Voss

by Patrick White

  ‘That is very reasonable,’ commented Boyle. ‘And Thorndike should be here by then. A black from Cubanong has just come in. Thorndike has arrived there. If they have sent up anything for you, as an afterthought, Thorndike will have it.’

  ‘Who is this Thorndike?’ the German asked, although he was not interested in knowing more.

  ‘That is difficult to answer. Thorndike is just a man. Comes and goes. Does a job here and there. He is of no importance, but useful. Brings things, you know. Mail.’

  The simplicity of the clay-coloured landscape was very moving to the German. For a moment everything was distinct. In the foreground some dead trees, restored to life by the absence of hate, were glowing with flesh of rosy light. All life was dependent on the thin lips of light, compressed, yet breathing at the rim of the world.

  ‘That will be convenient then, and I shall leave at once on the arrival of Thorndike.’

  Never had an issue of greater importance been decided so conclusively by an apparently insignificant event.

  ‘Take it easy, though,’ laughed Boyle, who began to suspect that other spurs had been applied to his particular friend.

  ‘Oh, it is natural to regret the waste of time,’ Voss shrugged and fenced. ‘And to wish to make amends for it.’

  So he explained, but did not tell, absorbed as he was in his discovery: that each visible object has been created for purposes of love, that the stones, even, are smoother for the dust.

  As darkness fell upon a world emptied for its complete reception, the German began to tremble in a cold sweat, with the consequence that, when the black woman brought the inevitable leg of charred mutton, he announced to his astonished host:

  ‘I do not think I will eat tonight. I am suffering from some derangement of the intestines.’

  And avoided further explanation under cover of the difficulties of language.

  For an hour or more he proceeded to pace up and down by himself, only interrupting his walk to stoop and pat the station dogs. These animals were quick to sense a desire to express tenderness, and, indeed, he was shaking with it.

  To what extent would he be weakened? He could not help but wonder, fear, and finally resent.

  As they waited for Thorndike, the strange moons continued to hang above Jildra, and even by day there would appear to be a closed eye, which signified the presence of a moon. Voss was for ever biting his whiskers and cracked lips. How thirsty the days were already, the ground opening in cracked mouths, in spite of that good rain, which people will always tell you has fallen. The German would go to the water-bag, and drink down pannikins full of the tepid canvassy water, which flushed his stomach. He already felt physically sick. Somewhere behind his knee-cap a time was beating, as he waited for the man Thorndike to arrive.

  Early on a certain morning, the leader was suddenly moved to issue orders.

  ‘I will have all cattle, goats, and sheep that we are taking with us, mustered and driven into the vicinity of the homestead,’ he announced to Boyle. ‘Dugald and Jackie must go with Turner and the boy. Ralph’ – he addressed the young grazier – ‘I will put in charge of these operations. Tomorrow we will make a start.’

  ‘You are not waiting, then, for this feller Thorndike?’ Boyle asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Voss. ‘It is certain. He will come before evening.’

  Boyle was rather diverted by this intelligence.

  ‘The smoke messages have got going?’ he inquired lazily.

  ‘Mr Judd,’ Voss called, going out into the languid morning of young, silky air, ‘I wish you to make a careful count of all firearms, tools, instruments, und so weiter, that nothing is overlooked. You, and Frank, will see that horses and mules are brought in and securely hobbled tonight.’

  Soon dogs were barking, children laughing, threads of dust weaving in and out of one another as a pattern began to form upon the bare earth at Jildra. Harry Robarts was by now brave enough to jab spurs into his horse’s sides, so that it would leap into action and execute proud and important figures. Harry himself had become leaner, for the distance had thinned him out. Yet, paradoxically, his once empty face was filled with those distances. They possessed, but they eluded him; he was still, and perhaps would remain always, lost.

  Now, however, Harry and those with him were riding forth. Their purposes were set in motion.

