Voss

by Patrick White

  How many people pass over that word, I wonder, and take it for granted. I will tell you something. In my foolishness I had made up my mind to work it in wool, for what purpose I had not decided, but to embroider it in some way for my own pleasure. First, I sketched the design on paper, and had actually begun in a variety of coloured wools: blue for distance, brown for the earth, crimson, why, I cannot say, except that I am obsessed by that colour. However, as I worked, the letters were soon blazing at me with such intensity that the most witless person alive must have understood their significance. So I put the work away, and now it is smouldering in the darkness of a cupboard.

  My dearest, at this distance, what can I do to soften your sufferings, but love you truly. Now that you have left behind the rich and hospitable country you have described, probably for some heartless desert, I pray that you are not filled with doubts. The moments of severest trial are surely the obscure details of a design that will be made clear at last – if we can endure till then, and for that purpose are we given to one another.

  Although my own happiness is incomplete, we continue here in a state of undisturbed small pleasures: picnics; morning calls (which you so despise, I seem to remember); a Mr McWhirter gave a lecture on the Wonders of India at the School of Arts at which my Aunt E. slept and toppled over. My Cousin Belle Bonner will dance her feet right off before she marries Lieut. Radclyffe. That event, for which we are already busily preparing, should take place in the early spring. There is every indication that Belle will reap all the rewards for her sweetness and beauty. I do hope so, for I love her dearly. Mr Radclyffe is resigning his commission, and they plan to settle on some land he has taken up in the Hunter Valley, at no great distance, I understand, from your friends the Sandersons.

  Now, dear, I can only pray that this will reach you, which I must finish without further ado, as my Uncle is calling from below and Mr Bagot (our messenger to Moreton Bay) is impatient to leave.

  I thank you for your kindness, and your thoughts, and await most anxiously the letter I know you will hasten to send me at the first opportunity for doing so.

  Ever your sincere

  LAURA TREVELYAN

  ‘Laura!’ they were calling. ‘Laura! Mr Bagot cannot wait.’

  ‘I am coming,’ cried Laura’s dry voice, which rattled the window-panes, ‘in one minute.’

  But she had to read first.

  Then she was appalled.

  ‘Oh,’ she protested, ‘I am not as bad as all this.’

  As she blistered her fingers on the sealing-wax.

  Immediately, her childishness, prolixity, immodesty, blasphemy, and affectations were intensified. They were opened up like wounds at which she would be for ever probing.

  ‘Laura!’

  Yet, at the time, I was sincere, she persisted, from the depths of her disillusion.

  Her own opinion did not console, however, and she went from her room, carrying in her hands extinguished fire.

  10

  SEVERAL of the mules had disappeared. Unlike such major disasters as the theft of the cattle on Christmas Eve, and the quiet death of the first sheep, with its neck outstretched along the ground, the latest incident was passed over lightly by the members of the expedition. Riding on towards the west, they were, naturally, the lighter for each loss, and so, must gain more easily on that future which remained a dusty golden to each pair of eyes.

  They rode, and they came eventually to a ridge of abrupt hills, dappled and dancing with quartz, at the foot of which some black women were digging with their sticks for yams. Such meetings had come to be accepted by all. The blacks squatted on their haunches, and stared up at the men that were passing, of whom they had heard, or whom they had even seen before. Once, the women would have run screaming. Now they scratched their long breasts, and squinted from under their bat’s-skin hands. Unafraid of bark or mud, they examined these caked and matted men, whose smell issued less from their glands than from the dust they were wearing, and whose eyes were dried pools. As for the men, obsessed by their dream of distance and the future, they glanced at the women as they would into crevices in hot, black rock, and rode on.

  By some process of chemical choice, the cavalcade had resolved itself into immutable component parts. No one denied that Mr Voss was the first, the burning element, that consumed obstacles, as well as indifference in others. All round the leader ranged the native boy, like quicksilver, if he had not been bronze. Jackie was always killing things, or scenting a waterhole, or seeing smoke in the distance, or just shambling off on his horse and standing on the fringes of liberty.

