Voss

by Patrick White

  By this stage of the journey the number of dogs had been reduced to two, a kind of rough terrier, and Gyp, the big mongrel-Newfoundland that had given good service as a sheep-dog in the days of sheep.

  ‘Gyp is in fine condition, sir,’ Judd remarked to Voss one day as they rode along.

  He knew the leader’s fondness for the dog, and thought secretly to humour him in this way.

  The black bitch had, indeed, flourished since the sheep had been abandoned and the ground had softened. She led a life of pleasure, and would trot back and forth on spongy feet, her long tongue lolling in pink health, her coat flashing with points of jet.

  ‘She has never looked better,’ Judd ventured to add.

  ‘Certainly,’ Voss replied.

  He had ridden back for company, and now sensed that he had done wrong; he must suffer for it.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, raising his voice. ‘She is eating her head off, and I have been considering for several days what must be done for the common good.’

  Both men were silent for a little, watching with cold fascination the activities of the fussy dog, who was passing and re-passing, and once laughed up at them.

  ‘I have thought to destroy her,’ said the fascinated Voss, ‘since we have no longer sheep, hence, no longer any earthly use for Gyp.’

  Judd did not answer; but Harry Robarts, who was riding close by, at the heels of the cattle, looked up, and did protest:

  ‘Ah, no, sir! Kill Gyp?’

  He was already dry of throat and hot of eye.

  Others were similarly affected when they heard of the decision. Even Turner suggested:

  ‘We will all share a bit of grub with Gyp whenever she don’t catch. She will be fed out of our ration, sir, so there will be no drain on the provisions.’

  Voss was grinning painfully.

  ‘I would like very much to be in a position to enjoy the luxury of sentiment,’ he said.

  Accordingly, when they made the midday halt, the German called to his dog, and she followed him a short way. When he had spoken a few words to her, and was looking into the eyes of love, he pulled the trigger. He was cold with sweat. He could have shot off his own jaw. Yet, he had done right, he convinced himself through his pain, and would do better to subject himself to further drastic discipline.

  Then the man scraped a hole in which to bury his dog. As the grave was rather shallow, he placed a few stones on top, and some branches from a ragged she-oak, which he found growing there beside the river.

  From a distance the members of his party could have been watching him.

  ‘What does it matter?’ said Turner at last, who had been amongst the most vociferous in Gyp’s defence. ‘It is only a dog, is it not? And might have become a nuisance. It could be that he has done right to kill it. Only, in these here circumstances, we are all, every one of us, dogs.’

  After going about for several days like one dead, Voss was virtually consoled. Burying other motives with the dogs, he decided that his act could but have been for the common good. If he had mystified his men, mystery was his personal prerogative. If Laura did not accept, it was because Laura herself was dog-eyed love.

  As they rode along he explained to that loving companion who lived and breathed inside him: he had only to hold the muzzle to his own head, to win a victory over her. At night, though, his body was sick with the spasms of the dying dog. Until the continuous lovers felt for each other’s hand, to hear the rings chatter together. Truly, they were married. But I cannot, he said, stirring in his sleep, both kill and have. He was tormented by the soft coat of love. So he at once left it, and walked away. He was his former skeleton, wiry and obsessed.

  At night now it would rain like bullets into the embers of the fires, and the sleeping men would stir at the report on canvas, as if they had been hit. The rain fell for the most part at night, but on one occasion men and beasts were humped against it for a whole day. Their misery continued into the night, until, suddenly, the blackness opened for the cold stars.

  Then it began to rain again, and did not hold up. Nobody could conceive of eternity except as rain.

  Men and beasts were grown very thin as they butted with their heads against the solid rain. Some of the men were hating one another worse than ever. Animals hate less, of course, because they have never expected more. But men grow green with hatred. Green slime was slapped upon the ground across which they were floundering. On that side of the river there were trees of shiny green with long, dark lances for leaves, which threatened the eyes and eardrums. Yet, in the condition to which they had come, the men’s souls were more woundable than flesh. One or two most dispirited individuals confessed to themselves that their greatest pleasure would have been to die.

