Voss

by Patrick White

  ‘I would like to avoid the conflict of opinion that a large party will certainly involve.’

  ‘You will be gone a year, two years, nobody knows; in any event, a long time. During that period you will profit by being able to draw upon a diversity of opinion. Great distances will tax physical strength. Some of your party may be forced to fall out; others, one must face the melancholy fact, may pass on. You appreciate my point of view? It is also Mr Sanderson’s. He is convinced that these men will be of value to the expedition.’

  ‘Who are they?’ asked the cloudy German.

  The merchant at once mistook indifference for submission. The expression on his face had clarified as he sat forward to continue in full pride of superior strength.

  ‘There is young Angus. You will like Angus. He is the owner of a valuable property in the neighbourhood of Rhine Towers. A young fellow of spirit – I will not say hot-headed of anyone so amiable – who visited the Downs several years ago, and was at that time anxious to pursue fortune farther to the west, though just then conditions happened to be unfavourable.

  ‘Then,’ said Edmund Bonner, to his ivory paper-knife, that his wife had put on his desk one birthday, but which he had never used, ‘there is also Judd. I have not met Judd, but Mr Sanderson swears by him as a man of physical strength and moral integrity. An improviser, besides, which is of the greatest importance in a country where necessities are not always to hand. Judd, I understand, has shown himself to be most commendably adaptable. Because he came out here against his will. In other words, was a convict. Free now, naturally. The circumstances of his transportation were quite ridiculous, I am led to believe.’

  ‘They always are,’ interrupted Voss.

  The merchant suspected that he might have been caught in some way. He was suspended.

  ‘Most of us have committed murders,’ the German said, ‘but would it not be ridiculous, Mr Bonner, if, for that murder which you have committed, you have been transported to New South Wales?’

  Mr Bonner, who was left with no alternative, laughed at this joke, and decided to withdraw from deep water. With the elegant but strong paper-knife he began to tap a strip of canvas he had unfolded on the scented leather of his desk

  ‘I expect you will consider it imprudent, Mr Voss, if I ask whether you have studied the map?’

  Here, indeed, was a map of a kind, presumptuous where it was not a blank.

  ‘The map?’ said Voss.

  It was certainly a vast dream from which he had wakened. Even the draper suspected its immensity as he prodded at the coast with his ivory pointer.

  ‘The map?’ repeated the German. ‘I will first make it.’

  At times his arrogance did resolve itself into simplicity and sincerity, though it was usually difficult, especially for strangers, to distinguish those occasions.

  ‘It is good to have a good opinion,’ laughed the merchant.

  His honest flesh heaved, and himself rather drunken, began to read off his document, to chant almost, to invoke the first recorded names, the fly-spots of human settlement, the legend of rivers.

  Mr Bonner read the words, but Voss saw the rivers. He followed them in their fretful course. He flowed in cold glass, or dried up in little yellow pot-holes, festering with green scum.

  ‘So you realize how much must be taken into account’ – the merchant had recovered himself. ‘And tempus fugit, tempus fugit! Why, I am blessed if it is not already time for dinner, which provides us with an excellent illustration of what I have been trying to convey.’

  Thereupon, he slapped his strange, but really rather pleasing, because flattering, protégé on the knee. Flattering was the word. Edmund Bonner, once a hollow, hungry lad, was flattered by someone whose whole appearance suggested that he was hungry in his turn.

  Now the whole stone house was booming with bronze, for Jack Slipper had come in from the yard and struck the great gong, his naked arms tensed and wiry, as Rose Portion went backwards and forwards, with dishes or without, ignoring all else but her own activity.

  ‘You must be feeling peckish,’ the expectant Mr Bonner remarked.

  ‘Please?’ asked Voss, perhaps to avoid making a decision.

  ‘I dare say’ – the merchant gave it extra weight – ‘you could put away your share of dinner.’

  ‘I am not prepared,’ replied the German, who was again unhappy.

  ‘Who ever had to prepare for a plate of prime beef and pudding!’ said the merchant, already surging forth. ‘Mrs Bonner,’ he called, ‘our friend will stay for dinner.’

  ‘So I anticipated,’ said Mrs Bonner, ‘and Rose has laid a place.’

