Voss

by Patrick White

  The natural sequence of events soothed the superior being in his cave, to the extent that he might have fallen asleep if the gelatinous, half-created world had not loomed too close, reminding him of disagreeable things. He had to recall the soup the convict had prepared the night before from flour hidden on the backs of mules. The gelatinous mess was even less palatable in retrospect, the cook more hateful than his soup. So that the erstwhile creator was fiddling with his blanket-sleeves. Moreover, he began to have an inkling of a confession he had made, in a tent, at night, under the influence of laudanum, and in human terms.

  So the divine spirit fled out, into the swirl of blown rain. The man that remained continued to watch the shiny grey soup of the prevailing flood, and for want of a better occupation, crushed an earthworm that had crawled for protection as far as the rocky platform on which he sat.

  In the circumstances, it was not altogether surprising that a human figure should appear, and that this figure should develop into Judd, his head down to the new-blown rain, as he carried a quart pot.

  ‘I could not sleep, and as it was not raining at the time,’ the convict explained when he had approached, ‘I decided to find the goats, and have brought back a drop of milk for Mr Le Mesurier.’

  Voss was furious.

  ‘Maybe such quantities of milk are not correct treatment for a man whose bowels are in a delicate condition.’

  Judd did not answer at once. When he did, he said:

  ‘At all events, there is the milk.’

  And he set the pot upon the floor of the cave.

  During the morning, Voss administered another dose from the much reduced supply of laudanum and rhubarb. Then, after debating whether to throw out the contents of Judd’s quart, he decided on an opposite course. Seeing the convict seat himself in their vicinity, with the object of mending a broken bridle, the German persuaded the unwilling Le Mesurier to sip at the controversial milk, and was rewarded later by the patient’s suffering an access of diarrhoea.

  ‘Only as reason led me to expect,’ commented the physician, in pouring the milk away, again under the convict’s nose.

  Judd, who had in his life experienced the cat, did not open his mouth.

  ‘Or else,’ said Voss, who could not let the matter drop, ‘one of the goats is sick.’

  Then he began to clean up the invalid’s mess with equanimity, even love. Noble gestures of doubtful origin did stimulate him most of all. If they left him haggard, as from suffering – for he was aware of his human nature also – it was good that he should suffer, along with men.

  So he looked deliberately at Judd. But the latter plied his saddler’s needle.

  If it had not been for the journals that some of them kept, it would have been difficult for the members of the expedition to sense the passage of time. The days were possessed of a similarity, of sickness, and rain, and foraging for firewood, as they dripped slowly, or blew in gusts of passionate vengeance, or stood quite still for intervals of several hours, in which the only sound was that of passive moisture. Yet, a variety of incidents did also occur, or were created out of the void of inactivity, mostly quite trivial events, but which uneasy minds invested with a light of feverish significance.

  There was the morning, for instance, when their cattle disappeared, such cattle as these had become, skeletons rather, from which the hair had not yet rotted. Then each of the shaggy men who had been abandoned began to wander about distraught, with his thumbs hung from the slits of his trouser pockets, looking for tracks, for dung, for some sign. If they did not communicate their distress to one another, it was because it was too great to convey, but a stranger would have read it in any of those faces, which were by now interchangeable, as the dumb creatures shambled up and down, snuffling after the rest of the herd.

  A whole two days, Voss, Judd, Angus, and the blackfellow searched the country pretty thoroughly. Of all the expedition these men were the fittest, although in the case of Voss he would not have allowed himself to appear less. An effort on his part, it was an effort also on the part of Judd to continue to admire his leader, but as the convict was a fair man, he did make that effort. So they continued to roam the water looking for the lost cattle, and from a distance their employment appeared effortless.

  Then they lost Jackie.

  Ralph Angus cursed.

  ‘These blacks are all alike,’ he complained, and punished his horse’s mouth as the blackfellow did not offer himself. ‘In no circumstances are they to be relied upon.’

  ‘Some whites would pack their swags,’ said Judd, ‘if the road led anywhere.’