  Some way behind the advance party would come the spare horses and the pack-mules driven by Le Mesurier and Palfreyman. These two exchanged all manner of kindnesses and sympathy, but not their thoughts. Palfreyman was not sure which god Le Mesurier worshipped. Le Mesurier would address Palfreyman very distinctly, and smile encouragingly out of his dark lips, as if the ornithologist had been a foreigner. Well, he was, too, in that he was another man. Grown paler beneath the scales of salt, Palfreyman was sad, who would have melted with other men in love. Whenever he failed, he would blame himself, for he was by now persuaded of his inability to communicate, a shortcoming that made him more miserable, in that the salvation of others could have depended on him.

  Sometimes Palfreyman would leave Le Mesurier to bring on their mob of mules and horses, and ride ahead with the apparent intention of joining Voss. Then, keeping a discreet distance, he would wait for his leader to call him forward. But the German would not. He despised the ornithologist, for obvious reasons, which Palfreyman himself knew. Of rather delicate constitution, failures of this nature, together with the pains of prolonged travel, would often cause the latter to suffer tortures. So he would force upon himself all kinds of menial tasks, as penance for his disgraceful weakness. He would scour the fat from their cooking utensils with handfuls of the dry, powdery earth; he would strain the scum from any water they found; he even treated Turner, who had broken out in boils, presenting an appearance of the most abject human misery.

  All this the ornithologist taught himself to endure, and the voice of Voss saying:

  ‘Mr Palfreyman, in his capacity of Jesus Christ, lances the boils.’

  Mercifully, such incidents could occur only at their resting-places, dubious oases in the shimmering plain of motion. For the most part, personal feelings were numbed by the action of the animals that carried the party on.

  Behind the spare horses and the pack-mules would stumble the few skeletons of cattle, with Judd in attendance, and Harry Robarts. The convict could coax a flagging beast most marvellously. These shocking steers and one or two udderless cows would have laid down long ago, if little reflections of the man’s will had not continued to flicker in their fixed eyes. As from his cattle, the beef had dwindled from the man, but he was still large, because big-boned. Heavy, too, he would change horse frequently, to rest the back of the one he had been riding. If his frame appeared to have suffered less than that of any other human member of the expedition, undoubtedly this was because his earlier life had tempered it. His mind, moreover, had returned to his good body, and was now in firm possession, devoted to all those objects on which the party was dependent, as well as to the animals in his charge.

  Judd remained, besides, intensely interested in natural forms. For instance, he would pick at the black fruit of trees to release the seed; with the rough skin of his hand, he would rub a hot, white bone, whether of man or animal, as if to re-create its flesh; he would trace with the toe of his boot a footprint in the dust to learn its shape and mission. Afterwards, he would climb back upon his horse, and sit there looking indestructible. Seldom did the action of the sun reduce him to dreams of the future. Judd, it would sometimes appear, was himself an element.

  Once Voss and Jackie had discovered in some trees a platform of leafy saplings fastened together with strips of bark. They were still examining it when Judd and Harry caught them up.

  ‘Thes
e dead men,’ the native boy explained, and it was gathered that his people laid their dead upon such platforms, and would leave them there for the spirits to depart.

  ‘All go,’ said the blackfellow. ‘All.’

  As he placed his hands together, in the shape of a pointed seed, against his own breast, and opened them skyward with a great whooshing of explanation, so that the silky, white soul did actually escape, and lose itself in the whirling circles of the blue sky, his smile was radiant.

  Those who had heard and witnessed were thoughtful as they rode on. It was easy in that landscape to encourage thoughts of death.

  But the thick Judd, whose own soul had achieved fulfilment not by escaping from his body, but by returning to it, preferred to interpret the aboriginal illusion in terms of life. He who was wedded to earthly things would often invoke them as he rode along, and so, on the day they began to climb those quartz hills, he was thinking of his wife, who smelled of bread and soap, and who had the mole beside her nose, with the three little hairs sprouting from it. This he now saw with wonder, and much more from the years they had lived together, before he woke. Yet, he had got life in his sleep. His sons were evidence enough of that. Golden-skinned, they galloped the horses bareback down to water, and folded sheep at smoky dusk, and cut the lambs’ tails in season, with the blood spurting in little fountains into their laughing mouths. Suddenly his ribs were aching, and the welts of old punishment. The cat of love smote him in the hands of his great sons.

