Voss

by Patrick White

The blacks themselves were disgusted by those of his gestures which conveyed a meaning. Several of the males made hissing noises, and the pan-handle was flung down.

  Hearing the scuffling and flumping that followed, and curses from Turner, and gibberish of natives, the German had come out of his tent, and entered into the situation.

  ‘Turner,’ he said, ‘your behaviour will always live down to what I would expect. You will please me by not molesting these people who are my guests.’

  Someone who had begun to snigger did not continue. It was often thus in the presence of Voss. His laborious attitudes would fill the foreground and become the right ones.

  Now he approached the black whose instincts had rejected Turner’s offer, and, holding out his hand, said stiffly:

  ‘Here is my hand in friendship.’

  At first the blackfellow was reluctant, but then took the hand as if it had been some inanimate object of barter, and was turning it over, examining its grain, the pattern of veins, and, on its palm, the lines of fate. It was obvious he could not estimate its value.

  Each of the white men was transfixed by the strangeness of this ceremony. It would seem that all human relationships hung in the balance, subject to fresh evaluation by Voss and the black.

  Then the native dropped the hand. There was too much here for him to accept. Although something of this nature had been expected by his companions, Voss appeared somewhat saddened by the reception his gesture had received.

  ‘They are at that stage when they can only appreciate material things,’ he said in some surprise.

  It was he who was in the wrong, to expect of his people – for as such he persisted in considering them – more than they were capable of giving, and, acknowledging his mistake, he promptly instructed the boy to fetch a bag of flour.

  ‘At least, sir,’ said Ralph Angus, ‘let us question them on the subject of the stolen cattle.’

  Dugald did exchange with the natives a few, unhappy, private words. Then all was mystery, in a concert of black silence.

  ‘No know,’ said Dugald, in that sick voice he would adopt for any of his failures.

  By this time the boy had lugged the flour into their presence, and Dugald was ordered to explain its virtues. This he did briefly, as people will confess unwillingly to the lunacy of some relative.

  The blacks were chattering, and plunging their hands into the flour, and giving floury smiles. Then they swooped upon the bag, and departed through the valley, laughing. While yet in sight, some altercation of a semi-humorous nature arose, and many hands were tugging at the bag. One old woman was seizing handfuls of the flour and pouring it upon her head. She stood there, for a moment, in veils of flour, an ancient bride, and screamed because it tickled. They were all laughing then, and running through a rain of flour, after which they trailed the empty bag, until it was dropped, finally, in ignoble rags.

  Such an abuse could have been felt most keenly by Voss, the benefactor, if at that moment the smells of roasting mutton had not arisen.

  ‘It is the dinner,’ cried Harry Robarts, quite forgetting the earlier stages of its preparation.

  Judd had fixed the carcass above the coals of a fire, in a kind of shallow trench, and now the golden sheep was rustling with juices and spitting fat. Slabs of hot meat were presently hacked off for the whole company, who for once omitted to gnaw the bones before throwing them to the dogs. All were soon bursting, but still contrived to stuff down some of the hard puddings that Judd had improvised out of flour and currants, and boiled in water; even these were good on that day. Afterwards the men lay in the grass, and embroidered on their past lives, stories such as nobody believed, but to which they listened contentedly.

  Even Voss descended from his eminence, and was reviewing the past through benevolent gauze.

  ‘I can remember in the house of my parents a green stove. It was composed of green tiles, you understand, of which the decoration was rampant lions, though they more resembled thin cats, it occurred to me as a boy.’

  Everybody listened to the German. Exhausted by food, mellow with Christmas, they no longer demanded narrative, but preferred the lantern slides of recollection. Into these still, detached pictures entered the simplest members of the party as into their own states of mind.

  ‘Round that green stove we would sit on Christmas Evening: the relatives, some acquaintances, old women living off friendship, one or two boys apprenticed by my father. We would sing the Christmas songs. There was always a tree, a Tannenbaum, smelling as such trees will when they bleed from fresh wounds. Between all this festivity, and sweet things that were passing round, and the hot wine, I would hear the streets. It was the snow, filling and filling the empty streets, until we were lost, it seemed, in Christmas.’

