The grazier was fascinated by the pot.
‘How so?’
He smiled to hide his intense interest.
‘People of that kind will destroy what you and I know. It is a form of madness with them.’
The young landowner clucked with his tongue against his teeth. He was unhappy once more. A runnel of rainwater, besides, was trickling down his neck. He was for ever shifting.
‘I know,’ pursued Turner, ‘because I have looked in the book.’
‘What book?’
‘Why, the book that Frank is always writing in.’
Angus was not aware that such a book existed, but pretended that he was. Thus he would conceal his ignorance of most things.
‘If it is his private property,’ he mumbled.
‘Naow, naow, Ralph,’ said Turner. ‘What is that?’
The hair stood up on the back of the young man’s neck. He avoided an answer.
‘What was in this book?’ he asked, unhappily.
‘Mad things,’ Turner replied, ‘to blow the world up; anyhow, the world that you and me knows. Poems and things.’
‘Poetry can be very enjoyable,’ said Angus, who had memories of young ladies seated after dinner beside lamps.
‘I do not deny that,’ Turner hastened to agree; ‘I am partial to a good read of it meself. But this was like, you might say, Ralph, like certain bits of the Bible. They are cut up, like, but to make trouble, not to make sense.’
As trouble was Turner’s own particular province, his mouth was now watering, and his eyes shone.
‘We have no right to make such comparisons, you know,’ insisted Angus, whose doubts of his friend had grown great.
‘Go on, Ralph,’ said the latter. ‘If a man don’t assume his rights, nobody is going to give ’em to him.’
The young grazier looked out into the night, on which a moon had risen. Black wings were continually sweeping the surface of the silver plain. It was the wind hustling the clouds, of course. But on several occasions during the journey, his own thoughts had developed a span that had carried them almost out of his control.
‘This is what I think, Ralph,’ Turner was saying, ‘mind you, in confidence, seeing as how we are mates. I think that Le Mesurier will in the end turn out to be in league with Voss. It is the oil, see? And that barmy boy, why, Harry would not harm a fly, but oil, oil, see, he must go over, too.’
Ralph Angus tossed what had been his handsome head. So horses will discourage the March fly.
‘I will not discuss Mr Voss,’ he said. ‘Besides, there is no question of going over to him. We are all with him.’
‘Discuss Mr Voss?’ spat Turner. ‘You cannot discuss what is not.…’
His spittle appeared white-hot, as it curled and twisted on the embers of the lost fire.
‘Do you believe in God, Ralph?’ asked Turner.
‘I should think there are very few individuals so miserable as not to,’ answered the upright young man.
Turner might have been rehearsing such a situation all his life.
‘I do not believe in God,’ he said.
A water was dripping in the silver silence.
‘Not in nothing that I cannot touch.’
He gave the quart an angry poke.
‘Do you think as Voss was reading my thoughts when he set hisself up? But I was not deceived.’
‘Are you not most unhappy?’ asked Angus, whom the disclosure had shocked considerably.
‘Oh, there is plenty of other things to believe in,’ Turner cried, looking in anguish at his friend’s face, which, however, avoided him.
‘Without dependin’ on God, who is the Devil, I would say, to have got us into a mess like this. There!’ cried the angry man. ‘That is what I think of Mr Bloomin’ Voss!’
Young Ralph Angus was so shaken he felt he could no longer call upon his own considerable virility for support.
‘Mr Palfreyman has faith,’ he remembered, with the relief of a pious girl.
‘Oh,’ shrugged Turner, ‘Mr Palfreyman is a good man.’
Consequently, he cancelled out.
The rocks in the moonlight were on the verge of bursting open, but failed.
‘There is still Albert Judd,’ murmured Turner, becoming dreamy. ‘He is ours, Ralph. He will lead us out. He is a man.’
‘I have every confidence in Judd,’ Angus agreed, but shifted his position.
‘Of course you have,’ cried Turner. ‘You only have to look at his hands.’
The young man, inside himself, in the most secret part of him, was disgusted. He could not have given himself into the hands of the convict. Something almost immodest was required of him.
Finally, he laughed it off, showing his immaculate, man’s teeth.
‘How we are talking through our hats!’ he protested. ‘I expect we are all become a bit mad by this.’
But Turner, whose mouth was stuck open, would have had to contradict his dreams. What remained of life was upon the lips, the slight, white rime of salt, which will also embitter dreams. He was snoring brokenly.
Then the young man realized the distance he had come from the Palladian façade and emerald turf into that desert country, and how he had sunk himself almost gratefully to the level of his sleeping companion. If he even sensed the existence of levels higher than that to which he had been born, he was left to wrinkle his forehead at them. So he drowsed, and wondered. And looked quickly at the sleeping Turner. He would have condemned his friend for his own thoughts. For just then Ralph Angus had been seated, rather, at the convict’s side, and together they were mending hobble-chains. The jingly chains were delightful as a childhood game. The convict could do many simple, but fascinating things: he knew tricks, and rhymes, and could take a wart off by magic. Then the young man, who had by this time crossed right over, from the outside, into the circle of sleep, watched the hands take the rope, and lasso the chestnut horse. He had learnt it at Moreton Bay, Judd explained; while the horse fought back with all his strength, the vein bursting from his glossy neck.
*
The morning that followed the storm was set in a splendour of enamels. The two stiff men were practically strutting as they performed their early ritual. Afterwards they killed two of the more respectable sheep, or rather, Angus did, while Turner offered advice in such a way that it did seem as if he were taking part in the operation. This accomplishment he had acquired while employed as a labourer at Sydney.
Once the sheep had been dressed and cut up into convenient quarters, they loaded their horses as best they could, and prepared to carry the meat across the hills, to be dried at the main camp.
The weather and the prospect of comparative comfort had rendered Turner quite merry. As he rounded up the already skipping goats, which, it was presumed, would continue to accompany the expedition, as they had received no order to abandon them, he was belabouring his horse’s rump with his hand, and singing:
‘A-jew, a-jew kind sheep,
The fatal hour has come.…’
‘Poor beggars,’ he added, ‘how glad I am to see the last of ’em.’
And settled himself in the saddle for the ascent.
As they slowly climbed, driving their small herd of goats, Ralph Angus looked back at the brown sheep standing in the plain, but turned at once, for he did not care to show any concern over what must be considered a commodity rather than an animal. Although this young fellow was possessed of great decency, naturally there were limits to what he was permitted to reveal.