Voss

by Patrick White

  Presently they turned off along the sandy track that led down through Point Piper. The wheels of the carriage fell, as it were, from shelf to shelf of sandstone. Immediately the bones of the well-conducted passengers appeared to have melted, and the soft bodies were thrown against one another in ignominious confusion. In some circumstances this could have been comical, but something had made it serious. So the face of the grave young woman showed, and somehow impressed that gravity on the faces of the others. She withdrew her skirt ever so carefully from the rough black cloth that covered the German’s protuberant knees.

  Some of the Pringle children came bursting through the scrub to show the way, and ran alongside, laughing, and calling up at the windows of the newly arrived carriage, and even directing rather impudent glances at a stranger who might not have had the Bonners’ full protection. The Pringles always arrived first at places. In spite of, or because of her fortune, for she was rich in her own right as well as through her husband, Mrs Pringle could have felt the need to mortify herself. She would march up and down with a watch in her hand, and shout at people quite coarsely, Mrs Bonner considered, shout at them desperately to assemble for departure, but it was all well intended. Irritation was a mark of her affection. She was most exacting of her husband, would raise her voice at him in company, and continually demand evidence of that superiority which he did not possess. These displays he met with a patient love, and had recently given her an eleventh child, which did mollify her for a little.

  ‘Ah, there you are,’ exclaimed Mrs Pringle, who with her assistants had been unpacking food behind the bushes in a circle of carriages and gigs.

  The tone of her words expressed as much censure as politeness would allow. At her side, as almost always, was her eldest daughter, Una.

  ‘Yes, my dear,’ said Mrs Bonner, whom events had made mysteriously innocent. ‘If we are late, it is due to some little domestic upheaval. I fear you may have been anxious for us.’

  When the Bonners were descended, the girls kissed most affectionately, although Una Pringle had always been of the opinion that Laura was a stick, worse still, possessed of brains, and in consequence not to be trusted. In general, Una preferred the other sex, though she was far too nice a girl to admit it to a diary, let alone a friend. Now, using the glare as an excuse, she was pretending not to examine the gentleman, or man, who had accompanied the Bonners, and who, it seemed, was also the most terrible stick. True to her nature, Una Pringle immediately solved a simple mathematical problem involving two sticks.

  Mrs Bonner saw that she could no longer defer the moment of explaining the presence of the German, so she said:

  ‘This is Mr Voss, the explorer. Who is soon to leave for the bush.’

  Formal in its inception, it sounded somehow funny at its end, for neither Mrs Bonner nor Mrs Pringle could be expected to take seriously a move so remotely connected with their own lives.

  ‘The gentlemen are down there,’ said Mrs Pringle, hoping to dispose of an embarrassment. ‘They are discussing something. Mr Pitt has also come, and Woburn McAllister, and a nephew or two.’

  Many children were running about, in clothes that caught on twigs. Brightly coloured laughter hung from the undergrowth.

  Voss would have liked to retire into his own thoughts, and did to a certain extent. He loked rather furry in his self-absorption. The nap of his hat had been roughed up, and he was cheaply dressed, and angular, and black. Nobody would know what to do with him, unless he did himself.

  So Mrs Pringle and Mrs Bonner looked hopefully in that direction in which the gentlemen were said to be.

  ‘You girls go down with Mr Voss,’ insisted Mrs Pringle, conscripting an impregnable army, ‘while Mrs Bonner and I have a little chat.’

  ‘Shall we?’ asked Una, though there was no alternative.

  They all walked decently off. Their long skirts made paths along the sand, dragged fallen twigs into upright positions, and swept ants for ever off their courses.

  ‘Do you like picnics?’ asked Una Pringle.

  ‘Sometimes,’ Belle replied. ‘It depends.’

  ‘Where is Lieutenant Radclyffe?’ Una asked.

  ‘It is his afternoon for duty,’ answered Belle, importantly.

  ‘Oh,’ said Una.

  She was a tall girl, who would be married off quite easily, though for no immediately obvious reason.

  ‘Have you met Captain Norton of the Valiant?’ Una asked.