  The German paused.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘It was not altogether different. Except for the snow, selbstverständlich. There was the snow.’

  ‘And except that we are not lost,’ Judd felt compelled to add.

  Some of them laughed, and said they were not so sure. At that moment they would not have cared.

  ‘What did you use to eat, sir?’ asked Harry Robarts.

  ‘At Christmas, a goose. But on the Christmas Evening, always a fine carp.’

  ‘What is a carp, sir?’

  But how could the German answer, who was so far distant?

  In the cool of the evening, when those who had been feasting rose from their stupor of meat and dreams, Voss asked Judd to come with him, and they took horses, and rode out in the direction in which Jackie had gone to look for the lost cattle. It was not long before they had left behind all trace of that pleasant valley where they were camped, entering a dead country, in which the horses were continually stumbling, for they would plunge their feet into burrows or hidden pot-holes, and sink up to the pasterns in the crumbly earth.

  Once in the course of this hard going, the horse which Voss was riding shied at a snake. The fact that it was a live one was surprising, for all else in the landscape appeared to be dead. The horse was immediately protesting, with his breath and his forelock, and the whites of his eyes. In that sudden leap, the German’s left temple and part of his forehead were scored by the branch of a dead tree, nothing serious, indeed, he would not have thought anything more of the matter, if the blood had not begun to trickle down into his eyes.

  ‘You should attend to it, sir,’ said Judd, on noticing that his leader was brushing away the blood.

  ‘It is nothing,’ Voss replied.

  And frowned. With the result that the blood was again gushing, and tumbling down into his eyes.

  ‘Wait,’ said Judd.

  Astonishingly, Voss did. They were both reining in. They were jumping down upon the ground. The convict took a handkerchief that he had but lately washed in the river at the place where they were encamped, and with which he was now preparing to bind the German’s head.

  Should I let him? wondered the latter.

  But he was already submitting. He was bowing his head. He could smell the smell of the crumpled, but spotless handkerchief, which had been dried on spikes of grass, at leisure, in the sun. He could hear the convict’s breathing, very close.

  ‘Is that too tight, sir?’ Judd was asking.

  Although expert in being of service to others, frequently on such occasions he would experience a weakness so delicious that his skilful hands would bungle.

  ‘That is right. As it is,’ said Voss.

  To surrender itself into other hands is one of the temptations of mortal flesh, the German knew, and shivered for an instant.

  ‘Do you say that somebody is passing over your grave?’ he laughed.

  ‘There is some such saying,’ replied the convict, whose eyes were examining his work with a detached affection.

  When they had remounted and were riding on, Voss wondered how much of himself he had given into her hands. For he had become aware that the mouth of the young woman was smiling. It was unusually full and compassionate. Approba
tion must have gone to his head, for he continued unashamedly to contemplate her pleasure, and to extract from it pleasure of his own. They were basking in the same radiance, which had begun to emanate from the hitherto lustreless earth.

  ‘We will find it pretty rough going from now on, I expect, sir,’ interrupted Judd, who was ploughing forward somewhat in advance.

  ‘I have every confidence in our company,’ said the German.

  They rode on, and it could have been the gentle silence of evening that made them both grateful.

  Not long after this, on the banks of a dry creek, they came upon Jackie with seven head of cattle, or what remained of the lost herd.

  ‘You look all over?’ exploded the infuriated Voss.

  ‘All over,’ said Jackie, reasoning that this was what the white man wished to hear.

  ‘We could fan out in the morning, the whole lot of us,’ suggested Judd, ‘and perhaps snap up a few more.’

  As it was growing late, nothing else could be done for the present, but fall in behind the exasperating rumps of the recovered few, and return to camp.

