Voss

by Patrick White

  ‘Dear me, if these educated young ladies are not the deuce,’ said Tom Radclyffe, whose turn it was to hate.

  Ideas disturbed his manliness.

  ‘I am sorry, Tom, to have given you literally what you asked for,’ Laura said. ‘You must take care not to run the risk in future.’

  ‘I am sorry that you should have such horrid thoughts on a jolly occasion. The bones of a dead man in a grave!’ Miss Hollier said. ‘Mr Palfreyman has been telling me such delightful, really interesting and instructive things about birds.’

  Mr Palfreyman appeared sad.

  He was, in fact, happiest with birds, and realized this as he watched Miss Hollier’s shining teeth. But he was wrong, he knew, unreasonably so. Some people cannot bear to touch the folded body of a dead bird. He, on the other hand, must learn to overcome his impulse to retreat from kind hands.

  Puddings had by this time been brought: brittlest baskets of caramel, great gobbets of meringue. When the big, thick, but somehow thoughtful woman who was waiting at table set down among them the jellied quinces, Voss saw that it was indeed a pretty dish, of garnet colour, with pale jade lozenges, and a somewhat clumsy star in that same stone, or angelica.

  Then the German looked across at the niece, who had been avoiding him all the evening, it seemed, though until that moment he had not felt the need for her attention. Without intending it sardonically, he smiled and asked:

  ‘If you have not understood the poem by the words, how would you interpret it?’

  Laura Trevelyan frowned slightly.

  ‘You yourself have made the excuse that must always be made for poetry,’ she replied.

  Just at that moment, under the influence of discussion, everyone else at the table was deaf to the German and the young woman, who were brought together for the first time since the Pringles’ picnic, rather more closely than Laura would have wished.

  However, she now returned his smile, and said:

  ‘You must allow me my secrets.’

  He wondered whether she was being sincere, or just womanly, but as he had drunk several glasses of wine, he did not really care. Her head, he noticed, was glittering in its setting of candlelight, either with the hysteria of a young girl, or that sensibility at which she hinted, and which he rather despised unless he could learn its secrets.

  He kept looking at her on and off, while she bent her head and knew that some kind of revelation must eventually take place, terrible though the prospect was.

  In the course of ritual, after the ladies had abandoned the gentlemen to the port and everyone had been bored for a little, Mrs Bonner pounced on Mr Topp and smiled and asked: Would he? It was obvious that he had been invited only for this moment. As it was invariably the case, he was neither surprised nor offended, but addressed himself to the pianoforte with such relief that the susceptibilities of his hosts would have been hurt if they had but considered. Mrs Bonner, however, was creating groups of statuary. This was her strength, to coax out of flesh the marble that is hidden in it. So her guests became transfixed upon the furniture. Then Mrs Bonner, having control, was almost happy. Only, thought and music eluded her. Now she was, in fact, standing in her own drawing-room with this suspicion on her face, of something that had strayed. If she could have put her finger on it, if she could have turned infinity to stone, then she would have sunk down in her favourite chair, with all disposed around her, and rested her feet upon a little beaded stool.

  Mr Topp played and played. He would have continued all night, as he had developed the vice of playing for himself, but Miss Hollier had to be pressed, and was eventually persuaded to execute that piece in which she crossed her wrists several times, ever so gracefully, above the keys.

  Then Tom Radclyffe must stand up to sing Love’s Witchcraft. He had a high bass. Real fervour filled his scarlet coat, and caused some vibration amongst the objects in glass and china on the shelves of cabinets. Belle Bonner’s skin had turned a cloudy white.

  ‘Maiden look me in the face,’

  the Lieutenant sang;

  ‘Steadfast, serious, no grimace!

  Maiden, mark me, now I task thee

  Answer quickly, what I ask thee!

  Steadfast look me in the face.

  Little vixen, no grimace!’

