‘She could have staked herself, or been ripped open by a kangaroo,’ said Voss.
He wandered off, calling the lost Tinker, but soon abandoned his efforts to find her. A matter of such insignificance could not occupy his mind for long.
‘Of course you know what has happened to the poor tyke,’ Turner whispered to Judd.
Deliberately he chose Judd, in whom he was always confiding.
Judd, however, on this occasion, did not listen to Turner’s conclusions. He was enclosed in his own thoughts.
Very soon after this, the fat country through which they were passing began to thin out, first into stretches of yellow tussock, then into plains of grey saltbush, which, it was apparent, the rains had not touched. Even the occasional outcrops of quartz failed as jewellery upon the sombre bosom of that earth.
One morning Turner began to cry:
‘I cannot! I cannot!’
The cores of his extinct boils were protesting at the prospect of re-entering the desert. His gums were bleeding under the pressure of emotion.
If the others barely listened, or were only mildly disgusted by his outburst, it was because each man was obsessed by the same prospect. Without an audience, Turner quietened down, and was jolted on.
‘At least we shall throw off our friends the blackfellows, if they are at all rational,’ observed Ralph Angus. ‘No one in his senses would leave abundance to enter this desert.’
‘That you would not understand, Ralph,’ grinned Voss, implying that he did.
‘I am entitled to my own opinions,’ muttered the young man. ‘But I will keep them to myself in future.’
Voss continued to grin. His flesh had been reduced to such an extent, he could no longer smile.
So the party entered the approaches to hell, with no sound but that of horses passing through a desert, and saltbush grating in a wind.
This devilish country, flat at first, soon broke up into winding gullies, not particularly deep, but steep enough to wrench the backs of the animals that had to cross them, and to wear the bodies and nerves of the men by the frantic motion that it involved. There was no avoiding chaos by detour. The gullies had to be crossed, and on the far side there was always another tortuous gully. It was as if the whole landscape had been thrown up into great earthworks defending the distance.
In the course of the assault, the faces of all those concerned began to wear an expression of abstraction. In the lyrical grass-lands through which they had lately ridden, they had sung away what was left of their youth. Now, in their silence, they had even left off counting their sores. They had almost renounced their old, wicker bodies. They were very tired at sunset. Only the spirit was flickering in the skull. Whether it would leap up in a blaze of revelation, remained to be seen.
Then, one evening as they scrambled up towards a red ridge, one of the horses, or skeleton of a gelding, of which the eyes had gone milky with blight, and the crimson sores were the only signs of life, stumbled, and fell back with a thin scream into the gully, where he lay, and lunged, and continued to scream.
At once every man, with the exception of the leader, raised his voice, in curses, commands, or words of advice. All together. What they intended to achieve by their outcry, the men themselves could not have explained, except that they had been compelled to join with the horse in expression of their common agony.
Then Voss said:
‘I suggest that you shoot the beast, Mr Judd.’
Judd dismounted, and, when he had unslung his gun and descended the slope, quickly dispatched the poor horse. This humane act was the only one that reason could have suggested, yet, when the convict had stripped the pack-saddle from the carcass, pulling at the leather with such force as he could still summon, almost falling back under the surviving weight of his once powerful frame, he took stones, and began to pelt the dead horse. He pelted slowly and viciously, his broad back turned to the group of his companions, and the stones made a slow, dead noise on the horse’s hide.
Until Voss insisted:
‘Come up, Mr Judd. It is foolish to expend your energy in this way.’
It did seem foolish. Or terrifying. Harry Robarts, who had respected, and even fallen in love with his mate, was terrified. But he, poor boy, was simple.
As soon as Judd had recovered his customary balance, and his legs had returned him to the horse he had been riding, the party struggled a little farther, climbing out upon what appeared to be a considerable plateau, arid certainly, but blessedly flat.
‘Here I think we will camp,’ decided Voss, when they had come to a few twisted trees.
