‘Come on,’ said Boyle.
If he could have attacked or accused his guest in some way, he would have, but the German had assumed a protective cloak of benevolence. As they rode homeward, the many questions that the latter asked, all dealing with the flora and fauna of the place, were unexceptionable, expressed with that air of simple benevolence. His face wore a flat smile, and there were little lines of kindness at the outer corners of his eyes.
Yet there was something, Boyle knew. He rode, answering the German’s questions, but absently flicking at his horse’s shoulder with the skein of reins.
During the remainder of their sojourn at Jildra, Boyle tried to read the faces of the German’s men for some clue to their leader’s nature and intentions. But they, if they knew, would not be read, or else were spell-ridden in the hot, brown landscape. As they went about the tasks that had been allotted to them, such business as arises during an interval of preparation and rest, the men appeared to have little existence of their own, unless it was a deeply buried one. There was Palfreyman, in a cabbage-tree hat that made him look smaller, with a clean, white handkerchief to protect his neck and throat, but which exposed, rather, his own innocence and delicacy. There he was, riding out, an old woman of a man, with the boy Robarts perhaps, and one or two natives, to secure the ornithological specimens which he would then clean and prepare by candlelight. Nothing more simplified than Palfreyman. So, too, the others were tranquilly occupied. Judd had become an immense rump as he busied himself at shoeing horses. Others were oiling firearms, greasing leather, sharpening axes, or sewing on buttons.
Except once or twice, nothing untoward occurred. On one occasion, to give the exceptions, Boyle had gone into the men’s tent, admittedly to satisfy his curiosity, and there was Frank Le Mesurier, sprawled out upon his red blanket, writing in a notebook. As Boyle was a big man, he was forced to stoop to enter the rather low-slung, oiled calico tent, then to stand hunched. He was so obvious that he made no attempt to behave casually. The blood was too thick in his fingers. Le Mesurier stopped writing, and rolled over on his book, which he could not hide effectively, because it had been seen.
‘Where is Mr Voss?’ asked Boyle.
Although he had not been looking for Voss, it was true the German was always somewhere in his mind.
‘I do not know,’ answered the young man, darkly returning the intruder’s stare. ‘He has gone out somewhere,’ he added in a hollow voice, which suggested that the speaker had but recently woken.
Then Boyle squatted down, as an opportunity seemed to be offering itself.
‘Have you known him long?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Le Mesurier answered at once, and at once began to hesitate. ‘Well, no,’ he corrected, prodding at a seam of the tent with his stump of lead pencil. ‘Let me see now. I knew Mr Voss at Sydney.’
Then he blushed and was confused.
‘It was much longer than that,’ he said. ‘It was on board the ship. Which does make it a very long time.’
Boyle’s suspicion increased. What was this young man trying to hide? Had he, perhaps, participated, or was he still participating in the German’s crime?
Le Mesurier lay there blushing dark, and resenting the intrusion more than ever. Now, as on that evening under the scrubby trees of the Domain, he felt that he did share something of his leader’s nature, which he must conceal, as, in fact, he was hiding the notebook that contained the most secret part of himself.
Boyle suspected this, but could no more snatch away the book than tear out by bleeding roots those other secrets of personality.
‘I was thinking of taking the gun down to the river, to look for a few duck that I saw making that way. Will you come, Frank?’ he now asked.
He wanted to kill something.
The young man agreed to come, rolled over, and grabbed for his hat. In the folds of the blanket there was no sign of the notebook that both knew to be there.
So they went down to the river, which had almost dried since the last rain. A brown heat was descending like a flat lid. Jildra, with its squalid pleasures of black flesh and acres of concealed wealth, was reduced to a panful of dust and stinking mud, in which Brendan Boyle himself had chosen to stick.
Once during those days, the latter approached Voss and almost asked to take part in the expedition, as if death in unpredictable circumstances were suddenly preferable to slow rotting.
Instead, they discussed water-bags.
This man has a favour to ask, the German knew, and in consequence grew wily. All, sooner or later, sensed his divinity and became dependent upon him. There was young Ralph Angus, Sanderson’s grazier-neighbour, blushing like a girl to ask an opinion. The armour of youth and his physical strength had not protected him against discovery of his own ignorance during the journey north. Turner was abject, of course, and Harry Robarts an imbecile. But Angus might prove a worthy sacrifice. The young bull of pagan rites, he would bellow and cast up his brown, stupid eyes before submitting.
Of all the company, Judd remained least changed. Voss was encouraging, but amused. The day he found the convict tarring a horse’s swollen pastern, the German’s upper lip was as long in amused appreciation as a hornet is in legs. He looked at the stooping man, and said:
‘Is it a solution you are putting, Mr Judd?’
‘It is,’ replied the latter, chasing some insect away from his face with his tar-free arm.
‘You have not omitted the oil?’ asked Voss.
‘No,’ said Judd.
Voss was whistling a little tune of insect music.
‘That is excellent,’ he said.
He continued to whistle until, Judd could feel, he was drifting on. Then the convict’s empirical nature was glad of the stench of tar, and the heat which was for ever descending and ironing the dust still flatter.
Heavy moons hung above Jildra at that season. There was a golden moon, of placid, swollen belly. There were the ugly, bronze, male moons, threateningly lopsided. One night of wind and dust, there was a pale moonstone, or, as rags of cloud polished its face, delicate glass instrument, on which the needle barely fluttered, indicating the direction that some starry destiny must take. The dreams of men were influenced by the various moons, with the result that they were burying their faces in the pregnant moon-women, or shaking their bronze fists at any threat to their virility. Their dreams eluded them, however, under the indicator of that magnetic moon. The white dust poured out from between their fingers, as they turned and turned on hairy blankets that provoked their nakedness. On the other hand, there were some who lay and listened to their own eyelids grate endlessly.
Such was the predicament of Palfreyman on one particularly white night. Unable to sleep, he had passed the time reviewing houses in which he had lived, minor indignities he had suffered, and one tremendous joy, a white eagle fluttering for a moment on the branch of a dead tree and almost blotting out the sky with the span of its wings.
The sound of the strong feathers, heard again above the squeak of mice and groans of sleep in Boyle’s squalid shack, had almost freed the wakeful Palfreyman, when Voss rose. There he was, striped by moonlight and darkness, the stale air moving round him, very softly. Voss himself did not move. Rather was he moved by a dream, Palfreyman sensed. Through some trick of moonlight or uncertainty of behaviour, the head became detached for a second and appeared to have been fixed upon a beam of the wooden wall. The mouth and the eyes were visible. Palfreyman shivered. Ah, Christ is an evil dream, he feared, and all my life I have been deceived. After the bones of the naked Christ had been drawn through the foetid room, by sheets of moonlight, and out the doorway, the fully conscious witness continued to lie on his blanket, face to face with his own shortcomings and his greatest error.