Voss

by Patrick White

  ‘Mr Palfreyman has faith,’ he remembered, with the relief of a pious girl.

  ‘Oh,’ shrugged Turner, ‘Mr Palfreyman is a good man.’

  Consequently, he cancelled out.

  The rocks in the moonlight were on the verge of bursting open, but failed.

  ‘There is still Albert Judd,’ murmured Turner, becoming dreamy. ‘He is ours, Ralph. He will lead us out. He is a man.’

  ‘I have every confidence in Judd,’ Angus agreed, but shifted his position.

  ‘Of course you have,’ cried Turner. ‘You only have to look at his hands.’

  The young man, inside himself, in the most secret part of him, was disgusted. He could not have given himself into the hands of the convict. Something almost immodest was required of him.

  Finally, he laughed it off, showing his immaculate, man’s teeth.

  ‘How we are talking through our hats!’ he protested. ‘I expect we are all become a bit mad by this.’

  But Turner, whose mouth was stuck open, would have had to contradict his dreams. What remained of life was upon the lips, the slight, white rime of salt, which will also embitter dreams. He was snoring brokenly.

  Then the young man realized the distance he had come from the Palladian façade and emerald turf into that desert country, and how he had sunk himself almost gratefully to the level of his sleeping companion. If he even sensed the existence of levels higher than that to which he had been born, he was left to wrinkle his forehead at them. So he drowsed, and wondered. And looked quickly at the sleeping Turner. He would have condemned his friend for his own thoughts. For just then Ralph Angus had been seated, rather, at the convict’s side, and together they were mending hobble-chains. The jingly chains were delightful as a childhood game. The convict could do many simple, but fascinating things: he knew tricks, and rhymes, and could take a wart off by magic. Then the young man, who had by this time crossed right over, from the outside, into the circle of sleep, watched the hands take the rope, and lasso the chestnut horse. He had learnt it at Moreton Bay, Judd explained; while the horse fought back with all his strength, the vein bursting from his glossy neck.

  *

  The morning that followed the storm was set in a splendour of enamels. The two stiff men were practically strutting as they performed their early ritual. Afterwards they killed two of the more respectable sheep, or rather, Angus did, while Turner offered advice in such a way that it did seem as if he were taking part in the operation. This accomplishment he had acquired while employed as a labourer at Sydney.

  Once the sheep had been dressed and cut up into convenient quarters, they loaded their horses as best they could, and prepared to carry the meat across the hills, to be dried at the main camp.

  The weather and the prospect of comparative comfort had rendered Turner quite merry. As he rounded up the already skipping goats, which, it was presumed, would continue to accompany the expedition, as they had received no order to abandon them, he was belabouring his horse’s rump with his hand, and singing:

  ‘A-jew, a-jew kind sheep,

  The fatal hour has come.…’

  ‘Poor beggars,’ he added, ‘how glad I am to see the last of ’em.’

  And settled himself in the saddle for the ascent.

  As they slowly climbed, driving their small herd of goats, Ralph Angus looked back at the brown sheep standing in the plain, but turned at once, for he did not care to show any concern over what must be considered a commodity rather than an animal. Although this young fellow was possessed of great decency, naturally there were limits to what he was permitted to reveal.

  Nothing untoward occurred during the short journey, except that the two horsemen were soon caught in a black net of flies that had fallen upon the meat dangling from their saddles. This caused Turner to curse and kick, and his nag in consequence to sidle and pigroot. Each provoked the other to worse.

  ‘By cripes,’ the man screamed at the horse, ‘one or other of us will break his neck, and both of us is fly-blown; I can feel the maggots strolling on me skin. Ralph, can you not feel ’em?’

  Ralph made a face. As steam had begun to rise from the sodden earth, and the mind was already languishing, he decided it was unnecessary to reply to his friend. Besides, one of the advantages of such a friendship lay in the freedom to choose silence. Animals do not discuss. So the two men toiled on, each accepting the other’s shortcomings in gratitude for the continued enjoyment of his own. Small figures on the same mountain, they were more alike than not.