  For, by this season the land was cooling off; cold days would alternate with others of a fitful steaminess, while nights were unequivocally cold, in which flapped the wet rags of canvas and miserable flesh. Chills and fevers had broken out, besides. There was scarce one man who was not chafing the shreds of his shivering, frayed flesh, that had first been desiccated to the substance of salt cod. Greenish-yellow teeth were rattling in the skulls, from which men looked out, luminous, but deceived.

  Frank Le Mesurier was the worst, who had begun the soonest, in fact the night of his ride across the mountains to deliver the leader’s message to the shepherds. He was soon mumbling of dried peas that he could not spit out of his mouth – they were fixed there in his aching jaws – and of some treasure, great chunks of smouldering ore, that would tear his hands as he tried to fetch it out of his chest, and which he must not lose at any cost.

  He had grown very frail and thin, yellow, and transparent; he had the appearance of a yellow lily, but hairy, and stinking. Noticing one day how he was swaying in his saddle, Voss ordered the young man to camp inside his own tent at the next resting-place, and himself dosed him with quinine, and wrapped him in his own blankets. He was all tenderness for the patient, as if he must show the extent of his capabilites. To dispense love, he remembered suddenly. If nobody was impressed, it was not that they suspected hypocrisy, but because they could expect anything of Voss. Or of God, for that matter. In their confused state it was difficult to distinguish act from act, motive from motive, or to question why the supreme power should be divided in two. To kiss and to kill are similar words to eyes that focus with difficulty. So the others watched gravely as the German tended the sick man. His back turned to them, the physician himself was trembling, from the pains with which he was racked as the result of repeated wettings, but more especially for fear that his stock of love might be exhausted, or the bungling of divinity recognized.

  When evening at last came, for they had camped early on account of the indisposition of most of the company, he ordered Jackie to come with him and lasso several of the goats which had recently kidded. While the blackfellow wrestled with the caught goats, Voss milked them – it would have been ludicrously angular on a less heroic scale – and hurried back to his patient with the rain battering the foaming pot. As night fell Le Mesurier was persuaded to swallow a few mouthfuls of the warm, hairy milk, laced with rum from a little store the prudent German had been hoarding against sickness.

  As the sick man tried the milk on his tongue, Voss watched longingly, upon his hands and knees, on the tamped mud floor of the straining tent.

  ‘Tell me, Frank,’ he asked, ‘do you feel any easier?’

  ‘No,’ replied the yellow face, from which a string of milk hung. ‘It is very distressing. Everything fluctuates, and my mind and body will not coincide.’

  As it continued to rain, the German retired early. Then their common fever filled the tent. But Voss was in some measure eased by the love he had dispensed; it had done more good to him than to the patient. So, with its white salve, he continued to anoint. She was dressed on this occasion in a hooded robe, of full, warm, grey rain, that clothed her completely, except for the face. He was able to diagnose from experience that her illness was that of celibate pa
ralysis. Her stone form did not protest, however. Or expect. But awaited her implicit physician. At this stage of the sickness, he said, I will administer this small white pill, which will grow inside you to gigantic proportions. Please note: the act of giving is less humiliating than that of receiving. Can you bear to receive what will entail great suffering? He saw the smile crack open in honey-coloured stone. If I have suffered the Father, she smiled, then I can suffer the Son. Immediately he sensed the matter had attained flesh-proportions, he was nauseated. He was no Moslem. His trousers were not designed for parturition. I am One, he protested, forming the big O with his convinced mouth. And threw the pill upon the ground. But she continued to smile her inexorable smile, which signified they had been married an eternity, and that stone statues will survive the years of the Turk.

