Voss

by Patrick White

  It transpired that the caves were neither very deep nor very dark, for in addition to their general shallowness, a shaft descended through the cliffside into the most important chamber, and down this sleeve a dusty light poured. The floor was deep in dust, which deadened footfall, and made for reverence. There was a smell of dust and age, also possibly of human bodies, but ancient ones, and passionless at last.

  Under the influence of the reverent light, the black boy was murmuring, but in his own tongue, because he was moved. Now the cave began to smell also of his live, youthful body. It appeared from his unguarded face and dreaming muscles that the place was full of a good magic.

  Then Voss caught sight of the drawings.

  ‘What do these signify, Jackie?’ he asked.

  The boy was explaining, in his own language, assisted by a forefinger.

  ‘Verfluchte Sprachen!’ cried the German.

  For he was doubly locked in language.

  As the boy continued unperturbed, the man had to recover from his lapse. He was looking.

  ‘Snake,’ Jackie explained. ‘Father my father, all blackfeller.’

  ‘Gut,’ added the boy, for the especial benefit of the German, and the word lit the whole place.

  The man was yielding himself up to the simplicity of the drawings. Henceforth all words must be deceitful, except those sanctioned by necessity, the handrail of language.

  ‘Kangaroo,’ said the boy. ‘Old man,’ he smiled, touching certain parts.

  These were very prominent, and befitting.

  Although initiated by sympathy into the mystery of the drawings, of which the details fulfilled needs most beautifully, the German did retreat from the kangaroo.

  He now said, rather primly:

  ‘Ja. Natürlich. But I like these better. What are they?’

  These appeared to be an assembly of tortuous skeletons, or bundles of bones and blowing feathers. Voss remembered how, as a boy, he had flown kites with messages attached to their tails. Sometimes the string would break, and the released kite, if it did not disintegrate in the air, must have carried its message into far places; but, whatever the destination, he had never received a reply.

  Now, however, looking at the kite-figures, his heart was hopeful.

  ‘Men gone away all dead,’ the boy explained. ‘All over,’ he waved his arm. ‘By rock. By tree. No more men,’ he said, beginning to comb the light with his dark fingers, as if it had been hair. ‘No more nothink. Like this. See?’ He laid his cheek upon his hands, seed-shaped, and his eyelashes were playing together. ‘Wind blow big, night him white, this time these feller dead men. They come out. Usfeller no see. They everywhere.’

  So that the walls of the cave were twanging with the whispers of the tangled kites. The souls of men were only waiting to come out.

  ‘Now I understand,’ said Voss gravely.

  He did. To his fingertips. He felt immensely happy.

  Why can it not remain like this, he wondered to the woman who was locked inside him permanently, and who would answer him through the ends of her long, dreaming hair. She suggested: the souls of those we know are perhaps no more communicative than their words, if you wind in the strings to which they are attached, and that is why it is arranged for those to break, and for the liberated souls to carry messages of hope into Bohemia, Moravia, and Saxony, if rain has not erased; in that event, the finders must content themselves with guesses.

  The man in the cave should have felt wet, and aching, and cold, but the woman’s smooth, instinctive soul caressed his stubborn, struggling spirit. Secretly he would have liked – or why secretly, for the boy would not have understood – he would have liked to contribute to the rock drawings, in warm ochre, the L of happiness.

  But time was passing, bats were stirring, the boy had tired of the drawings, and was standing at the mouth of the cave, remembering that substantial kangaroo, of which he had stuffed into his belly the last singed squares of hide ten days previously. He was hungry now.

  ‘Nun wir müssen zurück,’ said the man, emerging from his thoughts.

  Language did not bother the black: that is to say, generally he would not listen. Now he waited for the man to act. Then he followed.