  Mr Judd went immediately, with his quartermaster stride, and began to account for such tackle as was in his charge. Frank Le Mesurier had already spotted the mules and horses, and their attachment of tails, occupied in the shade some little distance off. He would ride over later, as they moved to open pastures with the cool, and turn them with his whip, and they would drum the depths out of the earth as they raced up the flat towards the homestead, and pull up sharp at the yards, on their knees almost. The sky would be peacock-coloured then.

  In the heat, after the men had left to muster, Mr Judd was proceeding methodically. He had a scrap of crumpled paper, on which he would make his own signs. There was a stub of lead pencil in his mouth. One of his thumbs had been badly crushed by a sledge-hammer long ago, and had grown, in place of a nail, a hard, yellow horn. Now as he worked, he experienced a sense of true pride, out of respect for what he was handling, for those objects, in iron, wood, or glass did greatly influence the course of earthly life. He could love a good axe or knife, and would oil and sharpen it with tender care. As for the instruments of navigation, the mysticism of figures from which they were inseparable made him yet more worshipful. Pointing to somewhere always just beyond his reach, the lovely quivering of rapt needles was more delicate than that of ferns. All that was essential, most secret, was contained for Judd, like his own spring-water, in a nest of ferns.

  Sometimes he would breathe upon the glass of those instruments, and rub it with the cushiony part of his hand, of which the hard whorls of skin and fate were, by comparison, indelicate.

  But now he complained:

  ‘Frank, I cannot find that big prismatic compass in the wooden frame.’

  ‘It cannot have got far, a big thing like that,’ answered Le Mesurier, who was not greatly interested.

  ‘These blacks would thieve any mortal thing, I would not be surprised,’ the convict said.

  He was sweating, as big men will, in sheets, but his upper lip was marked by little stationary points of exasperation, anxiety, even cold despair.

  He was looking everywhere for that compass.

  ‘Frank,’ he said, ‘it has got me bested. It will not be found.’

  Then he went down to the gunyas, and cursed the black gins that were squatted there, looking in one another’s hair, laughing with, and tumbling the small, red-haired children. The black gins did not understand. Their breasts became sullen.

  To Judd, the peculiar problem of the lost instrument was as intricate as the labyrinth of heat, through which he trudged back.

  Mr Voss was furious, of course, because he had been expecting something, if not necessarily this.

  Judd went away.

  In the late afternoon when the other men rode in, and were watering their horses and coiling their whips, they were closely questioned, but there was not a single one could honestly feel the compass concerned him personally. At best amused, at worst they were irritated at having to turn out their packs.

  Voss, who had come down to the tents, a prophetic figure in his dark clothes, said that the instrument must be found.

  Boyle, too, had come across. He had questioned the blacks at the camp, and was pretty certain no native was withholding the prismatic compass.

  ‘Then there is no explanation,’ Judd cried, and flung his own saddle-bags from side to side, so that some of the onlookers were put in mind of the flapping, of a pair of great, desperate wings.

  ‘It is as if I was dreaming,’ the convict protested.

  For almost all, the situation had begun to assume the terrible relevant irrelevance of some dreams. They stood rooted in the urgent need to find the compass.

&n
bsp; Which Judd, it now appeared, was drawing out of his own saddle-bag.

  ‘But I never put it there,’ said his shocked voice. ‘There was no reason.’

  His strong face was weak.

  ‘No reason,’ he added, ‘that I can think of.’

  But he would continue to fossick in desperation through his memories of all evil dreams.

  Voss had turned and walked away. The incident was closed, if not to his positive advantage, to the detriment of some human being. Yet, there were times when he did long to love that which he desired to humiliate. He recalled, for instance, the convict’s wife, whose simplicity was subtle enough to survive his proving of her lie. He remembered, with some feeling, the telescope that Judd himself had rigged up, and found unequal to its purpose of exploring the stars. Associated with such thoughts, of human failure and deceit, the German’s shoulders narrowed as he flumped across the dusty yard. Judd’s humiliation over the discovered compass forced him up the side-tracks of pity, until, suddenly, he jibbed. Delusion beckoned. His throne glittered achingly.

