There was the morning, for instance, when their cattle disappeared, such cattle as these had become, skeletons rather, from which the hair had not yet rotted. Then each of the shaggy men who had been abandoned began to wander about distraught, with his thumbs hung from the slits of his trouser pockets, looking for tracks, for dung, for some sign. If they did not communicate their distress to one another, it was because it was too great to convey, but a stranger would have read it in any of those faces, which were by now interchangeable, as the dumb creatures shambled up and down, snuffling after the rest of the herd.
A whole two days, Voss, Judd, Angus, and the blackfellow searched the country pretty thoroughly. Of all the expedition these men were the fittest, although in the case of Voss he would not have allowed himself to appear less. An effort on his part, it was an effort also on the part of Judd to continue to admire his leader, but as the convict was a fair man, he did make that effort. So they continued to roam the water looking for the lost cattle, and from a distance their employment appeared effortless.
Then they lost Jackie.
Ralph Angus cursed.
‘These blacks are all alike,’ he complained, and punished his horse’s mouth as the blackfellow did not offer himself. ‘In no circumstances are they to be relied upon.’
‘Some whites would pack their swags,’ said Judd, ‘if the road led anywhere.’
‘I have great confidence in this boy,’ Voss announced, and would continue to hope until the end, because it was most necessary for him to respect some human being.
The white men rode home, which was what the cave had become. Paths now wound from its mouth. Harry Robarts had washed his shirt, and was drying it on a string beside the fire.
The German was filled with terrible longing at this scene of homecoming. He was, after all, a man of great frailty, both physical and moral, and so, immediately upon entering the cave, he returned outside, preferring to keep company with the gusts of rain than to expose his weakness to human eyes, except possibly those of his wife.
She, however, was quite strong and admirable in her thick, man’s boots beneath the muddied habit. Her hands were taking his weakness from him, into her own, supple, extraordinarily muscular ones. Yet, her face had retained the expression he remembered it to have worn when she accepted him in spite of his composite nature, and was unmistakably the face of a woman.
Ah Laura, my dear Laura, the man was begging, or protesting.
As he stood in the entrance to the cave, he was resting his forehead against a boss of cold rock.
Thus he was seen by Frank Le Mesurier, who had recovered a little of his strength, and was moving on his bed, looking for some person with whom to feel in sympathy. Now he observed their leader. The young man was glad that Voss remained unnoticed by the others, since only those who have known the lowest depths are unashamed. For some reason obscure to himself, he began also to recall, as he did frequently in those desert places, the extraordinary young woman that had ridden down to the wharfside. He remembered her swollen lips, and what had appeared at that distance to be the dark shadows under her eyes, how she had been enclosed strictly in her iron habit, and how, while inclining her head to talk with evident sincerity to Mr Palfreyman, she had remained innerly aloof.
For some reason, obscurer still, the visionary felt carried closer to his leader, as the woman rode back into his life. He lay amongst his blankets, and let the moon trample him, and was filled with love and poetry, as is only right, between the spasms of suffering.
That night, when the rather tender, netted moon rose between layers of cloud, Jackie returned, herding the lost cattle. Moonlight was glinting on the pointed horns, that at intervals could have contained the disc itself. The skin of the boy, who sat thin and terrified on his sombre horse, was inlaid with shining mother o’ pearl.
They looked out and saw him.
‘Here is Jackie come back,’ some of them said.
At once Voss was stumbling over bodies, to reach the mouth of the cave, to corroborate.
How glad he was, then.
‘One cattle no find,’ said the boy, and was beginning to sulk at the darkness which had but lately frightened him.
His nakedness chafed the horse as he slithered silkily down.
‘Even so, you have done well,’ said the German, relieved on a scale the others did not suspect, out of all proportion to the incident.
He could not talk in front of other people, but brought a lump of damper, which was left over from their evening meal.
‘There,’ he said to the hollow boy, and, almost angrily: ‘You will have to make do with that, because there is nothing more.’
Then the German returned abruptly to his bed, and of all those present, only the aboriginal, who was well practised in listening to silence, did not interpret their leader’s behaviour as contemptuous.
Nothing was added to the incident. Voss recorded it without comment in his journaclass="underline"
May 28th. Jackie returned at night with cattle, one head short. Before retiring, rewarded the boy with a ration of damper. He was quite pleased.
About this time there occurred also the incident of the mustard and cress.
Turner had been expressing himself in something like the following strain:
‘What would I not give for a nice dish of greens, cabbage, or spinach, or even turnip-tops at a pinch, with the water pressed out, and a lump of fresh butter slapped on like, or marrer from a good bone. But as long as there was greens.’
Greens they had had in small quantity, a kind of fat-hen that they would boil down occasionally, but in spite of this addition to their diet, Turner had become a scurvy mess, loathsome to see, and to smell, too.
Mr Palfreyman, who had overheard the fellow’s remark, remembered amongst his belongings some seeds of mustard and cress, which drought at first had prevented him from sowing, and which he had forgotten long before the weather broke.
Now, Turner was most repulsive to the rather fastidious Palfreyman, who, in normal circumstances, would have attended carefully to his hands, and changed his linen every day. In this he had been encouraged by his sister, whose clear, old-woman’s skin smelled habitually of lavender water or an essence of roses that she distilled herself, and whose tables were conspicuous for their little bowls of potpourri, and presses filled with the dry sheaves of lavender or yellow, crackling verbena leaves. It was, however, this same sister from whom he had run, at least, from her passionate, consuming nature, with the result that he was never finished wondering how he might atone for his degrading attitude, the constant fear of becoming dirtied, whether morally or physically, by some human being. Until the atrocious Turner, with greenish scabs at the roots of his patchy beard, and vague record of vice, seemed to offer him a means of expiation.
Once, in the cave that smelled of ashes and sickness, the ornithologist had suggested to the man that he should shave him.
‘To clean up your face and give it an opportunity of healing.’
Turner laughed.
‘I can see you shaving me, Mr Palfreyman, in the days before we lost our way.’
‘Do you not think we have found it?’ Palfreyman asked.
Turner made a noise, but submitted to being shaved.
It was a terrible operation.
When it was over, Palfreyman was sweating.
‘Seeing as it is Saturday night,’ Turner threatened, ‘I must make haste to find some moll, to lay with me on the wet grass and catch the rheumatics.’
Palfreyman flung the muck of soap and hair into the fire, where it proceeded to sizzle. His sister’s virgin soul winced; or was it his own?
Then, on this later occasion, Turner had confessed to his craving for greens. Miss Palfreyman, who preferred mignonette, was also in the habit of nursing up pots of mustard and cress, her brother remembered, and that he had those seeds in his pack, in an old japanned spectacle-case. At once he conceived the idea of sowing a bed for Turner and Le Mesurier, and went out on the very same day, into the rain, to look for a suitable site, and found one in a bed of silt, in a pocket of rock, some hundred yards from the eternal cave.