  ‘Not yet,’ yawned Belle, who aspired to no further conquests.

  Belle Bonner had adopted a flat, yet superior expression, because Una Pringle was one of those girls for whom she did not care, while forced by circumstance to know. Force of circumstance, indeed, had begun to inform the whole picnic. Till several children came, pulling, and jumping, shouting through shiny lips, inspiring Belle, whom they sensed to be an initiate, with a nostalgia for those games which she had scarcely left off playing. The boisterous wind soon flung her and several bouncing children amongst the fixed trees. Her blood was at the tips of her fingers. Her rather thick but healthy throat was distended. She herself was shouting.

  ‘Such vitality Belle has,’ sighed Una, who was left with that Laura and the foreigner.

  ‘Do you run and jump, Mr Voss?’ she inquired with an insipid malice.

  ‘Please?’ asked the German.

  ‘I expect he does,’ said Laura Trevelyan, ‘if the occasion demands it. His own very private occasion. All kinds of invisible running and jumping. I do.’

  Voss, who was brought back too abruptly to extract the full meaning from her words, was led to understand that this handsome girl was his ally. Though she did not look at him. But described some figure on the air with a muff of sealskin that she was carrying for the uncertain weather, and as a protection against more abstract dangers.

  Trevelyan was her name, he remembered. Laura, the niece.

  The gay day of wind and sharp sunlight had pierced the surface of her sombre green. It had begun to glow. She was for ever flickering, and escaping from a cage of black twigs, but unconscious of any transformation that might have taken place. This ignorance of her riches gave to her face a tenderness that it did not normally possess. Many tender waves did, besides, leap round the rocky promontory along which they were stumbling. There was now distinctly the sound of sea. As they trod out from the trees and were blinded, Laura Trevelyan was smiling.

  ‘There are the men,’ said Una rather gloomily, and did not bother to refrain from squinting, for all those gentlemen to whom she had pointed were already known to her.

  The other members of her party held their hands above their eyes, and then distinguished, through the sea glaze, the elderly gentlemen perched on golden rocks, and younger men who had taken off their hats, and boys wrestling or throwing stones. The drama of that male black was too sudden against the peacock afternoon.

  ‘We had better go down,’ said Laura, ‘and deliver Mr Voss.’

  ‘But I would interrupt,’ protested the German. ‘What are they talking about?’

  ‘Whatever men do talk about,’ said Laura.

  ‘Business,’ suggested Una.

  Some situations were definitely not his.

  ‘And the English packet. And the weather.’

  ‘And vegetables. And sheep.’

  As they descended relentlessly towards that male gathering, the girls’ fears for their ankles would sometimes crack the enamelled confidence of their voices. In the circumstances they would accept a hand or two. And Mr Voss had a strong wrist. He flung himself into this activity less in the cause of chivalry than in an endeavour to remain occupied.

  They did arrive, however, and there were many eyes, looking up, showing their whites, because it was not yet evident what defences would have to be erected.

  Only Mr Bonner leaped all incipient barricades, clapped his protégé on the shoulder, and cried in a very red voice:

  ‘Welcome, Voss. If I did not suggest you take the steps you have clearly taken of
your own accord, it is because I was under the impression it might not be in your line. That is, you are of rather a deep dye. Although, I am of the opinion nevertheless, that every man has something for his fellow, and it is only a matter of hitting on it. In any event, here you are.’

  Mr Bonner bristled with apologies for anyone who needed them.

  Some of the younger men, with leathery skins and isolated eyes, braced their calves, and shook hands most powerfully with the stranger. But two elderly and more important gentlemen, who would be Mr Pringle and the unexplained Mr Pitt, and whose stomachs were too heavy, and whose joints less active, merely cleared their throats and shifted on their rocks.

  Then it was told how Voss had come. He smiled a great deal. Anxious to convey goodwill, he succeeded only in looking hungry.

  ‘He was a godsend,’ said Laura, hearing the unnatural tones the situation was forcing her to adopt. ‘We used him as a protection against bushrangers.’

  The younger men laughed immoderately. Those of them with whom she was acquainted did not care for Laura Trevelyan, who was given to reading books.