  Now Belle was neither flesh nor marble. She was enveloped in, and had herself become, a cloud of the most assiduous tenderness. To have remained in such a trance, of cloud wrapping cloud, would have been perpetual bliss, but her practical nature led her out and away, and she was walking along the gravel paths surrounding a house in which she was established, with every sign of prosperity and elegance – and Love; Love, of course. Love approached along that same gravel, smelling familiarly of macassar, or, assuming another of his forms, stroked with the skins of seven babies. Until Belle blushed, and those who had been looking for it, saw.

  By that hour, before the tea-things were brought in, the lamplight, which in the beginning had been a solid, engrossed yellow, was suffused with the palpitating rose colours. The petals that had fallen on mahogany were reflected upward. The big, no longer perfect roses were bursting with scent and sticky stamens. And it was rather warm.

  Partly for that reason Laura Trevelyan had gone out through the moths to the terrace where the stone urns were, and where somebody had been crushing geranium, but the heavy air of darkness was, if anything, more distasteful to her than that of the rapt, cloying room. As she strolled she was still attended by the light from lamps. This, however, could not be stretched much farther, and she did hesitate. It was now possible that the usually solid house, and all that it contained, that the whole civil history of those parts was presumptuous, and that the night, close and sultry as savage flesh, distant and dilating as stars, would prevail by natural law.

  Drifting in that nihilistic darkness with agreeable resignation, the young woman bumped against some hard body and immediately recovered her own.

  ‘I beg your pardon, Miss Trevelyan,’ said Voss. ‘You also have come out in search of refreshment.’

  ‘I?’ said Laura. ‘Yes, it was stuffy. The first hot nights of the season are difficult. But so deceptive. Dangerous, even. A wind may spring up in half an hour from now, and we shall be shivering.’

  She was already, despite the fact that they were swathed in a woollen darkness. Down there, round the bay, there was still a rushy marsh, from which a young man who had recently gone in search of mussels had contracted a fever, it was told, and died.

  But Voss was not at that moment interested in climatic peculiarities.

  To what extent is this girl dishonest? he wondered.

  Unaccustomed to recognize his own dishonesties, he was rather sensitive to them in others.

  It is disgraceful, of course, Laura realized; I have come out here for no convincing reason. She was defenceless. Perhaps even guilty.

  ‘I try to visualize your life in this house,’ said Voss, facing the honeycomb of windows, in some of which dark figures burrowed for a moment before drowning in the honey-coloured light. ‘Do you count the linen?’

  He was truly interested, now that it did seem to affect him in some way not yet accounted for.

  ‘Do you make pastry? Hem sheets? Or are you reading novels in these rooms, and receiving morning calls from acquaintances, ladies with small waists and affectations?’

  ‘We indulge in a little of each,’ Laura admitted, ‘but in no event are we insects, Mr Voss.’

  ‘I have not intended to suggest,’ he laughed. ‘It is my habit of approach.’

  ‘Is it so difficult then, for a man, to imagine the lives of poor domesticated women? How very extraordinary! Or is it that you are an extraordinary man?’

  ‘I have not entered into the minds of other men, so that I cannot honestly say with any degree of accuracy.’

  But he would keep his private conviction.

  ‘I think that I can enter into the minds of most men,’ said the young woman, softly. ‘At times. An advantage we ins
ect-women enjoy is that we have endless opportunity to indulge the imagination as we go backwards and forwards in the hive.’

  ‘And in my instance, what does your imagination find?’

  He was laughing, of course, at the absurdity of that which he expected to be told. But he would have liked to hear practically anything.

  ‘Shall we go a little?’ he invited.

  ‘Walking in this darkness is full of dangers.’

  ‘It is not really dark. When you are accustomed to it.’

  Which was true. The thick night was growing luminous. At least, it was possible almost to see, while remaining almost hidden.

  The man and woman were walking over grass that was still kindly beneath their feet. Smooth, almost cold leaves soothed their faces and the backs of their hands.

  ‘These are the camellia bushes Uncle planted when he first came here as a young man,’ Laura Trevelyan said. ‘There are fifteen varieties, as well as sports. This one here is the largest,’ she said, shaking it as if it had been an inanimate object; it was so familiar to her, and now so necessary. ‘It is a white, but there is one branch that bears those marbled flowers, you know, like the edges of a ledger.’

