Voss

by Patrick White

  Actually, he did not stop to think. The quicker done, the better. But he won her with his answers.

  He is a greedy-looking pig, really, thought Frank Le Mesurier. A German swine. And was surprised at himself.

  ‘You should eat slower,’ said the old woman. ‘A lady told me you should chew your food thirty-seven times.’

  He was a handsome-looking man.

  ‘And build yourself up.’

  Thin about the face, with veins in the forehead. She recalled all the sick people she had ever nursed, especially her husband, who had been carried off by a consumption shortly after arrival on those shores.

  She sighed.

  Topp came in, bringing with him a bottle and glasses, knowing that Voss would not have offered anything, for that was his way. The music master did not blame him. Great men were exempt from trivial duties, and if the German was not great, his landlord would have liked him to be. Once Topp himself had composed a sonata for piano and flute. He had never dared own it, however, and would introduce it to his pupils as: ‘A little piece that we might run through.’

  Usually modest, tonight he was also melancholy.

  ‘It is the southerly winds that get into one’s bones,’ he said, ‘after the heat of the day.’

  Mrs Thompson was prepared to enlarge upon the climatic disadvantages of the Colony, but heard a lady of her acquaintance calling her from the street.

  ‘If it is not one wind, it is another. Ah, dear, it is terrible I Though on days when there is none, a person soon wishes there would be. This is the most contrariest place,’ was all she had time to say.

  Voss had sat back and was picking his teeth of the sweetbread. He also belched once, as if he had been alone with his thoughts.

  ‘I do meet scarcely a man here,’ he said, ‘who does not suspect he will be unmade by his country. Instead of knowing that he will make it into what he wishes.’

  ‘It is no country of mine,’ declared Topp, who had poured the wine, ‘except by the unfortunate accident of my being here.’

  Such was his emotion, he slopped the wine.

  ‘Nor mine, frankly,’ said Le Mesurier. ‘I cannot think of it except as a bad joke.’

  ‘I came here through idealism,’ said Topp, feverish with his own situation, ‘and a mistaken belief that I could bring nicety to barbarian minds. Here, even the gentry, or what passes for it, has eaten itself into a stupor of mutton.’

  ‘I see nothing wrong with this country,’ dared Harry Robarts, ‘nor with havin’ your belly full. Mine has been full since the day I landed, and I am glad.’

  Then his courage failed, and he drank his wine down, right down, in a purple gurgle.

  ‘So all is well with Harry,’ said Le Mesurier, ‘who sees with his belly’s eyes.’

  ‘It will do me,’ said the sullen boy.

  One day he would find the courage to kill this man.

  ‘And me, Harry,’ said Voss. ‘I will venture to call it my country, although I am a foreigner,’ he added for the company, since human beings have a habit of rising up in defence of what they repudiate. ‘And although so little of my country is known to me as yet.’

  Much as he despised humility, other people expected it.

  ‘You are welcome,’ sighed Topp, although already the wine had made him happy.

  ‘So you see, Harry,’ said Le Mesurier, ‘you have a fellow-countryman, who will share your patriotism in embracing the last iguana.’

  ‘Do not torment him, Frank,’ said Voss, not because it was cruel to bait dumb animals, but because he wished to enjoy the private spectacle of himself.

  Harry Robarts went so far as to wipe his grateful eyes. Like all those in love, he would misinterpret lovingly.

  As for Voss, he had gone on to grapple with the future, in which undertaking he did not expect much of love, for all that is soft and yielding is easily hurt. He suspected it, but the mineral forms were an everlasting source of wonder; feldspar, for instance, was admirable, and his own name a crystal in his mouth. If he were to leave that name on the land, irrevocably, his material body swallowed by what it had named, it would be rather on some desert place, a perfect abstraction, that would rouse no feeling of tenderness in posterity. He had no more need for sentimental admiration than he had for love. He was complete.

  The leader looked at his subordinates, and wondered whether they knew.

  But an unidentified body was falling up the steep stairs of the house. It thumped, drawing all attention, then burst through the doorway of the upper room. Candles guttered.

