Mary Hebden sighed, for all the men she knew, or it could have been that she was feeling sick from over-eating. Then the two passengers huddled against each other, in the stuffy atmosphere of oats and chaff that distinguished all vehicles from a livery stable.
‘And what are your plans?’ asked Mrs de Courcy of Colonel Hebden under the weeping elm.
‘I intend to return to Bathurst tomorrow,’ the Colonel volunteered.
‘I am happy to think Amelia and the children will benefit from your consideration,’ Mrs de Courcy said.
‘But shall leave shortly for Brisbane and Jildra. I realize that I did not fulfil my undertakings in those parts.’
‘You realized today. Thanks to Miss Trevelyan. I am jealous.’
‘You have no cause to be. I do not doubt that Miss Trevelyan is a young woman of considerable attainments. Quite beautiful, too. But beauty of an intellectual cast.’
‘Do not tell me!’ cried Mrs dc Courcy in mock rage.
In fact, all emotions must now be simulated, she knew from experience. If their relationship was to endure at all, it must do so on the frail thread of irony.
‘You devil,’ she added.
‘I have heard that word before,’ he laughed, opening his rather craggy face. ‘But, in this instance, its use is unjustified. Truly it is.’
It would have taken a far more serious accusation to quench the high spirits that the prospect of his journey had aroused. The attempts of the schoolmistress to discourage him had acted as a spur, and he had remained in a state of elation ever since. A man of less developed vanity might have inquired more deeply into Miss Trevelyan’s fears. But Colonel Hebden did not. In fact, he would give little further thought to one who could be of no more use to him.
15
FORCED to spend several months on his property at Bathurst in the company of his amiable wife, whose unselfishness tended to make her dull, and his children, who did not notice him at all, Colonel Hebden passed the time, somewhat irritably, in attending to his own affairs, and in dispatching letters to a number of acquaintances who shared his vice, the insatiable desire for perpetual motion through the unpleasanter portions of Australia. Finally, when all arrangements were made, the Colonel began to move north, gathering his party as he went. The company, however, was not fully assembled until they reached Jildra.
Brendan Boyle, who had been informed by Hebden of his intention to continue the search for Voss and who had responded with his usual rather flamboyant generosity, promising a mob of sheep, two native stockmen, and various articles of tackle that he personally would not have been without on such a journey, was waiting on the veranda, bursting out of his trousers, the shirt straining on his hairy navel, when the expedition arrived. The leader and the host had barely exchanged civilities, the members of the exploratory party had scarcely begun to ease their limbs, and the station blacks to enjoy an examination of the strangers’ goods, when Hebden asked anxiously:
‘Tell me, Boyle, did you have any luck?’
This referred to a passage in his letter of several months earlier, in which the Colonel had written:
With reference to the boy Jackie, it is most important that you detain him if he camps down with you before my arrival. If you should hear of his whereabouts even, from other natives, I would ask you to send word to him that his assistance is needed in locating the remains of Voss and his party, as well as those of the mutineers, or, if God should grant that any of these men be still alive, their unfortunate persons.
Now the Colonel could not wait to hear.
Boyle laughed. Out of respect for his stained whiskers, he formed his full lips into a delicate funnel, and spat.
‘Jackie,’ said the grazier, ‘did pass through Jildra a couple of weeks ago.’
‘And you did not apprehend him?’
The Colonel was quite taut.
‘Apprehend Jackie!’ said Boyle. ‘A man would as well attempt to put a willy-willy in a bag.’
‘Did you at least question him?’
‘Useless,’ sighed Boyle.
The Colonel would cheerfully have put under arrest this subordinate who had failed in his duties, but, in the circumstances, had to content himself with a show of blazing heartiness.
‘My dear fellow,’ he exclaimed, ‘do you know what you have done? You have only thrown the needle back into the haystack.’
Boyle waved a puffy hand.
‘Jackie,’ he said, ‘is mad.’
‘Madness will sometimes make sense,’ replied the Colonel piercingly.
