Nothing untoward occurred during the short journey, except that the two horsemen were soon caught in a black net of flies that had fallen upon the meat dangling from their saddles. This caused Turner to curse and kick, and his nag in consequence to sidle and pigroot. Each provoked the other to worse.
‘By cripes,’ the man screamed at the horse, ‘one or other of us will break his neck, and both of us is fly-blown; I can feel the maggots strolling on me skin. Ralph, can you not feel ’em?’
Ralph made a face. As steam had begun to rise from the sodden earth, and the mind was already languishing, he decided it was unnecessary to reply to his friend. Besides, one of the advantages of such a friendship lay in the freedom to choose silence. Animals do not discuss. So the two men toiled on, each accepting the other’s shortcomings in gratitude for the continued enjoyment of his own. Small figures on the same mountain, they were more alike than not.
When finally the party descended into the camp, it was found that Voss, Palfreyman, and the native boy were absent on some mission of a scientific nature, it was not specified what, and that Judd was unofficially in charge. The convict decided at once to cut the mutton into strips, and to light a fire, both to hasten the curing of their meat with smoke and to keep the flies away in the process. All of this he accomplished himself, for the others were not interested. Or else they had put themselves in his hands.
There was an air of peace at that camp, since rain had drowned many doubts. Thick, turbulent, yellow water was now flowing in the river bed. Green, too, was growing in intensity, as the spears of grass massed distinctly in the foreground, and a great, indeterminate green mist rolled up out of the distance. Added to the gurgle of water were the thousand pricking sounds of moist earth, the sound of cud in swollen cheeks of cattle, and sighs of ravaged horseflesh that looked at last fed and knowing. There was the good scent of rich, recent, greenish dung. Over all this scene, which was more a shimmer than the architecture of landscape, palpitated extraordinary butterflies. Nothing had been seen yet to compare with their colours, opening and closing, opening and closing. Indeed, by the addition of this pair of hinges, the world of semblance communicated with the world of dream.
However, the moment Judd pronounced the mutton sufficiently preserved by the combined action of smoke and sun, Voss decided they must strike camp the following morning, although there was not a man amongst them who would not have preferred to lie longer on his back and contemplate the scene. As for the German himself, he had been rejuvenated by the rain, and was making little jokes of a laborious nature. During the days of gathering green and kinder light, Laura had prevailed upon him to the extent that he had taken human form, at least temporarily. Like the now satisfied earth, he was at last enjoying the rewards of wedlock. His face was even fat.
It happened on the eve of their departure from the camp beside the river that Voss and Palfreyman were seated in the brigalow shade much occupied with specimens they had taken. Palfreyman with the skins of a collection of birds, Voss with some of those butterflies which would shatter the monochrome by opening in it. Even dead, the butterflies were joyful.
‘Tell me, Mr Palfreyman,’ Voss asked, ‘tell me, as a Christian, was your faith sufficient to survive until paradise was reached?’
‘I am a poor sort of Christian,’ replied Palfreyman, who was handling a small bird of a restrained colour. ‘Besides,’ he added, ‘paradise may well prove to be mirage.’
‘Admittedly,’ laughed Voss, because it was a gay day. ‘I myself am skeptisch,’ he said, waving his hand to embrace both the present landscape and his mosaic of dead butterflies, ‘although I confess to be fascinated by delusions, and by those who allow themselves to be convinced. But you, it appears, are not convinced.’
He said this quite kindly.
‘I am convinced,’ Palfreyman replied at last. ‘I believe, although there is a great deal I take on trust, until it is proved at the end. That it will be proved, I know.’
‘That is indeed faith,’ said Voss, again not unkindly, because the green plain had laid its mantle on him.
‘So my wife speaks,’ he added, from a distance.
‘Then you have a wife?’ asked Palfreyman, looking up.
‘No, no!’ protested Voss, with apparent amusement. ‘If she would exist!’ He laughed. ‘Such are the pitfalls of grammar. I acquire a wife by simple misuse of a tense.’
Palfreyman suspected this simplicity, while knowing grammatical error to be a source of great amusement to the German.
The latter now asked:
‘And you, Palfreyman, have no wife?’
‘No,’ the ornithologist confessed.
‘Not even a grammatical one,’ his companion murmured.
This was a statement rather than a question. His mirth had obviously subsided, that laughter rickety in structure which belied the well-founded voice. People would remember the German’s voice, whereas they were briefly, nervously haunted by his laughter.
Palfreyman also had exhausted a mood, it appeared, and was putting his work away, packing specimens and implements into the battered wooden cases. His celibacy was suddenly a miserable affair, that once had seemed dedicated.
‘No wives,’ he said, fastening a case firmly with a sharp, brass hook. ‘When I am at home, I live usually with my uncle, a Hampshire clergyman, for whom my sister keeps house.’
Here Palfreyman paused in telling, and Voss, in spite of his natural inquisitiveness, hesitated to encourage more. Each man realized how little he knew of the other, for each had respected his companion’s privacy out of jealousy for his own. Besides, the country had absorbed them to a great extent, and now, in the deepening shade of evening, on the edge of the brigalow scrub, they were diffident of confessing to their own lives.
Palfreyman, however, since he had dared a little, was being sucked back by the dreadful undercurrent of the past. As he could no longer hope for rescue, he continued.
‘My uncle’s vicarage would astonish any stranger expecting to find a house given up to normal human needs. Nor does this vicarage truly suggest the home of an inadequately rewarded, but devoted servant of God. Certainly it is noticeable for the advanced dilapidation of its grey stone, that the vines are opening up, or holding together, it is difficult to say which, but there are signs that the decay is not so much unavoidable as unheeded. If the roof should fall, as it well might, the neighbourhood would be roused by the most terrible shattering of glass, for the rooms are filled with glass objects, in a variety of colours, very fine and musical, or chunks with bubbles in them, and bells containing shells or wax flowers, to say nothing of the cases of humming birds. You see, my uncle, although a clergyman by name and intention, inherited a small fortune from a distant cousin. Some say that it was his downfall, because he could afford to be forgetful, but my sister, who is poor and dependent, suffers from the same disease — as well as from her infirmity, of which I will tell you.’
The narrator’s life, it seemed, was so cluttered up, he could not easily make his way between the objects of threatened glass.
‘My sister spends little enough time in the house, and probably could not remember in any detail the contents of its rooms. Dust would head her attempted list, I expect. I do not doubt her acquaintances are surprised that anyone so neat and clean, of dress and person, should be able to endure the ubiquitous dust. Moreover, thanks to my uncle’s comfortable means, she enjoys the services of two maids. What her critics fail to remember is that she constantly omits to give orders to her easy-going maids, in her great hurry to rush outside, into the garden, or the woods. My sister is particularly fond of woodland and hedgerow flowers: violets, primroses, anemones, and such-like. She will venture out in the roughest weather, in an old grey cloak, to see her flowers, and will often return with an armful of the common cow-parsley that she has been unable to resist, or a string of scarlet bryony to wear round her neck.