‘What friend?’ asked the lad dreamily.
‘Judd, of course.’
‘Was he my friend?’
‘How am I to tell, if you cannot?’
The German was half angry, half pleased.
Presently the boy said, looking in the fire:
‘No, sir. If I had gone, I would not a known what to do when I got there. Not any more.’
‘You would have learnt again very quickly.’
‘I could have learnt to black your boots, if you had a been there, sir. But you would not a been. And it would not be worth it. Not since you learnt me other things.’
‘What things?’ asked Voss quietly, whose mind shouted.
The boy was quiet then, and shy.
‘I do not know,’ he said at last, shyly. ‘I cannot say it. But know. Why, sir, to live, I suppose.’
He blushed in the darkness for the blundering inadequacy of his own words, but in his weak, feverish condition, was vibrating and fluctuating, like any star — living, in fact.
‘Living?’ laughed the German.
He was shouting with laughter to hide his joy.
‘Then I have taught you something shameful. How they would accuse me!’
‘I am happy,’ said Harry Robarts.
The German was shivering with the cold that blew in from the immense darkness, and which was palpitating with little points of light. So, in the light of his own conquest, he expanded, until he possessed the whole firmament. Then it was true; all his doubts were dissolved.
‘And what about you, Frank?’ he said, or shouted again, so recklessly that one old mare pricked up her drowsing ears.
‘Have I not taught you anything?’ he asked.
‘To expect damnation,’ said Le Mesurier, without considering long.
In the uncompromising desert in which they were seated, this answer should have sounded logical enough, just as objects were the quintessence of themselves, and the few remaining possessions of the explorers were all that was necessary in that life.
But Voss was often infuriated by rational answers. Now the veins were swollen in his scraggy neck.
‘That is men all over,’ he cried. ‘They will aim too low. And achieve what they expect. Is that your greatest desire?’
Either Le Mesurier did not hear, or else one of his selves did not accept the duties of familiar. It was the lad who replied to the question in the terms of his own needs.
‘I would like to eat a dish of fat chops,’ he said. ‘And fresh figs, the purple ones. Though apples is good enough. I like apples, and could put up with them instead.’
‘That is your answer,’ said Le Mesurier to Voss. ‘From a man going to his execution.’
‘Well, if I was asked what I would take for me last dinner,’ said the boy. ‘And who would not eat? What would you choose?’
‘Nothing,’ said Le Mesurier. ‘I would not eat for fear that I might miss something of what was happening to me. I would want to feel the last fly crawling on my skin, and listen to my conscience in case it should give up a secret. Out of that experience I might even create something.’
‘That would not be of much good,’ said Harry Robarts, ‘not if you was to die.’
‘Dying is creation. The body creates fresh forms, the soul inspires by its manner of leaving the body, and passes into other souls.’
‘Even the souls of the damned?’ asked Voss.
‘In the process of burning it is the black that gives up the gold.’
‘Then he will give up the purest,’ said Voss.
He pointed to the body of the aboriginal boy, whom they had forgotten, but who was lying within the light of the fire, curled in sleep, like some animal.
Of the three souls that were dedicated to him, Voss most loved that of the black boy. Such unimpaired innocence could only be the most devoted. Whereas, the simplicity of Harry Robarts was not entirely confident — it did at times expect doom — and the sophistications of Frank Le Mesurier could have been startling echoes of the master’s own mind.
So that Voss was staring with inordinate affection at the black-gold body of the aboriginal.
‘He will be my footstool,’ he said, and fell asleep, exalted by the humility of the black’s perfect devotion and the contrast of heavenly perfection. Sleep did, in fact, crown man’s sweaty head with stars.
But in the morning Jackie could not be found.
‘He will have gone to look for a strayed horse,’ said Voss at first, with the bland simplicity that the situation demanded.
‘Horses!’ cried Harry Robarts. ‘No horse of ours has the strength to stray.’
‘Or to find water,’ Voss persisted.
‘The waterholes are dry in hell,’ remarked Le Mesurier.
‘Then, he will come,’ said Voss. ‘Eventually.’
There was still some brown muck left in their canvas water-bags, and this they held carefully in their mouths. They did delay a little, although it began to appear to all that it was immaterial whether the native returned or not.
One of the horses, it was seen, would not get up again. The hair of its mane was spread out upon the ground, its bones barely supported the shabby tent of its hide, and the gases were rising in the belly, in one last protest, as the party pushed on.
By the time the sun had mounted the sky, their own veins had begun to run with fire. Their heads were exact copies of that same golden mirror. They could not look into one another for fear of recognizing their own torments.
Until the head of Harry Robarts was rendered finally opaque by the intense heat of the sun. He had acquired the shape and substance of a great reverberating, bronze gong.
‘I do not want to complain,’ he mumbled and throbbed. ‘But it is going on and on.’
Then he was struck.
‘I am beaten!’ he shouted, and the bronze doom echoed out through many circles of silence.
‘Listen,’ said Voss. ‘Did you not hear some sounds at a distance?’
His lips would just permit words.
‘It is my own thoughts,’ said Le Mesurier. ‘I have been listening to them now for some way.’
Nor would he look up from the desolate ground to which his eyes had grown accustomed. He would not have asked for more than this.
‘It is the devils,’ shrieked Harry Robarts, who was rolling upon a steed of solid fire.
It was often the simple boy who first saw things, whether material or otherwise. Now the German himself noticed through that haze of heat, the deeper haze, then the solid evidence, it appeared, of black forms. But still at a considerable distance. And always moving. Like corporeal shadows.
Voss dared to smile.
As the expedition advanced, it was escorted by a column at either side.
‘When we run together,’ said Le Mesurier, whose attention had been drawn, ‘that will be the centre of the fire.’
For the present, however, there was no sign that any fusion of the three columns might occur.
While the white men, with their little trickle of surviving pack-animals and excoriated old horses, stumbled on through the full heat of day, the blacks padded very firmly. Sometimes the bodies of the latter were solid as wood, sometimes they would crumble into a haze of black dust, but, whether formless or intact, they expressed the inexorability of confidence. By this time, each party was taking the other for granted. Women had come up, too, and were trailing behind the men. There were several dogs, with long, glistening tongues, from which diamonds fell.
Feeling his horse quiver beneath him, Voss looked down at the thin withers, at the sore which had crept out from under the pommel of the saddle. Then he did begin to falter, and was at last openly wearing his own sores than he had kept hidden. Vermin were eating him. The shrivelled worms of his entrails were deriding him. So he rode on through hell, until he felt her touch him.
‘I shall not fail you,’ said Laura Trevelyan. ‘Even if there are times when you wish me to, I shall not fail you.’