  When finally the party descended into the camp, it was found that Voss, Palfreyman, and the native boy were absent on some mission of a scientific nature, it was not specified what, and that Judd was unofficially in charge. The convict decided at once to cut the mutton into strips, and to light a fire, both to hasten the curing of their meat with smoke and to keep the flies away in the process. All of this he accomplished himself, for the others were not interested. Or else they had put themselves in his hands.

  There was an air of peace at that camp, since rain had drowned many doubts. Thick, turbulent, yellow water was now flowing in the river bed. Green, too, was growing in intensity, as the spears of grass massed distinctly in the foreground, and a great, indeterminate green mist rolled up out of the distance. Added to the gurgle of water were the thousand pricking sounds of moist earth, the sound of cud in swollen cheeks of cattle, and sighs of ravaged horseflesh that looked at last fed and knowing. There was the good scent of rich, recent, greenish dung. Over all this scene, which was more a shimmer than the architecture of landscape, palpitated extraordinary butterflies. Nothing had been seen yet to compare with their colours, opening and closing, opening and closing. Indeed, by the addition of this pair of hinges, the world of semblance communicated with the world of dream.

  However, the moment Judd pronounced the mutton sufficiently preserved by the combined action of smoke and sun, Voss decided they must strike camp the following morning, although there was not a man amongst them who would not have preferred to lie longer on his back and contemplate the scene. As for the German himself, he had been rejuvenated by the rain, and was making little jokes of a laborious nature. During the days of gathering green and kinder light, Laura had prevailed upon him to the extent that he had taken human form, at least temporarily. Like the now satisfied earth, he was at last enjoying the rewards of wedlock. His face was even fat.

  It happened on the eve of their departure from the camp beside the river that Voss and Palfreyman were seated in the brigalow shade much occupied with specimens they had taken. Palfreyman with the skins of a collection of birds, Voss with some of those butterflies which would shatter the monochrome by opening in it. Even dead, the butterflies were joyful.

  ‘Tell me, Mr Palfreyman,’ Voss asked, ‘tell me, as a Christian, was your faith sufficient to survive until paradise was reached?’

  ‘I am a poor sort of Christian,’ replied Palfreyman, who was handling a small bird of a restrained colour. ‘Besides,’ he added, ‘paradise may well prove to be mirage.’

  ‘Admittedly,’ laughed Voss, because it was a gay day. ‘I myself am skeptisch,’ he said, waving his hand to embrace both the present landscape and his mosaic of dead butterflies, ‘although I confess to be fascinated by delusions, and by those who allow themselves to be convinced. But you, it appears, are not convinced.’

  He said this quite kindly.

  ‘I am convinced,’ Palfreyman replied at last. ‘I believe, although there is a great deal I take on trust, until it is proved at the end. That it will be proved, I know.’

  ‘That is indeed faith,’ said Voss, again not unkindly, because the green plain had laid its mantle on him.

  ‘So my wife speaks,’ he added, from a distance.

  ‘Then you have a wife?’ asked Palfreyman, looking up.

  ‘No, no!’ protested Voss, with apparent amusement. ‘If she would exist!’ He laughed. ‘Such are the pitfalls of grammar. I acquire a wife by simple misuse of a ten
se.’

  Palfreyman suspected this simplicity, while knowing grammatical error to be a source of great amusement to the German.

  The latter now asked:

  ‘And you, Palfreyman, have no wife?’

  ‘No,’ the ornithologist confessed.

  ‘Not even a grammatical one,’ his companion murmured.

  This was a statement rather than a question. His mirth had obviously subsided, that laughter rickety in structure which belied the well-founded voice. People would remember the German’s voice, whereas they were briefly, nervously haunted by his laughter.

  Palfreyman also had exhausted a mood, it appeared, and was putting his work away, packing specimens and implements into the battered wooden cases. His celibacy was suddenly a miserable affair, that once had seemed dedicated.

  ‘No wives,’ he said, fastening a case firmly with a sharp, brass hook. ‘When I am at home, I live usually with my uncle, a Hampshire clergyman, for whom my sister keeps house.’

