Then he was glad again. He would have expressed that gladness, but could not, except by letting the smooth leaves lie upon his stubbly face, except by being of the stillness. In this way he offered his praise. For a short space the soul returned to his body, from which it had been driven out by whips, and he stood there looking through inspired eyes into the undergrowth.
When Harry Robarts discovered Judd, the latter was already at work upon the sheep’s carcass. He was cursing the flies.
‘Urchhh!’ cried the disgusted boy.
‘Why, Harry,’ said Judd, ‘those are only maggots.’
‘And what about our dinner?’
‘Why, it will be on your plates, as promised.’
‘Maggots and all?’
‘Maggots knock off very easy,’ Judd replied.
He was, even now, engaged in knocking them off.
‘Filthy stuff!’ cried the boy.
Certainly the meat was already of rather a green appearance as the result of such a damp heat.
‘You wait and see,’ coaxed the convict. ‘You will be surprised. If you do not eat your mutton, then I will eat my hat.’
But the boy was not consoled.
‘My stomach is turned up,’ he complained.
‘Not everyone is queasy by nature,’ answered Judd. ‘Still, Harry, I will ask you not to mention this to anyone else.’
Other incidents prevented the boy from breaking his promise.
During the morning a party of blacks appeared, first as shreds of shy bark glimpsed between the trunks of the trees, but always drifting, until, finally, they halted in human form upon the outskirts of the camp.
‘Did you ever see such a filthy race?’ asked Ralph Angus, whose strength and looks prevented him from recognizing anything except in his own admirable image.
‘We do not understand them yet,’ said Le Mesurier.
The latter’s doubts and discoveries could have been leading him towards the age of wisdom.
‘You are morbid, I believe, Frank,’ Angus said, and laughed.
He was all for driving out the wretched mob of cattle thieves.
The blacks were watching. Some of the men even grew noble in the stillness of their concentration and posture of their attenuated limbs. Their faces betrayed a kind of longing. Others, though, and particularly the old, could have been wallowing beforehand in the dust; they had the dusty, grey-black skins of lizards. Several of the women present had had the hair burnt from their heads. The women were altogether hairless, for those other parts which should have been covered, had been exposed by plucking. By some perversity of innocence, however, it did seem to emphasize the modesty of those who had been plucked. They had nothing left to hide.
Turner, naturally, was provoked to immoderate laughter, and was shouting:
‘What will you bid for the molls, Mr Le Mesurier?’
And when Le Mesurier was silent:
‘Or are they not to your taste?’
Finally, he took the handle of the iron frying-pan, which he still had about him from the previous night, and presented it to one of the more impressive blacks.
‘You sell wife,’ he demanded. ‘I buy. But the pretty one. The one that has not been singed right off.’
Everyone was by this time repelled by Turner, and by the blacks that had so inspired him.
The blacks themselves were disgusted by those of his gestures which conveyed a meaning. Several of the males made hissing noises, and the pan-handle was flung down.
Hearing the scuffling and flumping that followed, and curses from Turner, and gibberish of natives, the German had come out of his tent, and entered into the situation.
‘Turner,’ he said, ‘your behaviour will always live down to what I would expect. You will please me by not molesting these people who are my guests.’
Someone who had begun to snigger did not continue. It was often thus in the presence of Voss. His laborious attitudes would fill the foreground and become the right ones.
Now he approached the black whose instincts had rejected Turner’s offer, and, holding out his hand, said stiffly:
‘Here is my hand in friendship.’
At first the blackfellow was reluctant, but then took the hand as if it had been some inanimate object of barter, and was turning it over, examining its grain, the pattern of veins, and, on its palm, the lines of fate. It was obvious he could not estimate its value.
Each of the white men was transfixed by the strangeness of this ceremony. It would seem that all human relationships hung in the balance, subject to fresh evaluation by Voss and the black.
Then the native dropped the hand. There was too much here for him to accept. Although something of this nature had been expected by his companions, Voss appeared somewhat saddened by the reception his gesture had received.
‘They are at that stage when they can only appreciate material things,’ he said in some surprise.
It was he who was in the wrong, to expect of his people — for as such he persisted in considering them — more than they were capable of giving, and, acknowledging his mistake, he promptly instructed the boy to fetch a bag of flour.
‘At least, sir,’ said Ralph Angus, ‘let us question them on the subject of the stolen cattle.’
Dugald did exchange with the natives a few, unhappy, private words. Then all was mystery, in a concert of black silence.
‘No know,’ said Dugald, in that sick voice he would adopt for any of his failures.
By this time the boy had lugged the flour into their presence, and Dugald was ordered to explain its virtues. This he did briefly, as people will confess unwillingly to the lunacy of some relative.
The blacks were chattering, and plunging their hands into the flour, and giving floury smiles. Then they swooped upon the bag, and departed through the valley, laughing. While yet in sight, some altercation of a semi-humorous nature arose, and many hands were tugging at the bag. One old woman was seizing handfuls of the flour and pouring it upon her head. She stood there, for a moment, in veils of flour, an ancient bride, and screamed because it tickled. They were all laughing then, and running through a rain of flour, after which they trailed the empty bag, until it was dropped, finally, in ignoble rags.
Such an abuse could have been felt most keenly by Voss, the benefactor, if at that moment the smells of roasting mutton had not arisen.
‘It is the dinner,’ cried Harry Robarts, quite forgetting the earlier stages of its preparation.
Judd had fixed the carcass above the coals of a fire, in a kind of shallow trench, and now the golden sheep was rustling with juices and spitting fat. Slabs of hot meat were presently hacked off for the whole company, who for once omitted to gnaw the bones before throwing them to the dogs. All were soon bursting, but still contrived to stuff down some of the hard puddings that Judd had improvised out of flour and currants, and boiled in water; even these were good on that day. Afterwards the men lay in the grass, and embroidered on their past lives, stories such as nobody believed, but to which they listened contentedly.
Even Voss descended from his eminence, and was reviewing the past through benevolent gauze.
‘I can remember in the house of my parents a green stove. It was composed of green tiles, you understand, of which the decoration was rampant lions, though they more resembled thin cats, it occurred to me as a boy.’
Everybody listened to the German. Exhausted by food, mellow with Christmas, they no longer demanded narrative, but preferred the lantern slides of recollection. Into these still, detached pictures entered the simplest members of the party as into their own states of mind.