  ‘Interesting,’ he said.

  But it was an obscure reply, of a piece with the spongy darkness that surrounded them.

  ‘Then you are not going to answer my question?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘that silly claim I made! Although, to a certain extent, it is true.’

  ‘Tell me, then.’

  ‘Everyone is offended by the truth, and you will not be an exception.’

  That it would take place, they both knew now.

  Consequently, when she did speak, the sense of inevitability that they shared made her sound as if she were reading from a notebook, only this one was her head, in which her memorandum had been written, in invisible ink, that the night had breathed upon; and as she read, or spoke, it became obvious to both that she had begun to compile her record from the first moment of their becoming acquainted.

  ‘You are so vast and ugly,’ Laura Trevelyan was repeating the words; ‘I can imagine some desert, with rocks, rocks of prejudice, and, yes, even hatred. You are so isolated. That is why you are fascinated by the prospect of desert places, in which you will find your own situation taken for granted, or more than that, exalted. You sometimes scatter kind words or bits of poetry to people, who soon realize the extent of their illusion. Everything is for yourself. Human emotions, when you have them, are quite flattering to you. If those emotions strike sparks from others, that also is flattering. But most flattering, I think, when you experience it, is the hatred, or even the mere irritation of weaker characters.’

  ‘Do you hate me, perhaps?’ asked Voss, in darkness.

  ‘I am fascinated by you,’ laughed Laura Trevelyan, with such candour that her admission did not seem immodest. ‘You are my desert!’

  Once or twice their arms brushed, and he was conscious of some extreme agitation or exhilaration in her.

  ‘I am glad that I do not need your good opinion,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Nobody’s opinion!’

  He was surprised at the vehemence of feeling in this young girl. In such circumstances, repentance, he felt, might have been a luxury. But he did not propose to enjoy any such softness. Besides, faith in his own stature had not been destroyed.

  He began to bite his nails in the darkness.

  ‘You are upset,’ he said, ‘because you would like to pity me, and you cannot.’

  ‘If that were the case, I would certainly have cause to be upset,’ she blurted most wildly.

  ‘You would like to mention me in your prayers.’

  By this time Laura Trevelyan had become lost somewhere in the dark of the garden. But I, too, am self-sufficient, she remembered, with some lingering repugnance for her dead prayers.

  ‘I do not pray,’ she answered, miserably.

  ‘Ach,’ he pounced, ‘you are not atheistisch?’

  ‘I do not know,’ she said.

  She had begun to tear a cluster of the white camellias from that biggest bush. In passing, she had snapped the hot flowers, which were now poor lumps of things. She was tearing them across, as if they had not been flesh, but some passive stuff, like blotting-paper.

  ‘Atheists are atheists usually for mean reasons,’ Voss was saying. ‘The meanest of these is that they themselves are so lacking in magnificence they cannot conceive the idea of a Divine Power.’

  He was glittering coldly. The wind that the young woman had promised had sprung up, she realized dully. The stars were trembling. Leaves were slashing at one another.

  ‘Their reasons,’ said Laura, ‘are simple, honest, personal ones. As far as I can tell. For such steps are usually taken in privacy. Certainly after considerable anguish of thought.’

  The darkness was becoming furious.

  ‘But the God they have abandoned is of mean conception,’ Voss pursued. ‘Easily destroyed, because in their own image. Pitiful because such destruction does not prove the destroyer’s power. Atheismus is self-murder. Do you not understand?’

  ‘I am to understand that I have destroyed myself. But you, Mr Voss,’ Laura cried, ‘it is for you I am concerned. To watch the same fate approaching someone else is far, far worse.’

  In the passion of their relationship, she had encountered his wrist. She held his bones. All their gestures had ugliness, convulsiveness in common. They stood with their legs apart inside their innocent clothes, the better to grip the reeling earth.

  ‘I am aware of no similarity between us,’ Voss replied.