He did not say more. There were occasions when, out of almost voluptuous perversity, he did respect the feelings of others.
All sat in the dusk, nursing in their mouths a little tepid water, that tasted of canvas, or a sad, departed civilization.
But Harry Robarts went wandering across the desert of the moon, stumbling quite drunkenly, and when the actual moon had risen, the tears were icy in the ravines of the boy’s agèd face. Rambling and snivelling, he fell to counting such mercies as he had received, and in so doing, recalled the many acts of kindness of his mate the convict. These appeared more poignant, perhaps, since all human ties must be cut.
When, suddenly, in the mingling of dusk and moonlight, the boy realized that he was looking into animals’ eyes. In the interval before fear, the situation remained objective for all concerned. Then it became better understood. The boy saw that the eyes were those of a blackfellow, squatting in a hollow beside two women, his equals in nakedness and surprise, who were engaged in coaxing a firestick into marriage with a handful of dry twigs. The attitudes of all were too innocent to be maintained. The boy stumbled back upon his heels, mumbling the curses he had learnt, the black man leaped, faster than light, blacker than darkness, into the nearest gully, followed by his two women and their almost independent breasts.
The boy was still cursing the shock he had received, and the absence of that courage which he always hoped would come to match his strength, when he heard a wailing from the natives, and from the distance, a blurred burst of answering cries. Upon telling his story afterwards, he remembered also to have caught sight of a second, more distant fire the moment before it was extinguished.
‘So we did not throw off the damn blacks,’ panted Harry Robarts in his own camp circle.
Voss, alone of all his party, remained persistently cheerful.
‘There is no reason to believe that these natives are not of our present locality,’ he said, ‘and it could suggest that we have come to better country.’
Such logic persuaded those who wished to be persuaded.
‘It is unreasonable,’ laughed Voss, ‘when we have practically ignored the presence of the natives in the past, to behave of a sudden like a number of nervous women.’
‘We were strong then,’ said Judd, passionately. ‘And had hopes.’
‘You, surely, of all men, have known before the unwisdom of abandoning hope,’ the leader replied.
Seeking to comfort him with human precepts, in what was possibly an unearthly situation, the comforter alone was strengthened.
When Voss had lifted the flap of his tent and got inside, Judd the convict muttered to his own teeth:
‘In those days, I knew how much and how little I was capable of. I knew where I was headed. Now I do not know about us.’
After that, everybody went to bed, with firearms ready to hand, but slept deeply, as they were exhausted.
In the morning there was a bright, cold dew upon the world, and even the travellers, as they looked out across the austere plateau, were sensible of some refreshment, if only from sleep.
Voss himself was up earliest, and was going about gathering the dew with a sponge and squeezing it into a quart pot to make use of all possible moisture for his own consumption. Palfreyman soon joined him at his work.
‘It could be idyllic,’ the ornithologist remarked, ‘if we were to keep our heads lowered, and
concentrate our whole attention on these jewels.’
‘This is the way, I understand, in which some people acquire religious faith,’ the German replied.
Palfreyman, whose own faith had suffered considerably, was prepared to accept the remark as punishment of a sort.
‘Some people,’ he agreed.
‘Ah, Palfreyman,’ said Voss, ‘you are humble. And humility is humiliating in men. I am humiliated for you.’
As Palfreyman did not answer, he added, though more for himself:
‘I suspect we shall soon learn which of us is right.’
He could have continued to humiliate his unresisting friend and to exalt himself in that metallic light, for the mornings were still relentlessly cold and conducive to sharp detachment, if an uproar of voices had not at that moment arisen from the camp nearby. On going and inquiring into it, he and Palfreyman were informed by their companions that an axe, a bridle, and the surviving compass had disappeared, indeed from under canvas, in the course of the night.
‘It is these blacks, sir,’ Judd protested. ‘With your permission, I will go in search of them.’
