Voss

13

ALTHOUGH the money he had made was enough to have bought him absolution of his origins, Mr Bonner had never thought to aspire to gentle birth. That was a luxury he left to his wife, who did enjoy immensely both the triumphs and the punishments involved. The merchant enjoyed the money, having experienced the condition of errand lad, of blameworthy assistant, and of confidential clerk to several hard men. Ah, he did love the fortune that rendered him safe, so he considered, from attack by life, for, in the course of living, Mr Bonner had forgotten that the shell-less oyster is not more vulnerable than man. Safe in life, safe in death, the merchant liked to feel. In consequence, he had often tried to calculate, for how much, and from whom, salvation might be bought and, to ensure that his last entrance would be made through the right cedar door, had begun in secret to subscribe liberal sums to all denominations, including those of which he approved.

Intellectual, to say nothing of spiritual inquiry, was not, however, a serious occupation for a man. He was content to leave it to the women, or to some slightly comical specialist. If he had experienced yearnings of the spirit, he had come closest, though still not very close, to satisfying them by going out and thinning the buds from his camellia bushes, those fine, shiny, compact, inpenetrable shrubs that he had planted himself, and which had increased with his own magnificence. Although their flowers suffered in the end from perfection, and their reliable evergreen charms became a bore as the season progressed, that was really what he liked: the unchanging answer to his expectations. Take his God, for instance. If his God had not been a bore, Mr Bonner might have suspected Him. Instead, his respect for the Divine Will had approximated very closely to the respect in which he held his own. Associated for many years in what he had supposed an approved commerce, it had begun only now to dawn upon the draper that some cruel surprise was being prepared.

It was his niece, Laura Trevelyan, who had caused Mr Bonner’s world of substance to quake.

‘We hope to persuade Miss Trevelyan to try the sea-water bathing.’

On this occasion he had come round the glass partition, and waited for Palethorpe, his right hand, to close the ledger the latter had been fingering.

‘What is your opinion of sea-water bathing, Palethorpe?’ Mr Bonner asked, which was humble, indeed, for him.

Palethorpe, who had decided early in life that opinions were dangerous, replied rather carefully:

‘It depends, sir, altogether, I should say, upon the constitution of the person concerned.’

‘That could well be,’ agreed his disappointed employer.

‘Without studying the constitution, it would not be possible to express any opinion at all.’

Palethorpe hoped that he was saved.

But Mr Bonner churned the cash in his trouser pocket, his good money, out of which Palethorpe was paid, by all standards liberally. The merchant was generous enough, for he hated dispute and discomfort. Now, as was only natural, he felt himself to be cheated of his rights.

‘But you know my niece!’ he cried, in some impatience.

Delay always turned him red.

‘It is true, sir,’ Palethorpe admitted, ‘the young lady is known to me. By acquaintance, though, not by scientific study.’

No one could take exception to Palethorpe, with the result that he had got so far and no farther. He was above ambition. The colonial air had not destroyed his willingness to serve a master; both he and his discreet wife were of the doormat class, although of that superior quality which some impeccable doormats have. Sometimes the couple would discuss the feet that used them, or would lay evidence before each other, it might be more correct to say, for discussion implies criticism, and the Palethorpes did not criticize.

For instance, Mrs Palethorpe would begin:

‘I do believe the paisley shawl suits me better than I would have thought. Do you not consider, Mr Palethorpe, the shawl suits me, after all?’

‘Yes, yes. Very well. Very well,’ her husband answered steamily.

For, on this, as on almost every occasion, they were sipping tea. They were both near and far. In each other’s company, the Palethorpes always were.

‘The pattern suits me. I can carry it off. Being rather slim. Now stout ladies, I do not intend to criticize, it is not my habit, as you know, but Mrs Bonner cannot resist a large pattern.’

‘Mrs Bonner is of a generous, one might even say an embarrassingly generous nature. It was kindness itself to hand on the shawl.’

‘Oh, I appreciate it, Mr Palethorpe. It was the height of generosity. Mrs Bonner is of that character which is definitely sustained by generous giving. She is for ever pressing presents.’

‘And after so little wear. The paisley shawl is of the July consignment. I can remember well. Some ladies did consider the patterns a little florid for their tastes.’

‘But tastes do differ.’

‘Even perfect tastes. We cannot deny, Edith, that Mrs Bonner is in perfect taste.’

‘Oh, Mr Palethorpe, do not mortify me! If I was to harbour such a thought. Not in perfect taste!’

‘And Miss Belle.’

‘And we must not forget poor Miss Trevelyan.’

‘No.’

‘Although she is an intellectual young lady, and sometimes rather quiet.’

The Palethorpes sipped their tea.

‘The little girl is grown a pretty child. But serious, one would say,’ Mr Palethorpe resumed.

‘Altogether like, pardon me, like Miss Trevelyan. Which is pure coincidence, of course, for the little girl is not hers.’

The Palethorpes did grow steamy over tea in that climate.

Then Mrs Palethorpe asked:

‘How long is it, would you say, since the expedition left?’

‘I did make a note of it, as of all events of importance, but without consulting my journal, I could not speak with certainty.’

‘I would not inconvenience you,’ Mrs Palethorpe said.

She stirred her tea.

‘That Mr Voss, Mr Palethorpe, I have never asked, but did he not impress you as, to say the least, well, I do not wish to be vulgar, but, a funny sort of man?’

‘He is a German.’

Then Mrs Palethorpe asked with inordinate courage:

‘Do you consider this German is acceptable to Mr Bonner?’

Her husband changed position.

‘I do not know,’ he said, ‘and am too discreet to ask.’

Then, when his wife was crushed, he added:

‘But I do know, from long association with my employer, that Mr Bonner will not see what he does not wish to see, and all Sydney waiting for him to remove the blinkers.’

Mr Palethorpe gave a high, thin laugh, which was full of feeling, therefore quite unlike him.

‘All Sydney? Well, now! Is not that a slight exaggeration?’

‘My dear Edith,’ said Mr Palethorpe, ‘if a person is not allowed some occasional latitude, where will he find his recreation?’

His wife sighed agreement. She did invariably agree, because she was so pleased with him.

Then the Palethorpes continued to sip their tea, themselves a superior milky white, like the cups they had brought out from Home. No coarse stuff. They sat and listened to the rather melancholy accompaniment of their stomachs, and were soon walking in the rain in the neighbourhood of Fulham, their spiritual environment.

No one could take exception to the Palethorpes, which made them the more exasperating, as Mr Bonner realized upon that occasion when he had been hoping for advice. Palethorpe sensed this, he always did, and accordingly was quick to soothe.

Palethorpe said:

‘I do trust the young lady’s health will benefit by a short course of salt-water baths.’

‘It is not her health, Palethorpe,’ answered the merchant. ‘That is, it is, and it is not.’

‘Ah?’ hinted his inferior, with that inflection which derives from superior knowledge.

‘Altogether, I do not know what to make of it.’

Then the merchant went away, disappointed, and leaving disappointment behind.

Mr Bonner took the brougham, which was waiting for him, as always at that hour. After composing his legs for the journey, he unfolded them, and asked to stop at Todmans’, where they robbed him over three pears, beautifully nesting in their own leaves, in a little box. So he sat in the gloom of the enclosed brougham, holding the box of expensive pears, surrounded by their generous scent, gradually even by their golden light, and hoped that the material offering he intended making to his niece would express that affection which might be absent from his voice and looks. He was rather lonely in the brougham.

When they were entering the stone gateway of the house at Potts Point, which was no longer so very agreeable to him, he would have stopped the vehicle, and walked up the drive to postpone his arrival, but his attempts to attract attention were muffled by the upholstery; his voice fell back upon him, and he had not the will to raise the little lid through which he might have communicated with the driver. So he was carried on, unhappily, until there they were, clopping under the portico.

The door was already open.

‘Oh, sir,’ said Betty, the most recent of the girls who had replaced the dead Rose, ‘Miss Laura is taken proper sick.’

The merchant, to whom the effort of extricating himself from the brougham had given a congested look, was still holding his pears. It was a grey, gritty afternoon.

He did not consider it desirable to stimulate the flow of intelligence from this girl, a thin thing in her inherited dress, so he confined himself to uttering a few sounds that could not possibly have been construed as human.

‘Ah, Mr Bonner,’ said his wife, upon the stairs, and less avoidable, ‘I was on the point of sending. It is Laura. She is desperately ill. I brought Dr Bass. He left but a moment ago, most unsatisfactory. That young man, I will have it known amongst all our acquaintance, turned the pages of a book in my presence, to diagnose, if you please. When anyone of experience, when even I know, it is a brain fever. Mr Bonner, I must confess I am distracted.’

Indeed, her rings were scratching him unpleasantly.