  ‘I have great confidence in this boy,’ Voss announced, and would continue to hope until the end, because it was most necessary for him to respect some human being.

  The white men rode home, which was what the cave had become. Paths now wound from its mouth. Harry Robarts had washed his shirt, and was drying it on a string beside the fire.

  The German was filled with terrible longing at this scene of homecoming. He was, after all, a man of great frailty, both physical and moral, and so, immediately upon entering the cave, he returned outside, preferring to keep company with the gusts of rain than to expose his weakness to human eyes, except possibly those of his wife.

  She, however, was quite strong and admirable in her thick, man’s boots beneath the muddied habit. Her hands were taking his weakness from him, into her own, supple, extraordinarily muscular ones. Yet, her face had retained the expression he remembered it to have worn when she accepted him in spite of his composite nature, and was unmistakably the face of a woman.

  Ah Laura, my dear Laura, the man was begging, or protesting.

  As he stood in the entrance to the cave, he was resting his forehead against a boss of cold rock.

  Thus he was seen by Frank Le Mesurier, who had recovered a little of his strength, and was moving on his bed, looking for some person with whom to feel in sympathy. Now he observed their leader. The young man was glad that Voss remained unnoticed by the others, since only those who have known the lowest depths are unashamed. For some reason obscure to himself, he began also to recall, as he did frequently in those desert places, the extraordinary young woman that had ridden down to the wharfside. He remembered her swollen lips, and what had appeared at that distance to be the dark shadows under her eyes, how she had been enclosed strictly in her iron habit, and how, while inclining her head to talk with evident sincerity to Mr Palfreyman, she had remained innerly aloof.

  For some reason, obscurer still, the visionary felt carried closer to his leader, as the woman rode back into his life. He lay amongst his blankets, and let the moon trample him, and was filled with love and poetry, as is only right, between the spasms of suffering.

  That night, when the rather tender, netted moon rose between layers of cloud, Jackie returned, herding the lost cattle. Moonlight was glinting on the pointed horns, that at intervals could have contained the disc itself. The skin of the boy, who sat thin and terrified on his sombre horse, was inlaid with shining mother o’ pearl.

  They looked out and saw him.

  ‘Here is Jackie come back,’ some of them said.

  At once Voss was stumbling over bodies, to reach the mouth of the cave, to corroborate.

  How glad he was, then.

  ‘One cattle no find,’ said the boy, and was beginning to sulk at the darkness which had but lately frightened him.

  His nakedness chafed the horse as he slithered silkily down.

  ‘Even so, you have done well,’ said the German, relieved on a scale the others did not suspect, out of all proportion to the incident.

  He could not talk in front of other people, but brought a lump of damper, which was left over from their evening meal.

  ‘There,’ he said to the hollow boy, and, almost angrily: ‘You will have to make do with that, because there is nothing more.’

  Then the German returned abruptly to his bed, and of all those present, only the aboriginal, who was well practised
in listening to silence, did not interpret their leader’s behaviour as contemptuous.

  Nothing was added to the incident. Voss recorded it without comment in his journal:

  May 28th. Jackie returned at night with cattle, one head short. Before retiring, rewarded the boy with a ration of damper. He was quite pleased.

  About this time there occurred also the incident of the mustard and cress.

  Turner had been expressing himself in something like the following strain:

  ‘What would I not give for a nice dish of greens, cabbage, or spinach, or even turnip-tops at a pinch, with the water pressed out, and a lump of fresh butter slapped on like, or marrer from a good bone. But as long as there was greens.’

  Greens they had had in small quantity, a kind of fat-hen that they would boil down occasionally, but in spite of this addition to their diet, Turner had become a scurvy mess, loathsome to see, and to smell, too.

  Mr Palfreyman, who had overheard the fellow’s remark, remembered amongst his belongings some seeds of mustard and cress, which drought at first had prevented him from sowing, and which he had forgotten long before the weather broke.

