Voss

15

FORCED to spend several months on his property at Bathurst in the company of his amiable wife, whose unselfishness tended to make her dull, and his children, who did not notice him at all, Colonel Hebden passed the time, somewhat irritably, in attending to his own affairs, and in dispatching letters to a number of acquaintances who shared his vice, the insatiable desire for perpetual motion through the unpleasanter portions of Australia. Finally, when all arrangements were made, the Colonel began to move north, gathering his party as he went. The company, however, was not fully assembled until they reached Jildra.

Brendan Boyle, who had been informed by Hebden of his intention to continue the search for Voss and who had responded with his usual rather flamboyant generosity, promising a mob of sheep, two native stockmen, and various articles of tackle that he personally would not have been without on such a journey, was waiting on the veranda, bursting out of his trousers, the shirt straining on his hairy navel, when the expedition arrived. The leader and the host had barely exchanged civilities, the members of the exploratory party had scarcely begun to ease their limbs, and the station blacks to enjoy an examination of the strangers’ goods, when Hebden asked anxiously:

‘Tell me, Boyle, did you have any luck?’

This referred to a passage in his letter of several months earlier, in which the Colonel had written:

With reference to the boy Jackie, it is most important that you detain him if he camps down with you before my arrival. If you should hear of his whereabouts even, from other natives, I would ask you to send word to him that his assistance is needed in locating the remains of Voss and his party, as well as those of the mutineers, or, if God should grant that any of these men be still alive, their unfortunate persons.

Now the Colonel could not wait to hear.

Boyle laughed. Out of respect for his stained whiskers, he formed his full lips into a delicate funnel, and spat.

‘Jackie,’ said the grazier, ‘did pass through Jildra a couple of weeks ago.’

‘And you did not apprehend him?’

The Colonel was quite taut.

‘Apprehend Jackie!’ said Boyle. ‘A man would as well attempt to put a willy-willy in a bag.’

‘Did you at least question him?’

‘Useless,’ sighed Boyle.

The Colonel would cheerfully have put under arrest this subordinate who had failed in his duties, but, in the circumstances, had to content himself with a show of blazing heartiness.

‘My dear fellow,’ he exclaimed, ‘do you know what you have done? You have only thrown the needle back into the haystack.’

Boyle waved a puffy hand.

‘Jackie,’ he said, ‘is mad.’

‘Madness will sometimes make sense,’ replied the Colonel piercingly.

‘I do not doubt you would have drawn the teeth out of the patient. Everybody always would have, except myself,’ said Boyle, who was still cheerful. ‘But come inside, Hebden, and let us sit down to a friendly drink. I can offer you some genuine Jamaica. None of this local stuff.’

So Jackie was not apprehended, just then.

*

What of Jackie?

On the most fateful day of his life, this boy, who had experienced too much too early, had run from the camp of his adoptive tribe. He ran a good deal at first, while the red light rose higher in the empty morning, but when the yellow sun took full possession of the sky the fugitive figure began to walk, though even then he was forced intermittently to run, as flashes of the grey soles of his feet would indicate.

The boy, whose isolation in the colourless landscape was not made less terrible by his black skin, carried with him his empty hands. He wore a girdle of bark cloth, and round his neck, upon a string that he had begged one evening from Mr Judd, the bone-handled pocket-knife, a present from their leader. So that, as well as being alone, he was almost quite naked. In normal circumstances, the isolation would gradually have been reduced by the many little measures that made life agreeable and possible: by following the tracks of animals, by looking into scrub or logs, by looking for water or honey, by looking, always by looking. Temporarily, however, his eyes would not see clearly, and the loneliness was increased by his thoughts. Terrible knives of thought, sharpened upon the knives of the sun, were cutting into him. At night his thoughts, less defined, became, or were interchangeable with those spirits that haunted the places where he chose to sleep.