Mr Bonner mounted higher on the spongy stairs. The ripe fruit had become dislodged inside the little box, and for all its sensuous perfection, was jumping and jostling as if it had been cheap and woody. He no longer cared for this house; it was since Belle had gone, Belle the golden, who would smell of ripe pears — or was he confused? — on those untroubled days between hateful summer and vicious winter.

‘Well, then, we will send for Dr Kilwinning,’ Mr Bonner heard his strange voice.

‘Oh, dear, you are so good, we have always known.’ His wife was mopping her eyes with a shred of cambric and a handful of rings.

No one of all Mrs Bonner’s acquaintance was ignorant of what Dr Kilwinning would dare to charge, and that he was become accordingly the best physician in town.

But the Bonners were not a great comfort to each other as they went towards their niece’s door. Life was exceeding their capacities.

Laura was lying in her handsome bed, looking at nothing and at everything. During the crisis, which no one had explained very well to the perplexed merchant, the aunt had unbraided her niece’s hair. Now, the dark, hot hair appeared disagreeable to the uncle, who disliked anything that suggested irregularity. Nor could he remember when he had last entered his niece’s room, which gave him the impression of being littered with fragile secrets, so that he was forced to walk delicately, his every step an apology, and his thick, fleshy body looked quite grotesque.

Laura had to turn her head. She said:

‘I am sorry to be such an inconvenience to you.’

It was difficult, but her rather thin lips had managed that ridiculous sentence.

Mr Bonner sucked his teeth, and was moving even more delicately to atone for his deficiencies.

‘You must lie still,’ he whispered, imitating somebody he had once heard in a sick-room.

‘It is really nothing,’ said Laura. ‘But one of those stupid indispositions. That are difficult to explain.’

How gravely her jaws contended with speech. Her stiff and feverish form, inside which she could move about quite freely, was by now of little importance; it was, truthfully, nothing. Yet, between bouts of fever, she was idiotically comfortable, and could even enjoy the fumbling sympathies of her uncle and aunt.

‘Oh, dear, dear, dear Laura,’ Aunt Emmy was crying, ‘that we should suffer this. I cannot bear not knowing whatever it may be, but your uncle will bring the good doctor, who will explain everything.’

In times of stress Mrs Bonner transferred her own simplicity to those about her, and would address them as if they were, in fact, little children.

‘You will see,’ she added.

She was touching, and touching her young niece. To cover her up. Or to discover a reason for their suffering.

Looking at those two children from her tragic distance, Laura Trevelyan felt intolerably old. If she could have done something for them, but she could not. Even restored to full health, there would be nothing she could do, she realized, for her uncle and aunt.

Then Mr Bonner cleared his throat. Rescued by his wife’s words, he said in a young man’s voice:

‘Yes. The doctor. I will send Jim round. He will be here in two shakes. Yes. I will write a note.’

‘And if he should be at his dinner?’ remembered his wife.

‘I will make it worth his while to leave any dinner,’ said the merchant.

Given favourable circumstances, he was a man of power and influence.

Now he went about this business, after abandoning on a console table in the shadows of the room the unfortunate pears. These soft, innocent fruit seemed to proclaim a weakness that he would have liked to keep secret.

There the pears were, however, even if they remained temporarily unnoticed by Laura Trevelyan and Mrs Bonner. The latter continued desperately to tend her niece, bringing in succession a little toast-water, a good, strong broth that had slopped over while being conveyed from the kitchen, and a milk jelly in a pretty shape. When all these had been refused the aunt cried out passionately:

‘What more can I do? My dear, tell me, and I will do it.’

As if there had been a grudge between them.

‘I do not ask you to do anything,’ said Laura Trevelyan.

She had closed her eyes, and was smiling a smile that Mrs Bonner would have liked to interpret, but the girl was, in fact, so suffused with fire and weakness that she could not have borne her aunt even an imaginary grudge.

Notwithstanding, her niece’s defenceless eyelids exposed Mrs Bonner to fresh attacks of remorse.

‘It is always easier,’ she complained, ‘for those who are ill. They may lie there, while we who have our health must suffer. We are the weak, helpless ones.’

In the last resort of that helplessness, she held to her niece’s forehead a handkerchief soaked far too liberally in eau de Cologne, while continuing to disinter her own buried sins.

So the evening passed in activity and frustration. Dr Kilwinning came, and Dr Bass returned. Men’s boots commanded the stairs, and much masculine self-importance was expended. If the ignorance of young Dr Bass could at least be blamed, it had yet to be discovered what purpose the knowledge and experience of Dr Kilwinning would serve, although the eminent physician himself did drop several hints, together with many ornamental smiles, that he kept saved up for the consolation of ladies. Mrs Bonner had, in addition, great confidence in his beautiful cuffs, linked by lozenges of solid gold, in which were set rubies, though in most tasteful proportion.

‘And the very lightest diet,’ said the important doctor. ‘Soups.’

He smiled, and it became a mystic word, dimly steaming upon his tongue.

Mrs Bonner was compelled to smile back.

‘So nourishing,’ she sighed, herself by now nourished.

But her husband would not respond to such treatment. He began to look cunning. He was making his eyes small. As Dr Kilwinning remarked in confidence afterwards to a lady of his acquaintance, the merchant spoke with a directness that one would only expect from a very ordinary man. Mr Bonner said:

‘Yes, Doctor. But what is this sickness my niece has got?’

His wife feared at first that his want of delicacy might give offence.

‘It is still too early, Mr Bonner,’ the doctor said, ‘to diagnose the illness with anything like certainty. It could be one of several fevers. We must observe. And care for the patient.’ Here he smiled at Mrs Bonner, who returned his smile devotedly.

‘Hm,’ said the merchant.

‘I still declare it is a brain fever,’ ventured Mrs Bonner.

‘It could well be,’ sighed the doctor.

‘I would like to know the reason for this fever,’ said the merchant. ‘A reason can be found for everything.’

Then the doctor gave one of those jolly, indulgent laughs, and patted Mr Bonner on the elbow, and went away, followed by Dr Bass, whose shamefully honest ignorance Mrs Bonner had by this time forgotten.

That night Laura Trevelyan was racked by her fever, and called out repeatedly that the hair was cutting her hands. Her own hair was certainly very hot and heavy. But soft. Mrs Bonner made several attempts to arrange it in some way that might lessen the patient’s discomfort.

‘Oh, mum, it is terrible,’ said Betty, the new girl, ‘it is terrible to think they may take it off. Such lovely hair. There was Miss Hanrahan had the whole of her hair taken from her for the scarlet fever. But sold it to a lady who wanted to make pads for her own. So it was not quite lost. And Miss Hanrahan growing another lovely head.’

‘Go to bed, Betty,’ said Mrs Bonner.

‘I will sit up with Miss Trevelyan, if I may, mum,’ the girl proposed.

But Mrs Bonner was determined to bear her own cross.

‘I would never forgive myself,’ she cried, ‘if anything were to happen. And to my own niece.’

When the girl was gone, she prepared herself as if for a journey, with shawls, and plaids, and a book of sermons that she always held in an emergency, and presently her husband came, who could no longer sit alone in the desert that the house had become. Not suddenly, not tonight, not to Mr Bonner alone. These two people, looking at each other at intervals, in hope of rescue, had begun to realize that their whole lives had been a process of erosion. Oases of affection had made the desert endurable, until now the fierce heat of unreason threatened to wither any such refuge.

So the Bonners rambled helplessly, thinking of that transparent child whom nature had so heartlessly removed from them, and of this darker, opaque one, who had never really been theirs.

Once in the night, Laura Trevelyan, who was struggling to control the sheets, pulled herself up and forward, leaning over too far, with the natural result that she was struck in the face when the horse threw up his head. She did not think she could bear the pain.

‘The martingale!’ she cried out, willing herself not to flinch. ‘We have left the martingale at the place where we rested.’

When she was more controlled, she said very quietly:

‘You need not fear. I shall not fail you. Even if there are times when you wish me to, I shall not fail you.’

And again, with evident happiness:

‘It is your dog. She is licking your hand. How dry your skin is, though. Oh, blessed moisture!’

Whereupon, she was moving her head against the pillow in grateful ecstasy.

Such evidence would have delighted the Palethorpes, and mystified the Bonners, but the former were not present, and the latter were drooping and swaying in their own sleep on their mahogany chairs.

*

So the party rode down the terrible basalt stairs of the Bonners’ deserted house, and onward. Sometimes the horses’ hooves would strike sparks from the outcrops of jagged rock.

Since the expedition had split in two, the division led by Voss seemed to move with greater ease. It was perhaps obvious that it should. Those under his command, including the aboriginal boy, were struck by the incandescence of the man who was leading them. They were in love with that rather gaunt, bearded head, and would compel themselves to ignore the fact that it was a skull with a candle expiring inside.