  ‘It is Turner,’ said Voss, ‘and drunk.’

  ‘I am not what you would call sober,’ admitted the person in question, ‘nor yet drunk. It is the stringybark that has shook me up a bit. The stuff would rot your guts.’

  ‘I would not let it,’ replied the German.

  ‘A man’s nature will get the better of him,’ said Turner gloomily, and sat down.

  He was a long, thin individual, whose mind had gone sour. He was rather squint-eyed, moreover, from examining the affairs of others while appearing not to do so, but wiry too, for all the miserable impression he made. He had been employed those two months at the brickfields, and there was almost always some of the dust from the bricks visible in the cracks of his skin and creases of his clothes.

  ‘I had news,’ Voss said to him, ‘but have almost decided it will not interest you.’

  When Turner cried:

  ‘You do not intend to drop me on account of me nature, for which a man is not responsible! Anyone will tell yer that.’

  ‘If I take you, it will be because your nature will not receive much encouragement in those parts.’

  And because of a morbid interest in derelict souls, Voss suspected. Still there was in Turner sober a certain native cunning that put him on his mettle. A cunning man can be used if he does not first use.

  ‘Mr Voss, sir,’ pleaded Turner, drunk, ‘I will strain every muscle in me back. I will do the dirty work. I will eat grass.’

  ‘Only too obviously another convert,’ said Frank Le Mesurier, and got up.

  Anything that was physically repulsive to him, he would have trodden under foot. He would not have cared to brush against Turner, yet it was probable, riding through the long, yellow grass, their stirrup-irons would catch at each other in overtures of intimacy, or lying in the dust and stench of ants, wrestling with similar dreams under the stars, their bodies would roll over and touch.

  If this German is really philanthropist enough to take the man, he reflected. Or is he a fool?

  But Voss would not help him to distinguish.

  ‘Mr Topp,’ the German was saying, ‘if I had mastered the art of music, I would set myself the task of creating a composition by which the various instruments would represent the moral characteristics of human beings in conflict with one another.’

  ‘I would rather suggest the sublimity of perfection,’ said the innocent music master, ‘in great sweeps of pure sound.’

  ‘But in order to understand it, you must first find perfection, and that you will never do. Besides, it would be monotonous, not to say monstrous, if you did.’

  Turner, who was holding his perplexed head in a kind of basket of fingers, exclaimed:

  ‘Oh, oh! Gawd save us!’

  Then he remembered, and turned on Le Mesurier, who was ready to retire, a look of deliberate malice.

  ‘Converts, eh?’ Because it rankled. ‘You, with all your talk, are not such a saint, if gutters could tell. I seen you, in not such a Sunday wescoat, and mud on it, too. And whorin’ after women under the trees. And holdin’ forth to the public. Contracted with a practisin’ madman, you was, accordin’ to your own admission, for a journey to hell an’ back.’

  Then Turner began to laugh, and to wink great face-consuming winks at the listening boy.

  ‘If it was I, and I was drunk, then I cannot remember. Except that I have been drunk,’ said Le Mesurier, and they could see the gristle of his nose.
/>   ‘We are not the only sinners, eh, sonny?’ golloped the winking Turner.

  He felt the necessity of drawing in the boy. It was always better two to one.

  ‘I am willing to admit I have been drunk,’ said Le Mesurier.

  ‘It is true,’ said the sullen boy, who would enjoy the luxury of taking sides once he had learnt the game.

  ‘It is sometimes necessary,’ frowned Le Mesurier.

  ‘Ho-ho!’ exploded Turner. ‘Tell the worms! As if they will not know about the moist.’

  ‘But there are droughts, Turner, that no worm will experience in his blunt head as he burrows in the earth. His life is blissfully blindly physical. The worst that can happen to your worm is that he may come up and be trodden on.’

  ‘You are a gentleman,’ said Turner, whose lips had been dogging every word, ‘and I do not follow all of that. But I have me suspicions.’

  Le Mesurier would sometimes laugh in his nose.

  ‘And I will take your face off for it,’ Turner said.