  Down at the tents, Judd said:

  ‘Mr Palfreyman, I did not put that compass there.’

  ‘I believe you,’ answered Palfreyman.

  ‘There was no reason.’

  There is always a reason, Palfreyman corrected silently, and would continue to search for this one.

  Their stay at Jildra had become for the ornithologist a season of sleep-walking, dominated by his dream – it could have been – of tortured moonlight and rustling shadow, that retrospect had cast in lead. This brooding statue stumped horribly for him under the glass moon, but although Palfreyman watched – in fact, he continued to do so long after they had moved on – Voss the man did not walk again.

  And now, at Jildra, something else was about to happen. Blacks scented it first upon the evening air, and dogs were half inclined to snarl, half to fool with one another. Then some of the white men, who had washed their necks and faces of dust, and who were smelling of dried water and soap, and an aggressive, crude cleanliness, came up formally from the tents to announce that a team was approaching. Distantly already the barking of strange dogs was going off like pop-guns, and the dogs of Jildra had begun to whine and to bite at one another’s shoulders, to express their joy and solidarity.

  ‘It is Thorndike, then,’ said Voss, running out without a hat, which left the white of his forehead exposed: he could have been emerging from a mask.

  ‘Damn me, if you were not right,’ contributed Boyle.

  The latter was now permanently good-tempered, indifferent, acceptant, and, above all, amused.

  In time the team was straining into Jildra, with that gallantry of animals reaching a goal. The bullocks groaned to a stop, and were turning up their eyes, dilating their nostrils, and, to the last, resisting the heavy yokes with their necks.

  Thorndike, a scrawny, bloodshot individual, did not make any great show of pleasure, so insignificant and regular were his habits. Nor did he pay much attention to the German, about whom people had been talking; he merely handed over, as he had undertaken. For Thorndike brought, in addition to the expected provisions for Jildra, an axe that had been left behind at the station of a Mr McKenzie with whom the expedition had camped some miles farther back, as well as a bundle of mail, tied with a bow of string, for the German cove.

  Voss took the mail, and was striking his leg with it as he asked Thorndike questions, flat ones about his journey and the weather, at which the other rasped back in some amusement. Thorndike had never seen a German, but was determined not to look at this one. So he spat, and worked his adam’s apple, and went about freeing his bullocks.

  Presently, Voss went inside and untied his letters.

  There were instructions and digressions, naturally, by Mr Bonner. There was a friendly line from Sanderson; newspapers; and a lady had contributed a fly-veil, made by her own hands, out of knotted, green silk.

  There was also the letter, it would appear, from Miss Trevelyan.

  When he had read or examined all else, throwing pieces of intelligence to his host, who had by this time pushed back his plate, and was picking his teeth and mastering his wind, Voss did break the seal of Miss Trevelyan’s letter, and was hunching himself, and spreading and smoothing the paper, as if it had been so crumpled, he must induce it physically to deliver up its text.

  Finally he read:

  Potts Point,

  – Nov., 1845

  Dear Mr Voss,

  I must hasten to thank you for your letter, which arrived at its destination several days ago, by Newcastle packet. If the length of time needed for mine to reach you should make you suspect an utter unwillingness on my part to reply, you must take into account great and exonerating distances, as well as the fact that I have been compelled by the substance of what you have written to give it the deepest possible consideration. Even after such thought, I confess it is not clear what answer one in my position would be expected to return, and, since it is one of my most stubborn weaknesses to try to reach conclusions without the benefit of advice, I must, I fear, remain at least temporarily confused.

  Your letter was unexpected, to say the least of it: that anybody possessed of your contempt for human frailty should make so unequivocal a proposition to one so well endowed with that same frailty! For, on at least one memorable occasion, you did not attempt to conceal your opinion that I was a person quite pitiably weak in character. Having formed a similar estimate of myself, I could not very well reject your judgement, even though the truth one has perceived is, if anything, more distasteful when confirmed by the mind of another, a mind, moreover, that one has held in some esteem. That you made me suffer, I cannot deny, but the outcome or purpose of that suffering still remains to be understood. In the meantime, if nothing else, my lamentable frailty does accuse my arrogance.