In the prevailing harmony of souls, anything that could detract from human dignity — the incident of the raft, for instance, or that of the missing compass — was forgotten. All the members of the party, even the unhappy Harry Robarts, who was being torn intermittently in two directions, were as emanations of the one man, their leader. The blackfellow was a doubtful quantity, but there was nobody, except perhaps the leader himself, who did not expect to discard him. In fact, the others longed to be one less, so that they might enjoy their trinity.

It was the mules and few surviving horses that deserved pity, for these were without the benefit of illusion. They endured their fate, the former sullenly, the latter with a tired patience, no longer looking for a vegetation that did not exist. If they were to be allowed to die, they would. But from time to time they were thrown small handfuls of hope: once it was a patch of grey grass upon a hummock of red sand; once they devoured the thatch from some old native huts, swallowing and groaning, and afterwards stood still, the long, unnatural hairs quivering upon their withered lips. Temporarily, their bellies were filled, but not the days.

Nights were, by contrast, short and exquisite both to animals and men, for desires and intentions, no longer burning, were abandoned in favour of comradeship, dreaming, and astronomy, in the case of men, or pure being, in that of horses. Nobody, except Voss, was concerned whether his bones would rise again from the earth, when his green flesh, watered by the dew, was shooting nightly in celestial crops.

Relinquishing the pretence of tents, which in any event they would have been too weak and exhausted to erect, the three white men huddled close together at the fire. So, too, the wrecks of horses appeared to derive comfort from closeness, and would lie with the ridges of their backbones exposed to the darkness, not far from their irrational masters. All were united then, in the scent of sweat and the tentative warmth of bodies.

Voss said once:

‘Are you not sorry, Harry, that you did not return with your friend?’

‘What friend?’ asked the lad dreamily.

‘Judd, of course.’

‘Was he my friend?’

‘How am I to tell, if you cannot?’

The German was half angry, half pleased.

Presently the boy said, looking in the fire:

‘No, sir. If I had gone, I would not a known what to do when I got there. Not any more.’

‘You would have learnt again very quickly.’

‘I could have learnt to black your boots, if you had a been there, sir. But you would not a been. And it would not be worth it. Not since you learnt me other things.’

‘What things?’ asked Voss quietly, whose mind shouted.

The boy was quiet then, and shy.

‘I do not know,’ he said at last, shyly. ‘I cannot say it. But know. Why, sir, to live, I suppose.’

He blushed in the darkness for the blundering inadequacy of his own words, but in his weak, feverish condition, was vibrating and fluctuating, like any star — living, in fact.

‘Living?’ laughed the German.

He was shouting with laughter to hide his joy.

‘Then I have taught you something shameful. How they would accuse me!’

‘I am happy,’ said Harry Robarts.

The German was shivering with the cold that blew in from the immense darkness, and which was palpitating with little points of light. So, in the light of his own conquest, he expanded, until he possessed the whole firmament. Then it was true; all his doubts were dissolved.

‘And what about you, Frank?’ he said, or shouted again, so recklessly that one old mare pricked up her drowsing ears.

‘Have I not taught you anything?’ he asked.

‘To expect damnation,’ said Le Mesurier, without considering long.

In the uncompromising desert in which they were seated, this answer should have sounded logical enough, just as objects were the quintessence of themselves, and the few remaining possessions of the explorers were all that was necessary in that life.

But Voss was often infuriated by rational answers. Now the veins were swollen in his scraggy neck.

‘That is men all over,’ he cried. ‘They will aim too low. And achieve what they expect. Is that your greatest desire?’

Either Le Mesurier did not hear, or else one of his selves did not accept the duties of familiar. It was the lad who replied to the question in the terms of his own needs.

‘I would like to eat a dish of fat chops,’ he said. ‘And fresh figs, the purple ones. Though apples is good enough. I like apples, and could put up with them instead.’

‘That is your answer,’ said Le Mesurier to Voss. ‘From a man going to his execution.’

‘Well, if I was asked what I would take for me last dinner,’ said the boy. ‘And who would not eat? What would you choose?’

‘Nothing,’ said Le Mesurier. ‘I would not eat for fear that I might miss something of what was happening to me. I would want to feel the last fly crawling on my skin, and listen to my conscience in case it should give up a secret. Out of that experience I might even create something.’

‘That would not be of much good,’ said Harry Robarts, ‘not if you was to die.’

‘Dying is creation. The body creates fresh forms, the soul inspires by its manner of leaving the body, and passes into other souls.’

‘Even the souls of the damned?’ asked Voss.

‘In the process of burning it is the black that gives up the gold.’

‘Then he will give up the purest,’ said Voss.

He pointed to the body of the aboriginal boy, whom they had forgotten, but who was lying within the light of the fire, curled in sleep, like some animal.

Of the three souls that were dedicated to him, Voss most loved that of the black boy. Such unimpaired innocence could only be the most devoted. Whereas, the simplicity of Harry Robarts was not entirely confident — it did at times expect doom — and the sophistications of Frank Le Mesurier could have been startling echoes of the master’s own mind.

So that Voss was staring with inordinate affection at the black-gold body of the aboriginal.

‘He will be my footstool,’ he said, and fell asleep, exalted by the humility of the black’s perfect devotion and the contrast of heavenly perfection. Sleep did, in fact, crown man’s sweaty head with stars.

But in the morning Jackie could not be found.

‘He will have gone to look for a strayed horse,’ said Voss at first, with the bland simplicity that the situation demanded.

‘Horses!’ cried Harry Robarts. ‘No horse of ours has the strength to stray.’

‘Or to find water,’ Voss persisted.

‘The waterholes are dry in hell,’ remarked Le Mesurier.

‘Then, he will come,’ said Voss. ‘Eventually.’

There was still some brown muck left in their canvas water-bags, and this they held carefully in their mouths. They did delay a little, although it began to appear to all that it was immaterial whether the native returned or not.

One of the horses, it was seen, would not get up again. The hair of its mane was spread out upon the ground, its bones barely supported the shabby tent of its hide, and the gases were rising in the belly, in one last protest, as the party pushed on.

By the time the sun had mounted the sky, their own veins had begun to run with fire. Their heads were exact copies of that same golden mirror. They could not look into one another for fear of recognizing their own torments.

Until the head of Harry Robarts was rendered finally opaque by the intense heat of the sun. He had acquired the shape and substance of a great reverberating, bronze gong.

‘I do not want to complain,’ he mumbled and throbbed. ‘But it is going on and on.’

Then he was struck.

‘I am beaten!’ he shouted, and the bronze doom echoed out through many circles of silence.

‘Listen,’ said Voss. ‘Did you not hear some sounds at a distance?’

His lips would just permit words.

‘It is my own thoughts,’ said Le Mesurier. ‘I have been listening to them now for some way.’

Nor would he look up from the desolate ground to which his eyes had grown accustomed. He would not have asked for more than this.

‘It is the devils,’ shrieked Harry Robarts, who was rolling upon a steed of solid fire.

It was often the simple boy who first saw things, whether material or otherwise. Now the German himself noticed through that haze of heat, the deeper haze, then the solid evidence, it appeared, of black forms. But still at a considerable distance. And always moving. Like corporeal shadows.

Voss dared to smile.

As the expedition advanced, it was escorted by a column at either side.

‘When we run together,’ said Le Mesurier, whose attention had been drawn, ‘that will be the centre of the fire.’

For the present, however, there was no sign that any fusion of the three columns might occur.

While the white men, with their little trickle of surviving pack-animals and excoriated old horses, stumbled on through the full heat of day, the blacks padded very firmly. Sometimes the bodies of the latter were solid as wood, sometimes they would crumble into a haze of black dust, but, whether formless or intact, they expressed the inexorability of confidence. By this time, each party was taking the other for granted. Women had come up, too, and were trailing behind the men. There were several dogs, with long, glistening tongues, from which diamonds fell.

Feeling his horse quiver beneath him, Voss looked down at the thin withers, at the sore which had crept out from under the pommel of the saddle. Then he did begin to falter, and was at last openly wearing his own sores than he had kept hidden. Vermin were eating him. The shrivelled worms of his entrails were deriding him. So he rode on through hell, until he felt her touch him.

‘I shall not fail you,’ said Laura Trevelyan. ‘Even if there are times when you wish me to, I shall not fail you.’

Laying upon his sores ointment of words.

He would not look at her, however, for he was not yet ready.

In spite of his resistance, their stirrup-irons grappled together as they rode. Salt drops of burning sweat were falling upon the raw withers of the horse, making the animal writhe even in its weakness.

So they rode through hell, that was scented with the Tannenbaum, or hair blowing. His mouth was filled with the greenish-black tips of hair, and a most exquisite bitterness.

