Then he laughed, and spoke to the men in a few phrases of their own tongue, in a very English accent, to which they listened with that same politeness with which they received intelligence in any shape or form.
The elder native was most serious and formal. He was wearing what appeared to be a very old and floury swallowtail coat, but deficient in one tail. His black skin, which had been gathered by age into a net of finest grey wrinkles, was not tramelled further, except by a piece of bark-cloth, the colour of nature, in an appropriate place. A similar piece of cloth did cover his colleague a little; otherwise, the latter was naked, of a youthful, oily skin, and flattened features. This one, Jackie, was really quite young. He stood about with the delicacy of a young girl, looking away while absorbing all details, listening with his skin, and quivering his reactions. It was not possible to address him directly, nor would he answer, but through his mouthpiece, Dugald.
In other circumstances, Voss would have liked to talk to these creatures. Alone, he and the blacks would have communicated with one another by skin and silence, just as dust is not impenetrable and the message of sticks can be interpreted after hours of intimacy. But in the presence of Brendan Boyle, the German was the victim of his European, or even his human inheritance. So he got down from the shaky step, and advanced on the old black with his rather stiff, habitual gait and said:
‘This is for Dugald.’
It was a brass button that he happened to have in his pocket, and which had come off a tunic, of military, though otherwise forgotten origin.
The old man was very still, holding the token with the tips of his fingers, as if dimly aware in himself of an answer to the white man’s mysticism. He could have been a thinking stick, on which the ash had cooled after purification by fire, so wooden was his old, scarified, cauterized body, with its cap of grey, brittle ash. Inside the eyes moved some memory of myth or smoke.
The youth, on the other hand, had been brought to animal life. Lights shone in his skin, and his throat was rippling with language. He was giggling and gulping. He could have eaten the brass button.
On an afterthought, Voss again put his hand in his pocket and offered Jackie a clasp-knife that he was carrying.
‘Na, Junge,’ he said, with a friendliness that could not avoid solemnity.
Jackie, however, would not receive, except by the hand of his mentor, and then was shivering with awful joy as he stood staring at the knife on his own palm.
Voss, too, was translated. The numerous creases in his black trousers appeared to have been sculptured for eternity.
As all of this scene was a bit unexpected, not to say peculiar, to Brendan Boyle, the latter was itching to cut it short.
He jabbed with a finger in the old man’s shoulder-blade, and said:
‘Plenty valuable button. You take good care.’
After which, he spat, and was easing his clothes.
Boyle then proposed to Voss that they should spend the morning inspecting the sheep and goats he had selected for use of the expedition, and which would probably be found somewhere in the vicinity of a string of waterholes a mile or two north of the homestead. Voss agreed. It soon became clear that he and his host were continually humouring each other. In this way each hoped to hide the indifference he felt towards his companion, though each remained humorously aware that the other was conscious of his attitude. The agreeable part was that neither harboured actual dislike. No one could have disliked Brendan Boyle in spite of his peculiarities, and he was quite incapable of disliking for long anyone but himself.
So they set out from the slatternly settlement of Jildra, to which Voss had grown reconciled, just as he had come to accept certain qualities of his host. The smoky setting of the early morning was not unpleasing, even touching. Columns of blue smoke were ascending, a long cloud was lying flat above them, and the wisps of smoky grass, suggested an evanescence of the solid earth, of shack and tents, iron and hessian, flesh and bone, even of the rather substantial Brendan Boyle. They rode out of the jumble of grey sheds, past several gunyas, at which black women were standing, and little, red-haired boys with toy spears. Over the skins of the natives, the smoke played, and through. A yellowish woman, of spreading breasts, sat giving suck to a puppy.
‘Dirty beggars,’ coughed Mr Boyle — it was the smoke, ‘but a man could not do without them.’
Voss did not reply to what appeared, in his host’s case, obvious.
The two men rode on, in hats and beards, which strangely enough had not been adopted as disguises. In that flat country of secret colours, their figures were small, even when viewed in the foreground. Their great horses had become as children’s ponies. It was the light that prevailed, and distance, which, after all, was a massing of light, and the mobs of cockatoos, which exploded, and broke into flashes of clattering, shrieking, white and sulphur light. Trees, too, were but illusory substance, for they would quickly turn to shadow, which is another shape of the ever-protean light.
Later in the morning, when the air was beginning to solidify, the two riders were roused from themselves by sight of the promised waterholes. These might have been described more accurately as mud-pans, or lilyfields, from which several grave pelicans rose at once, and were making off on wings of creaking basket-work.
‘There are the sheep now,’ said the station-owner, pointing.
These dirty maggots were at first scarcely visible in the yellow grass, but did eventually move enough, and mill round, and stamp.
‘They are a rough lot,’ said Boyle, ‘but so is your undertaking. I am glad it is you,’ he had to add, sniggering, because in very many ways he was a schoolboy.
‘It is almost always impossible to convince other men of one’s own necessities,’ Voss said. ‘Do you believe you were convincing to us last night when you attempted to explain yours?’
‘I? What?’ exclaimed Boyle, and wondered whether his obscurer self had been caught in some indecent confession, or even act; he suspected it, but could not remember. ‘What a man lets out at night, you know, is a different thing from what he would say by day.’
He was protesting, and redder, as he searched his mind.
‘I cannot think what you are referring to,’ he concluded.
On such a mild and bountiful morning, Voss would not reveal what it was.
All this time the sheep, in their yellow wool and wrinkles, went on milling round and round, trying to find, or to escape from one another. Two black shepherds, at a distance, gave no indication of wanting to come any closer.
‘There, I think, are the goats,’ indicated Voss.
‘What? Oh, yes, the goats,’ Boyle replied.
About a hundred of these animals had gathered on the farther bank of a second waterhole, where they were climbing and slithering on the hulks of fallen trees, stretching their necks to pull at the fronds of live leaves, scratching at remote pockets of their bodies with the tips of their horns, skull-bashing, or ruminating dreamily. As the horsemen approached, the goat-mind was undecided whether to stay or run. Several did remain, and were staring up, their lips smiling, looking right into the faces of the men, even into their souls beyond, but with expressions of politeness.
‘Descendants of the original goat,’ Boyle commented rather crossly.
‘Probably,’ answered Voss, who liked them.
One aged doe had searched his mind with such thoroughness as to discover in it part of his secret, that he was, in fact, only in appearance man.
He held out his hand towards her subtle beard, but she was gone, and all of them, with hilarious noises, and a rain of black dung.