  Upon waking, the German saw that they were still at sea in the night of rain, bobbing and straining, with groaning of ropes and shivering of canvas, but that there was a tallow candle, one of those he had been keeping for an emergency, set in the middle of the darkness. Le Mesurier evidently had lit the candle, and was now hoping to resist chaos. The cone of yellow light was the one reality.

  ‘Oh, I am sick, sir,’ he complained, when he realized he was being observed.

  ‘There is no need for you to tell me that, Frank,’ said Voss.

  ‘I do not know how to attend to myself. I have not the strength of a fly.’

  In fact, he fell back then, to lie in his own misery.

  Very soon Voss understood from the terrible stench that his companion had lost control of his bowels, and that, in the circumstances, he must turn to and clean the man. So he set about it, woodenly. Prospective saints, he decided, would have fought over such an opportunity, for green and brown, of mud, and slime, and uncontrolled faeces, and the bottomless stomach of nausea, are the true colours of hell.

  When he was finished, and had set down the iron dish, he said:

  ‘But I am no saint, Frank, and am doing this for reasons of necessity and hygiene.’

  Le Mesurier was shielding his eyes.

  ‘How you are in my debt! Do you hear?’ laughed the German.

  The sick man, perceiving the vestige of a joke, did glimmer and murmur. He was grateful, too.

  After Voss had thrown out the contents of the dish, he administered a little rhubarb and laudanum, with the result that the patient began to doze, but every now and then his mind would come forward out of the distance.

  Once he sat up, and said:

  ‘I will repay you, I promise. I will not cheat you.’

  And once:

  ‘I will let you count it over one day, perhaps, in advance, when we are together in the cave. Shall we boil the quart, Mr Voss?’

  ‘Not in this downpour,’ answered the German. ‘We would never succeed to coax the fire.’

  ‘But in this cave,’ persisted the sick man, who appeared incandescent, and added: ‘You must give it to me, though. I will put it under the blanket for safety’s sake.’

  ‘Give what?’ asked Voss, who was by this time drowsing again.

  ‘The book,’ said Le Mesurier. ‘It is in my saddle-bag. Give it to me, Mr Voss. It is the book with marbled edges.’

  Like camellias, Voss remembered.

  ‘May I look in it?’ he asked, cautiously.

  To read the past? Or was it the future?

  ‘No,’ Le Mesurier said. ‘It is too soon.’

  Rummaging in the saddle-bag, amongst the dry crumbs of bread and splinters of petrified meat, Voss did find the book.

  How powerful he was, he realized, as he knelt there holding it. Never before had he held a man’s soul in his hand.

  ‘Will you repay me with this, Frank?’ he asked.

  ‘I am not yet ready,’ Le Mesurier said. ‘Do you remember the other evening, under the trees in the Domain? I can only give you what you have given me. Eventually. But you do not know how it must be dragged up out of me, or you would not ask for it. Can you not see that it is bleeding at the roots?’

  ‘Go to sleep now,’ Voss advised. ‘We shall speak about it another time.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Le Mesurier, and did seem disposed to sleep, the notebook bundled for safety under the blanket.

  But he sat up again, almost at once, and began to speak with comparative lucidity, wetting his feverish lips at first, for fear they might obstruct the words:

  ‘In the beginning I used to imagine that if I were to succeed in describing with any accuracy some thing, this little cone of light with the blurry edges, for instance, or this common pannikin, then I would be expressing all truth. But I could not. My whole life had been a failure, lived at a most humiliating level, always purposeless, frequently degrading. Until I became aware of my power. The mystery of life is not solved by success, which is an end in itself, but in failure, in perpetual struggle, in becoming.’

  Voss did not care to be told the secrets of others. He preferred to arrive at them by his own intuition, then to pounce. Now he did not have the advantage.

  So he said:

  ‘You have developed a slight fever, you know. It is better that you should try to rest.’

  Also he was trembling for those secrets of his own, of which it now seemed the young man might be possessed.