  Mr Pringle and Mr Pitt were slower in their mirth, more sceptical, for it was they who had been conducting that dialogue of almost mystical banality which had suffered interruption.

  Mr Bonner continued to look red. His pride in his German could not rise above his shame. So men will sweat for some secret gift they have failed to reveal to others, and will make subtle attempts openly to condemn what is precious to them.

  ‘Voss, you know, is to lead this expedition we are organizing. Sanderson is behind it, and Boyle of Jildra, and one or two others. Young Angus of Dulverton is to be a member,’ he added for those of his audience who were of the same age and temper as the young landowner.

  The younger men looked smilingly incredulous in a solid majority of tight, best cloth. They had folded their arms. Their seams and their muscles cracked.

  ‘It is a great event,’ said the congested Mr Bonner, ‘and may well prove historical. If they bring back their own bones. Eh, Voss?’

  Everybody laughed, and Mr Bonner was relieved to have made his sacrifice with an almost imperceptible movement of the knife.

  Voss could always, if necessary, fail to understand. But wounds will wince, especially in the salt air. He was smiling and screwing up his eyes at the great theatre of light and water. Some pitied him. Some despised him for his funny appearance of a foreigner. None, he realized with a tremor of anger, was conscious of his strength. Mediocre, animal men never do guess at the power of rock or fire, until the last moment before those elements reduce them to – nothing. This, the palest, the most transparent of words, yet comes closest to being complete.

  Mr Pringle cleared his throat. Because his material status entitled him to attention before anyone else present, he would speak slowly, and take a long time.

  ‘It seems to me, though, from such evidence as we have collected – which is inconsiderable, mark you – as the result of mere foraying expeditions from the fringes, so to speak, it seems that this country will prove most hostile to anything in the nature of planned development. It has been shown that deserts prefer to resist history and develop along their own lines. As I have remarked, we do not know. There may, in fact, be a veritable paradise adorning the interior. Nobody can say. But I am inclined to believe, Mr Voss, that you will discover a few black-fellers, and a few flies, and something resembling the bottom of the sea. That is my humble opinion.’

  Mr Pringle’s stomach, which was less humble, rumbled.

  ‘Have you walked upon the bottom of the sea, Mr Pringle?’ the German asked.

  ‘Eh?’ said Mr Pringle. ‘No.’

  His eyes, however, had swum into unaccustomed depths.

  ‘I have not,’ said Voss. ‘Except in dreams, of course. That is why I am fascinated by the prospect before me. Even if the future of great areas of sand is a purely metaphysical one.’

  Then he threw up a little pebble, which had been changing colour in his hand, turning from pale lavender to purple, and caught it before it reached the sun.

  The audience of healthy young men laughed at this German cove, their folded arms stretching the cloth still tighter on their backs.

  Poor Mr Bonner was desperately ashamed. He would have liked to push the fellow off somewhere, and intended in future to reserve the luxury of their association for private occasions, although the present one was certainly no fault of his.

  He thought of his wife. And frowned at his niece.

  Laura Trevelyan was at that moment tracing with her toe the long, ribbony track of some sea-worm, as if it had been important. In the rapt afternoon all things were all-important, the inquiring mouths of blunt anemones, the twisted roots of driftwood returning and departing in the shallows, mauve scum of little bubbles the sand was sucking down, and the sun, the sun that was hitting them over the heads. She was too hot, of course, in the thick dress that she had put on for a colder day, with the result that all words became great round weights. She did not raise her head for those the German spoke, but heard them fall, and loved their shape. So far departed from that rational level to which she had determined to adhere, her own thoughts were grown obscure, even natural. She did not care. It was lovely. She would have liked to sit upon a rock and listen to words, not of any man, but detached, mysterious, poetic words that she alone would interpret through some sense inherited from sleep. Herself disembodied. Air joining air experiences a voluptuousness no less intense because imperceptible.

  She smiled a little at this solution of sea and glare. It was the sun that was reddening her face. The hem of her skirt had become quite irregular, she saw, with black scallops of heavy water.

