‘Then you do not believe in me,’ said the German, suddenly sober, and as if he had really expected to find someone to replace himself in his own estimation.
The night was quiet as the blacks lay against their fires, under the coils of the golden snake. They would look up sometimes, but preferred that the old men should translate this experience into terms they could understand. Only, the old men were every bit as unhappy. All their lives haunted by spirits, these had been of a colourless, invisible, and comparatively amiable variety. Even the freakish spirits of darkness behaved within the bounds of a certain convention. Now this great fiery one came, and threatened the small souls of men, or coiled achingly in the bellies of the more responsible.
During the night, after Voss had crawled forward to put some sticks upon the fire that had been lit at the mouth of the twig hut, Le Mesurier asked softly:
‘What is your plan, then?’
‘I have no plan,’ replied Voss, ‘but will trust to God.’
He spoke wryly, for the words had been put into his mouth.
Le Mesurier was blasted by their leader’s admission, although he had known it, of course, always in his heart and dreams, and had confessed it even in those rather poor, but bleeding poems that he had torn out and put on paper.
Now he sat, looking in the direction of the man who was not God, and, incidentally, considering his own prospects.
‘That is a nice look-out for us,’ spluttered the abject disciple.
‘I am to blame,’ said Voss, ‘if that confession will make some amends.’
He sat humbly holding a little leaf.
‘If you withdraw,’ Le Mesurier began.
‘I do not withdraw,’ Voss answered. ‘I am withdrawn.’
‘And can give us no hope?’
‘I suggest you wring it out for yourself, which, in the end, is all that is possible for any man.’
And he crumpled up the dry leaf, Le Mesurier heard.
The latter had expected too much of hands which were, after all, only bones. As it grew light, he found himself looking at his own transparent palms.
Meanwhile, what had become of the fiery snake? As they engaged in their various daylight pursuits, of hunting, digging for yams, mending nets, and paying visits, the general opinion of the sobered tribe was that the Great One had burrowed into the soft sky and was sleeping off the first stages of his journey to the earth. The whites were now ignored, as being of comparative unimportance. All men were, in fact, as wichetty grubs in the fingers of children. So the tribe remained entranced. Their voices spoke softer than the dust, their shoulders were bowed down with the round, heavy sun, as they continued to wait.
The white men in their twig hut were offered no alternative. In the silence and the course of the day they listened to the earth crack deeper open, as their own skulls were splitting in the heat.
Frank Le Mesurier began to go through his possessions, flint and tinder, needle and thread, a button, the shreds of stinking shirts, the ends of things, the crumbs, the dust, all the time looking for something he had mislaid, and did eventually find.
This book no longer bore looking at, although his life was contained in its few pages: in lovely, opalescent intaglios, buckets of vomit, vistas of stillest marble, the livers and lights of beliefs and intentions. There was the crowned King, such as he had worshipped before his always anticipated abdication. There was Man deposed in the very beginning. Gold, gold, gold, tarnishing into baser metals.
During the afternoon, this wreck of an ageless man hobbled out through the crackling heat, out and away from the edge of the camp, as if called upon to ease nature. There was a skeleton of a tree, he saw, in white, bleached wood. He could see the distinct grains of dust. After he had sat a while, unoccupied, at the foot of the tree, he began to tear up the book, by handfuls of flesh, but dry, dry. His lips were flaking off. The blood must dry very quickly, he imagined.
And that is exactly what it did.
Bracing himself against the tree, Frank Le Mesurier began to open his throat with a knife he had. Such blood as he still possessed forgot itself so far as to gush in the beginning. It was his last attempt at poetry. Then, with his remaining strength, he was opening the hole wider, until he was able to climb out into the immense fields of silence.
The body of Le Mesurier glugged and blubbered a little longer before lying still. Even then, one of the ankles was twitching, that had come out of the large boot. Everything was too large that had not shrunk.
So Harry Robarts, who had been attracted by the paper blowing about, eventually found him, and was running, and stumbling, himself scattered, and crying:
‘I told yer! I told yer!’
He was blowing about, but must, somehow, return to his leader.
When he got in, Voss said, without raising his eyes:
‘It is poor Frank.’
The boy was shaking like a paper.
‘And the blood running out!’ he cried. ‘Oh, sir, he has slit his throat!’
It had not occurred to him that a gentleman might lie in real blood, like an animal.
‘We must see if we cannot go presently and bury him,’ Voss said.
But both knew that they would not have the strength. So they did not mention it again. They were pleased to huddle together, and derive some comfort from an exchange of humanity.
That night the boy crawled as far as the doorway and announced that the Comet had slid a little farther across the sky.
‘I am glad to have seen it,’ he said. ‘It was a fine sight. And soft as dandelions.’
Voss suggested that he should return into the depths of the hut, for the night air in the small hours could be injurious to him.
‘I will not feel it,’ said Harry. ‘I will pull it up to my chin. Besides, I can protect you better from here.’
Voss laughed.
‘There is little enough of me left to protect, and of such poor stuff, I doubt anyone would show an interest.’
‘I had a newt in a jar, did I tell you?’ Harry Robarts asked. ‘And a bird in a cage. It did not sing as it was supposed to do, but I grew fond of it. Until they opened the door. This thing, sir, in the sky, has it come to stay?’
‘No,’ said Voss. ‘It will pass.’
‘A pity,’ said the boy. ‘I could get used to it.’
‘Go to sleep,’ murmured Voss, who was irritated.
‘I cannot. There are some nights when everything I have ever seen passes through my head. Do you remember that box of yours, that I carried to the shipside, on London River?’
The man would not answer.
‘Do you remember the flying fishes?’
‘Yes!’
The man was maddened finally.
‘Are you not going to sleep?’
‘Oh, there is time for sleep. Sleep will not pass. Unless the dogs dig. And then they only scatter the bones.’
‘You are the dog,’ said the man.
‘Do you really think so?’ sighed the drowsy boy.
‘And a mad one.’
‘Licking the hands.’
‘No. Tearing at one’s thoughts.’
As the two fell into sleep, or such a numb physical state as approximated to it, Voss believed that he loved this boy, and with him all men, even those he had hated, which is the most difficult act of love to accomplish, because of one’s own fault.
Then sleep prevailed, and the occasional grumbling of the blacks, still at the mercy of the fiery snake, and the stirring of those earthly fires against which they lay, and the breaking of sticks, which break in darkness, just as they lie, from weight of time, it appears.
While they were asleep, an old man had come and, stepping across the body of Harry Robarts, sat down inside the hut to watch or guard Voss. Whenever the latter awoke and became aware of the man’s presence, he was not surprised to see him, and would have expected anyone. In the altering firelight of the camp, the thin old man was a single, upright, black stroke, becoming in the cold light of morning, which is the colour of ashes, a patient, grey blur.