II
They got Jack home, but he was very ill. His life would seem to come back. Then it would sink away again like a stone, and they would think he was going. The strange oscillation. Several times, Mary watched him almost die. Then from the very brink of death, he would come back again, with a strange, haunted look in his blood-shot eyes.
“What is it, Jack?” she would ask him. But the eyes only looked at her.
And Lennie, standing there silently watching, said:
“He’s had about enough of life, that’s what it is.”
Mary, blanched with fear, went to find Tom.
“Tom,” she said, “he’s sinking again. Lennie says it’s because he doesn’t want to live.”
Tom silently threw down his tool, and walked with her into the house. It was obvious he was sinking again.
“Jack!” said Tom in a queer voice, bending over him. “Mate! Mate!” He seemed to be calling him into camp.
Jack’s expressionless, fever-dilated, blood-shot eyes opened again. The whites were almost scarlet.
“Y’ aren’t desertin’ us, are y’?” said Tom, in a gloomy, reproachful tone. “Are y’ desertin’ us, mate?”
It was the Australian, lost but unbroken on the edge of the wilderness, looking with grim mouth into the void, and calling to his mate not to leave him. Man for man, they were up against the great dilemma of white men, on the edge of the white man’s world, looking into the vaster, alien world of the undawned era, and unable to enter, unable to leave their own.
Jack looked at Tom and smiled faintly. In some subtle way, both men knew the mysterious responsibilities of living. Tom was almost fatalistic-reckless. Yet it was a recklessness which knew that the only thing to do was to go ahead, meet death that way. He could see nothing but meeting death ahead. But since he was a man, he would go ahead to meet it, he would not sit and wait.
Jack smiled faintly, and the courage came back to him. He began to rally.
The next morning, he turned to Mary and said:
“I still want Monica.”
Mary dropped her head and did not answer. She recognised it as one of the signs that he was going to live. And she recognised the unbending obstinacy in his voice.
“I shall come for you too in time,” he said to her, looking at her with his terrible scarlet eyes.
She did not answer, but her hand trembled as she went for his medicine. There was something prophetic and terrible in his sallow face and burning, blood-shot eyes.
“Be still,” she murmured to him. “Only be still.”
“I shan’t ever really drop you,” he said to her. “But I want Monica first. That’s my way.”
He seemed curiously victorious, making these assertions.