‘You are not in possession of your faculties,’ he said to her at last.

‘What are my faculties?’ she asked.

Then they were drifting together. They were sharing the same hell, in their common flesh, which he had attempted so often to repudiate. She was fitting him with a sheath of tender white.

‘Do you see now?’ she asked. ‘Man is God decapitated. That is why you are bleeding.’

It was falling on their hands in hot, opaque drops. But he would not look at her face yet.

They had come to a broad plain of small stones, round in shape, of which at least some were apparently quartz, for where the swords of the sun penetrated the skin of the stone a blinding light would burst forth. These flashes of pure light, although rare, brought cries to the mouths of the three white men. The light was of such physical intensity. Laura Trevelyan, who had experienced sharper daggers, was silent, though. She rode apart, and waited.

When the men had recovered from their surprise, it was seen that the two columns of natives had come upon their rear, and were standing ranged behind them in an arc of concentrated silence. Voss dismounted, and was waiting. For ages everybody stood, and it seemed that nothing would ever happen beyond this commingling of silences, when there was a commotion in the ranks of the blacks, and an individual was pushed forward. He came, looking to the bare ground for inspiration, and when he had approached, Voss addressed him.

‘Well, Jackie, I do not blame you,’ he said. ‘I knew that this would have to happen. What next?”

But Jackie would not lift his head. Subtle thoughts that he had learnt to think, thoughts that were other men’s, had made it too heavy. His body, though, shone with a refreshed innocence.

Then he said:

‘No me. Jackie do nothun. These blackfeller want Jackie. I go. Blackfeller no good along white men. This my people.’ The renegade waved his arm, angrily, it seemed, at the ranks behind him. ‘Jackie belong here.’

Voss listened, touching his beard. He was smiling, or that was the shape his face had taken.

‘Where do I belong, if not here?’ he asked. ‘Tell your people we are necessary to one another. Blackfellow white man friend together.’

‘Friend?’ asked Jackie.

The word was twanging in the air. He had forgotten its usage.

Now the tribe began to murmur. Whether asking, urging, or advising, it was not clear.

Jackie had grown sulkier. His throat was full of knots.

‘Blackfeller dead by white man,’ he was prompted to say at last.

‘Do they wish to kill me?’ asked Voss.

Jackie stood.

‘They cannot kill me,’ said Voss. ‘It is not possible.’

Although his cheek was twitching, like a man’s.

‘Tell them I will not die. But if it is to deprive them of a pleasure, I offer them friendship as a substitute. I am a friend of the blackfellow. Do you understand? This is the sign of friendship.’

The white man took the boy’s hot, black, right hand in both his, and was pressing. A wave of sad, warm magic, and yearning for things past, broke over the blackfellow, but because the withered hands of the white man were physically feeble, even if warm and spiritually potent, the boy wrenched his hand away.

He began gabbling. Two men, two elders, and a younger powerful native now came forward, and were talking with Jackie, in words, and where these failed, with signs. That of which they spoke was of great importance and, even if deferred by difficulties, would, it appeared, take place.

Then Jackie, whose position was obviously intolerable, raised his eyes, and said:

‘No good, Mr Voss.

‘These blackfeller say you come along us,’ he added, for he was still possessed by the white man’s magic.

Voss bowed his head very low. Because he was not accustomed to the gestures of humility, he tried to think how Palfreyman might have acted in similar circumstances, but in that landscape, in that light, not even memory provided a refuge.

The eyes of the black men were upon him. How the veins of their bodies stood out, and the nipples.

As they watched.

The white man was stirring like a handful of dry grass. He was remounting his horse.

In his feebleness, or the dream that he was living, as he was hauling himself up by the pommel he felt the toe of his boot slither from the stirrup-iron. He felt some metal, undoubtedly a buckle, score his chin for a very brief moment of pain, before he was back standing on the ground. It was an incident which, in the past, might have made him look ridiculous.

But the black men did not laugh.

Then Voss, behaving more deliberately, succeeded in seating himself in the saddle, swaying, and smiling. The blood which had begun to run out of his chin was already stanched by the dry atmosphere, and the flies sitting on the crust of blood.

Even so, the woman had ridden closer to him, and was about to make some attempt to clean the wound.

‘Lass mich los,’ he said, abruptly, even rudely, although the rudeness was intended, rather, for himself.

Now the party had begun to move forward over the plain of quartz, in which, it was seen, a path must have been cleared in former times by blacks pushing the stones aside. The going was quite tolerable upon this pale, dusty track. Some of the natives went ahead, but most walked along behind. Now there was little distinction between skins, between men and horses even. Space had blurred the details.

‘Good Lord, sir, what will happen?’ asked Harry Robarts, rising to the surface of his eyes.

‘They will know, presumably,’ replied the German.

‘Lord, sir, will you let them?’ cried the distracted boy. ‘Lord, will you not save us?’

‘I am no longer your Lord, Harry,’ said Voss.

‘I would not know of no other,’ said the boy.

Again the man was grateful for the simple boy’s devotion. But could he, in the state to which he had come, allow himself the luxury of accepting it?

As he was debating this, Laura Trevelyan rode alongside, although there was barely room for two horses abreast on that narrow path.

‘You will not leave me then?’ he asked.

‘Not for a moment,’ she said. ‘Never, never.’

‘If your teaching has forced me to renounce my strength, I imagine the time will come very soon when there will be no question of our remaining together.’

‘Perhaps we shall be separated for a little. But we have experienced that already.’

They rode along.

‘I will think of a way to convince you,’ she said, after a time, ‘to convince you that all is possible. If I can make the sacrifice.’

Then he looked at her, and saw that they had cut off her hair, and below the surprising stubble that remained, they had pared the flesh from her face. She was now quite naked. And beautiful. Her eyes were drenching him.

So they rode on above the dust, in which they were writing their own legend.

*

The girl, Betty, was in tears the evening they took the hair from Miss Trevelyan by order of Dr Kilwinning. It was that lovely, she said, she would keep it always, and stuff a little cushion with it.

‘That is morbid, Betty,’ said Mrs Bonner.

But the mistress allowed the girl to keep the hair, because she was touched, and because it no longer confirmed her strength to deny other people the fulfilment of their wishes.

When they had put away the dressmaking scissors, Laura Trevelyan’s desecrated head lolled against the pillows. She was lying with her eyes closed, as she did frequently now, and Dr Kilwinning was taking her pulse, an occupation which filled a gap and prevented the ignorant from talking.

Of all those people who witnessed the removal of the hair, Mr Bonner was most stunned, who had never before seen a woman without her hair. It made him walk softly, and, shortly after the operation, he went out of his niece’s room, calculating that nobody would notice his absence.

When, finally, his wife came down with Dr Kilwinning, there he was, loitering at the foot of the stairs, near the stair cupboard, to be exact, as if he had been an intruder in his own house.

The doctor was for leaving with all speed of his patent-leather boots.

But these fleshy old people, who had wizened in a few days, were hanging upon him. The rather common old woman would have seized him by the cuffs. Alas, his status as fashionable physician failed to protect him from a great many unpleasantnesses. If anything, the fees he charged seemed, rather, to make some individuals aspire to get their money’s worth.

‘But tell me, Doctor, do you consider it to be infectious?’ Mrs Bonner was asking.

‘In a court of law, Mrs Bonner, I would not swear to it, but it would be as well to guard against the possibility of infection, shall we say?’

Dr Kilwinning, whose elastic calves had brought him mercifully to the bottom of the stairs, there encountered Mr Bonner, and they nodded at each other, as if they had only just met.

Mr Bonner hated Dr Kilwinning. He could have punched him on the nose.

‘Oh, dear, then if it is infectious,’ Mrs Bonner was crying, ‘there is the danger of the little girl.’

‘I did not say it was infectious. Indeed, it should not be.’ Dr Kilwinning laughed. ‘But the will of God, you know, has a habit of overruling the opinions of physicians.’

‘Then,’ said Mr Bonner, who could not stand it any longer, ‘there is something wrong somewhere. If the physician receives the fee that some physicians do receive, he should form an opinion that the Almighty would respect. If that is blasphemy, Dr Kilwinning, I cannot help it. You have forced me to it.’

Mrs Bonner was aghast. Dr Kilwinning moistened his rather full lips, that were so fascinating to some women. Then he showed his fine, white teeth.

He said:

‘Please do not blame me for your own nature, Mr Bonner.’

And the front door was rattling.

‘He is gone, at least,’ said the merchant.

‘And very likely will not return. Oh, dear, Mr Bonner, look what you have done. The little girl upon my mind, too. Though I do declare still, it is a simple brain fever, if that can be called simple which people die of. Regularly.’

