Voss

by Patrick White

  For he had already sensed, early in their association, that the young man was possessed of a gristly will, or daemon, not unlike his own. Now, smiling his approval, the German’s lips were tinged with the green of lightning.

  Le Mesurier, however, did not return the smile, but got upon his horse, which had remained saddled, in readiness, it seemed, and went.

  From the beginning, the rider had to urge his horse. As the almost dislocated withers in front of him proceeded to toil back up the ridge, the mare’s ears remained sad, her body had become a slab, or muleflesh, for horses do associate themselves with the more rational behaviour of men, mules with none. Through the irrational, brown dusk, premature by two hours, man and horse were moving. Clouds were now so close their weave was visible, bundles of ever dirtier stuff, that were swirling and fraying, even tearing in places on the rock summit. Rocks of thunder were rolling together, so that at times the man did duck his head to avoid collision with the approaching storm, and in doing so, the brim of his hat became more ridiculously ineffectual, beating on his eyelids, and causing him pain.

  Then he dragged the hat off, and stuffed it into his saddle-bag.

  At once his matted hair began to stream out, and as the wind encircled the pale, upper half of his forehead, he seemed to be relieved of some of the responsibility of human personality. The wind was filling his mouth and running down through the acceptant funnel of his throat, till he was completely possessed by it; his heart was thunder, and the jagged nerves of lightning were radiating from his own body.

  But it was not until the farther side of the ridge, going down, and he was singing the storm up out of him, that the rain came, first with a few whips, then with the release of cold, grey light and solid water, and he was immersed in the mystery of it, he was dissolved, he was running into crannies, and sucked into the mouths of the earth, and disputed, and distributed, but again and again, for some purpose, was made one by the strength of a will not his own.

  Angus and Turner, who had crawled under a rock ledge, which provided almost a small, uncomfortable cave at the foot of the hills, looked out as darkness fell, and saw Frank Le Mesurier descending the slope. They called, and he headed towards them, the mare carefully picking her way.

  The faces of the troglodytes were shiny like their own rock, as their skins had become soaked before reaching shelter. To the messenger who had just descended through the cloud, they also looked repulsively human. Sheep were huddling in the deluge, in which some of them had lain down with the obvious intention never to rise. Against rocks and scrub, lean goats were flattening their sides. The goats were most shocked by the uncompromising rain.

  Le Mesurier delivered his message without dismounting.

  ‘Well, you had better hobble your nag, Frank, and come inside. It is good in here, and you will be one more to carry a supply of mutton in the morning.’

  Thanks to their rock roof, and a handful of comparatively dry sticks, the drovers had even succeeded in starting a modest fire, and had begun to put away some stale damper and shreds of fibrous meat to the accompaniment of its sputtering. They were happy, their eyes suggested, but within human limits, so that Le Mesurier, who had been admitted to infinity at times, did not wish to enter their circle.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I shall go straight back.’

  ‘You are mad,’ shouted Angus, who had learnt to cherish his own limitations as a sure proof of sanity.

  ‘You will break your bally neck in the dark,’ shrieked Turner, hoping to encourage that possibility by his warning.

  Then the lightning leapt again. For a moment the green horseman looked down at the faces of the two human animals in their kennel of rocks. However, as wind and rain were stopping mouths, he did not open his, but turned his spindly horse. Nor did he know how to address those individuals into whose souls he saw most clearly; he was too startled by them.

  The mare was whinging but hopeful as she started back through the teeth of rocks. The rider gave her her head, and trusted to her instinct. By this time he was rather sunken, as if he had been so firmly contained by his envelope, that he had failed to burst out and rise to the heights of the storm. And now Voss began to go with him, never far distant, taunting him for his failures, for his inability to split open rock, and discover the final secret. Frank, I will tell you, said his mentor, you are filled with the hallucinations of intellectual power: I could assist you perhaps, who enjoy the knowledge that comes with sovereignty over every province of illusion, that is to say, spiritual power; indeed, as you may have suspected, I am I am I am …

  But the young man had been submitted to such a tumult of the elements, and now, of his own emotions, he failed to catch the divine Word, only the roll of thunder departing upon the drums of wax. So he shook his numbed head, until his ears rattled.