‘We cannot accuse the natives on no evidence,’ Voss replied.
‘I will soon find evidence,’ said Judd.
‘If they did not help themselves to our property,’ Turner spluttered biliously, ‘and they could have without much effort, simply by lifting the canvas, who else would have taken the things?’
Both Turner and Judd, remembering Jildra, were trembling to say more, but were held back by some lack of daring. Or was it by Voss? His strength had been increased by sight of the great, trembling Judd.
‘At least, here are the natives themselves,’ Palfreyman broke the awkwardness.
Everybody looked, and saw a group of several blackfellows assembled in the middle distance. The light and a feather of low-lying mist made them appear to be standing in a cloud. Thus elevated, their spare, elongated bodies, of burnt colours, gave to the scene a primitve purity that silenced most of the whites, and appealed particularly to Voss.
‘Good,’ he cried. ‘Here is an excellent opportunity to satisfy Judd’s eternal craving for material evidence.’
‘I do not understand,’ shouted the exasperated Judd. ‘I will give as well as find evidence. I will fire a few shots right into the middle of ’em.’
‘Wait, Albert. I will come with you. Dirty blacks,’ contributed Turner, the spotless. ‘But I must find my gun first.’
‘Neither of you will do anything so foolish,’ Voss said sharply. ‘I will go, and you will wait here. Na, mach, Jackie!’ he called to the native boy.
‘A lot will come of your hob-nobbin’ with the blacks. As always,’ Judd panted. ‘I cannot dream dreams no longer. Do you not see our deluded skeletons, Mr Voss?’
‘If you are suffering from delusions, it is the result of our unavoidable physical condition,’ said the German, rather primly.
‘Arrrr,’ groaned Judd.
But everyone fell silent, even Judd himself, while the aboriginals, of superior, almost godlike mien, waited upon their cloud, to pass judgement, as it were.
‘As our friend Judd is jealous of my attempts to establish understanding and sympathy between the native mind and ourselves,’ Voss observed finally, ‘I will ask Mr Palfreyman to go amongst them, and investigate this matter of our stolen property. He, at least, is unprejudiced, and will act politic.’
Somebody sighed. It could have been Palfreyman, who was startled by this sudden exposure of himself. His skin had turned yellow.
‘I am certainly unbiased,’ he said, and smiled thinly. ‘I shall go,’ he agreed. ‘I only hope that I may acquit myself truly,’ he added.
There he halted. Everyone was aware that he, an educated gentleman, no longer had control over the words he was using.
‘Excellent,’ applauded Voss.
The circumstances to which they were reduced prevented him from wetting his lips. He was confident, however, that by a brilliant accident he had hit upon a means of revealing the true condition of a soul.
‘Here,’ said Judd, offering Palfreyman his own weapon.
‘Will you go armed?’ asked Voss, lowering his eyelids.
‘No,’ said Palfreyman. ‘Of course not. Not armed.’
‘Will you, at least, take the native?’
‘I doubt whether they would understand him.’
‘Scarcely,’ said Voss. ‘But his presence.’
‘No. I will go. I will trust to my faith.’
It sounded terribly weak. Voss heard with joy, and looked secretly at the faces of the other men. These, however, were too thin to express anything positive.
Palfreyman, who was certainly very small, in what had once been his cabbage-tree hat, had begun to walk towards the cloudful of blacks, but slowly, but deliberately, with rather large strides, as if he had been confirming the length of an important plot of land. As he went forward he became perfectly detached from his surroundings, and was thinking of many disconnected incidents, of a joyful as well as an unhappy nature, of the love that he had denied his sister, of the bland morning in which he had stood holding the horse’s bridle and talking to Miss Trevelyan, even of the satisfaction that he and Turner had seemed to share as he shaved the latter’s suppurating face. Since it had become obvious that he was dedicated to a given end, his own celibacy could only appear natural. Over the dry earth he went, with his springy, exaggerated strides, and in this strange progress was at peace and in love with his fellows. Both sides were watching him. The aboriginals could have been trees, but the members of the expedition were so contorted by apprehension, longing, love or disgust, they had become human again. All remembered the face of Christ that they had seen at some point in their lives, either in churches or visions, before retreating from what they had not understood, the paradox of man in Christ, and Christ in man. All were obsessed by what could be the last scene for some of them. They could not advance farther.
