Voss

by Patrick White

  There is no reason why it should be otherwise, Laura told herself. But shivered.

  ‘Belle,’ she called, in a white voice, as low as she could make it above the noise, ‘let us go now. Everything has been said.’

  Soon the party was riding away, and Voss looked after them, and realized that he had not spoken to Laura Trevelyan. He watched the coil of hair in the nape of her neck, which revealed nothing, and her shoulders which suggested none of the strength she had displayed on that strange evening in the garden.

  He stood there wetting his lips in the crowd, as if he were about to call some last remark; but what? And, of course, his words would not have blown so far. Still, when Frank Le Mesurier fetched him to settle some matter that had to be decided, the lines of his face did appear somewhat relaxed.

  ‘Can you not sometimes make a decision in my absence, Frank?’ he asked.

  ‘What is this, sir?’ exclaimed the amazed Le Mesurier. ‘When would my decisions have been accepted?’

  But Voss only laughed.

  All that forenoon the crowd loitered, waiting for the wind. Some were swearing at the dust, some had got drunk, and were in danger of being taken up. One individual in particular was falling-drunk. His hat – that was gone; but on no account would he be parted from a little keg, which he carried like a baby in his arms.

  He would be ashamed in the morning, one honest body remarked.

  ‘It is me own business,’ he heard enough to reply, ‘and this is the last time, so let me alone.’

  ‘It is always the last time with the likes of you,’ the lady said. ‘I know from experience and a husband. Who is dead of it, poor soul.’

  ‘I will not be dead of this,’ drooled the man. ‘Or if I am, it is a lovely way to die.’

  The lady, morbidly attached to a situation over which she had no control, was sucking such teeth as remained to her.

  ‘It is a scandal,’ she said, of that which she could not leave be.

  ‘Why, if it is not Mr Turner,’ interrupted Harry Robarts, who had come up.

  ‘Who is that accusin’ me now?’ complained the man. ‘Oh, it is you, boy,’ he said more quietly.

  ‘We had all forgot you, Mr Turner, an’ if the wind had rose, you would have had no part in the expedition; the ship would have sailed.’

  ‘It is not my fate,’ said Turner. ‘The wind is with me. Or against, is it?’

  Either way, he blew out such a quantity from his own body, that the lady who had been solicitous for him, removed herself at speed.

  ‘Come now, Mr Turner,’ said the boy, ‘you are not acting as you ought. Come on board quiet like, with me, an’ lay down for a bit. Then you will feel better.’

  ‘I do not feel bad,’ insisted Turner.

  But he came as best he could, with his little keg, and fell down a hatchway without breaking his neck, and lay there.

  Once, only, as the ship began to move later that afternoon, he rose up in a dream, and cried:

  ‘Mr Voss, you are killing us! Give me the knife, please. Ahhhhh! The butter! The butter! It is not my turn to die.’

  So he was saved up out of his dreams, and preserved for the future.

  *

  The future? Laura Trevelyan could not bear to think of it, even though the present, through which the riding party moved, was still to some extent an unpleasant dream. They were riding home, however. Tea trees were scratching them, a stink of stale fish was rising out of Woolloomoolloo, and an Irish person, wife of the boatswain, it transpired, ran out of a humpy to ask whether they did not have news of Osprey. The boatswain’s wife, with a baby clawing at her bodice, and several little boys at heel, had every belief in that life.

  After escorting them as far as Potts Point, Mr Radclyffe left the young ladies to change their habits for loose gowns and a kind of informal, private beauty, that admirably suited the spring afternoon in which they finished a luncheon of cold meat and bread and honey. But the dream persisted disturbingly. Laura Trevelyan, drawing back her lips to bite the slice of bread and honey, saw whole rows of sailors’ blackened teeth gaping from a gunnel. The knife with which she slashed the butter, had a mottled, slippery handle, and could have been made from horse’s hoof.

  Afterwards the two cousins went up to Laura’s room.

  ‘I am going to rest,’ the latter announced.

  ‘So will I,’ said Belle. ‘I will lie here with you.’

  Which she had never done before.