  He did get up, together with Harry Robarts, who was his friend of a few moments. The breathing was enormous. It seemed that the passion which had swelled and was filling the room was the all-important one.

  Until Voss pricked it.

  ‘I am not interested in personal disagreements,’ he said; ‘who is drunk, who is a madman, who is disloyal. These are, in any event, of minor consideration. What distresses me more is my own great folly in continuing, like a worm, Frank, butting my head at whatsoever darkness of earth, once I have conceived an idea. You, Turner, Frank, are part of this strange, seemingly inconceivable idea. It distresses me that I cannot lay it aside, with all its component and dependent difficulties. But I cannot. Now you will go, please, out of this room, which is mine, you have forgotten. And you will remember also that the street is the property of all the citizens of this town. When we meet again, I trust you will have accepted one another’s faults, because we must be together for a long time.’

  Afterwards, nobody remembered having seen his face. His words, though, they recalled, were cast in metal, and one of his feet had kicked a little lump of hard mud that had been lying on the carpet, and which had struck the wainscot rather loud.

  When they had all gone, even poor Topp, who would have liked to stay and let the wine conduct some discussion of a philosophic nature, Voss went into the back room, took off his clothes quickly, and without thought, lay rather stiffly on the bed, as was his habit, and slept. He fell, straight, deeply into himself. It was not possible really, that anyone could damage the Idea, however much they scratched it. Some vomited words. Some coughed up their dry souls in rebounding pea-pellets. To no earthly avail. Out of that sand, through which his own feet, with reverence for velvet, had begun to pay homage, rose the Idea, its granite monolith untouched. Except by Palfreyman – was it? He could not distinguish the face, but the presence was pervading the whole dream. And now Voss was stirring on his straight bed. It was a humid night. His hands were attempting to free his body from the sweat with which it had been fastened.

  On the following, and several successive mornings, which were all bright and shadowless, made keener by the red dust that would fill the street in sallies of grit, Voss went here and there in his tall, black, town hat. He decided on the pack-saddles of Mr O’Halloran. He negotiated with a Mr Pierce for an eight-inch sextant, prismatic compasses, barometers, thermometers, and sundry other instruments. Enough flour for two years was to be delivered direct to the vessel from Barden’s mill.

  On the Thursday, as he noted briefly in his journal, he ‘met Palfreyman’, who arrived in town from Parramatta, where he had been recuperating from an illness at the property of a friend.

  Palfreyman and Voss spent some time together, in fact, walking in the Botanic Gardens, talking, or in silence, accustoming themselves warily to each other, and considering some of those questions that would arise out of a partnership of many months.

  Palfreyman was a shorter man than Voss, but the honest simplicity of his expression seemed to raise him to the height of most others. His face, of which the skin normally was burnt to the yellow-brown that colourless faces acquire in the sun, had been drained by his recent illness to a greenish white, the outline somewhat blurred. His eyes, of a light grey, were very straight-looking in their deep sockets, under the dark lids. Although his upper lip was exposed, whiskers of a good brown covered the lower parts of his face. He was dressed carefully, though without vanity, in several greys, with the result that the German’s hot coat and black sculptural trousers had an air of monumental slovenliness. Voss was, in fact, shamed into dusting spasmodically at his own sleeves as they walked, and once or twice twitched slightly at his cravat.

  ‘You will be strong enough already to undertake this journey, Mr Palfreyman?’ he asked, and frowned, at some thought, or wrinkle.

  ‘I am perfectly strong.’

  Staring at bright sunlight the Englishman would often wear an amazed look, as if the light were too illuminating.

  ‘I have been fed on eggs and cream by the wife and daughters of my friend Strang for I don’t know how many weeks. It was an unfortunate business, though really no more than a slight twist to my back when the horse fell. I confess I was shaken at first. To be incapacitated permanently by some accident to my back is a fear under which I have always laboured. But here I am, perfectly recovered.’

  Voss, who was also staring at the bright light, had been forced by it to smile. That is to say, the skin was tight against his teeth. He made quick, sucking noises to give Palfreyman the impression he was listening.