  The men had come out to her and, in fact, to all the company, who were now assembled in a cool hall, shifting their feet upon the yellow stone. Cool stone drank the laughter of the young people, and their conversation, which they made purely for the pleasure of speaking. Tom and Belle would sometimes play for hours at this kind of bat and ball. And there were the Palethorpes, who had arrived since. Mr P., as Mrs Bonner would refer to him, was her husband’s right hand, and indispensable as such, if also conveniently a Sunday joke. Mr P. was bald, with a moustache that somewhat resembled a pair of dead birds. And there was his wife – she had been a governess – a most discreet person, whether in her choice of shawls, or behaviour in the houses of the rich. The P.s were waiting there, self-effacing, yet both at home, superior in the long practice of discretion.

  ‘Thank you, I will not stay,’ Voss said, now in anger.

  A rude man, saw Mrs Bonner.

  A foreigner, saw the P.s.

  Someone to whom, after all, I am completely indifferent, saw Laura Trevelyan, although he is not here, to be sure, for my benefit. What is? she was compelled to add.

  Laughter and the society of others would sometimes drive this young woman to the verge of self-pity; yet she had never asked for rescue from her isolation, and now averted her eyes from Mr Voss in particular.

  ‘You will not stay?’ blustered the host, as if already potato-in-mouth.

  ‘If that is the intention of Mr Voss,’ said Mrs Bonner, ‘then we shall sustain a loss.’

  ‘You have made a bad poem!’ laughed Belle, kissing at her mother’s neck.

  The young girl was inclined to ignore visitors when any of her family was present.

  ‘The more beef for Mr P.!’ cried Lieutenant Radclyffe, who was chafing even in his humour.

  ‘Why, pray, for Mr. P.?’ exclaimed the gentleman’s wife in discreet protest, but giggled to please her patrons. ‘Is he a lion, then?’

  Everybody laughed. Even Mr P. showed his teeth beneath his dead birds. He was a man of all purposes.

  Consequently Voss was almost forgotten.

  ‘I am already bidden,’ he said.

  Although it was really unnecessary to assure those who were so little anxious for assurance.

  Expectation was goaded by smells that drifted past the cedar doors, with the consequence that the yellow flags were becoming intolerable to most feet.

  ‘Then, if Mr Voss is already engaged,’ said Mrs Bonner, to release someone who was unacquainted with the convolutions of polite behaviour.

  ‘Too bad, old Voss!’ said the brisk Lieutenant, who would cheerfully have abandoned this unnecessary acquaintance, to rush in himself, slash with a sword at the sirloin, and watch the red juices run.

  But the owner of the house continued to feel the weight of his responsibilities. He was compelled to offer parting advice, even if imperiously:

  ‘We must keep in touch, Voss. Daily communication, you know. There will be many things to decide. You will find me at my business premises any morning. Or afternoon, for that matter. But keep in touch.’

  ‘Naturally,’ replied the German.

  Sooner or later he was leaving, through the laughter and conversation of ladies, who had entered the dining-room, and were recalling the sermon and bonnets, as they seated themselves upon the chairs to which gentlemen blindly assisted them. However hig
h his vision had soared, the now leaden German trod in thick boots along the gravel. The indifference of voices in a room, even of the indistinct voices, becomes a criticism. So that he went faster, and grew clumsier, and leaner.

  He was an uncouth, to some he was a nasty man.

  All the way along the gritty road this nastiness was apparent to Voss himself. At such times he was the victim of his body, to which other people had returned him. So he walked furiously. He was not lame, but could have been. On that side of the Point there were several great houses similar to the Bonners’, from which human eye could have been taking aim through slits of shutters. Barricades of laurels blinded with insolent mirrors. Rooted in that sandy soil, in the straggling, struggling native scrub, the laurels had taken possession; strengthened by their own prevalence, the houses of the rich dared the intruder, whether dubious man, or tattered native tree.