‘I do not doubt you would have drawn the teeth out of the patient. Everybody always would have, except myself,’ said Boyle, who was still cheerful. ‘But come inside, Hebden, and let us sit down to a friendly drink. I can offer you some genuine Jamaica. None of this local stuff.’
So Jackie was not apprehended, just then.
*
What of Jackie?
On the most fateful day of his life, this boy, who had experienced too much too early, had run from the camp of his adoptive tribe. He ran a good deal at first, while the red light rose higher in the empty morning, but when the yellow sun took full possession of the sky the fugitive figure began to walk, though even then he was forced intermittently to run, as flashes of the grey soles of his feet would indicate.
The boy, whose isolation in the colourless landscape was not made less terrible by his black skin, carried with him his empty hands. He wore a girdle of bark cloth, and round his neck, upon a string that he had begged one evening from Mr Judd, the bone-handled pocket-knife, a present from their leader. So that, as well as being alone, he was almost quite naked. In normal circumstances, the isolation would gradually have been reduced by the many little measures that made life agreeable and possible: by following the tracks of animals, by looking into scrub or logs, by looking for water or honey, by looking, always by looking. Temporarily, however, his eyes would not see clearly, and the loneliness was increased by his thoughts. Terrible knives of thought, sharpened upon the knives of the sun, were cutting into him. At night his thoughts, less defined, became, or were interchangeable with those spirits that haunted the places where he chose to sleep.
So Jackie continued on his way. Whether he made fire or not, he was not saved from darkness. When it was necessary he did dig for yams, or stone a lizard, or suck the liquid roots of certain trees, or even the leaves of trees while the dew was still upon them, because to quench thirst and satisfy hunger were habits that he had learnt. Once he stalked some emu chicks, and eventually clutched a straggler and was feeling for his little knife, but suddenly preferred to wring the bird’s neck.
How, finally, he came to lose the knife he could not tell, but threw off the broken, greasy string, glad for what was a disaster of some practical significance.
The absence of the knife’s physical weight did not relieve his spirit, however. Because he was without obligations and there was nobody to observe, he would certainly play at times as if he had been still a child, but these short-lived games did not really interest him, for duties were allocated to children at a very early age.
At least he knew the comfort of motion. He was always travelling. Once at dusk, in an outcrop of rock, he came upon the hip-bone of a horse still wearing its grey hide and, next to it, a snaffle ring that rust was eating. The boy could not help but recall the immaculate, the superhuman perfection that the splendour of all such harness could suggest. In his mind it glittered, as in the country of its origin. He touched the ring, but became more cautious, even afraid, as he approached the fusty clothes that contained the few remains of a man. Then, he kicked the bundle, and rummaged in it. It was, he saw, the last of the one they called Turner, whom he had avoided whenever possible on account of his smell, which was the particular smell of all dirty white men.
The boy lingered in that darkening desert of broken windmills and old umbrellas. Beyond the rocks, with their cutting edges of glass, he found a handful of hair. He pulled the tuft as if it ha
d been a plant – at least it was growing out of the sand – and as he shook it free, he shivered for the sensation of white man’s hair, that he was touching for the second time. This was fine, frizzy stuff, a smouldering red in the last light. This, the blackfellow realized, would be the hair of Mr Angus. He remembered the thighs of the young man gripping the withers of a horse, and his pink skin shining through a wet shirt.
In that desert place the light continued to deepen.
Whatever else there might have been, Jackie knew there was no time left to discover it. So he ran from the dead men. When overtaken by darkness, about a mile off, he had reached a patch of brigalow scrub, and there he lay down.
Moonlight was of doubtful benefit when it came, because all night the spirits of the dead were with him. The thin soul of Turner was hanging like a possum, by its tail, from a tree. There was a cracking of sticks and whips by Mr Angus, who would rise up very close in a huge, white, blunt pillar of furry light. The boy thought he would not be able to endure it, and was pouring sand upon his head. When daylight came, his eyes were turned up and the rims of his eyelids staring outward, in a kind of fit. But he soon recovered in the heat of the morning and continued eastward, talking to himself of what he had seen.