  He was again cold, but still arrested. Her hands had eaten into his wrist.

  ‘It is for our pride that each of us is probably damned,’ Laura said.

  Then he shook her off, and the whole situation of an hysterical young woman. He was wiping his lips, which had begun to twitch, though in anger, certainly, not from weakness. He breathed deeply. He drank from the great arid skies of fluctuating stars. The woman beside him had begun to suggest the presence of something soft and defenceless.

  Indeed, Laura Trevelyan did not feel she would attempt anything further, whatever might be revealed to her.

  ‘For some reason of intellectual vanity, you decided to do away with God,’ Voss was saying; she knew he would be smiling. ‘But the consequences are yours alone. I assure you.’

  It was true; he made her know.

  ‘I feel you may still suspect me,’ he continued. ‘But I do believe, you must realize. Even though I worship with pride. Ah, the humility, the humility! This is what I find so particularly loathsome. My God, besides, is above humility.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Now I understand.’

  It was clear. She saw him standing in the glare of his own brilliant desert. Of course, He was Himself indestructible.

  And she did then begin to pity him. She no longer pitied herself, as she had for many weeks in the house of her uncle, whose unfailingly benevolent materialism encouraged the practice of self-pity. Love seemed to return to her with humility. Her weakness was delectable.

  ‘I shall think of you with alarm,’ she said. ‘To maintain such standards of pride, in the face of what you must experience on this journey, is truly alarming.’

  ‘I am not in the habit of setting myself limits.’

  ‘Then I will learn to pray for you.’

  ‘Oh dear, I have caught you out doubly,’ he laughed. ‘You are an Apostle of Love masquerading as an atheist for some inquisitorial purpose of your own. My poor Miss Trevelyan! I shall be followed through the continent of Australia by your prayers, like little pieces of white paper. I can see them, torn-up paper, fluttering, now that I know for certain you are one of those who pray.’

  ‘I have failed to be. But I will learn.’

  These simple ideas were surrounded with such difficulties they would scarcely issue out of her inadequate mind.

  Then he was touching her, his ha
nd was upon her shoulder-blades, and they realized they had returned into their bodies.

  ‘Is it not really very cold?’ she said at once, shivering.

  ‘People will come to look for you. You are lost in the garden.’

  ‘They are too agreeably occupied.’

  ‘I have been hateful to you this evening,’ confessed the German, as if it had just occured to him, but she did not resent it; in her state of recovered conviction his defects were even welcome.

  ‘We were unwise,’ he said, ‘to flounder into each other’s private beings.’

  She smiled.

  ‘I know you are smiling,’ he said. ‘Why?’ he asked, and laughed.

  ‘It is our beings that pleases me,’ she replied.

  ‘Is it not expressive, then?’

  ‘Oh, it is expressive, I dare say, in its clumsiness.’

  The beautiful, but rather tentative young girl of that evening, in her smouldering, peacock dress, and the passionate but bewildered soul of the woman that had flapped and struggled in the dark garden in its attempt to rescue (let us not say: subdue) were being dispossessed by a clumsy contentment of the flesh.

  ‘I have long given up trying to express myself,’ she sighed warmly.

  The man yawned.

  He knew that he did enjoy the company of this young woman, who was exhausted, and standing as naturally in her shoes as her careful upbringing would allow.

  ‘When I was younger,’ said this girl, as if it had been a long time ago, ‘I kept a diary. Oh, I wrote down everything, everything. I could not express too much. And how proud I was to read it. Then I no longer could. I would stare at a blank page, and that would appear far more expressive than my own emptiness.’

  The man yawned again. He was not bored, however, but very happy. He, too, was rather exhausted by what had happened, but his physical exhaustion was sealing up the memory of it.

  ‘While I am engaged on this expedition,’ he said, ‘I will, of course, keep a journal, that you will read afterwards, and follow me step by step.’

  Even his pride had grown tired and childlike.

  ‘The official journal of the expedition,’ murmured the young woman, not ironically, to the tired child.