So that Mrs Bonner remained uncomforted.

She was continually washing her hands, but could not cleanse herself of all her sins. She had Betty walk about the house with a red-hot shovel, on which to burn a compound of saltpetre and vitriol, that was most efficacious, somebody had claimed, although Mrs Bonner had forgotten who. Then, when the fumes rose from Betty’s shovel, the mystery deepened, and everyone in the house was unhappier than before.

Except possibly Mercy, the little girl. Her world was still substantial, when it was not melting into dreams. Particularly she loved Betty’s game of smoke. She would try to catch the smoke. She loved doves. She loved the marbles from the game of solitaire. If she loved her mother less than all these, it was because she had not seen her lately.

But her grandmother did come instead.

In the beginning, Mrs Bonner had taken charge of Laura’s child perhaps as an act of expiation, but soon became enthusiastic. Before going about her duties, she would disinfect herself most rigorously, of course. She would lay aside her rings, trembling all the while, until her impatient skirts hastened through the passages, and she was free at last to snuff up the sweet smell of cleanliness from the nape of the childish neck. This elderly woman would grow quite drunk on kisses, although it was but a mixed happiness that her secret vice brought her, for she would be reminded of her own child, living, but married, and of the several others she had buried in their babyhood.

‘Who am I? Who am I, then?’ she would ask, tickling the child’s stomach, while looking over her shoulder to make certain that nobody had seen or heard. ‘I am your Gran. Your Grand-mother.’

The child knew.

So Mrs Bonner was appeased.

In the first stages of her illness Laura Trevelyan had seemed to forget Mercy, but on the night when they cut off her hair, she roused herself, and said:

‘I would like to see her.’

‘Whom?’ they asked.

‘My little girl.’

‘But it would not he wise, dear,’ said the aunt, ‘on account of the possibility of infection. Dr Kilwinning would bear me out.’

The sick woman was thinking of something. Her face was giving it painful shape.

‘But if it were to be for the last time?’ she asked.

‘That is morbid talk,’ said Aunt Emmy, ‘when Dr Kilwinning is so particularly pleased with your progress.’

Then Laura Trevelyan began to laugh, except that she could not bring it out.

‘Oh, I shall not die,’ she did just manage. ‘Or you will not bury me.’

‘Laura, Laura!’ cried the aunt, horrified by the suffocated words that had struggled out of the scorched lips.

‘Because, you see, I am the only survivor of you all.’

‘Will you take a little cold broth if I bring it?’ asked Mrs Bonner, in self-defence.

Although her niece did not reply, she brought the soup, and was less troubled than usual when it was refused, as if the drinking of it had been but of secondary importance.

Presently Laura said:

‘Let us return to the subject of Mercy. Do you remember those people, those Asbolds?’

‘Only now that you have reminded me,’ Aunt Emmy said, but coughed a little wheezy cough.

Laura was silent again for quite an appreciable space, until Mrs Bonner began to suspect the presence of some terrible danger. There was, moreover, a heavy, cloying smell that had begun to irritate and worry her, inasmuch as she was unable to trace its origin. Her niece’s silence and the musty smell did fill the room with foreboding.

Laura opened her eyes. The aunt had never seen them so fine, nor so revealing. It was just for this reason that Mrs Bonner would not allow herself to look at them. She began to arrange the hairbrushes.

‘If I were to make some big sacrifice,’ Laura was saying. ‘I cannot enough, that is obvious, but something of a personal nature that will convince a wavering mind. If it is only human sacrifice that will convince man that he is not God.’

She began to cough. Mrs Bonner was frightened.

‘Oh, dear, it is my throat. It is the terrible Sun that he is imitating. That is what I must believe. It is a play. For anything else would be blasphemy.’

When her aunt had held water to her lips, again Laura opened her eyes very wide in her molten head.

She said:

‘So we must make this sacrifice, if necessary, over and over, till we are raw and bleeding. When can she go?’

‘Who?’

Mrs Bonner trembled.

‘Mercy.’

Laura Trevelyan moistened her lips.

‘To the Asbolds, as we have arranged. She is such a kind woman. She has such cool cheeks. And plum trees, were they? You see, I am willing to give up so much to prove that human truths are also divine. This is the true meaning of Christ. As Mrs Asbold will tell you. Won’t she? It is the secret we have had between us, all this time, since she would not look at me, and I saw that it was only a question of who should make the sacrifice.’

Mrs Bonner was distraught.

‘When will she go?’ Laura asked.

‘We shall talk about it some other time,’ gasped Mrs Bonner.

‘Tomorrow at the latest,’ Laura replied. ‘I shall make a point of gathering all my strength, all the night.’

‘Yes, yes. Rest.’

‘So that I shall be strong enough.’

Mrs Bonner was almost suffocated by unhappiness and the mysterious smell.

Laura appeared to be sleeping. Only once she opened her eyes, and in a voice of great agony, cried out:

‘Oh, my darling little girl.’

When, later, Mr Bonner came into the room, he found his wife in a state of some agitation.

‘Such a scene!’ Mrs Bonner whispered. ‘She has decided, for some reason, that she ought to give up Mercy, as a kind of sacrifice, to send her to the Asbolds after all.’

‘Then would it not be best to act upon her wishes?’ suggested the unhappy merchant. ‘Particularly as they coincide with your own.’

‘Oh, but she is out of her wits at present,’ said Mrs Bonner. ‘It would not be right.’

Mr Bonner seldom attempted to unravel the moral principles of his wife.

‘Besides,’ she added.

But she did not elaborate. On the contrary, she assumed an expression of cunning, to mask that secret life which she had begun to share with Laura’s child.

Mr Bonner would have been content to preserve the silence.

‘Oh, but there is a most intolerable smell! Do you not smell it?’ the good woman burst out.

‘Yes,’ said Mr Bonner. ‘I expect it is the pears.’

‘Which pears?’

‘The pears that I brought home for Laura, oh, on that night, the first night of her illness, and put down. Yes, here they are, my dear. In the confusion they have escaped your notice.’

‘My notice!’ cried Mrs Bonner.

There, indeed, were the black pears, somewhat viscid, in their nest of withered leaves.

‘Disgusting! Do, please, remove them, Mr Bonner.’

He was quite relieved to do so, this powerful man who had lost his power.

When she had dispatched the odious pears, and was alone except for her sleeping niece, Mrs Bonner was the better disposed for thought. I will think, she used to say, but in all her life had never discovered the secret of that process. It was a source of great exasperation to her, although most people did not guess.

Now, all night she was ready in fits of waking to welcome thought, which did not come. Then I am an empty thing, she admitted helplessly. Yet, she had been pretty as a girl.

By ashy morning, all joy or consolation seemed to have left the old woman, except their child, who was to go too.

So she rose quickly when the sun was up, and bundling the rich sleeves back along her arms, blundered into that room where Mercy had woken in a sound of doves.

‘There,’ said the woman. ‘We are together now.’

The child seemed to agree. How she fitted herself to the body. Beyond the window, all was now a drooling and consolation of doves. In the sunrise which was flooding the cool garden Mrs Bonner forgot those incidents of the past that she chose to forget, and was holding the flesh of the child against the present. All dark and dreadful things, all that she herself could not understand, might be waved away, if she could but keep the child.

‘How you do dribble,’ she said, almost with approval. ‘Dirty little thing!’

So she would address her secret child.

And Mercy clearly saw through the crumpled skin to those greater blemishes, which, in her presence, there was no necessity to hide.

That morning, when she was again decently concealed beneath a clean cap, Mrs Bonner went in to her niece, and was very brisk.

‘I declare you have slept beautifully, Laura,’ she said, arranging the pillows with her competent hands.

Laura did not contradict, but let things happen, for innerly she was inviolable.

And soon her aunt was trembling.

‘Will you not let me brush your hair?’ she asked.

‘But I have none,’ Laura replied.

Sometimes Mrs Bonner developed palpitations, which she would admit to her husband when it suited. Now, however, she realized that he had already left; the morning was hers, to arrange as she wished.

Laura turned her eyes, in that face which there was no escaping since the hair was cut, and said:

‘You will see that everything is packed neatly, Aunt, because I would not like to create a bad impression. You will find almost everything in the small cedar chest. Excepting those six nightdresses — you will remember we had too many — and the gauffered cap which Una Pringle gave. They are on the top shelf of the tallboy on the landing.’

Mrs Bonner’s face, that had been pretty in girlhood, was visibly swelling.

‘I do not know,’ she answered. ‘You must speak to your uncle. He would not allow it. One cannot dispose of a soul as if it were a parcel.’

Again, in the afternoon, Laura said:

‘I expect they will hire a carriage, or some kind of sprung conveyance. They would not carry a little child in a dray. All the way to Penrith.’