  Voss was grinning. The rider could see the mouth, for the rain had been folded away into the outer darkness. All around there was a sighing of wind, and a moon, the loveliest of all hallucinations, had slid into being. Its disc spun, and was buried, and recovered, cutting the mad, white hair of the clouds.

  On the edge of the ridge, the mare paused for a while, and was swaying, and raising her head. Then she plunged down towards what, she knew, was certainty. But in that interval of rest upon the summit, Voss and the rider had touched hands, the same glint of decomposition and moonlight started from the sockets of their eyes and from their teeth, and their two souls were united in the face of inferior realities.

  So like clings to like, and will be saved, or is damned.

  Riding down the other side, the young man conceived a poem, in which the silky seed that fell in milky rain from the Moon was raised up by the Sun’s laying his hands upon it. His flat hands, with their conspicuously swollen knuckles, were creative, it was proved, if one dared accept their blessing. One did dare, and at once it was seen that the world of fire and the world of ice were the same world of light; whereupon, for the first time in history, the third, and dark planet was illuminated.

  As he let himself be carried down the shining hillside, that was shown to be strewn with snares of jet now that the moon was fully risen, Le Mesurier was shivering. He who had carried the sun for a moment in his breast was frozen in his own moonlight. His teeth were tumbling like lumps of sugar. Any hope of salvation was, ironically, an earthly one, a little smudge of light from a candle-end, from behind a skin of canvas, at the foot of the hill.

  More ironically still, the light came from the tent of Voss, who was writing in his journal, like a methodical man. The others, on that night of rain and discomfort, had made an effort to overcome the darkness, but had fallen at once into a steamy sleep; they had not bothered even to sort out the bodies, and were bundled all hugger-mugger in the second tent.

  ‘Is that you, Frank?’ called Voss.

  ‘Yes,’ said Le Mesurier, addressing the luminous canvas.

  ‘Did you give this message?’ the German asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In what way will the sheep behave, when they are finally abandoned?’ the light asked. ‘Do you suppose they will be in any way aware, as they stand amongst those bushes? The silence, for one thing, will sound more intense as it penetrates the wool. Still, there will be water, and grass, and they will drink and graze before they lie down and die. It is, in any case, perfectly normal for sheep to die.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And we shall enjoy the advantage of the mutton from those that Ralph and Turner kill. We shall dry the meat in the sun. If there is a sun. Do you suppose, Frank, that the weather will permit of drying the meat?’

  But Le Mesurier had gone.

  And Voss, the man who was left alone, continued after a while to write in his journal.

  After hobbling his tired mare, Le Mesurier, the still-possessed, bundled into the second tent, in which the others were sleeping, their white bellies afloat upon the darkness, together with their dreams and snores. The young man, after dropping his wet and wrinkled rags, wrapped h
imself in a blanket, but continued to shiver. He was tortuously stooped in the low tent, as in a womb. When he had rummaged in his pack, and found a little candle-end – very precious – and the rather dented tinder-box, and the flame was at last trembling on the wick, he lay down, but still shivering and gritting his teeth, struggling in the grip of a fever, it would appear.

  Watching through his eyelashes, Harry Robarts saw Mr Le Mesurier take out that book in which he wrote so frequently. As he tossed and shivered, he was at great pains to form the words, Harry observed. Or the man’s dry mouth would suck at the air for some renewed sweetness of suffering. Until the boy, who shared the same transparent womb, longed to burst out into a life he did not know, but sensed. He was throbbing with excitement, while also afraid, as the teeth of the moon sawed away at the sodden canvas, as the slippery earth continued to heave, and the man to write in painful forms. At last Le Mesurier fell back with his head upon the saddle, and Harry Robarts watched the transparent fingers pinch the flame off the stinking wick.