  In the morning the convict’s plan was adopted by all but Palfreyman, who was occupied with the ornithological specimens he had taken while in the valley. He sat at work beneath a tree, brushing the flies off his neatly folded birds with a switch of leaves. So that the German was irritated to see him.

  ‘Perhaps it is as well you should remain, Palfreyman,’ he did say, contemplatively, ‘to guard against possible marauders.’

  But he continued to be furious with all, especially with Gyp, the big, half-Newfoundland bitch, that got beneath his horse’s feet, and then shrieked.

  Except that they discovered the hacked carcasses of two steers, the search for the missing cattle proved fruitless, and after several days it was decided to strike camp and push on without them. Only Palfreyman, it now appeared, had profited by their stay in that pleasant place, for the interlude of Christmas had faded, Turner was suffering from a fever, and two of the others from insect bites. Palfreyman had to try hard to conceal his personal contentment, but did not succeed in hiding it from Voss.

  ‘What shall we do,’ grumbled the latter, ‘when the back of the last mule is broken under the corpses of birds?’

  Palfreyman accepted this as a joke.

  And they pushed on.

  They were riding eternally over the humped and hateful earth, which the sun had seared until the spent and crumbly stuff was become highly treacherous. It was, indeed, the bare crust of the earth. Several of the sheep determined to lie down upon it and die. Their carcasses did not have much to offer, though the blacks would frizzle the innards and skin, and stuff these delicacies down their throats. The white men, whose appetites were deadened by dust, would swallow a few leathery strips of leg, or gnaw from habit at the wizened chops. Their own stomachs were shrivelling up. In the white light of dawn, horses and cattle would be nosing the ground for any suggestion of leaf, any blade of grass, or little pocket of rock from which to suck the dew. The ghosts of things haunted here, and in that early light the men and animals which had arrived were but adding to the ghost-life of the place.

  But it is what we expected, the German assured himself.

  His features had grown thinner, his eyes, of that pale, pure blue, were the clearer for this confirmation of vision by fact.

  Once they came across a party of blacks, trooping gaily over the grey earth. The blacks approached, laughing, and showing their white teeth. Unlike their fellows farther back, they proceeded to hail Dugald and Jackie. An exchange of cheerful civilities was taking place; then the thin line straggled on into the vastness. The women were carrying nets and children, but the men were free.

  It was afterwards learnt from Dugald that the party was on its way to eat the fruit of the bunya bunya.

  ‘Where?’ asked Le Mesurier, to whom those dark trees promised paradise.

  ‘Very far. Blackfeller walk,’ answered Dugald, growing sad. ‘Many sleeps,’ he added.

  So the white men continued westward through what could have been their own perpetual sleep, and the fruit of the mystic bunya bunya contracted in their mouths.

  Several days from there they came to a ridge, of hills even, at which a brigalow scrub whipped their flesh back to waking. Mules began to buck. The udders of those goats which had kidded were slashed and torn by twigs, and the glassy eyes of the most rational of all animals were seeing far too clearly as they advanced into chaos. On the farther side of the ridge, however, there was the suggestion of a creek, that is to say, a string of pools, filled with brown water or scum, for which the expedition made with all the speed it could muster, and but for curses, and skill in horsemanship, would have been trapped in it.

  As it was, two of the more obstinate mules succeeded in becoming bogged, and were only dragged out by concerted strength at the end of their leading ropes, and blows on the rump from the torn-off branch of a tree.

  One of these animals, it was seen, had staked itself. Dark blood was mingling on its fetlock with the slime of mud. It limped ostentatiously.

  Voss approached the animal with that directness which comes from controlled distaste, a thin figure possessed by will, and was immediately lying on his back, his face even thinner.

  Most of his party appeared as if drugged by circumstance, but Palfreyman was quick to dismount and run to their leader.

  ‘What is it, Mr Voss?’

  ‘It has got me in the stomach. The devil of a thing!’ the German did manage to convey, as he lay twisting his lips.