  Here Palfreyman paused in telling, and Voss, in spite of his natural inquisitiveness, hesitated to encourage more. Each man realized how little he knew of the other, for each had respected his companion’s privacy out of jealousy for his own. Besides, the country had absorbed them to a great extent, and now, in the deepening shade of evening, on the edge of the brigalow scrub, they were diffident of confessing to their own lives.

  Palfreyman, however, since he had dared a little, was being sucked back by the dreadful undercurrent of the past. As he could no longer hope for rescue, he continued.

  ‘My uncle’s vicarage would astonish any stranger expecting to find a house given up to normal human needs. Nor does this vicarage truly suggest the home of an inadequately rewarded, but devoted servant of God. Certainly it is noticeable for the advanced dilapidation of its grey stone, that the vines are opening up, or holding together, it is difficult to say which, but there are signs that the decay is not so much unavoidable as unheeded. If the roof should fall, as it well might, the neighbourhood would be roused by the most terrible shattering of glass, for the rooms are filled with glass objects, in a variety of colours, very fine and musical, or chunks with bubbles in them, and bells containing shells or wax flowers, to say nothing of the cases of humming birds. You see, my uncle, although a clergyman by name and intention, inherited a small fortune from a distant cousin. Some say that it was his downfall, because he could afford to be forgetful, but my sister, who is poor and dependent, suffers from the same disease – as well as from her infirmity, of which I will tell you.’

  The narrator’s life, it seemed, was so cluttered up, he could not easily make his way between the objects of threatened glass.

  ‘My sister spends little enough time in the house, and probably could not remember in any detail the contents of its rooms. Dust would head her attempted list, I expect. I do not doubt her acquaintances are surprised that anyone so neat and clean, of dress and person, should be able to endure the ubiquitous dust. Moreover, thanks to my uncle’s comfortable means, she enjoys the services of two maids. What her critics fail to remember is that she constantly omits to give orders to her easy-going maids, in her great hurry to rush outside, into the garden, or the woods. My sister is particularly fond of woodland and hedgerow flowers: violets, primroses, anemones, and such-like. She will venture out in the roughest weather, in an old grey cloak, to see her flowers, and will often return with an armful of the common cow-parsley that she has been unable to resist, or a string of scarlet bryony to wear round her neck.

  ‘As my uncle’s tastes are similar – he is always bringing in mosses to dry, and plants to press – the parish suffers the most shocking neglect. But the sheep remain fond of their shepherds, and will go to great lengths to protect them. I have noticed that if a man is afflicted with what one might call an honest weakness, people do tolerate that fault, and will love its victim, not in spite of, but because of it. Then, there is my sister’s infirmity.’

  This sat upon the brother also, the German saw.

  ‘My sister is several years older than I. She is become rather frail, although she continues to drive herself with her astonishing will. She is a very passionate woman. She will smash things deliberately, and cry over them afterwards, and try to fit the pieces together. Some of those glass ornaments of which I spoke. Once, when I was a boy, she flew into a rage, and threw me out of an upper window. It happened like this. On hearing a suspicious silence, I had crept into the room, and found my sister at her looking-glass. She had outlined her lips completely in red ink, giving them the arch of a perfect, but horrifying mouth. I was very frightened, which impressed itself upon her the moment she noticed me, and she immediately rushed, in her passion, and pushed me through the open window. Then, when I lay upon the ground below, calling breathlessly that I had broken my back, she raced down, screaming that she had killed me, or else I would recover, and for the rest of our lives I would be her image. It was her shoulders, she meant,’ Palfreyman explained. ‘My sister is deformed.’

  Miss Palfreyman stood over the two men. She was twisting a bunch of small flowers, violets they could have been, which were her offering, but from which the flesh was coming away in terrible jerks. Of all the blots and distortions of evening, the shadow of her hump upon the ground was the most awful.

