When it was almost noon, and the valley had narrowed to a neck, the convict left his cattle, which were tired and unwilling, and rode forward.
He said:
‘Mr Voss, I reckon it is near Christmas. If it is not tomorrow, it is soon after.’
Then they listened to the silence.
If he had been given to irony, Palfreyman would have indulged in it at this point, but as he was not, he looked at the grass, and waited.
‘Yes, you are correct, Judd,’ said Voss.
The birds were screaming and ascending in red riot.
‘It is tomorrow,’ said the German precisely.
All round this group hung the heat in sheets of damp silence.
‘It did not occur to me to mention it,’ said Voss. ‘You know, in such circumstances.’
He let his hand fall limply, as if his own body were as much to blame.
‘But if this festival will mean anything to you, Judd, personally, or to any of the other men, then certainly must we celebrate it.’
‘I would like to celebrate Christmas, sir,’ said Judd.
Once he would have looked to Palfreyman, even last week he might have, but did not now. This rather massive man, sitting astride his caked horse, was not in need of support for the present.
Instead, it was Palfreyman who felt the need to follow. He hastened to add:
‘I, too, would like to celebrate Christmas.’
It was perfectly natural that any Christian should wish to join the emancipated convict at this season of complete emancipation, yet Voss, who feared union, most of all one in which he himself might become involved, suspected snares.
‘Good,’ he said, wetting his lips, and smiling painfully. ‘Then, what would you suggest, Judd?’
He waited to hear something he would hate.
‘I would suggest, sir, that we call a halt just where we are. It is a pleasant spot,’ the convict said, and indeed, it was reflected in his face, a place of large leaves and consoling water. ‘If you agree, I will kill a sheep, that we will eat tomorrow. I will make a pudding or two, not the real thing, like, but to deceive ourselves. I am not going to suggest, sir, how we should spend Christmas Day. Every man will have his own ideas.’
‘We could read the service,’ he did add, as a careful after-thought.
‘Let us, at least, call the halt,’ said Voss, and, riding into the shadow of a tree, flung his hat down, then himself.
Judd took command. His face was glad, Palfreyman saw. Calling to his mates as they approached, throwing out his thick, hairy arm, signalling to them to dispose of beasts and baggage in a final halt, the convict had become a man of stature. Little signs of hopefulness were playing round his mouth amongst the lively points of perspiration. The strength of innocence can but increase, Palfreyman realized, and was himself glad.
Then, as he was exhausted by the luxuriance of unwonted green, by the habitual heat, as well as by the challenge of souls that he had just witnessed, the ornithologist went and joined the German in the shadow of his tree.
‘It is not splendid?’ asked Voss, admiring the prospect of sculptural red rocks and tapestries of musical green which the valley contained.
Palfreyman agreed.
‘Ennobling and eternal,’ persisted the German. ‘This I can apprehend.’
Because it is mine, by illusion, it was implied, and so the ornithologist sensed. By now, moreover, the latter had learnt to read the eyes.
‘Yet, to drag in the miserable fetish that this man has insisted on! Of Jesus Christ!’
The vision that rose before the German’s eyes was, indeed, most horrible. The racked flesh had begun to suppurate, the soul had emerged, and gone flapping down the ages with slow, suffocating beat of wings.
As the great hawk flew down the valley, Turner did take a shot at it, but missed. It was the glare he blamed.
During the afternoon Voss continued in his journal the copious and satisfying record of their journey through his country, and succeeded in bringing the narrative up to date. As he sat writing upon his knees, the scrub was smouldering with his shirt of crimson flannel, the parting present of his friend and patron, Edmund Bonner. If there were times when the German’s eyes suggested that their fire might eventually break out and consume his wiry frame, as true fire will lick up a patch of tortured scrub, in a puff of smoke and a pistol shot, on this occasion he was ever looking up and out, with, on the whole, an expression of benevolent amusement for that scene in which his men were preparing a feast.
‘Do you appreciate with me the spectacle of such pagan survivals?’ he called once to Palfreyman, and laughed.
For Judd had seized the lamb, or stained wether, and plunged the knife into its throat, and the blood had spurted out. Several of his laughing audience were splashed.
Judd himself was painted liberally with the blood of the kicking sheep. Afterwards he hung its still carcass on a tree, and fetched its innards out, while the others lay in the grass, and felt the sweat stiffen on them, and talked together peacefully, or thought, or chewed the stems of the fat grass. Although they appeared to ignore the butcher, they were implicitly but the circumference of that grassy circle. Judd was the centre, as he plunged his arms into the blue cavern of the sheep.
Watching from his distance, Voss remembered the picnic by the sea, at which he had spoken with Laura Trevelyan, and they had made a circle of their own. As he saw it now, perfection is always circular, enclosed. So that Judd’s circle was enviable. Too late, Laura said, or it was the shiny, indigenous leaves in which a little breeze had started up. All the immediate world was soon swimming in the same liquid green. She was clothed in it. Green shadows almost disguised her face, where she walked amongst the men, to whom, it appeared, she was known, as others were always known to one another, from childhood, or by instinct. Only he was the passing acquaintance, at whom she did glance once, since it was unavoidable. Then he noticed how her greenish flesh was spotted with blood from that same sheep, and that she would laugh at, and understand the jokes shared with others, while he continued to express himself in foreign words, in whichever language he used, his own included.
Laura Trevelyan understood perfectly all the preliminaries of Judd’s feast. It would be quite simple, humble, as she saw it; they would eat the meat with their hands, all of them, together, and in that way, it would become an act of praise.
As the day grew to an end, and preparations for the feast were completed, Voss grew angry and depressed.
The same night, after the fires had been lit, and the carcass of the sheep that would be eaten for Christmas was a sliver of white on the dark tree, Judd took fat, and tossed the liver in a pan, and when it was done, brought it to his leader.
‘Here is a fine piece of liver, sir, done as nice as you would see it.’
But Voss said:
‘Thank you, Judd. I cannot. It is the heat. I will not eat tonight.’
He could not. The liver stank.
When Judd went away, which he did as respectfully as ever, he had a glittery look in his eye, and pitched the liver to the dogs.