Mrs Bonner occupied herself with a piece of tatting.

Towards evening Laura raised herself on the pillows, and said:

‘Do you not see that I shall suffer by it? I could die by it? But I must. Then he will understand.’

‘Who?’ cried Mrs Bonner, her breath rank from her own suffering. ‘Who?’

And, laying down her work, she looked at her niece’s black eyelids.

Laura Trevelyan, by this time at the height of her illness, was almost dried up.

‘O Jesus,’ she begged, ‘have mercy. Oh, save us, or if we are not to be saved, then let us die. My love is too hard to bear. I am weak, after all.’

That evening, when Mr Bonner came in, unwillingly, he inquired:

‘Is there any improvement?’

His wife replied:

‘Do not ask me.’

There was some little consolation in the unexpected return of Dr Kilwinning. He was smelling of a glass of port wine that he had been invited to taste at a previous house, but which the Bonners forgave him in the circumstances.

Dr Kilwinning controlled his rich breath, and announced that he proposed to bleed Miss Trevelyan the following day. As he left the room, an ill-fitting door of a wardrobe was jumping, and flouting the silence. It was not a very good piece of furniture, but Mrs Bonner did truly love her niece, in whose room she had put it.

All the evening the old people were flapping like palm leaves.

The sick woman conducted herself at times with such rational gravity that her hallucinations were doubly awful whenever she felt compelled to share them.

‘I think it better,’ she announced, ‘if I do not see Mercy again. After all. In the morning, that is, before she goes. You will be sure that she has only a light breakfast, Aunt, because of the jolting of the cart. And she must wear something warm that can be taken off in the heat of the day.’

Then:

‘You will attend to it, Aunt? Won’t you?’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Mrs Bonner, who was wrestling with her conscience as never before.

In search of air or distraction, she went and drew back the curtains. Such was her preoccupation with earthly matters, she did not often notice the sky, but there it was now, most palpable, of solid, dark, enamelled blue. Or black. It was black like well-water, so cold her body could not bear it. But the great gaudy jumble of stars did please the child in her. And a curious phenomenon. As she followed its broad path of light, she almost dared hope it might lead her out of the state of mortal confusion.

‘Look, Laura,’ she called, holding back the curtains, her eyes moist. ‘A most unusual and wonderful thing.’

She stood, flattening herself ingratiatingly against the sash, in hopes that the patient might be able to see merely by turning her head.

‘Do you not want to look at it, Laura?’ she begged.

But Laura Trevelyan, who was again with her eyes closed, barely answered:

‘I have seen it.’

‘Silly girl,’ said Aunt Emmy, ‘I have but just drawn the curtains!’

‘It is the Comet,’ said Laura. ‘It cannot save us. Except for a breathing space. That is the terrible part: nothing can be halted once it is started.’

When Mr Bonner returned, his wife was still holding the helpless curtain.

‘Ah,’ he said, and his eyes showed that he too had hoped to escape along the path of celestial light, ‘you have seen the Comet, about which they are all talking. It is expected to be visible for several days.’

‘I was drawing Laura’s attention to it,’ Mrs Bonner said.

‘In the absence of an official astronomer, Mr Winslow is recording his observations,’ the merchant revealed, ‘and will send a report Home by the first packet to leave.’

Then the two old people stood rather humbly watching an historic event. In that blaze, they were dwindling to mere black points, and as the light poured, and increased, and invaded the room, even Laura Trevelyan, beneath the dry shells of her eyelids, was bathed at least temporarily in the cool flood of stars.

*

Towards the end of the afternoon, when the rim of the horizon had again grown distinct, and forms were emerging from the dust, they seemed to have arrived at the farther edge of the plain, from which rose an escarpment. Slowly approaching its folds of grey earth, the party was at length swallowed by a cleft, furnished with three or four grey, miserable, but living trees, and, most hospitable sight of all, what appeared to be an irregular cloth, of faded green patchy plush.

All the animals became at once observant. Moisture even showed in the dry nostrils of the dragging horses, whose dull eyes had recovered something of their natural lustre. Little velvet sounds began to issue out of their throats.

Here, miraculously, was water.

In the scrimmage, and lunging, and groaning that followed, the riders were almost knocked off, but did, by luck and instinct, keep their seats. The blackfellows, who were laughing generously out of their large mouths, ran whooshing amongst the animals to restrain them, but soon desisted, and just laughed, or scratched themselves. After the exertions of the journey and emotion of their meeting with the whites, they themselves did not much care what happened.

It was their ant-women who were engrossed by the continuance of life, who wove into the dust the threads of paths, who were dedicated to the rituals of fire and water, who shook snake and lizard out of their disgusting reticules, and who hung golloping children upon their long and dusty dugs. For the moment, at least, it appeared that men were created only for the hours of darkness.

As for the white men, dazed by so much activity, they accepted to be set apart, while hands, or swift, black birds made a roof of twigs over them. Soon they were completely encased in twigs, beyond which voices crackled. It seemed that an argument of procedure was taking place. Some of the blackfellows would, some would not. Some were tired. Others shone with a light of inspiration and yearning.

Presently, Jackie came and sat down amongst the white men, whose ways he knew, but it soon became apparent, from his sullen manner, that he was but obeying orders.

‘What will they do to us, Jackie?’ Le Mesurier asked. ‘What ever it is, let it be quick.’

Jackie, however, did not intend to understand.

And Le Mesurier continued to sit, staring indifferently at the fragile, yellow-looking bones of his own hands.

Various blacks came and went. A young girl, of pretty, barely nubile breasts, and an older, very ugly woman, seated themselves behind Jackie, suggesting a relationship recently formed. The boy, though obviously possessive, was insolent to the two women. They, in their turn, were rather shy.

Some men came, who had painted their bodies, and who filled the twig shelter with the smell of drying clay. There was, in addition, the wholly natural, drugging smell of their bodies, and of ants. As the singing began, somewhere in the rear, in that cleft of the escarpment where they were encamped, round the trampled mud of the waterhole, under the quenched blue of the sky, the two women in the twig cage were playing nervously with the long hairs of their armpits; their eyes were snapping in the shadows.

The singing, as monotonous as grey earth, as grey wood, rose in sudden spasms of passion, to die down, down, as the charcoal lying. The voices of dust would die right away. To rise and sing. One voice, alone, would put on the feathers of parakeets in gay tufts of song. The big, lumbering pelican voices would spread slower wings. There was laughter, too, of young voices, and the giggling of black women.

‘At least I intend to observe this ceremony,’ the German announced, remembering a vaguely scientific mission.

He began to unfold his difficult legs.

‘No,’ said Jackie, in an unusually high, recovered voice. ‘No, no. Not now.’

So they continued to sit. Through the chinks in the very black twigs, blue was poured into blue, until there was no measuring its depths. Sparks were flying, or stars. There was the smell of hot wood-ash, and cold stars.

Before the end came.

There was a definite end.

‘Do you hear, the heathen blacks have stopped?’ said Harry Robarts, the clumsy white boy.

Jackie had gone from there, followed by his two women, now as cold as dead lizards.

The silence seeming to allow their freedom to the trinity of whites, Voss went to the door, and was looking out.

‘Look, Frank, Harry,’ he called, ‘at this unearthly phenomenon. Whatever may happen, it is too beautiful to ignore.’

His voice trembled from the effort of breaking the bonds of language. His woodenness was falling from him, and he was launching out into the fathoms of light.

‘Lord, sir, what is it, then?’ asked Harry Robarts.

‘It is evidently a comet,’ said Le Mesurier.

Harry was ashamed to ask for further explanation, but bathed in his reverent ignorance. It was beautiful. He was hollow with it.

Now the darkness was full of doubt and almost extinguished voices. The branches of trees, or black arms, were twitching, as Voss continued to observe the quick wanderer, almost transfixed by distance in that immeasurable sky. His mouth, thirsty for so long, was drinking down the dark blue.

‘Yes. A comet, evidently,’ he was gulping.

Then Jackie was standing in the silence.

‘Why are you afraid?’ Voss asked.

The blackfellow was quite cold.

But, with his dark body and few words, he began to enact the story of the Great Snake, the grandfather of all men, that had come down from the north in anger.

‘And what are we to expect?’ asked Voss humorously. ‘This angry snake will do what?’

‘Snake eat, eat,’ cried the black boy, snapping at the darkness with his white teeth.

Voss was roaring with pleasure.

‘Then the blacks will not kill us?’ asked Harry Robarts. ‘We are saved?’

‘If we are not devoured by blacks,’ Voss replied, ‘or the Great Snake, then we shall be eaten by somebody eventually. By a friend, perhaps. Man is a tempting morsel.’

Harry, who could not understand, was comforted, rather, by his more immediate prospects.