  So the two girls lay down, in some way grateful for each other, even in uneasy sleep, which was half present, half future, almost wholly apprehensive. Even Belle, touching her own hot cheek, was conscious of the future, not as the gauze that it had always been in the past, but as some inexorable marble thing. It was forming.

  Tom, she was saying, men fall in love, over and over again, but it is always with themselves.

  Do you really think to escape? he asked. You will not, even though I may sometimes wish it. It is Laura who will escape, by putting on canvas. She has sailed.

  Belle Bonner sat up.

  ‘She has sailed.’

  But it was Rose Portion speaking.

  ‘What?’ asked Belle, whose face was in an afternoon fever.

  ‘Oh, miss, the ship. Osprey,’ said Rose, who had come in a hurry, with a dish of preserved cumquats in her hand.

  Laura still lay in long folds of uneasy marble. Her hand was curled, and could have been carved, if it had not been for a twitching.

  ‘Miss? Miss Laura!’ called Rose. ‘It is the ship. It is such a sight.’

  Belle touched her cousin.

  The two women who were awake realized that the event was somehow of greater concern to the third who was still asleep.

  Laura Trevelyan woke then, raised herself upon straight arms, got up, and went out without word or second thought to the long balcony. Her skirt, which was of a pale colour and infinite afternoon coolness, streamed behind her.

  There, indeed, was the ship.

  The wind was moving Osprey out towards the Heads. The blue water, now ruffled up, was full of little white waves. It had become an animal of evident furriness, but still only playful, because the mood was a recent one. Osprey continued in her pride of superior strength. She was not yet shaken.

  ‘Yes, they have got away,’ said Laura, in a clear, glad, flat voice.

  Her face also was rather flat for that moment, just as its expression of gladness, which she had flung on while rising from her sleep, was inadequate and transparent; it did not quite conceal.

  ‘Oh, I will pray for them,’ exclaimed Rose Portion, clutching the saucer with the cumquats.

  ‘But you do not know them,’ said Belle, to whom her maid’s concern was consequently absurd.

  ‘I do not need to know them.’

  ‘They may not need praying for. It is ridiculous.’

  Rose did not answer.

  The three women watched the ship.

  Laura Trevelyan threw back the sleeve of her creamy gown, as if it had been heavy.

  ‘Do you think Mr Palfreyman is nice?’ Belle Bonner asked.

  ‘From what little I have seen of him, I think exceptionally nice,’ her cousin replied.

  ‘But quiet.’

  ‘He says whatever has to be said.’

  The women were watching the ship.

  ‘He is a man of education, I expect,’ said Belle. ‘Not an ignorant colonial savage. Like us.’

  ‘Oh, miss!’ protested Rose.

  ‘But he is kind,’ Belle continued. ‘And kind people do not mind.’

  ‘Oh, Belle, do not chatter so!’ said Laura.

  ‘But is it not true?’

  ‘All that you have said. Though beside the point.’

  The three women watched the ship.

  Presently Rose Portion, who had taken upon herself that chastening which was intended for Miss Belle, said in a whisper, holding her stomach:

  ‘These are a few cumquats that I was bringin’ to you for a taste, when
I saw the ship had sailed.’

  And she set the saucer, with two forks, upon a little bamboo table, and went softly away.

  Neither girl thanked the woman for her trouble, except in spirit, for the words had been absorbed from them.

  Wind and sea were tossing the slow ship. Gusts of that same wind, now fresh, now warm, troubled the garden, and carried the scents of pine and jasmine into the long balcony. The two young women could not have told whether they were quickened or drugged, until a kind of feverish melancholy began to take possession of them. Their bodies shivered in their thin gowns; their minds were exposed to the keenest barbs of thought; and the whole scene that their vision embraced became distinct and dancing, beautiful but sad.

  Yet, it seemed to Laura Trevelyan, those moments of her life which had been of most importance were both indistinct and ugly. The incident with the German in the garden had been indescribably ugly, untidy, painful. She could not help recalling that, and in doing so, there came into her mouth a bad taste, as of blood oozing, as if she had lost a tooth. She bit her lip, but was reminded of his rather pointed teeth as he stood talking that morning at the wharf.