So Jackie continued on his way. Whether he made fire or not, he was not saved from darkness. When it was necessary he did dig for yams, or stone a lizard, or suck the liquid roots of certain trees, or even the leaves of trees while the dew was still upon them, because to quench thirst and satisfy hunger were habits that he had learnt. Once he stalked some emu chicks, and eventually clutched a straggler and was feeling for his little knife, but suddenly preferred to wring the bird’s neck.

How, finally, he came to lose the knife he could not tell, but threw off the broken, greasy string, glad for what was a disaster of some practical significance.

The absence of the knife’s physical weight did not relieve his spirit, however. Because he was without obligations and there was nobody to observe, he would certainly play at times as if he had been still a child, but these short-lived games did not really interest him, for duties were allocated to children at a very early age.

At least he knew the comfort of motion. He was always travelling. Once at dusk, in an outcrop of rock, he came upon the hip-bone of a horse still wearing its grey hide and, next to it, a snaffle ring that rust was eating. The boy could not help but recall the immaculate, the superhuman perfection that the splendour of all such harness could suggest. In his mind it glittered, as in the country of its origin. He touched the ring, but became more cautious, even afraid, as he approached the fusty clothes that contained the few remains of a man. Then, he kicked the bundle, and rummaged in it. It was, he saw, the last of the one they called Turner, whom he had avoided whenever possible on account of his smell, which was the particular smell of all dirty white men.

The boy lingered in that darkening desert of broken windmills and old umbrellas. Beyond the rocks, with their cutting edges of glass, he found a handful of hair. He pulled the tuft as if it had been a plant — at least it was growing out of the sand — and as he shook it free, he shivered for the sensation of white man’s hair, that he was touching for the second time. This was fine, frizzy stuff, a smouldering red in the last light. This, the blackfellow realized, would be the hair of Mr Angus. He remembered the thighs of the young man gripping the withers of a horse, and his pink skin shining through a wet shirt.

In that desert place the light continued to deepen.

Whatever else there might have been, Jackie knew there was no time left to discover it. So he ran from the dead men. When overtaken by darkness, about a mile off, he had reached a patch of brigalow scrub, and there he lay down.

Moonlight was of doubtful benefit when it came, because all night the spirits of the dead were with him. The thin soul of Turner was hanging like a possum, by its tail, from a tree. There was a cracking of sticks and whips by Mr Angus, who would rise up very close in a huge, white, blunt pillar of furry light. The boy thought he would not be able to endure it, and was pouring sand upon his head. When daylight came, his eyes were turned up and the rims of his eyelids staring outward, in a kind of fit. But he soon recovered in the heat of the morning and continued eastward, talking to himself of what he had seen.

As he left the country of the dead behind him, he realized that he had not found the remains of Mr Judd. Journeying along, through the glare of the sun and the haze of memory, the form of the big white man was riding with him on and off, the veins in the back of his broad hand like the branches of a tree, his face a second copper sun. This link between the flesh and the sullen substance of nature was in itself an assertion of life, and the boy would hang his head in relief and shame.

Jackie promised himself great happiness in talking to old Dugald. As he approached Jildra, he began to sing. To his disappointment, however, he discovered that Dugald had become so old he was again young, and he, Jackie, was weighed down with the wisdom of age. So he did not tell Dugald much beyond some uninteresting facts concerning the mutiny of the white men. All else he kept to himself.

For it is not possible to communicate lucidly with men after the communion of souls, and the fur of the white souls had brushed the moist skin of the aboriginal boy as he shuddered in the brigalow scrub. He was slowly becoming possessed of the secrets of the country, even of the spirits of distant tribal grounds. The children of Jildra ran screaming from him and hid in the gunyahs, and when he went from there, whole tribes of strange natives would beat the trees as he approached, or sit in ashy silence round their fires as he recounted to their unwilling ears tales of the spirit life.

But of his own, the great spirit by which he was possessed, that would sometimes look in from the outside, through his eyes, but which more often would writhe inside him, like waning life, or gush and throb, like blood — of that spirit he would never tell, because nobody was to know of it but himself.