  During the afternoon the main party was conveyed as far as the providential caves, Le Mesurier still very weak, swaying on his horse, with Turner, Angus, and Harry Robarts by now also debilitated, though to a lesser degree. Arrived at the point where Voss and the native had swum the river, it was decided to build a raft on which to ferry to the opposite bank any stores that could suffer from a wetting. Accordingly, Judd began to fell some saplings, of which there were few enough in the neighbourhood, and those none too straight. However, he was able to hew down a bare necessity of timber. Rain could not quench him. Water had become his element, as his shining axehead swam through the wood. The saplings were soon bound together, and upon floats of hollow logs, by means of thongs cut from a cowhide that Judd had saved against the day when such a situation should arise.

  In the meantime, the men had begun to curse and bludgeon cattle, mules, and spare horses into swimming the river. The animals were begging for mercy in piteous strains, but did finally hump themselves, and plunge. Goats were next shooed into the water after a preliminary scampering. This operation was nearer murder, for the rational creatures were crying as though the knife was in their throats; indeed, some of the murderers promptly felt the blade in their own. But the goats were bobbing and swimming. Their horns were ripping up the air in vain. Then it was seen that at least five of the animals would not scramble out. As they were carried past and away, one old horny doe was beseeching Voss, who began calling out:

  ‘Mr Judd, have you not yet prepared the raft? We shall not be across and dried before darkness overtakes us.’

  Because nothing could be done for the goats.

  ‘Mr Judd,’ he called, ‘are you aware that flour will turn to paste in water? Put it on the raft, man!’

  To such an extent was the German distressed by the fate of the goats, he was determined to make every member of his party hate him, as he pretended not to watch those decent animals descending into hell.

  Presently it was the turn of the raft. This was launched with difficulty owing to the steepness of the bank and weight of the green wood, Turner complaining that his guts were busted open, but eventually the craft was bumping on the water, and its cargo loaded, for the most part flour, ammunition, Mr Palfreyman’s ornithological specimens, and plants and insects which were the property of Voss himself. While several pairs of hands steadied the tossing timbers, Judd and Jackie swam their horses across the river, bearing ropes previously secured to the dubious craft.

  At this point Voss did foresee the catastrophe that would overtake them, and did almost lift up his voice, but it was too heavy. Fascinated by the doomed raft, he continued to stare. That which he apprehended almost in physical detail had to happen, so he watched, with his chin sunk upon an old woollen comforter that the sharp change in the weather had persuaded him to wind round his neck.

  Judd and the blackfellow had moored the raft to a tree on the opposite bank. The plan was that the remainder of the party should swim their horses across, and join in hauling in the ropes. But this was not to be. The current took the raft, once released by hands, and as it bobbed top-heavily at the end of the ropes, solemnly tipped it up. The scene was almost exactly as Voss, in that flash, had visualized, and by this time every member of the party, watching the ridiculous object of the raft, was convinced by his own helplessness that it had to happen thus.

  ‘Crikey,’ Turner cried at last, ‘there goes our flour, that we could at least have used to paper the walls of the bally caves, for what looks like being a lengthy visit.’

  Voss, who had ordered the loading of the flour, did not say anything. Nor did Judd.

  Some of the party appeared not to care, but were spurring their horses recklessly down the bank, for, in any event, this most personal river still had to be
crossed.

  ‘Do you think you can manage it, Frank?’ asked Palfreyman, who had already forced himself to accept the loss of his specimens as some form of retribution.

  Le Mesurier, who had dismounted during the foregoing operations, was seated on a rock, holding his head. He looked very ill.

  ‘I cannot sit any longer on a horse,’ he said.

  ‘You will have to. At least a few more hundred yards,’ Palfreyman replied.

  ‘He will hold to his horse’s tail, and be drawn across,’ Voss decreed, and continued to explain, and to organize.

  Turner, Angus, and Harry Robarts, who were clearing the water from their dazed eyes, had formed a little group with Judd. They were sheltering against one another’s bodies, and watching from the other side.

  ‘If you are to die, Frank,’ said Voss, ‘it will be more comfortable to do so in the cave.’

  ‘I do not care if I lie down here and die,’ Le Mesurier answered.

