Even the depths lead upward to that throne, meandered his inspired thoughts. He straightened his shoulders, lying back along the croup of the crazily descending horse. It had become quite clear from the man’s face that he accepted his own divinity. If it was less clear, he was equally convinced that all others must accept. After he had submitted himself to further trial, and, if necessary, immolation.
I shall worship you, suddenly said the voice of the cold girl.
It was she who had wrestled with him in the garden, trying to throw him by some Christian guile, or prayers offered.
I shall pray for you, she said then.
‘Jesus,’ murmured the man, making it sweet, soft, pitiful. Because ineffectual.
Then he laughed, and spat it out.
Almost at once, Voss realized that he was righting himself upon the saddle because it was no longer necessary to lean back. They had come to the bottom, and there was a woman looking at him.
The old gelding stood on the flat bottom of a rock enclosure, directly at the foot of the mountain. Almost wholly enfolded by rocky cliffs, this considerable pocket opened out farther on, gently, cautiously, it could be seen, into a blue and noble plain.
But, for the present, it was the foreground that prevailed. In it the woman stood watching, after the manner of animals, like the horse which had come down from the mountain, and the herd of brown goats, which was now gathering gravely on its own ground.
‘I am seeking for a Mr Judd,’ said Voss, to whom alone, of all those present, he himself was not strange.
‘Ah,’ said the woman, stirring. ‘This is his place. But he is not here.’
‘He will come, though.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Oh, yes.’
She was standing in front of a house, or hut, of bleached slabs, that melted into the live trunks of the surrounding trees. The interstices of the slab hut had been daubed with a yellow clay, but this, too, had weathered, and formed part of a natural disguise. Only smoke gave some sign of human occupation, drifting out of the chimney, always taking fresh shapes.
‘You are his wife, perhaps?’ suggested Voss.
The woman, who was bending a twig, waited for it to snap, and said:
‘Yes.’
Thus she realized time was passing.
‘I am in the middle of making the butter,’ she said, or tossed out. ‘I cannot leave it. You can hitch the horse over there.’
She walked, or stamped, round the side of the hut, a heavy woman, in whom purpose took the place of grace. Some of the goats were following her. She went inside a smaller hut, from which there soon came the sound of butter tumbling crumbly in a wooden churn, awkward, but created.
Walking on numb legs, Voss went over presently to the smaller hut. He had every intention of examining the woman as if she had been an animal. She was, though.
By this time she had lifted the butter from the churn, and was pressing and squeezing, squelching with her strong hands, not all as labour, but some for pleasure. There was a milky perspiration still upon the mound of white butter.
‘He will not be long,’ she said, after she had prepared her voice for the adventure. ‘He is down at the lamb-marking with the two boys. They should have finished yesterday, only the dusk come while there was a few left.’
Then she paused. Her throat had contracted. All her strength was in her red hands.
‘Why is the butter white?’ asked Voss.
‘It is the goats.’ She laughed.
Some of these had come in, and were nibbling at the stranger’s buttons.
‘He is going on this great expedition,’ continued the woman after some pause. ‘You know, to find an inland sea. Or is it gold?’ She laughed, because she knew better.
‘Was your husband telling you that?’ the stranger asked.
‘I do not remember,’ said the woman, rubbing at a cheek with her shoulder, at a hair, or gnat. ‘I heard somewhere. People talk. They tell you things.’
‘What will you do when your husband goes?’
‘What I always do.’
She was washing the butter. The lapping of the water would not allow the silence to wrap her for very long. She reduced the butter, then built it up again, a solid fortress of it.
‘I will be here,’ she said, ‘for ever now.’
‘Have you no wish for further experience of life?’
She was suspicious of the words the stranger used. An educated gentleman.
‘What else would I want to know?’ she asked, staring at her fat butter.
‘Or revisit loved places?’
