Voss

by Patrick White

  In other circumstances, Voss would have liked to talk to these creatures. Alone, he and the blacks would have communicated with one another by skin and silence, just as dust is not impenetrable and the message of sticks can be interpreted after hours of intimacy. But in the presence of Brendan Boyle, the German was the victim of his European, or even his human inheritance. So he got down from the shaky step, and advanced on the old black with his rather stiff, habitual gait and said:

  ‘This is for Dugald.’

  It was a brass button that he happened to have in his pocket, and which had come off a tunic, of military, though otherwise forgotten origin.

  The old man was very still, holding the token with the tips of his fingers, as if dimly aware in himself of an answer to the white man’s mysticism. He could have been a thinking stick, on which the ash had cooled after purification by fire, so wooden was his old, scarified, cauterized body, with its cap of grey, brittle ash. Inside the eyes moved some memory of myth or smoke.

  The youth, on the other hand, had been brought to animal life. Lights shone in his skin, and his throat was rippling with language. He was giggling and gulping. He could have eaten the brass button.

  On an afterthought, Voss again put his hand in his pocket and offered Jackie a clasp-knife that he was carrying.

  ‘Na, Junge,’ he said, with a friendliness that could not avoid solemnity.

  Jackie, however, would not receive, except by the hand of his mentor, and then was shivering with awful joy as he stood staring at the knife on his own palm.

  Voss, too, was translated. The numerous creases in his black trousers appeared to have been sculptured for eternity.

  As all of this scene was a bit unexpected, not to say peculiar, to Brendan Boyle, the latter was itching to cut it short.

  He jabbed with a finger in the old man’s shoulder-blade, and said:

  ‘Plenty valuable button. You take good care.’

  After which, he spat, and was easing his clothes.

  Boyle then proposed to Voss that they should spend the morning inspecting the sheep and goats he had selected for use of the expedition, and which would probably be found somewhere in the vicinity of a string of waterholes a mile or two north of the homestead. Voss agreed. It soon became clear that he and his host were continually humouring each other. In this way each hoped to hide the indifference he felt towards his companion, though each remained humorously aware that the other was conscious of his attitude. The agreeable part was that neither harboured actual dislike. No one could have disliked Brendan Boyle in spite of his peculiarities, and he was quite incapable of disliking for long anyone but himself.

  So they set out from the slatternly settlement of Jildra, to which Voss had grown reconciled, just as he had come to accept certain qualities of his host. The smoky setting of the early morning was not unpleasing, even touching. Columns of blue smoke were ascending, a long cloud was lying flat above them, and the wisps of smoky grass, suggested an evanescence of the solid earth, of shack and tents, iron and hessian, flesh and bone, even of the rather substantial Brendan Boyle. They rode out of the jumble of grey sheds, past several gunyas, at which black women were standing, and little, red-haired boys with toy spears. Over the skins of the natives, the smoke played, and through. A yellowish woman, of spreading breasts, sat giving suck to a puppy.

  ‘Dirty beggars,’ coughed Mr Boyle – it was the smoke, ‘but a man could not do without them.’

  Voss did not reply to what appeared, in his host’s case, obvious.

  The two men rode on, in hats and beards, which strangely enough had not been adopted as disguises. In that flat country of secret colours, their figures were small, even when viewed in the foreground. Their great horses had become as children’s ponies. It was the light that prevailed, and distance, which, after all, was a massing of light, and the mobs of cockatoos, which exploded, and broke into flashes of clattering, shrieking, white and sulphur light. Trees, too, were but illusory substance, for they would quickly turn to shadow, which is another shape of the ever-protean light.

  Later in the morning, when the air was beginning to solidify, the two riders were roused from themselves by sight of the promised waterholes. These might have been described more accurately as mud-pans, or lilyfields, from which several grave pelicans rose at once, and were making off on wings of creaking basket-work.

  ‘There are the sheep now,’ said the station-owner, pointing.