Voss addressed the aboriginal.

‘You want for white man save blackfellow from this snake?’

The explorer, however, was still laughing. He was so light.

‘Snake too much magic, no good of Mr Voss,’ Jackie replied.

‘Then you do not believe in me,’ said the German, suddenly sober, and as if he had really expected to find someone to replace himself in his own estimation.

The night was quiet as the blacks lay against their fires, under the coils of the golden snake. They would look up sometimes, but preferred that the old men should translate this experience into terms they could understand. Only, the old men were every bit as unhappy. All their lives haunted by spirits, these had been of a colourless, invisible, and comparatively amiable variety. Even the freakish spirits of darkness behaved within the bounds of a certain convention. Now this great fiery one came, and threatened the small souls of men, or coiled achingly in the bellies of the more responsible.

During the night, after Voss had crawled forward to put some sticks upon the fire that had been lit at the mouth of the twig hut, Le Mesurier asked softly:

‘What is your plan, then?’

‘I have no plan,’ replied Voss, ‘but will trust to God.’

He spoke wryly, for the words had been put into his mouth.

Le Mesurier was blasted by their leader’s admission, although he had known it, of course, always in his heart and dreams, and had confessed it even in those rather poor, but bleeding poems that he had torn out and put on paper.

Now he sat, looking in the direction of the man who was not God, and, incidentally, considering his own prospects.

‘That is a nice look-out for us,’ spluttered the abject disciple.

‘I am to blame,’ said Voss, ‘if that confession will make some amends.’

He sat humbly holding a little leaf.

‘If you withdraw,’ Le Mesurier began.

‘I do not withdraw,’ Voss answered. ‘I am withdrawn.’

‘And can give us no hope?’

‘I suggest you wring it out for yourself, which, in the end, is all that is possible for any man.’

And he crumpled up the dry leaf, Le Mesurier heard.

The latter had expected too much of hands which were, after all, only bones. As it grew light, he found himself looking at his own transparent palms.

Meanwhile, what had become of the fiery snake? As they engaged in their various daylight pursuits, of hunting, digging for yams, mending nets, and paying visits, the general opinion of the sobered tribe was that the Great One had burrowed into the soft sky and was sleeping off the first stages of his journey to the earth. The whites were now ignored, as being of comparative unimportance. All men were, in fact, as wichetty grubs in the fingers of children. So the tribe remained entranced. Their voices spoke softer than the dust, their shoulders were bowed down with the round, heavy sun, as they continued to wait.

The white men in their twig hut were offered no alternative. In the silence and the course of the day they listened to the earth crack deeper open, as their own skulls were splitting in the heat.

Frank Le Mesurier began to go through his possessions, flint and tinder, needle and thread, a button, the shreds of stinking shirts, the ends of things, the crumbs, the dust, all the time looking for something he had mislaid, and did eventually find.

This book no longer bore looking at, although his life was contained in its few pages: in lovely, opalescent intaglios, buckets of vomit, vistas of stillest marble, the livers and lights of beliefs and intentions. There was the crowned King, such as he had worshipped before his always anticipated abdication. There was Man deposed in the very beginning. Gold, gold, gold, tarnishing into baser metals.

During the afternoon, this wreck of an ageless man hobbled out through the crackling heat, out and away from the edge of the camp, as if called upon to ease nature. There was a skeleton of a tree, he saw, in white, bleached wood. He could see the distinct grains of dust. After he had sat a while, unoccupied, at the foot of the tree, he began to tear up the book, by handfuls of flesh, but dry, dry. His lips were flaking off. The blood must dry very quickly, he imagined.

And that is exactly what it did.

Bracing himself against the tree, Frank Le Mesurier began to open his throat with a knife he had. Such blood as he still possessed forgot itself so far as to gush in the beginning. It was his last attempt at poetry. Then, with his remaining strength, he was opening the hole wider, until he was able to climb out into the immense fields of silence.

The body of Le Mesurier glugged and blubbered a little longer before lying still. Even then, one of the ankles was twitching, that had come out of the large boot. Everything was too large that had not shrunk.

So Harry Robarts, who had been attracted by the paper blowing about, eventually found him, and was running, and stumbling, himself scattered, and crying:

‘I told yer! I told yer!’

He was blowing about, but must, somehow, return to his leader.

When he got in, Voss said, without raising his eyes:

‘It is poor Frank.’

The boy was shaking like a paper.

‘And the blood running out!’ he cried. ‘Oh, sir, he has slit his throat!’

It had not occurred to him that a gentleman might lie in real blood, like an animal.

‘We must see if we cannot go presently and bury him,’ Voss said.

But both knew that they would not have the strength. So they did not mention it again. They were pleased to huddle together, and derive some comfort from an exchange of humanity.

That night the boy crawled as far as the doorway and announced that the Comet had slid a little farther across the sky.

‘I am glad to have seen it,’ he said. ‘It was a fine sight. And soft as dandelions.’

Voss suggested that he should return into the depths of the hut, for the night air in the small hours could be injurious to him.

‘I will not feel it,’ said Harry. ‘I will pull it up to my chin. Besides, I can protect you better from here.’

Voss laughed.

‘There is little enough of me left to protect, and of such poor stuff, I doubt anyone would show an interest.’

‘I had a newt in a jar, did I tell you?’ Harry Robarts asked. ‘And a bird in a cage. It did not sing as it was supposed to do, but I grew fond of it. Until they opened the door. This thing, sir, in the sky, has it come to stay?’

‘No,’ said Voss. ‘It will pass.’

‘A pity,’ said the boy. ‘I could get used to it.’

‘Go to sleep,’ murmured Voss, who was irritated.

‘I cannot. There are some nights when everything I have ever seen passes through my head. Do you remember that box of yours, that I carried to the shipside, on London River?’

The man would not answer.

‘Do you remember the flying fishes?’

‘Yes!’

The man was maddened finally.

‘Are you not going to sleep?’

‘Oh, there is time for sleep. Sleep will not pass. Unless the dogs dig. And then they only scatter the bones.’

‘You are the dog,’ said the man.

‘Do you really think so?’ sighed the drowsy boy.

‘And a mad one.’

‘Licking the hands.’

‘No. Tearing at one’s thoughts.’

As the two fell into sleep, or such a numb physical state as approximated to it, Voss believed that he loved this boy, and with him all men, even those he had hated, which is the most difficult act of love to accomplish, because of one’s own fault.

Then sleep prevailed, and the occasional grumbling of the blacks, still at the mercy of the fiery snake, and the stirring of those earthly fires against which they lay, and the breaking of sticks, which break in darkness, just as they lie, from weight of time, it appears.

While they were asleep, an old man had come and, stepping across the body of Harry Robarts, sat down inside the hut to watch or guard Voss. Whenever the latter awoke and became aware of the man’s presence, he was not surprised to see him, and would have expected anyone. In the altering firelight of the camp, the thin old man was a single, upright, black stroke, becoming in the cold light of morning, which is the colour of ashes, a patient, grey blur.

Voss was dozing and waking. The grey light upon which he floated was marvellously soft, and flaking like ashes, with the consequence that he was most grateful to all concerned, and looked up once in an effort to convey his appreciation, when the old man, or woman, bent over him. For in the grey light, it transpired that the figure was that of a woman, whose breasts hung like bags of empty skin above the white man’s face.

Realizing his mistake, the prisoner mumbled an apology as the ashy figure resumed its vigil. It was unnecessary, however, for their understanding of each other had begun to grow. While the woman sat looking down at her knees, the greyish skin was slowly revived, until her full, white, immaculate body became the shining source of all light.

By its radiance, he did finally recognize her face, and would have gone to her, if it had been possible, but it was not; his body was worn out.

Instead, she came to him, and at once he was flooded with light and memory. As she lay beside him, his boyhood slipped from him in a rustling of water and a rough towel. A steady summer had possessed them. Leaves were in her lips, that he bit off, and from her breasts the full, silky, milky buds. They were holding each other’s heads and looking into them, as remorselessly as children looking at secrets, and seeing all too clearly. But, unlike children, they were confronted to recognize their own faults.

So they were growing together, and loving. No sore was so scrofulous on his body that she would not touch it with her kindness. He would kiss her wounds, even the deepest ones, that he had inflicted himself and left to suppurate.

Given time, the man and woman might have healed each other. That time is not given was their one sadness. But time itself is a wound that will not heal up.

‘What is this, Laura?’ he asked, touching the roots of her hair, at the temples. ‘The blood is still running.’

But her reply was slipping from him.

And he fell back into the morning.

An old, thin blackfellow, seated on the floor of the twig hut, watching the white man, and swatting the early flies, creaked to his feet soon after this. Stepping over the form of the boy, who was still stretched across the entrance, he went outside.