‘Ah,’ she said, lifting her head, and the shadows hanging from it, slyly sniffing the air at some ale-house corner, but almost immediately she dropped the lids over her searing eyes. ‘No,’ she said, sulkily. ‘I do not love any other place, anyways enough to go back. This is my place.’
When she raised her eyes again, he did believe it. Her glance would not betray the honest shape of her possessions. These were her true eyes, looking through ferns at all wonders, animal-black, not wishing to interpret.
‘He is restless, though,’ she continued, brisker, laughingly. ‘He is a man. Men know more about things. And want to know more. He has got a telescope to look at the stars, and would tell you about them if you asked him; they are no concern of mine. The stars!’ She laughed. ‘He is a quiet one. But deep. Sits there by the coals, and feels his knuckles. I would never know all what he knows. Nor would not ask. And make things! He can put a gun together, and a clock, only the clock is broke now for good. It was no fault of his; something essential, he says, is missing. So we watch the sun now.’
She had begun to slap the butter with broad wooden pats, that left a nice grain upon it.
‘Sir, there would be no man more suitable than him to lead this great expedition, not if they had thought a hundred years.’
The stranger heard the thwack.
The woman raised her head again, with that same cunning which had shown itself once before, plumb in the middle of her honesty.
‘Would you, perhaps, have an interest in the expedition, that you are come to see him?’
‘Yes,’ said the stranger. ‘Voss.’
And did click his heels together funny, the woman related ever after.
‘Ah, I heard tell.’
Her voice was trailing.
‘Sir,’ she said, blunt, ‘I am a woman that gets little practice with talkin’, and that is why it has been comin’ out of me by the yard. It is one of my weaknesses. In those days, they would punish me for it. I was often reported. But no one can say I do not work.’
And she hit the butter.
Voss laughed and, looking through the doorway, remarked:
‘Here, I do believe, is the leader of the expedition.’
‘Sir,’ decided the woman, coming round the sturdy bench, ‘that is something he would never claim. It was me, truly, sir. Because all men will lead, some of the time, anyways, even the meanest of ’em. It is in their nature. And some are gifted different, whether it is for shootin’ the wicks off candles, or divinin’ water, or catchin’ rats. You will be well advised to let them have their glory, take it from me.’
Just then her lord approached, accompanied by their sons, a pair of strapping boys, each bare to the middle. All three were spotted with dry blood, and had a smell upon them, of young, waxy lambs.
When the German and the convict had come together, neither was certain how to proceed. The sons of the latter knew that this meeting was no concern of theirs, so stood stroking their bare skins, their faces grown wooden.
The mother had gone inside.
‘I am ridden in this direction, because I have wished to see your place,’ the German began.
‘My place is of no consequence,’ the other answered.
He began to bring the visitor out of earshot of his family, because he was a different person in conversation with acquaintances.
‘I like to see people, how they live,’ said Voss. ‘Th
ey become easier to understand.’
The convict laughed, as far as his straight mouth would let him.
‘I am nothing to understand.’
His expression was guilty, but he could also have been pleased.
They walked on through a grove of saplings, that stirred, and bent, and invited strolling. Beyond stood a shed where the family shore their flock in season, very plain, of the same grey slabs, with races for the sheep to enter by, the pens below, of wattle and split posts, as in the Old Country. In one corner there was something resembling a gallows, furnished with ropes and pulleys. It was one of those erections that will rise up against the sky on immense evenings, though the present occasion, with its lambs’-wool clouds and pink sun, was not of that scale.
‘What is that gibbet?’ asked Voss to revive the conversation.
‘Gibbet?’ flashed the man, very bloodshot.
Then, when he had seen, he explained with his usual decent calm.
‘That is where we kill. You can string a sheep up there. Or a beast.’
They continued, as if by agreement, to stroll along the edge of the plain, but in the shadow of the sheltering mountain, until it became apparent the squatter had purposely led his guest to a cleft where a spring welled into a basin of amber water. Black, rocky masses, green, skeleton ferns, the pale features of men, all fluctuated in the mirror of water. Taking off his shirt, Judd got upon his knees, and was washing off the lambs’ blood with a piece of crude soap already there on a rock ledge
He is strong, mused Voss, considering not so much the thick body as some strength of silence of which the man was possessed.