So Jackie came and went. He became a legend amongst the tribes. Of the great country through which he travelled constantly, he was the shifting and troubled mind. His voice would issue out of his lungs, and wrestle with the rocks, until it was thrown back at him. He was always speaking with the souls of those who had died in the land, and was ready to translate their wishes into dialect. If no other blackfellow learned what those wishes were, it was because his fear prevented him from inquiring of the prophet.

*

Although Colonel Hebden missed Jackie by a week or two at Jildra, he was not less determined to follow his original plan and search for Voss in the mountain ranges and along the dry river courses to westward. If clues led him, he had the will and the supplies to attempt whatever deserts the centre of the Continent might contain. In this spirit he led his party out from under the classic coolabahs of Jildra into a congenial autumn. The sun was pleasant on the Colonel’s eyelids as he turned in his saddle and looked back at the last of the roofs and smoke.

Accompanied by four friends, all experienced bushmen, together with two native stockriders and a whole train of baggage animals, the leader dared in the beginning to anticipate success, but, as the weeks were consumed and the distance covered, with the usual privation and disheartening natural resistance to all progress, whether of scrub and sand, or of uncommunicative wild blacks, the explorer’s ugly face grew glummer. Sometimes at sundown he could not bring himself to write in his journal the firmly rational account that it was his custom to write. In fact, he would sit and think about Amelia and the children, and, opening his whitened, salty mouth, yawn like a horse.

Even Colonel Hebden had been made to look ridiculous by that most irrational country; the resistance of his human dignity was being broken down. He did not, of course, intimate to any of his companions anything of what was happening; on the contrary, he was continually cheering them on with helpful and amusing suggestions, of which even the wisest were sometimes irritating. If the Colonel himself did not see, it was thanks to his long training in self-esteem.

Then, one evening, quite suddenly, he determined to make an early confession of failure, and hoped fervently to receive similar confessions from the others. Encamped beside a miserable waterhole, on the edge of a pocked plain, he had already crossed the track made by Voss and his party in their journey to the west — crossed it at least twice, if he had but known — and the cupful of brown scum round which the rescuers had squatted was a means of reprieve withheld from the mutineers on the last morning of their lives. The bodies of the latter, such as Jackie had found, only a little less of them perhaps, were in fact still lying within a good stone’s-throw of the beaten Colonel. This, however, was an irony he would never be allowed to enjoy.

Veils were spread upon him, and that night, when at last he fell asleep, he was haunted more than usually by the souls of the dead country with which he had become so unwisely obsessed. It could have been that the torments suffered by the lost on the morning of their dying still infested the surrounding air, but whatever the explanation, and it could not have been a rational one, the Colonel continued to turn, and the horsemen did not cease to ride.

*

In their perpetual ride, the three horsemen came on, through a fog of thin, yellow dust. Dust of presage entered their mouths, and was fumbled by their shreds of lips. The horses, too, tasted the yellow dust, but seemed to derive comfort from the slight muddy mucus on their bits.

In that pale but burning light, the shivery legs of the men were gripping the knives of horses’ withers, without, however, controlling them; only the tradition of control remained. A little to the fore rode Judd, of course, as befitted the usurping leader, but just as the men no longer controlled the horses, so the leader was no longer truly in command. His party continued to follow at his heels, because they feared to stop.

Judd was mumbling some of the time, and would look up from under floury eyebrows, like an old, deceived dog. Ah, if he could have thrown off that body which had always been a trial to him, whether hewing stone, receiving the cat, streaming through forests of tropical grass, bearing chains, crossing deserts, but to part company was not permitted till the very last. In the desert of earthly experience he must watch his hopes drying up, past and present, flesh and memory, his own clumsily reliable hand, the little suet dumplings his wife was heaping on his full plate, the innocent vein in a horse’s ear, the twin fountains of his wife’s love rearing high in trustfulness. Sleep was stirring on her dusty bed, and when he had bitten the nipple of her left breast, she cried out in anguish that the years had been deceiving her. He had to laugh, though. In the end, he laughed, all of us is bit. It was the kind of joke he could enjoy.