  Then Belle, who was finally overwhelmed by the moist, windblown afternoon, began to be afraid.

  ‘Laura,’ she said, very quietly.

  She was as determined to press against her cousin, as the latter was to hold her off.

  But Belle could not bear it. She was both afraid, and filled with a desire to mingle with what she did not understand, which was the future, perhaps, hence her necessity.

  ‘Laura,’ she asked, ‘what has come over us? What is happening?’

  She was crying, and pressing herself against the mysterious body of her cousin.

  ‘It is nothing. It is you who imagine,’ said Laura, resisting with her voice, with all her might.

  Persistent touch was terrifying to her.

  But neither could resist the force of that afternoon. Seeking protection, they were swept together, in softest sympathy.

  ‘Tell me, Laura,’ cried Belle, ‘what is it?’

  Her hot tears shocked the other’s colder skin.

  ‘But I cannot,’ Laura cried, ‘when there is nothing – nothing to tell.’

  As they rocked together on the balcony, in the shaggy arms of the honest trees, in the bosom of the all-possessing wind, they were soothed to some extent, and the light, touching the cumquats on the little bamboo table, turned these into precious stones, the perfection of which gave further cause for hope.

  6

  OSPREY anchored after what would have been an uneventful voyage, if, during it, Turner had not woken from his drunken sleep in an almost disordered state of mind, babbling of some knife that he had in his possession and must find immediately. After rummaging through his box and tumbling his things, it had come to light, of black, bone handle and rather elegant blade. It was unlucky, he insisted, and come by in strange circumstances. The man was quite frenzied, till he had run to the side and flung the knife into the waves. Then he grew calmer, and the vessel was carried on and reached Newcastle.

  It was evening when the party landed. They were met, as arranged, by Mr Sanderson, and taken to an inn on the outskirts of the town, where, he suggested, they would enjoy greater peace. Nobody objected. They were at the mercy of anyone at this stage. Voss drove with Mr Sanderson. They could not yet find living words, but offered dry communications which did not really convey, and were an embarrassment to each other. By the time they entered the yard of the inn, they had chosen silence as a state preferable to conversation. However, neither man was resentful, and they were drawn closer together by having to face the anomalous life of the inn, as they got down into the yellow patches of light, the scent of urine and roasting meats, the barking of a pointer, and a tangle of woolly advice from the inevitable drunkard.

  Their sojourn at the inn was of the briefest, for Mr Sanderson had provided horses, and it was his intention that they should proceed the following morning to his station at Rhine Towers, a journey of several days, while such equipment as the party had brought from Sydney would follow by bullock-wagon, at easier pace.

  Voss accepted this most reasonable plan, and, on the morning after landing, joined his host in heading the cavalcade that started out from Newcastle. None was more elated than young Harry Robarts, who had never been astride a horse before, and who was soon surveying from his eminence the fat lands of the settlers, and snuffing up the aromatic scents of the mysterious, blue bush, that rose up as they approached, and enveloped, and silenced. Soon there was only the clinking of metal, the calling of birds, and the aching of Harry’s thighs, that ticked regularly as a clock, in hot, monotonous, endless time.

  ‘Oh, Gawd,’ he moaned and rolled from side to side in attempts to ease himself.

  But there was no relief. There were the pastures, there was the bush. There was the hot, red sun of Harry Robarts’ face set in his prickly head.

  The country was by no means new to Voss, who had returned by land from Moreton Bay and the North, yet, on this significant occasion, he observed all things as if for the first time. It was a gentle, healing landscape in those parts. So he was looking about him with contented eye, drinking deep draughts of a most simple medicine. Sometimes they would leave the road, from the stones of which their horses’ feet had been striking little angry sparks, and take short cuts instead along the bush tracks, walking on leaves and silence. It was not the volcanic silence of solitary travel through infinity. The German had experienced this and had been exhausted by it, winding deeper into himself, into blacker thickets of thorns. Through this bushland, men had already blazed a way. Pale scars showed in the sides of the hairy trees. Voss was merely following now, and could almost have accepted this solution as the only desirable one. The world of gods was becoming a world of men. Men wound behind him, heads mostly down, in single file. He was no longer irritated by their coughing. Ahead of him sat the long, thin, civilized back of his host.