‘When we first come here,’ Judd began dreamily, ‘this was all we had.’ He lathered himself with dreamy soap. ‘I mean, we got here in a dray, along the plain that runs to the South. We had an axe, of course, and a bag of flour, and shovels and things. We had the mattresses. But nothing of importance. I never owned anything of value, except once a gold chain, that got took off me in the street. At home.’
He was lathering his neck and his armpits, which made the dream seem silky, subtler.
‘Then, here was this spring. We found it.’
It was, indeed, as seductive as the lesser jewels. (Is not the poetry of topaz or moonstone more nostalgic than that of diamonds?) Looking at those wet pebbles over which the water was welling, Voss could have put one in his pocket, as if he had been still a boy.
‘I soon was owner of the spring,’ said Judd, soaping himself. ‘I would come and sit here of an evening.’
Circles expanding on the precious water made it seem possible that this was the centre of the earth.
‘Then, you wish to leave all this, all that you have found, and all that you have made, for the possibility of nothing?’ Voss asked, as softly as his foot, which was probing the brown crooks of ferns.
He was very thoughtful.
Judd, who had sluiced himself quickly and brutally, once it had come to that point, had turned round, and was groping for his shirt. The man’s back, the German saw, was laced with scars, of an ugly purple, and the shameful white of renewed skin.
‘Yes,’ said Judd.
He was looking at the water.
‘It is not mine,’ he said, ‘any more than that gold chain, which somebody shook in the street. And when they would take the cat to me, I would know that these bones were not mine, neither. Oh, sir, I have nothing to lose, and everything to find.’
In some agitation, which was only just visible in that thick body and still mind, he began to hurry his visitor away. They walked across the rather harsh bush grass, and skirted a clearing in which, on a rock platform, on a tripod, was the telescope that the convict’s wife had mentioned. It was a somewhat larger instrument than Voss had visualized.
‘What is that?’ he asked, in spite of knowing.
Judd murmured.
‘That is a telescope,’ he said, ‘that I rigged up to look at the stars. But you would not see nothing. It is too weak.’
He hurried the visitor past. He did not wish to communicate anything further, and was, moreover, ashamed of himself for any speculation upon which he had ventured. He was noted, rather, for his practical resourcefulness and physical strength. These were the qualities which had recommended him to Mr Sanderson.
When they had reached hut and horse, Voss held out his hand, and said:
‘We shall assemble at Rhine Towers the day over tomorrow.
‘The day after tomorrow,’ laughed Judd, with strong teeth.
They were liking each other now.
As the light was already bronzed, Voss did not delay in mounting his horse, and was soon climbing the sharp ridge that lay between there and Sandersons’.
That night his hosts told him something of the Judds’ history, in no sustained narrative, however, for what they knew had been put together from fragments, some of which, they admitted, did not fit together. For what crime Judd had been transported, they were not certain, but, on arrival in the Colony, he had been subjected to the greatest brutality and most rigorous kinds of physical labour. He had attempted once to escape, but had been dragged back while still upon the lower slopes of the mountains, through the intervention of God, it would seem, considering the fate of those who remained at large. On another occasion, involved in a mutiny, the ringleaders of which were summarily shot, Judd had been overlooked, again, it would appear, by divine favour. As one of those unfortunate beings who took part in the premature colonization of Moreton Bay, he had met his wife, herself a convict. There were those who doubted whether their union had received the blessings of the Church. If this were true, it had not prevented the tie from enduring many years since the first touch of hands under the giant grasses and teeming moisture of Moreton Bay. The latter part of their sentences the Judds had served more happily in the employment of a Judge-Advocate at Sydney, and it was from his home and upon his recommendation that they had received their pardons.