  These dirty maggots were at first scarcely visible in the yellow grass, but did eventually move enough, and mill round, and stamp.

  ‘They are a rough lot,’ said Boyle, ‘but so is your undertaking. I am glad it is you,’ he had to add, sniggering, because in very many ways he was a schoolboy.

  ‘It is almost always impossible to convince other men of one’s own necessities,’ Voss said. ‘Do you believe you were convincing to us last night when you attempted to explain yours?’

  ‘I? What?’ exclaimed Boyle, and wondered whether his obscurer self had been caught in some indecent confession, or even act; he suspected it, but could not remember. ‘What a man lets out at night, you know, is a different thing from what he would say by day.’

  He was protesting, and redder, as he searched his mind.

  ‘I cannot think what you are referring to,’ he concluded.

  On such a mild and bountiful morning, Voss would not reveal what it was.

  All this time the sheep, in their yellow wool and wrinkles, went on milling round and round, trying to find, or to escape from one another. Two black shepherds, at a distance, gave no indication of wanting to come any closer.

  ‘There, I think, are the goats,’ indicated Voss.

  ‘What? Oh, yes, the goats,’ Boyle replied.

  About a hundred of these animals had gathered on the farther bank of a second waterhole, where they were climbing and slithering on the hulks of fallen trees, stretching their necks to pull at the fronds of live leaves, scratching at remote pockets of their bodies with the tips of their horns, skull-bashing, or ruminating dreamily. As the horsemen approached, the goat-mind was undecided whether to stay or run. Several did remain, and were staring up, their lips smiling, looking right into the faces of the men, even into their souls beyond, but with expressions of politeness.

  ‘Descendants of the original goat,’ Boyle commented rather crossly.

  ‘Probably,’ answered Voss, who liked them.

  One aged doe had searched his mind with such thoroughness as to discover in it part of his secret, that he was, in fact, only in appearance man.

  He held out his hand towards her subtle beard, but she was gone, and all of them, with hilarious noises, and a rain of black dung.

  ‘Come on,’ said Boyle.

  If he could have attacked or accused his guest in some way, he would have, but the German had assumed a protective cloak of benevolence. As they rode homeward, the many questions that the latter asked, all dealing with the flora and fauna of the place, were unexceptionable, expressed with that air of simple benevolence. His face wore a flat smile, and there were little lines of kindness at the outer corners of his eyes.

  Yet there was something, Boyle knew. He rode, answering the German’s questions, but absently flicking at his horse’s shoulder with the skein of reins.

  During the remainder of their sojourn at Jildra, Boyle tried to read the faces of the German’s men for some clue to their leader’s nature and intentions. But they, if they knew, would not be read, or else were spell-ridden in the hot, brown landscape. As they went about the tasks that had been allotted to them, such business as arises during an interval of preparation and rest, the men appeared to have little existence of their own, unless it was a deeply buried one. There was Palfreyman, in a cabbage-tree hat that made him look smaller, with a clean, white handkerchief to protect his neck and throat, but which exposed, rather, his own innocence and delicacy. There he was, riding out, an old woman of a man, with the boy Robarts perhaps, and one or two natives, to
secure the ornithological specimens which he would then clean and prepare by candlelight. Nothing more simplified than Palfreyman. So, too, the others were tranquilly occupied. Judd had become an immense rump as he busied himself at shoeing horses. Others were oiling firearms, greasing leather, sharpening axes, or sewing on buttons.

  Except once or twice, nothing untoward occurred. On one occasion, to give the exceptions, Boyle had gone into the men’s tent, admittedly to satisfy his curiosity, and there was Frank Le Mesurier, sprawled out upon his red blanket, writing in a notebook. As Boyle was a big man, he was forced to stoop to enter the rather low-slung, oiled calico tent, then to stand hunched. He was so obvious that he made no attempt to behave casually. The blood was too thick in his fingers. Le Mesurier stopped writing, and rolled over on his book, which he could not hide effectively, because it had been seen.