*

After a fearful night, Mrs Bonner insisted that Jim Prentice go and fetch Dr Kilwinning.

‘For such good as it may do.’

Her husband said:

‘We would have done better to stick to the simple young fellow we had in the beginning, rather than waste our money upon this nincompoop in cuffs.’

Each wondered who was to blame, but it could not be laid at anybody’s door at that early hour.

‘He is very highly spoken of,’ sighed Mrs Bonner, who was wearing all her rings, as ladies do at a shipwreck or a fire, for this was the disaster of her orderly and uneventful life.

‘Silly women will speak highly of a doctor if they like the cut of his coat,’ complained the merchant. ‘There is nothing so fetching to some, as a tight, black, bull’s back.’

‘Mr Bonner!’ his wife protested, although she could enjoy an indelicacy.

His shanks were very white and thin by that light, but his calves were still imperious, and the festoons of the nightshirt, between his legs as he sat, were of an early, pearly grey, and the very best quality material.

Because he had been her husband, the old woman felt sadly moved.

‘There are times,’ she said, ‘when you say the unkindest things.’

Some of his strength was restored with her words, and he cleared his thick, thonged throat, and declared:

‘I will tell Jim to bring the doctor over in the brougham, so that there need be no fuss about harnessing other horses at this hour. Some people can make difficulties. And fetching the doctor’s man out. It is a different matter if the horse is not required, nor the man.’

Mrs Bonner was blowing her nose, of which the pores had been somewhat enlarged by the hour and emotion.

Now also, she glanced towards her niece’s sick-bed. If she did this less frequently, it was because her courage failed her. She had become intimidated by the mysteries with which her house was filled.

However, by the time the groom had fetched Dr Kilwinning, and driven him through the shiny shrubs, and deposited him under the solid sandstone portico, the master and mistress were neatly dressed, and appeared to be in full possession.

The doctor himself was remarkably neat, and particularly about his full, well-cut, black back, which Mrs Bonner determined in future not to notice.

He was carrying a little cardboard box.

‘I propose to let some blood,’ he explained. ‘Now. Although I had intended waiting until this evening.’

The old couple drew in their breath.

Nor would Mrs Bonner consent to look at those naked leeches, lolling upon the moist grass, in their little box.

As the day promised scorching heat, they had already drawn the curtains over the sun, so that the young woman’s face was sculptured by shadow as well as suffering. But for a painful breathing, she might not have been present in her greenish flesh, for she did not appear directly aware of anything that was taking place. She allowed the doctor to arrange the leeches as if it were one of the more usual acts of daily life, and only when it was done did she seem concerned for the ash, which, she said, the wind was blowing into their faces from off the almost extinguished fires.

Once she roused herself, and asked:

‘Shall I be weakened, Doctor, by losing blood?’

The doctor pursed his mouth, and answered to humour her:

‘On the contrary, you should be strengthened.’

‘If that is the truth,’ she said. ‘Because I need all my strength. But people have a habit of making truth suit the occasion.’

And later on:

‘I think I love truth best of all.’ Pausing. ‘That is not strictly true, you know. We can never be quite truthful.’

All the time the leeches were filling, until they could no longer twitch their tails. Mrs Bonner was petrified, both by words that she did not understand, and by the medusa-head that uttered them.

Laura Trevelyan said:

‘Dear Christ, now at last I understand your suffering.’

The doctor frowned, not because his patient’s conclusion approached close to blasphemy, but because he was of a worldly nature. Although he attended Church, both for professional reasons and to please his rather fashionable wife, the expression of faith outside its frame of organized devotion, scandalized, even frightened this established man.

‘You see,’ he whispered to Mrs Bonner, ‘how the leeches have filled?’

‘I prefer not to look,’ she replied, and had to shudder.

Laura’s head — for all that remained of her seemed to have become concentrated in the head — was struggling with the simplicity of a great idea.

When she opened her eyes and said:

‘How important it is to understand the three stages. Of God into man. Man. And man returning into God. Do you find, Doctor, there are certain beliefs a clergyman may explain to one from childhood onward, without one’s understanding, except in theory, until suddenly, almost in spite of reason, they are made clear. Here, suddenly, in this room, of which I imagined I knew all the corners, I understand!’

The doctor was prepared to speak firmly, but saw, to his relief, that she did not require an answer.

‘Dear God,’ she cried, gasping for breath, ‘it is so easy.’

Beyond the curtains the day was now blazing, and the woman in the bed was burning with a similar light.

‘Except,’ she said, distorting her mouth with an irony which intensified the compassion that she felt, and was now compelled to express, ‘except that man is so shoddy, so contemptible, greedy, jealous, stubborn, ignorant. Who will love him when I am gone? I only pray that God will.

‘O Lord, yes,’ she begged. ‘Now that he is humble.’

Dr Kilwinning had to tear at the leeches with his plump, strong hands to bring them away, so greedily were they clinging to the blue veins of the sick woman.

‘That is clear, Doctor?’ she asked.

‘What?’ he mumbled.

The situation had made him clumsy.

‘When man is truly humbled, when he has learnt that he is not God, then he is nearest to becoming so. In the end, he may ascend.’

By this time Dr Kilwinning’s cuffs had acquired a crumpled look. The coat had wrinkled up his back. Upon departure, he said quite sincerely:

‘This would appear to be a case where medicine is of little assistance. I suggest that Miss Trevelyan might care to talk to a clergyman.’

But when the eventuality was broached, Laura laughed.

‘Dear Aunt,’ she said, ‘you were always bringing me soups, and now it is a clergyman.’

‘We only thought,’ said Aunt Emmy; and: ‘All we do is intended for the best.’

It was most unfair. Everybody jumped upon her, even for those ideas which were not her own.

But Laura Trevelyan was temporarily comforted by some illusion. Or by the action of the leeches, hoped her uncle, against his natural scepticism. At all events, she did rest a little in the course of the afternoon, and when the breeze came, as it usually did towards four o’clock, a salt air mingled with the scent of cooling roses, she remarked in a languid voice:

‘Mercy will be there. They are taking her down out of the cart. I hope there are no wasps, for she will be playing a good deal, naturally, under the fruit trees. How I wish I might lay my head, if only for a little, in that long, cool grass.’

Suddenly she looked at her aunt, with those eyes which saw more than others.

‘Mercy went?’ she asked.

‘That was your wish,’ said Aunt Emmy, moistening her lips, and forced her handkerchief into a tighter ball.

‘I am glad,’ said Laura. ‘My mind is at rest.’

Mrs Bonner wondered whether she were not, after all, stronger than her niece.

*

Voss attempted to count the days, but the simplest sums would swell into a calculation of universal time, so vast that it filled his mouth with one whole mealy potato, cold certainly, but of unmanageable proportions.

Once he asked:

‘Harry? Wie lang sind wir schon hier? How many days? We must catch the horses, or we will rot as we lie in this one place.’

As if to rot were avoidable. By moving. But it was not.

‘We rot by living,’ he sighed.

Grace lay only in the varying speeds at which the process of decomposition took place, and the lovely colours of putrescence that some souls were allowed to wear. For, in the end, everything was of flesh, the soul elliptical in shape.

During those days many people entered the hut. They would step across the form of the white boy, and stand, and observe the man.

Once, in the presence of a congregation, the old blackfellow, the guardian, or familiar, put into the white man’s mouth a whole wichetty grub.

The solemnity of his act was immense.

The white man was conscious of that pinch of soft, white flesh, but rather more of its flavour, hot unlike that of the almond, which also is elliptical. He mumbled it on his tongue for a while before attempting to swallow it, and at once the soft thing became the struggling wafer of his boyhood, that absorbed the unworthiness in his hot mouth, and would not go down. As then, his fear was that his sinful wafer might be discovered, lying before him, half-digested, upon the floor.

He did, however, swallow the grub in time.

The grave blackfellows became used to the presence of the white man. He who had appeared with the snake was perhaps also of supernatural origin, and must be respected, even loved. Safety is bought with love, for a little. So they even fetched their children to look at the white man, who lay with his eyes closed, and whose eyelids were a pale golden like the belly skin of the heavenly snake.

In the sweet, Gothic gloom in which the man himself walked at times, by effort, over cold tiles, beneath gold-leaf, and grey-blue mould of the sky, the scents were ascending, of thick incense, probably, and lilies doing obeisance. It would also be the bones of the saints, he reasoned, that were exuding a perfume of sanctity. One, however, was a stinking lily, or suspect saint.

It began to overpower.

One burning afternoon the blacks dragged away the profane body of the white boy, which was rising where it lay. They let out yells, and kicked the offending corpse rather a lot. It was swelling. It had become a green woman, that they took and threw into the gully with the body of the other white man, who had let his own spirit out.

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 the 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.