So the white men continued westward through what could have been their own perpetual sleep, and the fruit of the mystic bunya bunya contracted in their mouths.
Several days from there they came to a ridge, of hills even, at which a brigalow scrub whipped their flesh back to waking. Mules began to buck. The udders of those goats which had kidded were slashed and torn by twigs, and the glassy eyes of the most rational of all animals were seeing far too clearly as they advanced into chaos. On the farther side of the ridge, however, there was the suggestion of a creek, that is to say, a string of pools, filled with brown water or scum, for which the expedition made with all the speed it could muster, and but for curses, and skill in horsemanship, would have been trapped in it.
As it was, two of the more obstinate mules succeeded in becoming bogged, and were only dragged out by concerted strength at the end of their leading ropes, and blows on the rump from the torn-off branch of a tree.
One of these animals, it was seen, had staked itself. Dark blood was mingling on its fetlock with the slime of mud. It limped ostentatiously.
Voss approached the animal with that directness which comes from controlled distaste, a thin figure possessed by will, and was immediately lying on his back, his face even thinner.
Most of his party appeared as if drugged by circumstance, but Palfreyman was quick to dismount and run to their leader.
‘What is it, Mr Voss?’
‘It has got me in the stomach. The devil of a thing!’ the German did manage to convey, as he lay twisting his lips.
At this point Judd arrived at his side, and the tortured man was carried back up the slope, and laid in the shade of some scrub, over which the convict rigged a sheet of canvas as additional shelter.
As the German continued to bite his lips, and seemed incapable of uttering any but his own language, Judd took it upon himself to call a halt, and they camped there several days, treating the sick, for the fever-ridden Turner had contracted the diarrhoea, from the milk of a goat, he insisted, and there was, besides, the staked mule.
Judd had soon organized the camp. He sent the supple Jackie out along a log to scoop the scum-water with a pannikin. Dugald unearthed the roots of trees, from which he shook a quantity of crystal water. Soon all were meagrely refreshed. Only the beasts were dissatisfied with their portion of scum; they would stand and murmur, with their heads held low, nosing for celestial dew.
One evening when the pain had begun to leave him, and the skin of his face was less yellow, Voss sent for Judd and thanked him formally.
‘For your personal attention, Mr Judd, and kindness,’ said the stiff German, who was still stretched upon the ground like a breathing corpse, looking from beneath his eyelids.
‘A man does what he can,’ said Judd, and would have accepted the cat rather than the scourge of recognition.
‘But with no water,’ he blurted.
A most shameful tenderness was taking the shape out of his mouth.
He had, indeed, been forced to boil in a pot of scum the rags he had used to foment the German’s belly. Tinged by the mule’s hoof with saffron and purple, this part of his anatomy must originally have been ivory in colour, very thin, moreover, and private, so that, as he worked, the convict had been forced continually to turn his head, and turn his head, to look out into the haze, and thus avoid violating further the privacy, that almost sacrosanctity of which he was aware.
Voss, who had felt more exposed on some less physical occasions, despised all sickness; he despised physical strength; he despised, though secretly, even the compassion he had sensed in the ministrations of Judd. His own strength, he felt, could not decrease with physical debility. But, was Judd’s power increased by compassion?
He was continually observing the convict as the latter applied the miserable hot rags, and now, from beneath his eyelids, as he thanked the man for his services.
‘And particularly for seeing fit to assume command.’
Judd stood there.
‘I did not take command, not intentional like.’
‘But it is for this that I commend you,’ answered Voss, looking ever deeper into Judd.
‘I did round up a few mules,’ the convict confessed. ‘And tell the men to see as the canvas was pegged down. And kill a beast. And send the blacks to look for water. Because I am a practical man.’
‘And mules must be rounded up. And men, men must be driven, although they blind themselves to the truth.’
Then the convict protested with great vehemence:
‘Not men. It is not so with men.’
This man was shaking, as if the wounds were opening in him.
‘Good, Judd,’ laughed Voss. ‘I will exonerate you from any such designs.’
But when the fellow had gone away, he continued to suspect him of exercising great power, though within human limits. For compassion, a feminine virtue, or even grace, of some sensual origin, was undoubtedly human, and did limit will.
So the German was despising what he most desired: to peel the whale-bone off the lily stem and bruise the mouth of flesh.
Ah, he cried, rubbing his face against the leather of the saddle-bag.
Then he lay more tranquilly upon the barren hillside. He thought about the woman whose consent was making her his wife. All twisted lusts had gone out of his body and the stunted trees. The sky was flowering at that hour, and the distant fields of vision. He lay breathing gently in this union of earth with light. He lay thinking of the wife from whose hands he would accept salvation, if he were intended to renounce the crown of fire for the ring of gentle gold. That was the perpetual question which grappled him as coldly as iron.
In a few days Voss was up. His will walked erect, if not yet his emaciated body. As the others were cured of their ills, Turner of all but the grumbles, and the offending mule of its lameness, the German called Judd and Palfreyman and informed them of his decision to make a start on the following morning.
It was a relief to put an end to inactivity on that scrubby slope. Life starts afresh with each fresh journey, even into the dust. So the forenoon and evening were filled with lively preparation.
Only Dugald was squatting inactive on the ashy fringe of a small fire. The old native was more than ever a man of ash and charred wood; his brittle hams might have crumbled at a touch.
‘What is it, Dugald?’ asked the German. ‘Are you not pleased?’
‘Blackfeller old,’ said the old man, in a voice that was his oldest. ‘This feller too old.’
How the notes of lamentation twangled on his bone harp.
‘This feller sick. Sick old. Wanta go back Jildra. This no place old feller die.’
‘I will not let you die, Dugald,’ Voss consoled lightly.
‘You let Mr Voss die. You no stop Dugald,’ answered the old black, looking gravely at the white man.
‘How let myself die?’
‘Not now. No ready. You no stop when ready.’
This melancholy conversation that was taking place at the fire’s edge had its gaiety for Voss.
‘You old devil,’ he laughed, ‘you will see us all put in the ground.’
Then the old man himself began to laugh.
‘No here,’ he laughed ashily. ‘Jildra. Jildra good place. Please,’ he said, quickly, quietly. ‘I go away Jildra.’
But the German dismissed that possibility with his hand, and walked on.
The old man continued to nurse what was, indeed, a sickness of foreboding and fear. He was holding his old ashen head as he squatted by the fire. The hostile spirits of unfamiliar places were tormenting him.
Later, in the camp which had begun already to dissolve in anticipation of the morning’s move, Voss caught something of the old native’s melancholy, and began to look about at their blackened pots, at the leather tackle which sweat had hardened, and those presumptuous notebooks in which he was scribbling the factual details of their journey. Then the palms of his hands knew a great helplessness. The white sky, for it was again evening, was filled with empty cocoons of cloud, fragile and ephemeral to all appearance, but into which he would have climbed, if he had been able. As he could not, he continued to walk about the camp, and his men looked up from whatever work they were engaged upon, searching his face with the eyes of children who have not yet learnt to reject appearances.