  In his craving for earthly love, Judd struck the stirrup-iron of Harry Robarts rather roughly with his own, and bruised Harry’s knee with his, for they were riding side by side.

  ‘Move over, son,’ the man complained. ‘You are riding that close we will be joined for ever at the stirrup-irons.’

  The boy lowered his eyes, and removed himself.

  ‘It was not a-purpose,’ he sulked.

  ‘Whichever way, it is not safe,’ said Judd.

  He had developed an affection for the sawney boy. It was out of pity, so he explained it, and in camp would cut for him choicer bits of starved mutton, or dried beef, and put them on the lad’s plate, and go away. Formed by circumstances, their relationship remained upon the whole respectful, although the boy was inclined to accept it for want of a better, and the man, often impatient, was sometimes even contemptuous of his mate.

  Now, as they rode together, it appeared that the boy was still thinking of the tree-platform recently discovered, and of the migration of aboriginal souls, for he murmured tentatively, dreamily:

  ‘Did you notice it go, Mr Judd, when Jackie opened his hands?’

  ‘Notice what?’ asked the man.

  ‘It was a white bird, like, very quick.’

  ‘Now, you have been seeing things,’ said the man.

  The boy sniggered, and slapped at his horse’s withers with the bundle of reins.

  ‘Did you not see?’ he persisted.

  ‘Nao!’ said the man.

  Then a steer stumbled, and fell, and they pushed and kicked it to its feet again. When it was walking, Judd resumed their conversation.

  ‘You had better tell Mr Voss of this here experience of yours, Harry, with birds. It would interest him.’

  For, if wax has to be wax, then it is difficult to resist a squeeze, and Judd was only human.

  ‘Not Mr Voss,’ said Harry. ‘Not on your life.’

  ‘Mr Voss would understand such things,’ smiled Judd.

  ‘That is why I would not tell him.’

  ‘Or he would take it out on yer for ever.’

  ‘Yes,’ Harry replied.

  It was obvious that all possibilities were contained for him in the single form of Voss.

  Judd had become as silent as a piece of leather. He would have liked to give the boy a present, and remembered a magnifying-glass with ebony handle that he had kept for years, in a shammy leather bag, in a box.

  They were riding and drowsing in perpetual dust, and stumbling on the rocky sides of the hills they were ascending, when Judd reached over and grabbed something from the trunk of a tree.

  ‘There you are, Harry,’ he said, and offered his closed, hairy hand. ‘There is a present for yer.’

  In the absence of ebony he was forced to such measures.

  ‘What is it?’ asked the boy, advancing his own hand, but cautiously.

  ‘No,’ laughed Judd, blushing under dirt. ‘Open your mouth, shut your eyes.’

  Then, when his suggestion had been followed, he popped a little lump of gum into the lad’s open mouth.

  ‘Aoh!’ cried Harry, wrinkling up.

  ‘No,’ insisted Judd. ‘Go on.’

  He was putting into his own mouth a similar knot of gum, to demonstrate his faith in the token, or else they would both die of it.

  So they rode, and sucked the gum, which was almost quite insipid in flavour, if slightly bitter. Yet, they were both to some extent soothed and united by its substance and their act, and were prodding the rumps of the broken cattle gently with their toes, as they rode back and forth in their oblique ascent of the glaring hill, until the boy glanced up, and there was Voss, looking not at him, but forward into the distance from a crag.

  As the lad stared at his leader, the sun’s rays striking the surrounding rocks gave the impression that the German was at the point of splintering into light. There he sat, errant, immaculate, but ephemeral, if he had not been supernal.

  ‘We will never get that far,’ muttered the gloomy Harry Robarts.

  ‘He would not want you to,’ said Judd.