  Now, Turner was most repulsive to the rather fastidious Palfreyman, who, in normal circumstances, would have attended carefully to his hands, and changed his linen every day. In this he had been encouraged by his sister, whose clear, old-woman’s skin smelled habitually of lavender water or an essence of roses that she distilled herself, and whose tables were conspicuous for their little bowls of potpourri, and presses filled with the dry sheaves of lavender or yellow, crackling verbena leaves. It was, however, this same sister from whom he had run, at least, from her passionate, consuming nature, with the result that he was never finished wondering how he might atone for his degrading attitude, the constant fear of becoming dirtied, whether morally or physically, by some human being. Until the atrocious Turner, with greenish scabs at the roots of his patchy beard, and vague record of vice, seemed to offer him a means of expiation.

  Once, in the cave that smelled of ashes and sickness, the ornithologist had suggested to the man that he should shave him.

  ‘To clean up your face and give it an opportunity of healing.’

  Turner laughed.

  ‘I can see you shaving me, Mr Palfreyman, in the days before we lost our way.’

  ‘Do you not think we have found it?’ Palfreyman asked.

  Turner made a noise, but submitted to being shaved.

  It was a terrible operation.

  When it was over, Palfreyman was sweating.

  ‘Seeing as it is Saturday night,’ Turner threatened, ‘I must make haste to find some moll, to lay with me on the wet grass and catch the rheumatics.’

  Palfreyman flung the muck of soap and hair into the fire, where it proceeded to sizzle. His sister’s virgin soul winced; or was it his own?

  Then, on this later occasion, Turner had confessed to his craving for greens. Miss Palfreyman, who preferred mignonette, was also in the habit of nursing up pots of mustard and cress, her brother remembered, and that he had those seeds in his pack, in an old japanned spectacle-case. At once he conceived the idea of sowing a bed for Turner and Le Mesurier, and went out on the very same day, into the rain, to look for a suitable site, and found one in a bed of silt, in a pocket of rock, some hundred yards from the eternal cave.

  Here Palfreyman sowed, and the miraculous seeds germinated, standing up on pale threads, then unfolding. It was very simple and very quick. Several times on the crucial day, the man emerged from the cave to assist at the act, the importance of which was enormous.

  So that, when he found that something had cut almost half his precious seedlings, Palfreyman’s eardrums were thundering. He began to watch for birds, or animals, and would hang about in the grey rain. His feet made sucking sounds as they changed position in the mud, while those seedlings which had not been cut continued to thrive in spite of the abominable conditions, and were growing even coarse.

  But the ornithologist could not bring himself to cut. Curiosity and rancour prevented him. Until one day, as he watched from close by, Voss approached the vegetable bed, took a knife from his pocket, bent down, and cut a liberal tuft against the ball of his thumb. There he stood, stuffing the greenstuff into his mouth, like an animal.

  Palfreyman was stunned.

  ‘Mr Voss,’ he said at last, coming forward.

  ‘Ach! Mr Palfreyman!’ said Voss, or mumbled greenly.

  So a sleepwalker is caught, but will not understand.

  ‘Do you not realize how this greenstuff comes to be growing here?’ Palfreyman began.

  ‘It is good,’ said the German, stooping and reaping again, ‘but in such small quantities, it cannot give the greatest pleasure.’

  Palfreyman was on the point of asking whether the leader knew that the seed had been sown by hand of man, but desisted. He felt that he did not wish to hear his suspicions confirmed.

  When Voss was finished, he cleaned the knife of any traces of green by drawing the blade between his forefinger and thumb. Then he closed it, and put it away.

  ‘Tell me, Palfreyman,’ he asked, ‘are you very distressed at the loss of the specimens in the river?’

  ‘They were immaterial,’ shrugged the ornithologist.

  ‘They were the object of your joining the expedition,’ corrected Voss.

  ‘I am inclined to think there were other reasons,’ Palfreyman replied. ‘And we have not yet reached the most important.’

  He was sorely tried, but would not yield to the impulse to believe that his leader’s behaviour or the loss of his specimens could be the ultimate in tests.