  ‘The country round here is divided up, for the greater part, into small holdings. That is to say, until we reach the boundaries of Rhine Towers, and Dulverton, which is the property of Ralph Angus,’ explained Sanderson, who would sometimes become embarrassed by silence, and feel it his duty to instruct his guests.

  At places, in clearings, little, wild, rosy children would approach the track, and stand with their noses running, and lips curled in natural wonder. Their homespun frocks made them look stiffer. An aura of timelessness enveloped their rooted bodies. They would not speak, of course, to destroy any such illusion. They stood, and looked, out of their relentless blue, or hot chocolate eyes, till the rump of the last horse had all but disappeared. Then these children would run along the track in the wake of the riders, jumping the mounds of yellow dung, shouting and sniffing, as if they had known the horsemen all along, and always been brave.

  Only less timid by a little were the mothers, who would run out, shaking the structure of a slab or wattle hut, dashing the suds from their arms, or returning to its brown bodice the big breast that had been giving suck. In spite of their initial enthusiasm, the mothers would stop short, and stand in the disturbed silence, after mumbling a few guilty words. It was for husbands to speak to emissaries from the world. So the squatters themselves would come up, in boots they had cobbled during winter nights. Their adam’s apples moved stiffly with some intelligence of weather, flocks, or crops. As they had hewn, painfully, an existence out of the scrub and rocks, so they proceeded to hew the words out of a poor vocabulary.

  Voss appeared to glow.

  ‘These are good people. One can see,’ he said. ‘Have they all been free settlers?’

  ‘Some. Some are emancipists,’ Sanderson replied from over his shoulder. ‘There are both kinds. And there are good and bad of each.’

  Because he was a better man than Voss, he also had fewer transitory illusions. Just then, exalted by hopes of regeneration, the German was ready to believe that all men were good.


  ‘It goes without saying there are such distinctions,’ he agreed, but with the air of suffering of one who has been misunderstood by a superficial companion. ‘If you will look into the skin of a beautiful young lady, you will see perhaps one or two blemishes: a patch of slight inflammation, let us say, the holes of the pores, even a pimple. But this is not to deny the essence of her beauty. Will you not concur?’

  ‘If it is a question of essence,’ Sanderson replied, with appropriate gravity.

  The way he was placed, Voss could see only his host’s back, which was that long, discreet, civilized one already mentioned.

  Sanderson was a man of a certain culture, which his passionate search for truth had rid of intellectual ostentation. In another age the landowner might have become a monk, and from there gone on to be a hermit. In the mid nineteenth century, an English gentleman and devoted husband did not behave in such a manner, so he renounced Belgravia for New South Wales, and learned to mortify himself in other ways. Because he was rich and among the first to arrive, he had acquired a goodish slice of land. After this victory of worldly pride, almost unavoidable perhaps in anyone of his class, humility had set in. He did live most simply, together with his modest wife. They were seldom idle, unless the reading of books, after the candles were lit, be considered idleness. This was the one thing people held against the Sandersons, and it certainly did seem vain and peculiar. They had whole rows of books, bound in leather, and were for ever devouring them. They would pick out passages for each other as if they had been titbits of tender meat, and afterwards shine with almost physical pleasure. Beyond this, there was nothing to which a man might take exception. Sanderson tended his flocks and herds like any other Christian. If he was more prosperous than most, one did not notice it unduly, and both he and his wife would wash their servants’ feet in many thoughtful and imperceptible ways.

  ‘We are how many miles now from your property?’ Voss would ask on and off.

  And Sanderson would tell.

  ‘I am most anxious to see it,’ Voss said invariably.

  Places yet unvisited can become an obsession, promising final peace, all goodness. So the fallible man in Voss was yearning after Rhine Towers, investing it with those graces which one hopes to find at the heart of every mirage, entering its mythical buildings, kindling a great fire in the expectant hearth. Its name glittered for him, as he rode repeating it to himself.