  ‘Where is Mr Voss?’ asked Boyle.

  Although he had not been looking for Voss, it was true the German was always somewhere in his mind.

  ‘I do not know,’ answered the young man, darkly returning the intruder’s stare. ‘He has gone out somewhere,’ he added in a hollow voice, which suggested that the speaker had but recently woken.

  Then Boyle squatted down, as an opportunity seemed to be offering itself.

  ‘Have you known him long?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Le Mesurier answered at once, and at once began to hesitate. ‘Well, no,’ he corrected, prodding at a seam of the tent with his stump of lead pencil. ‘Let me see now. I knew Mr Voss at Sydney.’

  Then he blushed and was confused.

  ‘It was much longer than that,’ he said. ‘It was on board the ship. Which does make it a very long time.’

  Boyle’s suspicion increased. What was this young man trying to hide? Had he, perhaps, participated, or was he still participating in the German’s crime?

  Le Mesurier lay there blushing dark, and resenting the intrusion more than ever. Now, as on that evening under the scrubby trees of the Domain, he felt that he did share something of his leader’s nature, which he must conceal, as, in fact, he was hiding the notebook that contained the most secret part of himself.

  Boyle suspected this, but could no more snatch away the book than tear out by bleeding roots those other secrets of personality.

  ‘I was thinking of taking the gun down to the river, to look for a few duck that I saw making that way. Will you come, Frank?’ he now asked.

  He wanted to kill something.

  The young man agreed to come, rolled over, and grabbed for his hat. In the folds of the blanket there was no sign of the notebook that both knew to be there.

  So they went down to the river, which had almost dried since the last rain. A brown heat was descending like a flat lid. Jildra, with its squalid pleasures of black flesh and acres of concealed wealth, was reduced to a panful of dust and stinking mud, in which Brendan Boyle himself had chosen to stick.

  Once during those days, the latter approached Voss and almost asked to take part in the expedition, as if death in unpredictable circumstances were suddenly preferable to slow rotting.

  Instead, they discussed water-bags.

  This man has a favour to ask, the German knew, and in consequence grew wily. All, sooner or later, sensed his divinity and became dependent upon him. There was young Ralph Angus, Sanderson’s grazier-neighbour, blushing like a girl to ask an opinion. The armour of youth and his physical strength had not protected him against discovery of his own ignorance during the journey north. Turner was abject, of course, and Harry Robarts an imbecile. But Angus might prove a worthy sacrifice. The young bull of pagan rites, he would bellow and cast up his brown, stupid eyes before submitting.

  Of all the company, Judd remained least changed. Voss was encouraging, but amused. The day he found the convict tarring a horse’s swollen pastern, the German’s upper lip was as long in amused appreciation as a hornet is in legs. He looked at the stooping man, and said:

  ‘Is it a solution you are putting, Mr Judd?’

  ‘It is,’ replied the latter, chasing some insect away from his face with his tar-free arm.

  ‘You have not omitted the oil?’ asked Voss.

  ‘No,’ said Judd.

  Voss was whistling a little tune of insect music.

  ‘That is excellent,’ he said.

  He continued to whistle until, Judd could feel, he was drifting on. Then the convict’s empirical nature was glad of the stench of tar, and the heat which was for ever descending and ironing the dust still flatter.

  Heavy moons hung above Jildra at that season. There was a golden moon, of placid, swollen belly. There were the ugly, bronze, male moons, threateningly lopsided. One night of wind and dust, there was a pale moonstone, or, as rags of cloud polished its face, delicate glass instrument, on which the needle barely fluttered, indicating the direction that some starry destiny must take. The dreams of men were influenced by the various moons, with the result that they were burying their faces in the pregnant moon-women, or shaking their bronze fists at any threat to their virility. Their dreams eluded them, however, under the indicator of that magnetic moon. The white dust poured out from between their fingers, as they turned and turned on hairy blankets that provoked their nakedness. On the other hand, there were some who lay and listened to their own eyelids grate endlessly.