  ‘Rest!’ laughed Le Mesurier. ‘I must remind you again of the evening we spent together in the Domain, when we did more or less admit to our common daemon.’

  The German was unable, then and there, to think of a means to stop the conflagration.

  The sick man was burning on.

  ‘Of course, we are both failures,’ he said, and it could have been a confession of love.

  They lay and listened to the long, slow rain, which did not quench.

  ‘If you were not sick, Frank,’ said Voss at last, ‘you would not believe your own ears.’

  But now the young man’s eyes obviously saw.

  ‘It is the effect of the drug,’ explained Voss, who was himself fast succumbing.

  ‘You will not remember anything of what you have said. For that reason,’ he added, quite dryly, and wriggling his scraggy neck, ‘I will agree that it could be true.’

  So that these two were united at last.

  Le Mesurier, whose mission it was, he was convinced, to extract the last drop of blood out of their relationship, leaned forward, and asked:

  ‘Since I am invited to be present at the damnation of man, and to express faithfully all that I experience in my own mind, you will act out your part to the end?’

  ‘There is no alternative,’ Voss replied, addressing the grey-green body of his sleeping companion.

  Not long afterwards the German, who had intended to examine the notebook, but refrained out of dislike, almost fear of reading his own thoughts, fell asleep, too, in the pewter-coloured light.

  That morning the leader of the expedition resolved to take only the aboriginal boy and push on in search of a more suitable place in which to fortify themselves against the wet, and treat the sick. After only a couple of miles’ travel they were rewarded by sight of what appeared to be the entrance to some caves on the opposite bank of the river.

  ‘You go, Jackie,’ said Voss, ‘make sure this place good dry.’

  But the black boy, whose naked body was shivering and chafing in a shroud of hard, wet canvas, immediately replied:

  ‘Too black. This feller lost inside.’

  ‘Dugald would not be frightened,’ said Voss.

  ‘Dugald no here,’ answered Jackie truthfully.

  Voss cursed all black swine, but at once persuaded himself it was the rain that had made him lose his temper, for he clung to a belief that these subjects of his kingdom would continue to share his sufferings long after the white men had fallen away.

  As there was no avoiding it, he spurred his unhappy horse down the yellow bank of the river, and into the flood, of which the breathtaking cold swallowed every thought and emotion. Otherwise, they were drifting deliciously. No dream could ha
ve been smoother, silenter, more inevitable. But the wretched horse, it appeared, was trampling the water, or swimming, for eventually he did scratch a foothold, heave himself up, and scramble out upon the opposite bank, there to shake his sides, until his bones and those of his rider were rattling together terribly. Jackie, who had followed, holding the tail of his brown gelding, soon stood there too, smiling and chattering with cold, his nakedness running with light and water, for he had lost his canvas cloak. Of bronze rather than the iron of most other blacks, fear and cold had refined him further into an imperial gold, so that Voss was reconciled to his slave, especially since the river had been negotiated by his own courage.

  ‘Now,’ he announced, ‘we will inspect the caves.’

  The black boy did not refuse, but would not have gone ahead of that exorcizing magic the white man possessed. Night was terrifying, and was never quite emptied out of pockets such as these caves. He would not willingly have gone through darkness without carrying fire. Even moonlight was suspect, full of the blandishment of malicious fur, and treacherous teeth that snapped at black skin.

  ‘Blackfeller belong by these caves,’ said Jackie, beginning to scent something.

  ‘How?’ asked Voss.

  The black boy could not explain his instincts, so he smiled, and swayed his head, and avoided the expectant eyes of his superior.

  ‘We shall soon see,’ said the German, stooping.

  Immediately he entered, there was a flitting of bats. The bats flew out, screamed at the rain, circled, and for want of an inviting alternative, returned to their disturbed darkness. Alone in the landscape, the black boy began to feel it was probably preferable to follow the bats, and rejoin his master. How fortunate he was to have one. The rain was sighing with him.