‘Neither of you will do anything so foolish,’ Voss said sharply. ‘I will go, and you will wait here. Na, mach, Jackie!’ he called to the native boy.
‘A lot will come of your hob-nobbin’ with the blacks. As always,’ Judd panted. ‘I cannot dream dreams no longer. Do you not see our deluded skeletons, Mr Voss?’
‘If you are suffering from delusions, it is the result of our unavoidable physical condition,’ said the German, rather primly.
‘Arrrr,’ groaned Judd.
But everyone fell silent, even Judd himself, while the aboriginals, of superior, almost godlike mien, waited upon their cloud, to pass judgement, as it were.
‘As our friend Judd is jealous of my attempts to establish understanding and sympathy between the native mind and ourselves,’ Voss observed finally, ‘I will ask Mr Palfreyman to go amongst them, and investigate this matter of our stolen property. He, at least, is unprejudiced, and will act politic.’
Somebody sighed. It could have been Palfreyman, who was startled by this sudden exposure of himself. His skin had turned yellow.
‘I am certainly unbiased,’ he said, and smiled thinly. ‘I shall go,’ he agreed. ‘I only hope that I may acquit myself truly,’ he added.
There he halted. Everyone was aware that he, an educated gentleman, no longer had control over the words he was using.
‘Excellent,’ applauded Voss.
The circumstances to which they were reduced prevented him from wetting his lips. He was confident, however, that by a brilliant accident he had hit upon a means of revealing the true condition of a soul.
‘Here,’ said Judd, offering Palfreyman his own weapon.
‘Will you go armed?’ asked Voss, lowering his eyelids.
‘No,’ said Palfreyman. ‘Of course not. Not armed.’
‘Will you, at least, take the native?’
‘I doubt whether they would understand him.’
‘Scarcely,’ said Voss. ‘But his presence.’
‘No. I will go. I will trust to my faith.’
It sounded terribly weak. Voss heard with joy, and looked secretly at the faces of the other men. These, however, were too thin to express anything positive.
Palfreyman, who was certainly very small, in what had once been his cabbage-tree hat, had begun to walk towards the cloudful of blacks, but slowly, but deliberately, with rather large strides, as if he had been confirming the length of an important plot of land. As he went forward he became perfectly detached from his surroundings, and was thinking of many disconnected incidents, of a joyful as well as an unhappy nature, of the love that he had denied his sister, of the bland morning in which he had stood holding the horse’s bridle and talking to Miss Trevelyan, even of the satisfaction that he and Turner had seemed to share as he shaved the latter’s suppurating face. Since it had become obvious that he was dedicated to a given end, his own celibacy could only appear natural. Over the dry earth he went, with his springy, exaggerated strides, and in this strange progress was at peace and in love with his fellows. Both sides were watching him. The aboriginals could have been trees, but the members of the expedition were so contorted by apprehension, longing, love or disgust, they had become human again. All remembered the face of Christ that they had seen at some point in their lives, either in churches or visions, before retreating from what they had not understood, the paradox of man in Christ, and Christ in man. All were obsessed by what could be the last scene for some of them. They could not advance farther.
Voss was scourging his leg with a black stick.
Palfreyman walked on.
Harry Robarts would have called out, if his voice had not been frozen.
Then, we are truly damned, Frank Le Mesurier knew, his dreams taking actual shape.
Palfreyman continued to advance.
If his faith had been strong enough, he would have known what to do, but as he was frightened, and now could think of nothing, except, he could honestly say, that he did love all men, he showed the natives the palms of his hands. These, of course, would have been quite empty, but for the fate that was written on them.
The black men looked, fascinated, at the white palms, at the curiously lidded eyes of the intruder. All, including the stranger himself, were gathered together at the core of a mystery. The blacks would soon begin to see inside the white man’s skin, that was transfigured by the morning; it was growing transparent, like clear water.
Then one black man warded off the white mysteries with terrible dignity. He flung his spear. It stuck in the white man’s side, and hung down, quivering. All movements now became awkward. The awkward white man stood with his toes turned in. A second black, of rather prominent muscles, and emotional behaviour, rushed forward with a short spear, or knife, it could have been, and thrust it between the white man’s ribs. It was accomplished so easily.
‘Ahhhhh,’ Palfreyman was laughing, because still he did not know what to do.
With his toes turned in.
But clutching the pieces of his life.
The circles were whirling already, the white circles in the blue, quicker and quicker.
‘Ah, Lord,’ he said, upon his knees, ‘if I had been stronger.’
But his voice was bubbling. His blood was aching through a hole which the flies had scented already.
Ah, Lord, Lord, his mind repeated, before tremendous pressure from above compelled him to lay down the last of his weakness. He had failed evidently.
Then Harry Robarts did scream.
Then Judd had discharged his gun, with none too accurate aim, but the muscular black was fumbling with his guts, tumbling.
Voss was shouting in a high voice.
‘I forbid any man to fire, to make matters worse by shooting at this people.’
For they were his.
All the blacks had streaked from the scene, however, except the second murderer, who had stumbled, straddled a rock, toppled, before the violence of uncontrol flung him away, somewhere, into a gully.
Mr Palfreyman was already dead when the members of the expedition arrived at his side and took him up. Nor was there a single survivor who did not feel that part of him had died.
In the course of the morning a grave was dug in the excessively hard ground, by which time the eyelids of the dead man had thickened, and the black blood was clotting in his wounds. Death had turned him into wax.
Pious peasants wore their knees out worshipping similar effigies, Voss remembered with disgust. The face of Laura Trevelyan, herself waxen amongst the candles, did reproach him for a moment during the orgy of mortality at which they were assisting, but he drove her off, together with the flies, and spoke very irritably, for flesh, like candles, is designed to melt.
‘The sooner he is below ground, the better,’ he said, ‘in such heat.’
‘We must read the burial service,’ mumbled Judd.
‘I prefer not to,’ Voss replied.
‘I cannot,’ said Judd.
Frank Le Mesurier, whose wasted face was running with yellow sweat, declined.
‘I cannot,’ Judd kept repeating, as he knelt upon the stones, beside the trench in which it was intended to put the dead man, ‘but would if I had the education.’
It was terrible for him to have to admit.
Finally, Ralph Angus read the service, correcting himself time and again, for the meaning of the words was too great for him to grasp; he had been brought up a gentleman.
In the case of Harry Robarts, however, truth descended upon ignorance in a blinding light. He saw into the meaning of words, and watched the white bird depart out of the hole in Mr Palfreyman’s side as they lowered the body into the ground.
As for Judd, he cried for the sufferings of man, in which he had participated to some extent, if not yet in their entirety.