‘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.