  ‘Besides,’ continued the ornithologist in his rather gentle voice, ‘it might be some time before I should receive an invitation to join another such expedition. It is an opportunity in which His Grace would, I feel, be personally interested.’

  Mr Palfreyman had been commissioned by an English peer, a petulant one left over from a previous reign, who collected all manner of things, from precious stones and musical instruments, to stuffed birds and tigers. In his Palladian house, His Grace seldom looked at his possessions, except on sudden impulse, to tear out a drawer for an instant on a nest of poor eggshells, or to delight a mistress with a branch of wired humming-birds. But to collect, to possess, this was his passion. Until he was tired of all those lifeless objects. Then they were quickly swathed and handed to the nation.

  In the service of this peer Mr Palfreyman had made the voyage to New South Wales. If the motive of his commission was largely whimsical, his professional integrity did not allow him to recognize it. He was a scientist. Dedication to science might have been his consolation, if it had not been for his religious faith. As it was, his trusting nature built a bridge in the form of a cult of usefulness, so that the two banks of his life were reconciled despite many an incongruous geographical feature, and it was seldom noticed that a strong current flowed between.

  Now Mr Voss and Mr Palfreyman, who had been led here and there by conversation, were standing on a little, actual, rustic bridge in the Botanic Gardens. Circumstance was joining them, whether comfortably or not.

  Mr Voss was saying, ‘I do not doubt you will have every opportunity, Mr Palfreyman, to further your patron’s interests, in virgin country, west of the Darling Downs. I was merely considering the question of your health.’

  They were standing rather grotesquely on the ugly ornamental bridge. They were looking down, but without observing what it was that lay beneath them. (It was, in fact, a mess of dead water-lily leaves.)

  ‘My health,’ said Palfreyman, ‘has always been tolerably good.’

  ‘You are strong-willed, I see,’ laughed Voss.

  For some reason, the latter knew, he-would have liked to dispose of Palfreyman, who answered:

  ‘It is not a question of my will, Mr Voss. It is rather the will of God that I should carry out certain chosen undertakings.’

  Voss drew up his shoulder to protect himself from some unpleasantness. Then he was again normal
ly tall, beside the smaller, but convinced Palfreyman, whose grey eyes were still engrossed beyond the withered lily leaves.

  ‘Your sentiments will recommend themselves to Mr Bonner,’ said Voss, ‘who is of the opinion that the rascals I have got together do not give a sufficiently moral tone to the expedition. Like most gentlemen well established in their materialism, Mr Bonner invokes moral approval.’

  The German would have liked to make some further witticism, but it did not come naturally to him. Even his laughter sounded convulsive, against an agitation of banana palms, two or three of which were standing there behind them.

  ‘Look,’ said Palfreyman, pointing at a species of diaphanous fly that had alighted on the rail of the bridge.

  It appeared that he was fascinated by the insect, glittering in its life with all the colours of decomposition, and that he had barely attended to the words of Voss.

  The latter was glad, but not glad enough. He would have liked to be quite certain, not from any weakness in his own armour, but from his apparent inability to undermine his companion’s strength. Naturally it was unpleasant to realize this.

  But it was only a matter of seconds. And there was the oblivious Palfreyman pointing with taut finger at the insect, which obviously was all that existed.

  Immediately the fly had flown, the two men embarked on some further conversation of a practical nature, and Voss agreed to take Palfreyman to Mr Bonner the very next day.

  ‘He is an excellent man, you know,’ said Voss. ‘Generous, and trusting. The patron par excellence.’

  Palfreyman merely smiled, almost as if it had been the shadow of his illness on his greenish, full, contemplative face.

  ‘Now, look after yourself, my dear fellow, in this city of unexpected dangers,’ said Voss nicely, as they were taking leave of each other in the sun at the gates.

  He could be very nice, and wanted badly to be nicer. He smiled with a genuine charm, although his teeth were inclined to be pointed. He put his hand on his colleague’s arm, which was an unusual gesture for him.

  Then they parted. Palfreyman, who was frequently very happy in this insubstantial world, walked with the slowness of leisure. But Voss hurried about some business, the wind whipping his trouser legs.