Voss listened to this with some, though not with great, interest, because he had not discovered it for himself.
But Palfreyman was greatly moved.
‘I will not easily forget,’ he said, ‘my first meeting with the man, and the almost Christlike humility with which he tended one responsible, in a sense, for all his sufferings.’
Voss jerked his head.
‘Your sentiments, Mr Palfreyman, are sometimes stirred to sickliness. However great your sympathy for this individual, it is unreasonable to want to take upon yourself the guilt of a felon, which it must be admitted, he was, to greater or lesser degree.’
Palfreyman looked at Voss.
‘I cannot overcome my convictions, for you, or for anyone, Mr Voss.’
Voss got up. His black boots were squeaking.
‘I detest humility,’ he said. ‘Is man so ignoble that he must lie in the dust, like worms? If this is repentance, sin is less ugly.’
He appeared to be greatly agitated. His skin was a dark yellow in the candlelight. His darker lips were rather twisted.
Palfreyman did not answer. He had composed his hands into an inviolable ball.
Afterwards Voss relented, but most of all towards himself. He was looking about somewhat jerkily in that half-lit room in which his words had fallen. There was a faint tinkling of crystal drops, suspended by silver wires from the sockets of the candlesticks.
Now, in this tinkly silence, he began also to excuse himself after a fashion to Mrs Sanderson, who had averted her face halfway through the foregoing scene, which, obviously, she had found most distasteful.
Ignoring his apologies, she said, however, very kindly:
‘I recommend you to drink a cup of warm milk before you retire to bed. When one is over-tired, it works wonders.’
Voss did not think he would accept her advice, but his eyes were for the moment grateful.
He is a handsome man, of a kind, she saw again, and, I do believe, asking to be saved. She wondered whether she would one day mention this to her husband.
>
That night Voss dreamed of the goat butter, in which the convict’s wife was about to mould a face. But which face? It was imperative to know. The necessity made his skin run with sweat, long after the inconclusive dream was done, and he lay there turning and tossing in the grey impersonality of sleep.
Next day, their last at Rhine Towers, was a gentle one. On such occasions are last testaments composed. Much was forgiven. The men spent hours conversing with little children. The day had never been more beautiful in that valley, nor had withdrawn more quickly from it in long robes of gold, and blue, and purple.
Just at evening, Voss had gone down to the river of ghostly trout. He was purged since yesterday, possessed even of some of the humility which Palfreyman extolled as a virtue. Standing by the brown waters of the friendly river as it purled and swirled over the stones, and looking back to where the house was fastened, so it appeared, to the bank, with much hopefulness and trust by human hands, the man was drawn nostalgically towards that strength of innocence which normally he would have condemned as ignorance, or suspected as a cloak to cover guile.
So, watching the clumsily-conceived but eventually beautiful house, of which the material structure had begun to dissolve, windows flower with the blurry clocks of candlelight, he could remember the elbows of the young woman as she sat at the piano and played through some insignificant nocturne. Woodenly. For all her grace and superficial self-possession, her cold mouth and warm eye, her small ears, which he now recalled in extraordinary detail, down to the last transparent curve, it was in the quality of rather stubborn innocence that her greatest strength lay. She herself was probably unconscious of what he had but now discovered. So, too, in the baleful garden, when she was indeed a wooden woman, of some ugliness, but strength, her words had struck deeper for their clumsy innocence, and could have delivered, as he had feared, or desired, a coup de grâce.
He continued to think about the young woman, there on the banks of the river, where the points of her wooden elbows glimmered in the dusk. Then, as it was time and he was tired, he climbed the slope and returned into the house.
Later that night, Voss searched in his valise for paper and his box of pens, and, after seating himself within range of a pair of candles, at a convenient little table covered with a cloth that Mrs Sanderson herself had worked, began to write to those of his patrons who wished to be kept informed, whenever possible, of his movements: rather pompous letters, which they expected, and of which he was capable.
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