later, leaving on business in St. Petersburg, he will leave her a letter with a proposal of marriage. And her answer would be waiting for Nicholas in the Russian capital before his ship docked in the Gulf of Finland. The answer was short:

‘I agree. I will wait for you from all your travels.’

He would return to Australia and they would marry. He will then return to the island of New Guinea, where only the Papuans lived, and Nicholas would describe their life in diaries and in detailed letters to his wife. She read them aloud in the evenings, sitting at the long table on the veranda. Sir John Robinson was not at home till late, and all the children sat down next to Aunt Margaret, and eagerly listened to every word from so far and wild a country.

‘The natives of the coast on which we landed had never before come in contact with a white race,’ Aunt Margaret read slowly. ‘These Papuans live in the stone age. They do not know how to make a fire and always keep the log burning, lit once from a tree that was struck by lightning. When they travel, they carry this burning log with them…’

Night was falling. The children were put to bed, but neither Archie nor his siblings could sleep for a long time. And the next morning in the bushes near the old Fig tree, the action began. The older ones whittled spears, the younger ones made new clothes out of burdocks and smeared their faces with soot and clay. An hour later, a band of bedraggled savages were whooping around the house. Archibald's brother Robin, as the eldest, pounded his chest with his fist: