The plump body and the dried one lay together in the gully.
There let them breed maggots together, white maggots, cried one blackfellow, who was a poet.
Everybody laughed.
Then they were singing, though in soft, reverential voices, for it was still the season of the snake that could devour them; they were singing:
‘White maggots are drying up,
White maggots are drying up.…’
Voss, who heard them, saw that the palm of his otherwise yellow hand was still astonishingly white.
‘Harry,’ he called out in his loneliness, ‘come and read to me.’
And then:
‘Ein guter Junge.’
And again, still fascinated by his own surprising hand:
‘Ach, Harry is, naturally, dead.’
Only he was left, only he could endure it, and that because at last he was truly humbled.
So saints acquire sanctity who are only bones.
He laughed.
It was both easy and difficult. For he was still a man, bound by the threads of his fate. A whole knot of it.
At night he lay and looked through the thin twigs, at the stars, but more especially at the Comet, which appeared to have glided almost the length of its appointed course. It was fading, or else his eyes were.
‘That, Harry,’ he said, ‘is the southern Cross, I believe, to the south of the mainmast. That is where, doubtless, their snake will burrow in and we shall not see him again.
‘Are you frightened?’ he asked.
He himself, he realized, had always been most abominably frightened, even at the height of his divine power, a frail god upon a rickety throne, afraid of opening letters, of making decisions, afraid of the instinctive knowledge in the eyes of mules, of the innocent eyes of good men, of the elastic nature of the passions, even of the devotion he had received from some men, and one woman, and dogs.
Now, at least, reduced to the bones of manhood, he could admit to all this and listen to his teeth rattling in the darkness.
‘O Jesus,’ he cried, ‘rette mich nur! Du lieber!’
Of this too, mortally frightened, of the arms, or sticks, reaching down from the eternal tree, and tears of blood, and candle-wax. Of the great legend becoming truth.
Towards evening the old man who sat with the explorer cut into the latter’s forearm, experimentally, cautiously, to see whether the blood would flow. It did, if feebly. The old man rubbed a finger in the dark, poor blood. He smelled it, too. Then he spat upon his finger, to wash off the stain.
The following day, which could also prove to be the last, was a burning one. The blacks, who had watched the sky most of the night in anticipation of the Great Snake’s disappearance, were particularly sullen. They had suffered a fraud, it seemed. Only the women were indifferent. Having risen from the dust and the demands of their husbands, they were engaged in their usual pursuit of digging for yams. All except one young woman, who was exhausted by celestial visions. Almost inverted, she had dreamt dizzily of yellow stars falling, and of the suave, golden flesh, full of kindness for her, that she had touched with her own hands.
Consequently, this young person, to whom a mystery had been revealed, as if she were an old man, increased in importance in the eyes of the others. Her companions were diffident of sharing their chatter. They talked round, rather than to the young initiate, who had been, until recently, the little girl they had given to Jackie, the boy from a tribe to the eastward.
That day the men returned earlier than usual from the hunt, and were questioning the unfortunate Jackie, who suffered the miseries of language. They could not hew the answers out of his silence. He remained an unhappy, lumpish youth.
Then the old fellow who had let the blood of the white man came into their midst showing his finger. This member was examined by everyone of responsible age, although there was no longer any trace of blood. By sundown, all were angry and sullen.
So the explorer waited. He did not fear tortures of the body, for little enough of that remained. It was some final torment of the spirit that he might not have the strength to endure. For a long time that night he did not dare raise his eyes towards the sky. When he did, at last, there were the nails of the Cross still eating into it, but the Comet, he saw, was gone.
There was almost continuous tramping and stamping on earth. It had become obvious to the blacks that they were saved, which should have been the signal to express simple joy, if, during all those days, they had not been deceived, both by the Snake and by the white man. So the blacks were very angry indeed, if also glad that one of the agents responsible for their deception still remained to them.
Voss listened.
Their feet were thumping the ground. The men had painted their bodies with the warm colours of the earth they knew totem by totem, and which had prevailed at last over the cold, nebulous country of the stars. The homely spirits were dancing, who had vanquished the dreadful ones of darkness. The animals had come out again, in soft, musky fur and feather. They were dancing their contribution to life. And the dust was hot beneath their feet.
Voss could hear them. As it was no longer possible for him to turn his neck more than an inch or two, he did not see, but could smell the stench of their armpits. The black bodies were sweating at every pore.
Then he heard the first scream; he heard the rattle of chains, and knew.
In the night the blackfellows were killing the horses and mules of the white men, as it was now their right. The emaciated animals could not rear up, but made an attempt with their hobbled forelegs. Some, ridiculously, fell over sideways. Their eyes were glittering with fear in the firelight. Their nostrils were stiff. Blood ran. Those animals that smelled the blood, and were not yet touched, screamed more frightfully than those which were already dying. Tongues were lolling out. If the mules were silenter, they were also perhaps more desperate, like big, caught fish leaping and squirming upon the bank of a river. But their eyes glazed finally.
None of this was seen by Voss, but at one stage the spear seemed to enter his own hide, and he screamed through his thin throat with his little, leathery strip of remaining tongue. For all suffering he screamed.
Ah, Lord, let him bear it.
Soon the bowels of the dying animals were filling the night. The glistening, greenish caverns of their bellies were open. Drunk with the foetid smells, the blacks were running amongst the carcasses, tearing out the varnished livers, and hacking off the rough tongues.
Almost before the blood was dry on their hands, they had fallen to gorging themselves, and in a very short time, or so it seemed, were sucking the charred bones, and some were coughing for a final square of singed hide that had stuck in going down. It was, on the whole, a poor feast, but the bellies of all had swelled out. If they were beyond pardon, it was their lean lives that had damned them.
Voss heard the sucking of fingers beside the fires, as the blacks drowsed off into silence, deeper, closer, their own skins almost singed upon the coals.
As for himself, a cool wind of dreaming began about this time to blow upon his face, and it seemed as if he might even escape from that pocket of purgatory in which he had been caught His cheeks, above his exhausted beard, were supple and unfamiliar. The sleek, kind gelding stood, and was rubbing its muzzle against its foreleg, to gentle music of metal, which persisted after he had mounted. Once he had ridden away, he did not look back at the past, so great was his confidence in the future.
Thus hopeful, it was obvious she must be at his side, and, in fact, he heard a second horse blowing out its nostrils, the sound so pitched he would have known it to be morning without the other infallible sign of a prevailing pearliness. As they rode, the valleys became startling in their sonorous reds, their crenellations broken by tenuous Rhenish turrets of great subtlety and beauty. Once, upon the banks of a transparent river, the waters of which were not needed to quench thirst, so persuasive was the air which flowed into and over their bodies, they dismounted to pick t
he lilies that were growing there. They were the prayers, she said, which she had let fall during the outward journey to his coronation, and which, on the cancellation of that ceremony, had sprung up as food to tide them over the long journey back in search of human status. She advised him to sample these nourishing blooms. So they stood there munching awhile. The lilies tasted floury, but wholesome. Moreover, he suspected that the juices present in the stalks would enable them to be rendered down easily into a gelatinous, sustaining soup. But of greater importance were his own words of love that he was able at last to put into her mouth. So great was her faith, she received these white wafers without surprise.
After lingering some time with their discoveries, the two figures, unaffected by the interminable nature of the journey, and by their own smallness in the immense landscape, remounted their stout horses and rode on. They were for ever examining objects of wonder: the wounds in the side of a brigalow palm, that they remembered having seen somewhere before; stones that sweated a wild honey; and upon one memorable occasion, a species of soul, elliptical in shape, of a substance similar to human flesh, from which fresh knives were continually growing in place of those that were wrenched out.
All these objects of scientific interest the husband was constantly explaining to his wife, and it was quite touching to observe the interest the latter professed even when most bored.
From this luminous state Voss returned for a moment in the early morning. His faculties promised support, and he felt that he was ready to meet the supreme emergency with strength and resignation.
All that night, the blacks, although stupefied by gorging, had been turning in their sleep beside the fires, as if they were full but not yet fulfilled. About the grey hour several old men and warriors arose. Almost at once their bodies became purposeful, and they were joined by the guardian of the white man, who went and roused the boy Jackie.
Now, Jackie, whether sleeping or not, immediately went through all the appearance of waking, and himself gave an imitation of purposefulness, while shuddering like black water. He was still terribly supple and young. His left cheek bore the imprint of a bone-handled clasp-knife given him by Mr Voss, and upon which he had been lying. It was perhaps this sad possession, certainly his most precious, which had begun to fill him with sullenness. He was ready, however, to expiate his innocence.
All moved quickly towards the twig shelter, an ominous humpy in that light. Jackie went in, crowded upon by several members of his adoptive tribe still doubtful of his honesty. But the spirits of the place were kind to Jackie: they held him up by the armpits as he knelt at the side of Mr Voss.
He could just see that the pale eyes of the white man were looking, whether at him or through him, he did not attempt to discover, but quickly stabbed with his knife and his breath between the windpipe and the muscular part of the throat.
His audience was hissing.
The boy was stabbing, and sawing, and cutting, and breaking, with all of his increasing, but confused manhood, above all, breaking. He must break the terrible magic that bound him remorselessly, endlessly, to the white men.
When Jackie had got the head off, he ran outside followed by the witnesses, and flung the thing at the feet of the elders, who had been clever enough to see to it that they should not do the deed themselves.
The boy stood for a moment beneath the morning star. The whole air was trembling on his skin. As for the head-thing, it knocked against a few stones, and lay like any melon. How much was left of the man it no longer represented? His dreams fled into the air, his blood ran out upon the dry earth, which drank it up immediately. Whether dreams breed, or the earth responds to a pint of blood, the instant of death does not tell.
*
Also early in the morning, Mrs Bonner started up from the chair in her niece’s room in which she had been, not exactly sleeping, but wrestling with horrid tangible thoughts. She jumped up, out of the depths, and saw that it was Laura who had rescued her. The young woman was moving feebly on her sick-bed, while calling out with what remained of her strength after the bleedings to which she had been subjected on several occasions.
The aunt looked at her niece and hoped that she herself would know how to act.
‘What is it, my dear?’ begged the frightened woman. ‘I know that I am foolish, but pray that I may rise above my foolishness. Just this once. If only you will tell.’
Realizing that there were cupboards which she would never be allowed to arrange had stamped an expression of confusion, even of resentment, on Mrs Bonner’s good face. She stood looking at her niece, who was trying to disburden herself, it was at once clear, for veins stood out in her throat, and she was streaming with moisture and a peculiar grey light. This latter effect was caused, doubtless, by the morning, as it came in at the window, and was reflected by the panes, the mirrors, and various objects in ornamental glass.
‘O God,’ cried the girl, at last, tearing it out. ‘It is over. It is over.’
As she spoke, she shivered, and glistened.
The aunt put her hand on the niece’s skin. It was quite wet.
‘It has broken,’ said Aunt Emmy. ‘The fever has broken!’
She herself had dissolved into a hopeful perspiration.
Laura Trevelyan was now crying. She could not stop. Mrs Bonner had never heard anything quite so animal, nor so convulsive, but as she was no longer frightened, she did not pause to feel shocked.
‘Oh, dear,’ relief had made the old thing whimper, ‘the fever is broken. We must praise God.
‘Eternally,’ she added, and heard it sound exceptionally solemn.
But Laura Trevelyan cried.
Presently, when she was calmer, she said:
‘At least I shall look forward to seeing my little girl before very long.’