As he left the country of the dead behind him, he realized that he had not found the remains of Mr Judd. Journeying along, through the glare of the sun and the haze of memory, the form of the big white man was riding with him on and off, the veins in the back of his broad hand like the branches of a tree, his face a second copper sun. This link between the flesh and the sullen substance of nature was in itself an assertion of life, and the boy would hang his head in relief and shame.
Jackie promised himself great happiness in talking to old Dugald. As he approached Jildra, he began to sing. To his disappointment, however, he discovered that Dugald had become so old he was again young, and he, Jackie, was weighed down with the wisdom of age. So he did not tell Dugald much beyond some uninteresting facts concerning the mutiny of the white men. All else he kept to himself.
For it is not possible to communicate lucidly with men after the communion of souls, and the fur of the white souls had brushed the moist skin of the aboriginal boy as he shuddered in the brigalow scrub. He was slowly becoming possessed of the secrets of the country, even of the spirits of distant tribal grounds. The children of Jildra ran screaming from him and hid in the gunyahs, and when he went from there, whole tribes of strange natives would beat the trees as he approached, or sit in ashy silence round their fires as he recounted to their unwilling ears tales of the spirit life.
But of his own, the great spirit by which he was possessed, that would sometimes look in from the outside, through his eyes, but which more often would writhe inside him, like waning life, or gush and throb, like blood – of that spirit he would never tell, because nobody was to know of it but himself.
So Jackie came and went. He became a legend amongst the tribes. Of the great country through which he travelled constantly, he was the shifting and troubled mind. His voice would issue out of his lungs, and wrestle with the rocks, until it was thrown back at him. He was always speaking with the souls of those who had died in the land, and was ready to translate their wishes into dialect. If no other blackfellow learned what those wishes were, it was because his fear prevented him from inquiring of the prophet.
*
Although Colonel Hebden missed Jackie by a week or two at Jildra, he was not less determined to follow his original plan and search for Voss in the mountain ranges and along the dry river courses to westward. If clues led him, he had the will and the supplies to attempt whatever deserts the centre of the Continent might contain. In this spirit he led his party out from under the classic coolabahs of Jildra into a congenial autumn. The sun was pleasant on the Colonel’s eyelids as he turned in his saddle and looked back at the last of the roofs and smoke.
Accompanied by four friends, all experienced bushmen, together with two native stockriders and a whole train of baggage animals, the leader dared in the beginning to anticipate success, but, as the weeks were consumed and the distance covered, with the usual privation and disheartening natural resistance to all progress, whether of scrub and sand, or of uncommunicative wild blacks, the explorer’s ugly face grew glummer. Sometimes at sundown he could not bring himself to write in his journal the firmly rational account that it was his custom to write. In fact, he would sit and think about Amelia and the children, and, opening his whitened, salty mouth, yawn like a horse.
Even Colonel Hebden had been made to look ridiculous by that most irrational country; the resistance of his human dignity was being broken down. He did not, of course, intimate to any of his companions anything of what was happening; on the contrary, he was continually cheering them on with helpful and amusing suggestions, of which even the wisest were sometimes irritating. If the Colonel himself did not see, it was thanks to his long training in self-esteem.
Then, one evening, quite suddenly, he determined to make an early confession of failure, and hoped fervently to receive similar confessions from the others. Encamped beside a miserable waterhole, on the edge of a pocked plain, he had already crossed the track made by Voss and his party in their journey to the west – crossed it at least twice, if he had but known – and the cupful of brown scum round which the rescuers had squatted was a means of reprieve withheld from the mutineers on the last morning of their lives. The bodies of the latter, such as Jackie had found, only a little less of them perhaps, were in fact still lying within a good stone’s-throw of the beaten Colonel. This, however, was an irony he would never be allowed to enjoy.