  Such was the predicament of Palfreyman on one particularly white night. Unable to sleep, he had passed the time reviewing houses in which he had lived, minor indignities he had suffered, and one tremendous joy, a white eagle fluttering for a moment on the branch of a dead tree and almost blotting out the sky with the span of its wings.

  The sound of the strong feathers, heard again above the squeak of mice and groans of sleep in Boyle’s squalid shack, had almost freed the wakeful Palfreyman, when Voss rose. There he was, striped by moonlight and darkness, the stale air moving round him, very softly. Voss himself did not move. Rather was he moved by a dream, Palfreyman sensed. Through some trick of moonlight or uncertainty of behaviour, the head became detached for a second and appeared to have been fixed upon a beam of the wooden wall. The mouth and the eyes were visible. Palfreyman shivered. Ah, Christ is an evil dream, he feared, and all my life I have been deceived. After the bones of the naked Christ had been drawn through the foetid room, by sheets of moonlight, and out the doorway, the fully conscious witness continued to lie on his blanket, face to face with his own shortcomings and his greatest error.

  But there was an end to this unhappiness, he was surprised to find. The moonlight returned Voss to the room. As he was moved back, his bones were creaking, and his skin had erupted in a greenish verdigris.

  Palfreyman nearly put out his hand, to recall them both to their normal relationship, but was restrained by an access of cold.

  Next morning he remarked:

  ‘Mr Voss, do you know you were sleep-walking last night?’

  The German was engaged in putting on his socks, his backbone exposed to his accuser.

  ‘I have never been known to, before. Never,’ he replied, but most irritably, as if refusing a crime with which he had been unjustly charged.

  Boyle, who had just then come through the partition, scratching an armpit, felt compelled to say:

  ‘We welcome you, Voss, through the gate of human weaknesses.’

  And was glad at last. He remembered how the yellow woman had flattened her belly against him the other side of sleep.

  But Voss was grumbling. He had grown livid. All that day he remained bones rather than flesh.

  All his days were wasting away in precise acts. His feet were heavy with dust as he tramped between shed, tent, and stockyard. Now his distaste for men returned, especially for those with whom he had surrounded himself, or, to be more accurate, with whom an ignorant jackass had surrounded him against his will. Blank faces, like so many paper kites, themselves earth-bound, or at most twitching in the warm shallows of atmosphere, dangling a vertebral tail, could prevent him soaring towards th
e apotheosis for which he was reserved. To what extent others had entangled him in the string of human limitation, he had grown desperate in wondering.

  So he was chewing his pen over that journal of acts and facts, which he did keep meticulously, he was holding a narrow oblong of clean, folded paper to protect the page from other eyes and dust, at the moment when Boyle came into the room, crunching over stale bread, smelling of sweat, and said:

  ‘Now, Voss, I do not want to meddle in anybody’s affairs, but I would suggest you are missing the best of a good season by delaying.’

  ‘Yes. Yes,’ said Voss, flicking at the page with the paper shield that he held between his long, clean bones of fingers. And frowning. ‘In two, three days we shall be prepared to leave. I have a report to write,’ he added.

  ‘I do not want to suggest you are in any way de trop,’ said his host, and could have become sentimental, for anyone at all, even for this scraggy guest whom he did not understand, suspected, and at times had even disliked.

  Boyle was not resentful. Of loving flesh, he could not have wished for better than a close companion on the same dung-heap, to sit beside, and touch.

  ‘Understand that, old man,’ he said, patting the German on the knee.

  Voss frowned at the dust which had spurted through the open doorway and dirtied his clean paper. It was about sundown, and the blaze of light was blinding him.

  ‘I do not intend to inconvenience you above a day or two,’ he repeated.

  With these words, spoken thus, for a second time, he realized that he was staking all. Thus, he could blame no one else for his own human weakness. He had delivered up his throat to the long, cold, glistening braids of her hair, and was truly strangling in them.