Voss was scourging his leg with a black stick.
Palfreyman walked on.
Harry Robarts would have called out, if his voice had not been frozen.
Then, we are truly damned, Frank Le Mesurier knew, his dreams taking actual shape.
Palfreyman continued to advance.
If his faith had been strong enough, he would have known what to do, but as he was frightened, and now could think of nothing, except, he could honestly say, that he did love all men, he showed the natives the palms of his hands. These, of course, would have been quite empty, but for the fate that was written on them.
The black men looked, fascinated, at the white palms, at the curiously lidded eyes of the intruder. All, including the stranger himself, were gathered together at the core of a mystery. The blacks would soon begin to see inside the white man’s skin, that was transfigured by the morning; it was growing transparent, like clear water.
Then one black man warded off the white mysteries with terrible dignity. He flung his spear. It stuck in the white man’s side, and hung down, quivering. All movements now became awkward. The awkward white man stood with his toes turned in. A second black, of rather prominent muscles, and emotional behaviour, rushed forward with a short spear, or knife, it could have been, and thrust it between the white man’s ribs. It was accomplished so easily.
‘Ahhhhh,’ Palfreyman was laughing, because still he did not know what to do.
With his toes turned in.
But clutching the pieces of his life.
The circles were whirling already, the white circles in the blue, quicker and quicker.
‘Ah, Lord,’ he said, upon his knees, ‘if I had been stronger.’
But his voice was bubbling. His blood was aching through a hole which the flies had scented already.
Ah, Lord, Lord, his mind repeated, before tremendous pressure from above compelled him to lay down the last of his weakness. He had failed evidently.
Then Harry Robarts did scream.
Then Judd had dischar
ged his gun, with none too accurate aim, but the muscular black was fumbling with his guts, tumbling.
Voss was shouting in a high voice.
‘I forbid any man to fire, to make matters worse by shooting at this people.’
For they were his.
All the blacks had streaked from the scene, however, except the second murderer, who had stumbled, straddled a rock, toppled, before the violence of uncontrol flung him away, somewhere, into a gully.
Mr Palfreyman was already dead when the members of the expedition arrived at his side and took him up. Nor was there a single survivor who did not feel that part of him had died.
In the course of the morning a grave was dug in the excessively hard ground, by which time the eyelids of the dead man had thickened, and the black blood was clotting in his wounds. Death had turned him into wax.
Pious peasants wore their knees out worshipping similar effigies, Voss remembered with disgust. The face of Laura Trevelyan, herself waxen amongst the candles, did reproach him for a moment during the orgy of mortality at which they were assisting, but he drove her off, together with the flies, and spoke very irritably, for flesh, like candles, is designed to melt.
‘The sooner he is below ground, the better,’ he said, ‘in such heat.’
‘We must read the burial service,’ mumbled Judd.
‘I prefer not to,’ Voss replied.
‘I cannot,’ said Judd.
Frank Le Mesurier, whose wasted face was running with yellow sweat, declined.
‘I cannot,’ Judd kept repeating, as he knelt upon the stones, beside the trench in which it was intended to put the dead man, ‘but would if I had the education.’
It was terrible for him to have to admit.
Finally, Ralph Angus read the service, correcting himself time and again, for the meaning of the words was too great for him to grasp; he had been brought up a gentleman.
In the case of Harry Robarts, however, truth descended upon ignorance in a blinding light. He saw into the meaning of words, and watched the white bird depart out of the hole in Mr Palfreyman’s side as they lowered the body into the ground.
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