  Arrogance is surely the quality that caused us to recognize each other. Nobody within memory, I have realized since, dared so much as to disturb my pride, except in puppyish ways. Men, I am inclined to think, are frightened if their self-importance does not impress. You, at least, were not frightened, but ignored me so coldly that I was the one to become alarmed – of my insignificance and isolation.

  So, Mr Voss, we have reached a stage where I am called upon to consider my destroyer as my saviour! I must take on trust those tender feelings you profess, and which I cannot trace clearly through the labyrinth of our relationship. Can you wonder that I am confused? All the more since I have remained almost morbidly sensitive to the welfare of one whose virtues do not outweigh the many faults I have continued to despise.

  Now the question is: can two such faulty beings endure to face each other, almost as in a looking-glass? Have you foreseen the possible outcome? And have you not, perhaps, mistaken a critical monster for a compliant mouse?

  I, personally, to assume a most unseemly candour, would be prepared to wrestle with our mutual hatefulness, but mutually, let it be understood. For I do respect some odd streak of humanity that will appear in you in spite of all your efforts (after reading poetry, for instance, or listening to music, while your eyes are still closed), just as I regret most humbly my own wretched failures to conquer my unworthiness.

  Only on this level, let it be understood, that we may pray together for salvation, shall you ask my Uncle to accept your intentions, that is, if you still intend.

  In any event, Mr Voss, I do thank you once again for your kind letter, and shall intercede as ever for your safety and your happiness.

  Your sincere,

  LAURA TREVELYAN

  Then Boyle, who had been dozing in a pleasant apathy of tobacco and half-digested meat, opened his eyes, and asked:

  ‘Nothing bad, I hope, Voss?’

  ‘Why should it be bad? No,’ said the German, who was getting up, and mislaying and dropping other papers. ‘On the contrary, I have received nothing but favourable news.’

  And he tied the string tightly and methodically on his papers.

>   ‘I am glad of that,’ answered Boyle. ‘Nothing can upset a man’s digestion like doubtful news. For that reason, I am glad I no longer receive letters, except those in black and white.’

  ‘None of my acquaintances is in the habit of corresponding with coloured inks,’ said Voss. ‘I think I will turn in soon, Boyle, so as to make this early start that we have anticipated.’

  Now he went out into the darkness, ostensibly to issue last orders to his men, though in fact to hide himself, and failed in his real purpose, as he embraced the past tremblingly beneath a vast audience of stars.

  On his return he began to notice Palfreyman, who had been there all the time, seated within the candlelight, sketching for his own pleasure a big, dreamy lily propped in a tin mug.

  ‘What is this?’ asked Voss, with unduly warm interest.

  ‘It is a lily,’ said Palfreyman, with grave concentration on his silvery sketch, ‘which I found in the red soil along the second of the waterholes.’

  Voss made a lazy guess at the variety.

  ‘With these seeds?’ asked Palfreyman.

  Voss squinted. They were of a distinct shape, like testes, attached to the rather virginal flower.

  When the German had undressed and was lying in his blanket, he and Palfreyman began to recall other botanical specimens they had found, of unorthodox seed formation. Boyle had retired by now, and it was a pleasant, drowsy conversation that drifted between the two men, containing friendship, because it made no effort to.

  Perhaps it is I who am frequently to blame, Palfreyman decided, and would not move for fear of breaking the spell.

  ‘Will you not go to bed, Palfreyman?’ Voss yawned at last. ‘We start tomorrow early.’

  ‘It is the lily,’ Palfreyman said, and sighed. ‘We may never see it again in all its freshness.’

  Voss yawned.

  ‘It may be very common.’

  ‘It may,’ Palfreyman agreed.