  So Voss turned the corner and went from that locality. Gritty winds tended to free him. A wind off the sea, even off becalmed baywater and sea-lettuce, was stirring his beard as he descended the hill. Through the window of a slab cottage on the left, that sold little bits of pickled pork, and withered apples, and liquorice, an old woman was staring. But Voss did not look. There were other random cottages, or shops, and a drinking-house, with horses tied outside to a ring. But Voss did not look. He followed the ruts, raging at those flies which the wind did not seem to deter. His beard flew. He was very sinewy, a man of obvious strength when observed in the open, yet who could have been trailing some humiliation, and as he walked, really at an inordinate pace, from time to time he would glance anxiously through the trees upon his right, at nothing substantial, it appeared. There the bay flickered through the scrub that still stood along the road before the town. Glittering feverishly as the whites of certain eyes, its waters did not soothe, at least, in those circumstances, and in that light.

  So the foreigner came on into the town, past the Cathedral and the barracks, and went and sat in the Gardens beneath a dark tree, hoping soon to enter his own world, of desert and dreams. But he was restless. He began to graze his hands, upon twigs, and stubble of grass, and the stones of his humiliation. His face had dwindled to the bone.

  An old, grey-headed fellow who happened to approach, in fustian and battered beaver, chewing slowly from a small, stale loaf, looked at the stranger, and held out a handful of bread.

  ‘Here,’ invited the oldish man, himself chewing and quite contented, ‘stick this inside of you; then you will feel better.’

  ‘But I have eaten,’ said the German, turning on the man his interrupted eyes. ‘Only recently I have eaten.’

  So that the man in the beaver went away, trailing crumbs for the little birds.

  At once the German, beneath his tree, was racked by the fresh mortification to which he had submitted himself. But it was a discipline for the great trials and achievements in store for him in this country of which he had become possessed by implicit right. Unseeing people walked the sandy earth, eating bread, or sat at meat in their houses of frail stone foundations, while the lean man, beneath his twisted tree, became familiar with each blade of withered grass at which he stared, even the joints in the body of the ant.

  Knowing so much, I shall know everything, he assured himself, and lay down in time, and was asleep, slowly breathing the sultry air of the new country that was being revealed to him.

  *

  ‘Well, what do you think of him?’ asked Mr Bonner, wiping the fat from his mouth with a fine napkin.

  ‘Today confirmed the impression I received at our meeting a few months ago,’ said Lieutenant Radclyffe. ‘A madman. But harmless mad.’

  ‘Oh, Tom, what an accusation to make,’ said Mrs Bonner, who was in a mood for kindness, ‘and with no grounds, at least that we can see – yet.’

  But Tom was not concerned. Such an individual could not further his own career.

  ‘And do you really intend to send the creature on an expedition into this miserable country?’ asked Mrs Bonner of her husband. ‘He is so thin. And,’ she said, ‘he is already lost.’

  ‘How do you mean lost, Mamma?’ asked Belle, taking her mother’s hand, because she liked to feel the rings.

  ‘Well, he is,’ said Mrs Bonner. ‘He is simply lost. His eyes,’ she said, ‘cannot find their way.’

  She herself was groping after what her instinct knew.

  But Rose Portion had brought in a big apple-pie that was more important to some of those present.

  ‘Do not worry,’ said the merchant, as he watched his wife release the greeny, steamy apples from the pie. ‘There will be others with him,’ he said, ‘to hack a way.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Mrs Bonner, who loved all golden pastry-work, and especially when a scent of cloves was rising from it. ‘Nor did we really have time to understand Mr Voss.’

  ‘Laura did,’ said Belle. ‘Tell us about him, Lolly. What is he like?’

  ‘I do not know,’ said Laura Trevelyan.

  I do not know Laura, Mrs Bonner realized.

  The Palethorpes coughed, and rearranged the goblets out of which they had gratefully sipped their wine. Then a silence fell amongst the flakes of pastry, and lay. Till Laura Trevelyan said:

  ‘He does not intend to make a fortune out of this country, like other men. He is not all money talk.’

  ‘Other men are human,’ said her uncle, ‘and this is the country of the future. Who will not snap at an opportunity when he sees one? And get rich,’ he added, with sudden brutality of mouth. ‘This country,’ protested his full mouth.

  ‘Ah, this country!’ sighed his wife, who remembered others, and feared for her complexion.