  ‘She was kissing me, and crying, and blaming herself, and hoping,’ Palfreyman said, ‘until I became more terrified of her love than of my own condition. Especially when the pain subsided, and I got up. For the fall had only knocked the wind out of me. Then my sister was ashamed. We both were. Only, she was resentful too. On thinking it over since, I am convinced that she would have liked to keep me in her own image, as she expressed it, so that I should be completely hers. The most I can do for her is pray constantly that I may take some of her suffering upon myself, and that I may learn to return her love in the measure that she needs. But so far, I have failed. I know when I watch her stooping on the borders of the garden, to look at flowers, or to pull a piece of southernwood or rosemary, and smell it, and throw it away, useless, and glance over her shoulder, and walk on. Or she will fly at the duties she has been neglecting: the work of the parish; and the parishioners, like uneducated people who have inherited a book they cannot read, but which flatters their pride, will be quite pleased to have her amongst them, in spite of her strangeness. None of this, unfortunately, alleviates the pain of my sister’s situation. She feels that she is doomed to remain unique. I forgot to say she has had all the mirrors removed from the house, for her reflection is a double that she has grown to hate. Of course, there are all those other objects in glass, which I have mentioned, but they, she says, distort in any case.’

  ‘And your uncle,’ the German asked, ‘has he not taken note of the disappearance of the looking-glasses?’

  ‘My uncle has been engaged for many years on a key to the Revelation of St John the Divine. I doubt he would notice the disappearance of my sister, let alone a mirror.’

  The evening in which the two men were sitting had dissolved into a vast oblivion. The grey had consumed the green mist by natural process. The men themselves were cornered by it at the roots of the tree, from where the face of each appeared to the other as desirable as rafts to shipwrecked sailors.

  ‘Where I have failed most wretchedly,’ Palfreyman continued, ‘is in my inability to rescue my sister from her hallucinations. She cannot believe in the possibility of redemption for herself, because she does not feel she is acceptable to God. She is too plainly marked with the sign of His disapproval. Recently, she attempted to take her own life by opening her veins.’

  ‘And was trailing through the rooms that are filled with the jewels of glass,’ dreamed the German. ‘Her hump is less noticeable in the warm, grey cloak. By the time you reached her, she was already rather weak but glittering with blood, as she spattered the humming birds and other musical instruments.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you rescued, or condemned, your sister,’ Voss a
ccused, ‘by denying her the Gothic splendours of death. Her intention was glorious, but you rushed and tied a tourniquet, when all you had to offer was your own delusion.’

  ‘You cannot destroy me, Mr Voss!’ Palfreyman insisted.

  ‘Then,’ continued Voss, ‘not very long after, you left for the Antipodes, and retreated farther and farther from your failures, until we are sitting beneath this tree, surrounded by hazards, certainly, but of a most impersonal kind.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Palfreyman. ‘Yes.’

  He broke a stick.

  ‘I think I have realized all this,’ he said. ‘And that I did not have the strength to endure it. And must make amends.’

  Then Voss, who had been watching his companion’s blurry face, knew that Palfreyman could never rescue him, as he had almost hoped during the story of the hunchback sister. Although the brother would be saved, by the strength of his delusion, the hunchback sister, together with himself, were reserved, the German suspected, for the Gothic splendours. So the moon rose in the thicket of the brigalow, and was glittering in the eyes of the condemned.

  Next morning the expedition rose, and proceeded along the southerly bank of the rejuvenated river, that wound in general direction westward. Green disguised the treacherous nature of the ground, and in places, where heavier rain had fallen, there was the constant danger of pack animals becoming bogged, which did occur at intervals. Then the German’s hatred of mules became ungovernable. He would ride a hundred yards off his course in order to arm himself with a branch from a tree. At such times, the animals would smell danger from a distance, and would be sweating and trembling against his return; there were even some mules that would snatch at him with their long teeth as he passed, and jangle their bits, and roll their china eyes.

  Of dogs, however, Voss showed every sign of approbation, and would suffer for them, when their pads split, when their sides were torn open in battle with kangaroos, or when, in the course of the journey, they simply died off. He would watch most jealously the attempts of other men to win the affection of his dogs. Until he could bear it no longer. Then he would walk away, and had been known to throw stones at a faithless animal. In general, however, the dogs ignored the advances of anyone else. They were devoted to this one man. They could have eaten him up. So it was very satisfactory. Voss was morbidly grateful for the attentions of their hot tongues, although he would not have allowed himself to be caught returning their affection.