Again he was the old, baggy man, and would ride on because it had become a habit. The flies were filling the red rims of his eyes. Only a faint future was visible through the dust.

‘Albert,’ called Turner, who was the weakest, and who, for that very reason, still admired his illusion of the strong, resourceful friend. ‘Do you see it?’

‘Do I see what?’

‘The water.’

‘Do I see the water!’

‘We must come to it.’

They rode in silence, listening to one another’s snuffling of dust and mucus.

Angus hated Turner now. Always a decent, passionless young fellow, endlessness had taught him to hate. So he hated Turner. He hated Judd also, but expressed that hatred differently. Since he had been forced by circumstances to put himself in the convict’s hands, open dislike could have reflected on his own judgement. Yet, he would continue to hate Judd, whether standing with him in the pits of hell, or recognizing the man from his phaeton as he drove down George Street after dinner.

‘Arr, Gawd,’ cried Turner, ‘I cannot go on! I cannot!’

‘Keep it to yourself, then,’ Angus advised. ‘We are all in the same condition.’

Turner’s nose began to whimper. He coughed and coughed, but emptily, and was retching dry.

Judd no longer paid much attention to his companions, since he was fortunate enough to be riding in advance of them.

So that the silence and isolation began to eat at Ralph Angus, until he wondered how he might ingratiate himself with his hateful leader, Judd. That the latter was also admirable made their relationship even more unfortunate. Already in childhood, the young man saw, he had been repelled by what he most admired. He remembered playing in his little frock in his godmother’s conservatory. Mists were descending, the fur of soft leaves was mingling with his cheeks, when he tripped and fell over a gardener’s wrinkled boots. The man at once bent down, and lifted him up, into the world of animal flowers. How frightened he was, and in love with the strong colours of the hairy throats. Suffocating scents drove against him, and the different smell of the gardener. The man’s hands were different, too, that could perform the strangest miracles. Then he had buried his own blenching, ineffectual nails in the different skin, and fought the man’s laughter. The heads of spotted flowers were reeling.

Yet, the servant had remained superior in his strength and easy temper, and when the child had been returned to the ground, and run away upon his fastest wheels, he had wondered which of his possessions to bring and put in the man’s hands.

So, now, the young grazier knew that he must ingratiate himself also with the hateful, the unfeeling, worst of all, the superior Judd, whose back it was ahead.

‘Judd!’ he called, lifting up his voice from the depths where it lay. ‘Judd, I have a suggestion to make.’

Judd neither answered, nor turned, although it was evident that he was waiting to receive.

Angus rode, or forced his horse almost level with the man who had become his leader.

‘Let us open the veins of one of these horses that are almost done. And wet our lips. Would it not be an idea?’

Judd did not answer.

Angus felt relieved that he was not quite level with the convict, and could fall back, bumping on his iron saddle, he who had once been a fine figure on a horse. In his mouth he could taste the clotting of disgust.

But, now that he rode alone again, the young man could have cried for the distance that separated him from Judd.

As they were approaching an outcrop of rock, an event in time such as these relics of human life seldom experienced now, Turner, who was in the rear, felt that a great weight had begun to drag him down. Magnificently, cruelly salient rocks, glassy-sharp, he knew he was not intended to reach them. So he threw up his sticks of hands, and was falling, falling. Nothing could have stayed him, except, perhaps, a suspension of personal destiny. Even so, when he struck the ground, which he did very lightly, on account of his poor condition — no umbrella, in fact, could have landed lighter — he set up a wildly importunate shrieking.

‘Save me, you beggars!’ Turner shrieked. ‘You devils! You are not leaving me to die?’

His bowels were protesting at the last injustice humanity would inflict upon him. Then he lay, spread out, a thing of dried putrescence and the scars of boils. His skin was grinning.