  ‘He is obsessed by this country,’ said Laura Trevelyan. ‘That was at once obvious.’

  ‘He is a bit mad,’ pursued the Lieutenant monotonously.

  ‘But he is not afraid,’ said Laura.

  ‘Who is afraid?’ asked Tom Radclyffe.

  ‘Everyone is still afraid, or most of us, of this country, and will not say it. We are not yet possessed of understanding.’

  The Lieutenant snorted, to whom there was nothing to understand.

  ‘I would not like to ride very far into it,’ admitted Belle, ‘and meet a lot of blacks, and deserts, and rocks, and skeletons, they say, of men that have died.’

  ‘But Laura, together with the obsessed Herr Voss, is unafraid. Is that it?’ asked Lieutenant Radclyffe.

  ‘I have been afraid,’ said Laura Trevelyan. ‘And it will be some time, I expect, before I am able to grasp anything so foreign and incomprehensible. It is not my country, although I have lived in it.’

  Tom Radclyffe laughed.

  ‘It is not that German’s.’

  ‘It is his by right of vision,’ answered the young woman.

  ‘What is that?’

  She was trembling. She could not say.

  It is unlike Laura, felt her Aunt Emmy.

  ‘Here we are talking about our Colony as if it did not exist until now,’ Mr Bonner was forced to remark. ‘Or as if it has now begun to exist as something quite different. I do not understand what all this talk is about. We are not children. We have only to consider the progress we have made. Look at our homes and public edifices. Look at the devotion of our administrators, and the solid achievement of those men who are settling the land. Why, in this very room, look at the remains of the good dinner we have just eaten. I do not see what there is to be afraid of.’

  ‘Do not worry, Laura,’ said Aunt Emmy. ‘Is your head not better, dear?’

  ‘Why my head?’ asked Laura.

  People were looking questions at her. The glances of some of them even implied that she was of the same base metal as the German.

  ‘Oh, my head,’ she remembered. ‘Yes. No, it is better, I think.’

  Though presently, when they had got up from the table, she went away to her room.

  2

  SUSSEX STREET was not yet set so rigid that a cock might not shatter its import
ance, or blunt-nosed bullock, toiling over ruts, snuff at the dusty urban air, or piano scatter its distracted notes, from the house of Topp, Professor of Music, which was situated halfway down. The house itself was rather solemn, awkwardly conceived and executed, lacking in the grandeur which stone should create, for stone it was, honestly revealing how painfully it had been hewn. There in its almost weathered sides were the scars where the iron had entered in, like livid ribs, and in certain lights the dumpy house suggested all suffering. The rooms were agreeable enough, although centipedes would invade in the course of a humid summer, and green mould grow upon the boards, to the extent that Mrs Thompson, the old woman who attended to the needs of Topp, the proprietor, and any lodger, would begin to complain about her bones. How she would complain; but Topp was fortunate, his friends ventured to suggest, to have secured the services of a decent widow, without encumbrances, as it is said. Certainly there were sons, but distributed, and at a distance, where they were engaged in clearing and populating their adopted land. Primitive in appearance and of classic behaviour, her employer suspected the old woman of being the original Thompson. Often at evening, after tidying her excellent person, she would declaim the Thompson narrative for poor Topp, who had listened so often he had learnt to prompt the voice of legend. But they were both, perhaps, comforted.

  Topp, the music master, and a single gentleman, was comparatively silent and unprolific. He was a small, white, worried man, with small, moist, white hands, shameful in that country of dry, yellow callouses. All he made was music, for which he was continually apologizing, and hoping he might not be called upon to explain what useful purpose his passion served. So he would hurry past the doorways of hotels, from which laughter came, and dream of an ideal state in which the official tongue was music. Although he taught the pianoforte, visiting select homes during the morning hours, Topp played the flute for pleasure. Exquisite, pearly, translucent notes would flower on that unpromising wood, and fall from the windows as they faded, causing bullock teams to flick their tails, or some drunkard to invoke Jesus Christ. On days when Topp played his flute the dumpy house was garlanded with music, and it did sometimes happen that people passing in the street, through dust or mud, would grow gladder without thinking to discover why.