  But they got him to his feet.

  Then the last of the party was streaming silently, slowly, across the flood. Somewhere on either flank floated Voss and Palfreyman, each holding to his horse’s tail. But it was the central figure, or head, rather, that cut the breath, that played upon the imaginations of those who watched. Le Mesurier was pale as water. Some of the spectators wondered whether they had ever known him. He had plaited the yellow fingers of his left hand into the sharp, blue-black horsehair, but with his right he held above his head a notebook wrapped in a piece of waterproof sheeting. More than anything, he suggested a man engaged in celebrating the most solemn ritual.

  Such an emotional intensity underlay this mystic crossing, that the intrusion of solid ground beneath his feet was a violent shock to the invalid. As the horse lunged free, the man was wrested out of his entranced state, and would have fallen into the mud but for the hands that were receiving him.

  Seeing everyone delivered safe, Palfreyman would have liked to offer up a prayer, only this, he realized, would not have been politic, and moreover, since his immersion in the water, he doubted whether he could have found the words, so cold was his body, and unresponsive his faculties. In his numb confusion, his mind began to grope after some substitute for prayer with which to express his thankfulness, when he happened to catch sight of a battered quart pot, and cracked and swollen saddle-bag. These objects, of simple form and humble purpose, that exposure to the elements had emphasized, strengthened his sense of gratitude and trust to the extent that he resolved to proffer their images to God, and was at once consoled to know that his intention was acceptable.

  Meanwhile, all those who could, had begun to haul on the moorings of the capsized raft, and after considerable struggle, succeeded in bringing it to shore. Any cargo that rope had restrained while it was upside down in the water was in such a sorry condition, it was doubtful whether it could be of further use. What remained of the flour had become a bluish paste.

  Then Judd approached the leader, and with unexceptionable modesty, said:

  ‘Mr Voss, I must tell you I took the liberty to divide the flour into equal quantities. The second half has crossed the river on muleback. What condition it is in remains to be seen, but some of it may serve to fill a corner of our bellies, sir, when they are crying out for it.’

  To which Voss made the formal reply:

  ‘You did right, Judd, to have the foresight.’

  But he preferred to leave it at that.

  Every man of them was by now the worse for the privations he had endured, and as soon as mules and horses had been unloaded and unsaddled, then hobbled, and turned free, the whole human company was glad to huddle in the shelter of the caves. It was only later that evening, after they had dried themselves at the fires that had been lit, and eaten a little of a skillaglee of flour which Judd had been able to prepare, that any real attention was given to the rock drawings. These appeared immense as the reddish light shifted over the surface of the walls. The simplicity and truthfulness of the symbols was at times terribly apparent, to the extent that each man interpreted them according to his own needs and level.

  So there was ribaldry rising out of Turner, who spat, and said:

  ‘There is no mistaking the old man kangaroo. They have seen to that.’

  He spat again, this time at the drawing itself, but the stone and ochre quickly drank his spittle down, and nobody was long humiliated.

  ‘Women too, eh? Or is it cricket bats?’

  So he was brooding in the firelight, and wondering how he might cheat his celibacy.

  Ralph Angus, who was seated beside his bawdy friend, had glanced at the drawings, and almost at once looked away. The young landowner would have been afraid of what he had seen, if he had not quickly convinced himself that he was superior to it.

  On the other hand, Harry Robarts understood immediately what the drawings were intended to convey. Privation, which had reduced the strength of his body, had increased his vision and simplicity of mind, so that he was treading through the withered grass with the horde of ochrous hunters. Morning stole amongst the trees, all sound wrapped in pearly fog, the kind that lies close to the earth. The pale soles of his feet were cold with dew.

  Or he stood in front of another drawing, which he proceeded to interpret:

  ‘See, this man is going to die. They have planted a spear in his heart. It has gone in at the back through the shoulder-blades.’

  In fact, the little fishbone in faded red ochre had entered the wizened pear, that would soon be rattling in its cage of bones. The boy poked his finger between the bars, in order to touch the leathery thing.