The rocks now became a most desirable goal for the two survivors, though what they would achieve by satisfaction of that desire was not at all clear. With terrible slowness, the horses approached their destination. The riders’ breath rose in a stench of almost mystical intensity. There was some possibility, of course, that Judd might open the cupboard of the rock, and step inside, to find himself at last. But Ralph Angus was haunted by a fear that he might not know how to die, when it came to the moment, in a manner befitting a gentleman.

Naturally he could not expect reassurance or advice from the convict on such a matter. Moreover, they were already treading upon the outer defences of the citadel, where the young landowner’s horse stumbled, and he half jumped free, half was flung out of the saddle, to slide down the infernal incline of the first molten pyramid. Arrived at its base, he lay, and when he had recovered sufficiently, which he was allowed to do, began to knock his head against the soothing rock. So the great gong boomed in his ear and Ralph Angus died, as young ladies of his own class offered him tea out of Worcester cups. Deliciously their fingers of rose and lilac braided him up in their possessive hair. They smothered him, and mothered him, until, at the last, he was presented as a swaddled baby. In this, his beard could have caused doubts, but he had parted from it: there it was, sprouting from the sand, independently, like a plant.

Judd now occupied the desert.

If the convict was taking longer to die, it was because of his great physical resources, and because he was determined to find some shade.

After slithering from the back of his horse, tearing his papery hands on several buckles, he had begun to shamble round the rocks. On this incalculable journey, which he was accomplishing in the manner of a surprised orang-outang, looking, and swaying, blinded by fatigue and mica, he was mumbling continually:

‘A little piece of shade. A little piece of shade.’

Stumbling.

‘Oh, Lord,’ he sighed.

He did not pause to consider whether his companions were already dead, let alone ponder over their way of dying, because death is such an absorbing matter; his mind could only contend with his own. That he would die now, he was fairly confident. Nor was he afraid at the prospect. It seemed the only right end to his plain, practical life.

If only God would take him at once into His rocky bosom. He did earnestly pray for this, who had in his time seen animals lie squirming, and men too.

Miraculously, he had found a little shade, very thin, against his own monument, and when he had got down, into the shadow of the rock, making himself as acceptable as he could, then he ventured:

‘If it is your will, Lord, let me die now.’

Two horses still stood drooping in the sun as the man lay beneath his eyelids, but horses, he remembered, could take a long time, then go off with very little fuss.

*

All night long the hoofs of horses were stumbling back and forth.

In the early hours, while a moon still lay upon the muddy surface of the waterhole, Colonel Hebden awoke, breaking a particularly horrible dream, of which he could not remember the details. Since he had decided to abandon his mission, it was only natural that he should await somewhat anxiously the approach of daylight, and with it the opportunity to inform his companions of his intention. The morning finally came, and it was with obvious relief and delight that the members of the expedition found they were of one mind. To none had it occurred that others might have been harbouring the same secret thoughts. So that animal spirits were let loose, and there was much laughter and joking as these hitherto solitary individuals emerged from their isolation, to make plans for a hopeful future, while consuming their normal breakfast of muddy tea, dusty damper, and splintery strips of dried beef.

When the two aboriginals had brought in the hobbled horses, which had struggled back as always in the direction from which they had come, it did not take long to prepare for departure. Only Colonel Hebden himself gave one last look to westward, and at those inhospitable rocks in the near distance. Perhaps the fact that they were the only feature in the landscape made them most terrible.

So the expedition turned back.

That he had failed, was, of course, obvious to the Colonel, but he did not altogether blame himself. He blamed the boy Jackie, who had become, because of his elusiveness, the key to all secrets. Trailing back with his party in the direction of Jildra, Colonel Hebden’s private resolve was eventually to find Jackie, or to ‘apprehend’, as he noted that night in his journal.

He remained unsatisfied, however. If he had but known — there was a great deal that Colonel Hebden did not know; it was almost as if there had been a conspiracy against him — if he had but known, Death had just apprehended Jackie, crossing a swamp, during a thunderstorm, at dusk. The boy had not attempted to resist. He lay down, and was persuaded to melt at last into the accommodating earth, all but his smile, which his tight, white, excellent teeth showed every sign of perpetuating.