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.