  ‘Are you sure it is through the back, Harry, that the spear entered?’ the German asked, ironically.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Harry Robarts. ‘That way you do not know it is about to happen. The others prepared a plan behind his back.’

  ‘Other feller no like this feller. Draw picture. This feller die,’ said Jackie, who was squatting with his knees under his chin.

  ‘Convenience! You have only to draw the picture of your enemy, Turner, and he will die. It is simple as that,’ Voss said, and laughed.

  Although addressing Turner, he was sharing his joke with Judd and Angus, who were seated at the same fire.

  But there were occasions when some people refused to share the jokes of Voss.

  So the latter called to the blackfellow, and went in the rain and the dusk in search of the surviving goats, and when they had caught a couple, and drawn off the little milk they had made, busied himself for the rest of the evening with his patient, who had grown delirious since the afternoon.

  Le Mesurier was moving great weights. He was groaning, and pushing the sweat off his face. He was running through forests of hair. Trees let down their tails, but, repenting of their generosity, cut through his hands as far as the last shred of watery skin. Which protested and shrieked repeatedly.

  ‘I cannot lie and listen to this,’ cried Harry Robarts, and went and hid himself in a far corner that bats had dunged, but which was preferable, in that the silence held.

  Others, too, were grumbling, though decently.

  Towards morning, Le Mesurier was wrestling with the great snake, his King, the divine powers of which were not disguised by the earth-colours of its scales. Friction of days had worn its fangs to a yellow-grey, but it could arch itself like a rainbow out of the mud of tribulation. At one point during his struggles, the sick man, or visionary, kissed the slime of the beast’s mouth, and at once spat out a shower of diamonds.

  ‘No one will rob me,’ he shouted, and was gathering the dust with his yellow fingers, as far as the fire.

  He was collecting embers, even, until Voss rose and restrained him, administering a more concentrated dose from the laudanum that remained.

  In that tormented cave the German was a scraggy figure, of bare legs with random hairs upon them, but his shadow did dominate the wall.

  The sleepers were ranged round two separate fires, with the exception of Palfreyman,
who had spread his blanket somewhat apart, at equal distance from the two. For a long time he could not drop off, or did, but woke, and tossed, and drowsed. He would most willingly have maintained a balance; indeed, it was his one thought and desire, who was a small, weak, ineffectual man that his sister had flung upon a bed of violets. There, upon those suffocating small flowers, he had failed her kisses, but would offer himself, as another sacrifice, to other spears. The close cave intensified his personal longing. One side of him Voss, the other his lady sister, in her cloak that was the colour of ashes. Towards morning her hand, with its unnaturally pronounced finger-joints, took his hand, and they walked into the distant embers, which hurt horribly, but which he must continue to endure, as he was unfitted for anything else.

  About the same hour, Voss went to the mouth of the cave. If he was shivering, in spite of the grey blanket in which he had prudently wrapped himself, it was not through diffidence, but because each morning is, like the creative act, the first. So he cracked his finger-joints, and waited. The rain was withdrawn temporarily into the great shapelessness, but a tingling of moisture suggested the presence of an earth that might absorb further punishment. First, an animal somewhere in the darkness was forced to part with its life. Then the grey was let loose to creep on subtle pads, from branch to branch, over rocks, slithering in native coils upon the surface of the waters. A protoplast of mist was slowly born, and moored unwillingly by invisible wires. There it was, gently tugging. The creator sighed, and there arose a contented little breeze, even from the mouth of the cave. Now, liquid light was allowed to pour from great receptacles. The infinitely pure, white light might have remained the masterpiece of creation, if fire had not suddenly broken out. For the sun was rising, in spite of immersion. It was challenging water, and the light of dawn, which is water of another kind. In the struggle that followed the hissing and dowsing, the sun was spinning, swimming, sinking, drowned, its livid face, a globe of water, for the rain had been brought down again, and there was, it appeared, but a single element.