‘Then you know that I disobeyed your wishes?’ Aunt Emmy gulped.
‘I know that my will wavered, for which I hope I may be forgiven,’ her niece replied. ‘He will forgive, for at that distance, I believe, failures are accepted in the light of intentions.’
‘Who will forgive, who condemn, I cannot say, only that nobody has ever taken into consideration my powers of judgement,’ Mrs Bonner complained. ‘No, I am a muddler, it has been decided, and not even my own family will allow that I sometimes muddle right.’
Laura, by this time too exhausted to submit to more, was falling into a sleep that appeared peaceful enough, at least, to listen to, and watch.
When she had wiped her smeary face with an Irish handkerchief that could have been a dish-clout, Mrs Bonner’s first impulse was to wake her husband, such was her relief, and tell him there was now some possibility that their niece might recover from her terrible illness. She did go a little way along the passage, before thinking better of it. For Mr Bonner, a man of reticence in moments of emotion, might not have done justice to the situation. So she hugged her joy selfishly, in the grey house in the still morning, and let her husband sleep on.
14
THREE little girls, three friends, were tossing their braided heads in the privacy of some laurels, a nest of confidences and place of pacts, to which they almost always repaired with the varnished buns that the younger Miss Linsley distributed to the children at eleven o’clock.
‘I like potatoes,’ Mary Hebden said.
‘Mmmm?’ Mary Cox replied, in doubt.
‘I like pumpkin best,’ said Mary Hayley.
‘Oh, well, best!’ Mary Hebden protested. ‘Who was talking of best?’
They were all three skipping and jumping, as they licked the few grains of sugar off the insipid, glossy buns. It was their custom to do several things at once, for freedom is regrettably brief.
‘I like strawberries best.’ Mary Hebden jumped and panted.
‘Strawberries!’ shrieked Mary Cox. ‘Who will get strawberries?’
‘I will,’ said Mary Hebden. ‘Although I am not supposed to tell.’
‘That is one of the things you expect us to believe,’ Mary H
ayley said. ‘As if we was silly.’
‘Simple dimple had a pimple,’ chanted Mary Cox.
‘Syllables of sillicles,’ sang Mary Hayley, in her rather pure voice.
‘Very well, then,’ said Mary Hebden. ‘I had begun to tell. But will not now. Thanks to you, they will not be able to say I cannot keep promises.’
Mary Hebden had stopped. She shook her braids with mysterious importance, and began to suck her inkstains.
‘Old ink-drinker!’ accused Mary Cox.
‘I will drink sherbet this afternoon,’ said Mary Hebden.
She held her finger up to the light, and the sucked ink shone.
‘Like anything, you will,’ said Mary Hayley. ‘Between sewing and prayers.’
‘Very well, then,’ cried Mary Hebden, who could not bear it. ‘I will tell you.’
All the braids were still.
‘I am going to a party at Waverley, for grown-up people, at the home of Mrs de Courcy, who is a kind of cousin of my father’s.’
‘A party in term time?’ doubted Mary Cox.
‘And if it is for grown-ups, why should a child be going?’ asked Mary Hayley. ‘I do not believe it.’
‘It is a special occasion. It is quite true, I tell you.’
‘You have told us so many things,’ said Mary Cox.
‘But this is true. I swear it upon my double honour. It is a party for my uncle, who has come back from searching for that explorer who got lost. That German.’
‘Uggh!’ said Mary Hayley. ‘Germans!’
‘Do you know any?’ asked Mary Cox.
‘No,’ Mary Hayley replied. ‘And I do not want to. Because I would not like them.’
‘You are the silly one,’ Mary Hebden decided.
‘My father says that if you cannot be English, it is all right to be Scotch. But the Irish and everyone else is awful,’ said Mary Hayley. ‘Although the Dutch are very clean.’
‘But we are not English, not properly, not any more.’
‘Oh, that is different,’ said Mary Hayley. ‘Yourself is always different.’
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