  Soon there was not a man awake on either side of those sharp hills, for Angus and Turner had quickly fallen into a stupor against their bit of a hissing fire.

  Recently these two had become inseparable, if only through appreciation of each other’s mediocrity. In consequence, neither could apprehend the nature of their relationship, and each was flattered by it. The seedy Turner, who could not see straight except by squinting, and then was crooked in his final vision, who was spewed up out of what stew nobody had ever heard, and who had begun lately to suffer from the suppurating boils, this Turner was in love with the rich young landowner, and could not let him go from his side without he felt the draught. Ralph Angus, who had been so glossy, whose whiskers in normal circumstances wore a gallant, reddish curl – he was, in fact, the colour of a chestnut horse – would have been amused at Turner’s friendship if he had not become grateful for it. They could speak together, he had discovered, of little things. They would talk about the weather and the state of their stomachs, and end up feeling quite elevated by conversation. They would sigh like dogs, and enjoy the silences. If each had something to conceal, for Turner was possessed of cunning, and had been a pickpocket at times, and perhaps had even killed a man, while Angus had known the Palladian splendours – his godmother was the daughter of an earl, his nose had been wiped for him, and his father had grabbed several thousand colonial acres, by honest means – these running sores in their past lives had been mercifully healed by that nothingness to which their long journey had reduced the two friends.

  On the night of rain when they had made themselves at home beneath the rock ledge, they were noticeably united, the splendid, glossy gentleman, who had by now acquired the colour and texture of a coconut, and the yellow reprobate, whose body was crying out through the mouths of his boils. After they had lit their little fire, of which the spitting alone was a comfort, they began to say kind things to each other.

  ‘Here is a pinch of tea,’ Turner said. ‘You take your quart, Ralph, and brew for yerself. I have not got the stomach for even a hot cup of tea.’

  ‘But you are eating,’ Angus pointed out.

  ‘By George, so I am. It is from habit, I assure you,’ said Turner, crooking his finger a bit from proximity to the gentleman.

  ‘Then you will drink from habit, too, idiot,’ said Angus. ‘Or I will pour it into the ground.’

  ‘If you please, then,’ said Turner, with genteel resignation.

  The quart pot was soon sighing on the damp sticks. As the scum rose from the water, the men would knock it off. Each was seated tailorwise, sticking the fragments of food into his mouth, and staring far too intently at the pot, the alternative of which would have been his mate’s face.

  It was at this point and from this position that they had looked out and seen the horseman descending the hill.

  What they had always suspected, the lightning at once made evident: that the rider was not of their own kind. Even before he was gone, each of the cave-dwellers was raging, and longing to communicate his rage. They were brought together closer than before. Each wondered what the other had seen, although neither would have dared to speculate on the nature of his vision. Thought is very disturbing when it lights up the mind by green flashes.

  Some time after Le Mesurier had left, while Turner was still picking his teeth and digesting what he had eaten, he did remark:

  ‘That is one I cannot cotton to, Ralph.’

  The young landowner winced, and was loth to criticize a man who might possibly be considered a member of his own class.

  ‘He is an odd sort of cove. He is different,’ finally he replied.

  ‘Not so different from some,’ Turner said.

  ‘What do you imply by that?’ asked Angus, who did not care to become involved in any unpleasantness.

  He was what you would call a pleasant fellow, no one had anything against him, and now he did a little repent of his rash friendship.

  ‘Eh?’ mumbled Turner, resentfully.

  ‘What do you mean, then?’

  ‘Voss is what I mean. And Le Mesurier.’

  Angus tingled.

  ‘In this expedition, which is what it is called,’ Turner said, or whispered, rather, from habit, ‘we are made up of oil and water, you might say, and will not run together, ever.’

  The whites of the young grazier’s eyes had remained very clear.

  ‘I have every intention,’ he said, ‘of running together with Mr Voss, who is the leader of the expedition.’

  ‘Oil and water,’ Turner chanted.

  The fire hissed.

  ‘We understand each other, Ralph, you and me.’