  At this point Judd arrived at his side, and the tortured man was carried back up the slope, and laid in the shade of some scrub, over which the convict rigged a sheet of canvas as additional shelter.

  As the German continued to bite his lips, and seemed incapable of uttering any but his own language, Judd took it upon himself to call a halt, and they camped there several days, treating the sick, for the fever-ridden Turner had contracted the diarrhoea, from the milk of a goat, he insisted, and there was, besides, the staked mule.

  Judd had soon organized the camp. He sent the supple Jackie out along a log to scoop the scum-water with a pannikin. Dugald unearthed the roots of trees, from which he shook a quantity of crystal water. Soon all were meagrely refreshed. Only the beasts were dissatisfied with their portion of scum; they would stand and murmur, with their heads held low, nosing for celestial dew.

  One evening when the pain had begun to leave him, and the skin of his face was less yellow, Voss sent for Judd and thanked him formally.

  ‘For your personal attention, Mr Judd, and kindness,’ said the stiff German, who was still stretched upon the ground like a breathing corpse, looking from beneath his eyelids.

  ‘A man does what he can,’ said Judd, and would have accepted the cat rather than the scourge of recognition.

  ‘But with no water,’ he blurted.

  A most shameful tenderness was taking the shape out of his mouth.

  He had, indeed, been forced to boil in a pot of scum the rags he had used to foment the German’s belly. Tinged by the mule’s hoof with saffron and purple, this part of his anatomy must originally have been ivory in colour, very thin, moreover, and private, so that, as he worked, the convict had been forced continually to turn his head, and turn his head, to look out into the haze, and thus avoid violating further the privacy, that almost sacrosanctity of which he was aware.

  Voss, who had felt more exposed on some less physical occasions, despised all sickness; he despised physical strength; he despised, though secretly, even the compassion he had sensed in the ministrations of Judd. His own strength, he felt, could not decrease with physical debility. But, was Judd’s power increased by compassion?

  He was continually observing the convict as the latter applied the miserable hot rags, and now, from beneath his eyelids, as he thanked the man for his services.

  ‘And particularly for seeing fit to assume command.’

  Judd stood there.
r />   ‘I did not take command, not intentional like.’

  ‘But it is for this that I commend you,’ answered Voss, looking ever deeper into Judd.

  ‘I did round up a few mules,’ the convict confessed. ‘And tell the men to see as the canvas was pegged down. And kill a beast. And send the blacks to look for water. Because I am a practical man.’

  ‘And mules must be rounded up. And men, men must be driven, although they blind themselves to the truth.’

  Then the convict protested with great vehemence:

  ‘Not men. It is not so with men.’

  This man was shaking, as if the wounds were opening in him.

  ‘Good, Judd,’ laughed Voss. ‘I will exonerate you from any such designs.’

  But when the fellow had gone away, he continued to suspect him of exercising great power, though within human limits. For compassion, a feminine virtue, or even grace, of some sensual origin, was undoubtedly human, and did limit will.

  So the German was despising what he most desired: to peel the whale-bone off the lily stem and bruise the mouth of flesh.

  Ah, he cried, rubbing his face against the leather of the saddle-bag.

  Then he lay more tranquilly upon the barren hillside. He thought about the woman whose consent was making her his wife. All twisted lusts had gone out of his body and the stunted trees. The sky was flowering at that hour, and the distant fields of vision. He lay breathing gently in this union of earth with light. He lay thinking of the wife from whose hands he would accept salvation, if he were intended to renounce the crown of fire for the ring of gentle gold. That was the perpetual question which grappled him as coldly as iron.

  In a few days Voss was up. His will walked erect, if not yet his emaciated body. As the others were cured of their ills, Turner of all but the grumbles, and the offending mule of its lameness, the German called Judd and Palfreyman and informed them of his decision to make a start on the following morning.

  It was a relief to put an end to inactivity on that scrubby slope. Life starts afresh with each fresh journey, even into the dust. So the forenoon and evening were filled with lively preparation.