  ‘I say, Laura,’ said Willie Pringle, coming up, ‘we have had no races this picnic, and a picnic is not a picnic without races, do you think?’

  Willie Pringle was a boy, or youth, or young man by courtesy, who was rather loosely made, or had not hardened yet, with a rather loose, wet, though obviously good-natured mouth, and eyes that so far nobody had suspected of understanding. He had but recently joined the firm of his father and uncles, the solicitors, as office boy or very junior clerk, and was still feeling important.

  ‘Do you really think races are necessary?’ asked Laura, who had raced in the past, but who was now tracing through some slow necessity of her own the path of the sea-worm with her toe.

  ‘Well, no, races are not necessary. But are they not the sort of thing that people do at a picnic?’ Willie said, who wanted very badly to do those things which people did.

  ‘Silly Willie!’ Laura laughed, lazily but lovingly.

  Willie laughed too.

  He would have liked to share with Laura esoteric jokes and tastes. Once he had done a drawing of her, not because he was in love, he had not thought about that, but because her image had invaded his mind with immense power and brooding grief. Then, because his drawing was an empty, aching thing, his recurring failure, he had quickly torn it up.

  ‘No,’ his voice shouted, at a picnic. ‘It is not NECESSARY. But everyone is waiting. All these children. Let us do something.’

  But Laura would not join in.

  Mrs Bonner wished that Willie Pringle had been a few years older, which perhaps would have simplified matters; things do arrange themselves by propinquity, and Willie was an eldest son, of prospects, if not physical charms. Mrs Pringle, however, did not share Mrs Bonner’s wish. Herself more than rich, she did naturally aspire to consort with money. Moreover, she held a private opinion, very private indeed, that Laura Trevelyan was sly.

  One young man, in bone and orange skin, had begun to tell of the prevalence of worms in his merino flock at Camden. His elders followed his account with appeased eyes. Everyone was glad after the rankling experience of demoniac words to which they had been subjected by the German, who still stood there, though reduced, picking at his finger-nails.

  For two pins I would run him down the beach by his coat collar, said Mr Bonne
r, who had sided finally with the sheep.

  ‘But we must do something,’ protested Willie Pringle. ‘If not races, then I must think of some idea. You, Laura, if only you would help. Some game, or something. Or they might collect driftwood, and pile it into a heap, and light a bonfire.’

  ‘Are you so desperate?’ asked Laura Trevelyan.

  He was, but did not know it yet.

  ‘They are wasting the afternoon!’

  His mouth worked, upon the beginnings of words, or laughter, and gave up.

  Even as a little boy Willie Pringle had a suspicion that a great deal depended on him, but what it was he had not found out. So far his efforts had been confined to desperate attempts to copy the behaviour, to interpret the symbols of his class, and thus solve the mystery of himself. But all truths were locked. So he would look at the heartbreaking beauty and simplicity of a common table or kitchen chair, and realize that in some most important sense their entities would continue to elude him unless he could escape from the prison of his own skull. Sometimes he would struggle like an epileptic of the spirit to break out. The situation had made his hands moist and his limbs more rubbery and ineffectual than they should have been. People laughed at him a good deal. They had not yet made up their minds whether he was a monster, or a sleepwalker, or what. Later, when they found out, they would probably shun him.

  Belle solved Willie’s immediate problem by an inspiration of her own. She came running, together with two Pringles, two little girls, who had to hold on, either to her flying skirt, or preferably to some part of her inspired form. They would manacle her wrists with hot hands whenever she stopped short. Belle had taken her bonnet off. Her hair fell gold. Her skin, too, was golden, beneath the surface of which the blood was clearly rioting, and as she breathed, it did seem almost as though she was no longer the victim of her clothes.

  ‘Wait, Belle! Wait!’ cried the little girls.

  ‘Wait for us,’ called several others.

  Ah, Belle is released, Laura Trevelyan saw, and was herself closer to taking wing.

  Belle had a spray of the crimson bottlebrush that she had torn off recklessly. It was quite a torch flaming in her hand. She had in her skirt several smooth pebbles, in dove colours, and a little, flat, red tile, and a lump of green glass, which the bubbles made most desirable.