  The rich young landowner did sincerely yearn for understanding with his friend.

  ‘As that is a quart pot, there is no mistake about it,’ Turner assured him, and the black pot did look most convincing. ‘But that there Le Mesurier’ – how the speaker hated the name, and would roll it between his tongue and his palate, more often than not, as if to gather up a bad taste, and spit it out – ‘that Le Me-sur-ier would keep a cove guessing for years. Then you would wake up one fine day, and find as the pot was not at all what you and me thought it to be.’

  The grazier was fascinated by the pot.

  ‘How so?’

  He smiled to hide his intense interest.

  ‘People of that kind will destroy what you and I know. It is a form of madness with them.’

  The young landowner clucked with his tongue against his teeth. He was unhappy once more. A runnel of rainwater, besides, was trickling down his neck. He was for ever shifting.

  ‘I know,’ pursued Turner, ‘because I have looked in the book.’

  ‘What book?’

  ‘Why, the book that Frank is always writing in.’

  Angus was not aware that such a book existed, but pretended that he was. Thus he would conceal his ignorance of most things.

  ‘If it is his private property,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Naow, naow, Ralph,’ said Turner. ‘What is that?’

  The hair stood up on the back of the young man’s neck. He avoided an answer.

  ‘What was in this book?’ he asked, unhappily.

  ‘Mad things,’ Turner replied, ‘to blow the world up; anyhow, the world that you and me knows. Poems and things.’

  ‘Poetry can be very enjoyable,’ said Angus, who had memories of young ladies seated after dinner beside lamps.

  ‘I do not deny that,’ Turner hastened to agree; ‘I am partial to a good read of it meself. But this was like, you might say, Ralph, like certain bits of the Bible. They are cut up, like, but to make trouble, not to make sense.’

  As trouble was Turner’s own particular province, his mouth was now watering, and his eyes shone.

  ‘We have no right to make such comparisons, you know,’ insisted Angus, whose doubts of his friend had grown great.

  ‘Go on, Ralph,’ said the latter. ‘If a man don’t assume his rights, nobody is going to give �
�em to him.’

  The young grazier looked out into the night, on which a moon had risen. Black wings were continually sweeping the surface of the silver plain. It was the wind hustling the clouds, of course. But on several occasions during the journey, his own thoughts had developed a span that had carried them almost out of his control.

  ‘This is what I think, Ralph,’ Turner was saying, ‘mind you, in confidence, seeing as how we are mates. I think that Le Mesurier will in the end turn out to be in league with Voss. It is the oil, see? And that barmy boy, why, Harry would not harm a fly, but oil, oil, see, he must go over, too.’

  Ralph Angus tossed what had been his handsome head. So horses will discourage the March fly.

  ‘I will not discuss Mr Voss,’ he said. ‘Besides, there is no question of going over to him. We are all with him.’

  ‘Discuss Mr Voss?’ spat Turner. ‘You cannot discuss what is not.…’

  His spittle appeared white-hot, as it curled and twisted on the embers of the lost fire.

  ‘Do you believe in God, Ralph?’ asked Turner.

  ‘I should think there are very few individuals so miserable as not to,’ answered the upright young man.

  Turner might have been rehearsing such a situation all his life.

  ‘I do not believe in God,’ he said.

  A water was dripping in the silver silence.

  ‘Not in nothing that I cannot touch.’

  He gave the quart an angry poke.

  ‘Do you think as Voss was reading my thoughts when he set hisself up? But I was not deceived.’

  ‘Are you not most unhappy?’ asked Angus, whom the disclosure had shocked considerably.

  ‘Oh, there is plenty of other things to believe in,’ Turner cried, looking in anguish at his friend’s face, which, however, avoided him.

  ‘Without dependin’ on God, who is the Devil, I would say, to have got us into a mess like this. There!’ cried the angry man. ‘That is what I think of Mr Bloomin’ Voss!’

  Young Ralph Angus was so shaken he felt he could no longer call upon his own considerable virility for support.