Veils were spread upon him, and that night, when at last he fell asleep, he was haunted more than usually by the souls of the dead country with which he had become so unwisely obsessed. It could have been that the torments suffered by the lost on the morning of their dying still infested the surrounding air, but whatever the explanation, and it could not have been a rational one, the Colonel continued to turn, and the horsemen did not cease to ride.
*
In their perpetual ride, the three horsemen came on, through a fog of thin, yellow dust. Dust of presage entered their mouths, and was fumbled by their shreds of lips. The horses, too, tasted the yellow dust, but seemed to derive comfort from the slight muddy mucus on their bits.
In that pale but burning light, the shivery legs of the men were gripping the knives of horses’ withers, without, however, controlling them; only the tradition of control remained. A little to the fore rode Judd, of course, as befitted the usurping leader, but just as the men no longer controlled the horses, so the leader was no longer truly in command. His party continued to follow at his heels, because they feared to stop.
Judd was mumbling some of the time, and would look up from under floury eyebrows, like an old, deceived dog. Ah, if he could have thrown off that body which had always been a trial to him, whether hewing stone, receiving the cat, streaming through forests of tropical grass, bearing chains, crossing deserts, but to part company was not permitted till the very last. In the desert of earthly experience he must watch his hopes drying up, past and present, flesh and memory, his own clumsily reliable hand, the little suet dumplings his wife was heaping on his full plate, the innocent vein in a horse’s ear, the twin fountains of his wife’s love rearing high in trustfulness. Sleep was stirring on her dusty bed, and when he had bitten the nipple of her left breast, she cried out in anguish that the years had been deceiving her. He had to laugh, though. In the end, he laughed, all of us is bit. It was the kind of joke he could enjoy.
Again he was the old, baggy man, and would ride on because it had become a habit. The flies were filling the red rims of his eyes. Only a faint future was visible through the dust.
‘Albert,’ called Turner, who was the weakest, and who, for that very reason, still admired his illusion of the strong, resourceful friend. ‘Do you see it?’
‘Do I see what?’
‘The water
.’
‘Do I see the water!’
‘We must come to it.’
They rode in silence, listening to one another’s snuffling of dust and mucus.
Angus hated Turner now. Always a decent, passionless young fellow, endlessness had taught him to hate. So he hated Turner. He hated Judd also, but expressed that hatred differently. Since he had been forced by circumstances to put himself in the convict’s hands, open dislike could have reflected on his own judgement. Yet, he would continue to hate Judd, whether standing with him in the pits of hell, or recognizing the man from his phaeton as he drove down George Street after dinner.
‘Arr, Gawd,’ cried Turner, ‘I cannot go on! I cannot!’
‘Keep it to yourself, then,’ Angus advised. ‘We are all in the same condition.’
Turner’s nose began to whimper. He coughed and coughed, but emptily, and was retching dry.
Judd no longer paid much attention to his companions, since he was fortunate enough to be riding in advance of them.
So that the silence and isolation began to eat at Ralph Angus, until he wondered how he might ingratiate himself with his hateful leader, Judd. That the latter was also admirable made their relationship even more unfortunate. Already in childhood, the young man saw, he had been repelled by what he most admired. He remembered playing in his little frock in his godmother’s conservatory. Mists were descending, the fur of soft leaves was mingling with his cheeks, when he tripped and fell over a gardener’s wrinkled boots. The man at once bent down, and lifted him up, into the world of animal flowers. How frightened he was, and in love with the strong colours of the hairy throats. Suffocating scents drove against him, and the different smell of the gardener. The man’s hands were different, too, that could perform the strangest miracles. Then he had buried his own blenching, ineffectual nails in the different skin, and fought the man’s laughter. The heads of spotted flowers were reeling.
Yet, the servant had remained superior in his strength and easy temper, and when the child had been returned to the ground, and run away upon his fastest wheels, he had wondered which of his possessions to bring and put in the man’s hands.
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