  Voss was watching him.

  ‘Shall we walk back to the cave?’ Palfreyman asked.

  He was determined to like this man.

  Voss agreed that they could not benefit by continuing to stand about in the rain.

  As they were nearing the cave he turned to Palfreyman and said:

  ‘I want you to be candid with me. Are you of Judd’s party?’

  ‘Of judd’s party?’

  ‘Yes. Judd is forming a party, which will split off from me sooner or later.’

  ‘I will not split off,’ said Palfreyman, sadly. ‘I am not of any party.’

  ‘Ach, you cannot afford to stand aloof.’

  ‘Perhaps I expressed myself badly. Shall we say: I am of all parties?’

  ‘That is worse,’ cried Voss. ‘You will be torn in pieces.’

  ‘If it is necessary,’ Palfreyman replied.

  Voss, Palfreyman, and Laura continued to walk towards the cave. The selflessness of the other two was a terrible temptation to the German. At times he could have touched their gentle devotion, which had the soft, glossy coat of a dog. At other moments, they were folded inside him, wing to wing, waiting for him to soar with them. But he would not be tempted.

  ‘I will not consider the personal appeals of love,’ he said, ‘or deviate in any way from my intention to cross this country.’

  Then Voss entered the cave, and Palfreyman followed, looking distressed.

  As the rain continued, the prisoners were submitted to further trials, but it was still only trial by minutiae.

  Whenever they remained long in any one camp, Judd invariably came into his own. He immediately found – or invented, his leader would have said – many important jobs that needed doing. He became the master of objects. So that, after they had settled into their quarters in the cave, it was not long before he decided to inspect all the leather equipment they possessed; saddles, bridles, saddle-bags, and so forth. He could be seen stitching and patching beside the slow fire, upon which a dusty yellow light descended through the shaft that served them as chimney; or else he would be mending a shirt; or he was making a series of small bags in oiled cloth for the safekeeping of their reduced stock of medicines during the interminable wet.

  The flotsam Turner was fascinated by the idea of friendship with this man. Turner had lived in the streets, and m
ade acquaintances, but the solider stuff of friendship, or the subtle colours of permanence, he had neither known nor coveted. In fact, anything that restricted sudden change had always been undesirable.

  Yet, here he was, now grown wistful for the rock.

  ‘When we return from this here expedition,’ he said, stretching out and crossing his legs, for Turner was never occupied, ‘and have received our bounties and applause, I will get myself rigged out in something real gentlemanly, and come on a pleasure visit, Albert, to this property you was telling us of.’

  ‘If it is pleasure you are looking for, then you will be coming to the wrong place,’ Judd replied, with evident affection for his property as it stood.

  And he held up a needle and squinted to thread it.

  ‘Oh, it is not feather beds, nor nothink of that description you need worry about,’ Turner hastened to correct. ‘I can doss down as good as any on the floor, in that shed, for instance, where your old woman makes the butter.’

  For, through conversation, the place did exist, solidly, naggingly, in Turner’s mind.

  These fanciful, though humble plans tended to make Ralph Angus irritable and rather bored, for his own estate was considerable.

  ‘You would be a square peg, if ever there was,’ said the landowner, who had condescended to wax some thread for the use of Judd.

  ‘I would not,’ protested Turner. ‘I would learn things.’

  In a return to childhood, if necessary. Because dependent, it even seemed the only state desirable. He was carving his name upon the trunks of those dusty she-oaks that grew in a ragged fringe round the shack. Although alone, he was not lonely, for he had remained, as always, within call of his friend.

  ‘Tell us some more, Albert,’ he said, as they sat in actual person in the cave. ‘Tell us about the time the fire would not be held back, and burned the wool shed.’

  ‘The wool shed?’ laughed Angus.

  ‘Yes,’ said Judd, ‘the shed, that is, where I and my boys shear our sheep.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the rich young man, and showed mercy.

  ‘Tell us about the fox you brought home, and had on a chain, to tame,’ Turner pursued.