  But the boy would have jumped from his horse, and torn his knees open on the rock. As it was, aware of some disloyalty to his leader, he spat out the remains of the bitter, and now offensive gum.

  ‘I will stick closer than anyone, in the end,’ said Harry. ‘I will sit under the platform. I will learn languages.’

  ‘That is mad talk,’ protested Judd.

  Both were uneasy over what had been said, because either it could have been the truth, or only half of it, and which was worse it was difficult to tell.

  ‘Mad,’ repeated Judd, hitting his horse with the hard, dirty flat of his hand. ‘First birds, and now languages. What languages will you learn, Harry? German?’ He had to laugh.

  ‘It does not matter; German or any other. I will learn to speak what Mr Voss will understand, and tell what I have inside of me.’

  ‘What purpose will it serve?’ asked Judd, looking at the closed rock.

  He had grown gloomy.

  ‘Some people can write it down,’ continued the boy. ‘But I cannot write no more than speak. Not like Mr Le Mesurier. He has written it. I seen the book.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Judd. ‘What has he written?’

  ‘How do I know?’ cried the exasperated Harry. ‘If I cannot read but big print.’

  So that man and boy were plunging heavily on identical horses amongst the rocks.

  ‘He is keeping a journal,’ the man decided, finally. ‘Like Mr Voss.’

  ‘It is not that,’ said the boy. ‘He has a different look. I have watched him writing it.’

  ‘Then we will see, I expect, some day,’ sighed the man.

  ‘Not us,’ sneered the boy. ‘These here deserts will see it, the pages blowing about, till the sun has burnt ’em. We will not be here.’

  ‘I will not die. Though I may not know enough to read,’ said the man through his blunt teeth.

  ‘We will all die.’

  ‘You are mad, Harry!’ cried Judd.

  ‘I know as I am somewhat simple,’ confessed the boy, ‘and cannot put things good.’

  He had even forgotten Voss, who, when he looked again, was gone over the other side, and in his place were the swords of the sun, slashing at the quartz, and with less spectacular effect at a long, soft cloud of celestial wool, such as the men would not have imagined after looking so long at the dirty stuff on their own sheeps’ wretched backs. However, the cloud itself grew dirtier with the afternoon, and wa
s increasing, and changing uglily.

  Towards evening, men, horses, mules, and cattle had crossed the ridge, and were gathered at a point where a gully, descending upon a plain, joined the dry bed of a river.

  ‘Sure enough it will rain,’ said the men, whose eyes were already shining with moisture, and lips filling, while horses whinnied painfully, and blunt noses of cattle were snuffing.

  In hopes that the river would be restored, it was thought to camp there where they were, and to beat a retreat if necessary to higher ground.

  ‘There are still the sheep, though,’ remembered Palfreyman.

  Then, with his arm, Voss flung away the sheep.

  ‘We must abandon these,’ he frowned. ‘They do not keep up. They are costly in time.’

  Because rain must fall at the expense of time, he frowned even at the clouds which would soon revive his own skin.

  ‘Given feed and water, the sheep will travel faster,’ Judd submitted.

  ‘No,’ said Voss. ‘No. There are too few. It is not worth it.’

  A flash of green lightning cut the brown air.

  ‘All sheep must be sacrificed,’ shouted the German against the thunder, and inhaled until it began to appear he might burst. Then he added, more practically: ‘There is nothing to prevent Ralph and Turner from killing a couple for our own use. We will dry the mutton and carry it on.’

  The hills were jumbling and rocking.

  ‘Somebody must inform Ralph,’ the German continued to shout, of necessity, at those others who were unbuckling girths, unknotting knots, hobbling horses, or stretching pathetic squares of canvas, to cover their unwillingness to return across the ridge.

  ‘Let me see,’ reflected the Voss who was as exultant as the storm.

  He was never so hateful as when identifying weakness, and now, in this brown storm, almost anybody could have been accused.

  Then, strangely, he altered his approach.

  ‘You, Frank, will better go,’ he ordered Le Mesurier, but making it a conspiracy between themselves.