Voss

by Patrick White

  Of all those friends perhaps only Mrs Bonner was truly grateful, and she had grown obsequious.

  ‘Allow me to fetch you a jelly, my dear,’ she begged. ‘Even if, as you say, you have no appetite, a little wine jelly, in your condition, can only fortify.’

  For Mrs Bonner, with her head for figures, and her honest beginnings – it was, in fact, not generally known that she had helped her husband with the books – made a habit of reckoning up the cost, and was always flattered by magnificence.

  With everyone so busily employed, it was easy for Laura to return unnoticed and take her place amongst the company. Superficially restored, her composure might have seen the evening out if, in the arrangement of things, she had not found herself standing beside Dr Badgery. The surgeon would not, however, suffer her to bite him twice, nor his attention to stray from a helping of beef, and there he might have continued to stand, ignoring the true object of his concern, if their hands had not plunged at the same unhappy moment into a basket of bread.

  ‘Then, you enjoy yourself at dancing, Miss Trevelyan?’ the surgeon asked finally, while suggesting that her answer did not signify.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, no, no.’

  And he recognized the cries of men when their wounds are opened.

  ‘Why must you return to that?’

  Dr Badgery ate his beef, realizing he had begun to feel too deeply to trust himself upon stilts of words. On the other hand, a curious cracking sound, that his jaws always made while chewing, was now turning silence into something painfully grotesque.

  ‘I did accept the invitations of two partners,’ Laura admitted, ‘one because we had been happy together, as children, the other because, for the present at least, our relationship is inescapable.’

  ‘That is all very well,’ said the surgeon, ‘and sentimental, and stoical. The past is desirable, more often than not, because it can make no demands, and it is in the nature of the present to appear rough and uncharitable. But when it comes to the future, do you not feel that chances are equal?’

  He had rather blunt, white teeth, set in a trap, in his crisp beard.

  ‘I feel,’ she said slowly, and was already frightened at what she was about to admit, ‘that the life I am to live is already utterly beyond my control.’

  Even the dependable Dr Badgery could not have rescued her from that sea, however much she might have wished it. That she did wish, must be recorded, out of respect for her rational judgement and his worthiness. But man is a rational judge only fleetingly, and worthiness is too little, or too much.

  So the surgeon returned presently to his ship, and had soon restored the shape to his orderly life, except that on occasions the dark waters would seep between the timbers. Then he would welcome them, he would be drowning with her, their transparent fears would be flickering in and out of their skulls, trailing long fins of mutual colours.

  Long after Dr Badgery had fallen asleep in his brassbound cabin, on the night of his last meeting in the flesh with Laura Trevelyan, the ball at Bright’s Dancing Academy, Elizabeth Street, the much discussed, and finally legendary ball that the Pringles gave for Belle, continued to surge and sound. O the seas of music, the long blue dreamy rollers, and the little, rosy, frivolous waves. All was swept, all was carried up and down. To swim was the only natural act, although the eyes were smarting, as the fiddles continued to flick the golden spray, although, in the swell of dawn, question and answer floated out of reach.

  ‘It is really too much to expect of you, dear Mrs Pringle,’ said Mrs Bonner. ‘Let me order the horses. Could you not simply slip away? Or, supposing I were to go amongst the dancers, and hint to one or two of the more responsible girls, that it is almost morning? I am sure they would listen to reason.’

  O reason, O Mrs Bonner, speak to the roses and the mignonette. They will be trampled, rather, or float up and down in the silver seas of morning, together with the programmes and the used napkins.

  ‘Oh, Mrs Pringle, it has been the most lovely, lovely ball,’ said Belle Bonner, as she woke from her dream of dancing.

  Her cheek was still hot.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Pringle,’ smiled Laura Trevelyan, who offered a frank hand, like a man. And added: ‘I have enjoyed myself so much.’

  Because she was a woman, she was also dishonest whenever it was really necessary.

  Then all the dancers were going. Some of the girls, although well acquainted with the Bonners, carefully guided their skirts past Laura Trevelyan, who had observed them all that night as from a promontory, her eyes outlined in black.

  When the Bonners returned that morning, and had kissed, and sighed, and gone to their rooms, Laura sat down at her writing-desk, as if she had been waiting to satisfy a desire, and scrabbled in her trayful of pens, and immediately began to write:

  My dear Johann Ulrich,

  We have this moment come in from a ball, at which I have been so miserable for you, I must write, not knowing by what means in the world it will be possible to send the letter. Except by miracle, it will not be sent, and so, I fear, it is the height of foolishness.

  But write I must. If you, my dear, cannot hope to benefit, it is most necessary for me. I suppose if I were to examine my thoughts honestly, I should find that self-pity is my greatest sin, of which I do not remember being guilty in the past. How strong one was, how weak one always is! Was the firm, upright, reliable character one seemed to have been, a myth? …

  The reddish light of morning had begun to flow into the rooms of the sleeping house. The tender rooms were like transparent eggs, from which the protective shell had been removed.

  The young woman, whose eyelids were turned to buckram, was writing in her red room. She wrote:

  … It would seem that the human virtues, except in isolated, absolved, absurd, or oblivious individuals are mythical. Are you too, my dearest, a myth, as it has been suggested? …

  The young woman, whose stiff eyelids had been made red and transparent by the unbearably lucid light of morning, began to score the paper, with quick slashes, of her stricken, scratching pen.

  Ah, God, she said, I do have faith, if it is not all the time.

  Odd lumps of prayer were swelling in her mouth. Her movements were crippled as she stumbled about her orderly room that the red light made dreadful. She was tearing the tough writing-paper, or attempting to, for it was of an excellent quality; her uncle saw to it that she used no other. So that, in the end, the paper remained twisted up. Her breath was rasping, or retching out of her throat.

  Mercifully, she fell upon her bed soon after, recovering in sleep that beauty which was hers in private, and which, consequently, many people had never seen.

  *

  After a very short interval, it seemed, Belle Bonner was married to Tom Radclyffe, at St James’s, on a windy day. If Mrs Bonner had swelled with the material importance of a wedding, the disbelieving father appeared much shrunken as he supported his daughter up the aisle. How Belle felt, almost nobody paused to consider, for was not the bride the symbol of all their desires? Indeed, it could have been that Belle herself did not feel, so much as vibrate, inside the shuddering white cocoon from which she would emerge a woman. A remote, a passive rapture veiled her normally human face. To Laura Trevelyan, a bridesmaid who did not match the others, there was no longer any means of communicating with her cousin. She would have resented it more, and dreaded the possibility that their intimacy might never be restored, if she, too, was not become temporarily a torpid insect along with everyone else.

  So satin sighed, lozenges were discreetly sucked, and the scented organ meandered through the melodious groves of flowers.

  Then, suddenly, the bells were beginning to tumble.

  Everyone agreed that the Bonner wedding was the loveliest and most tasteful the Colony had witnessed. Afterwards, upon the steps, emotion and colour certainly flared high, as the wind took veil, hair, and shawl, rice stung, carriages were locked together in the crush, and the over-stuffed and excited
horses relieved themselves copiously in the middle of the street. There was also an episode with a disgraceful pink satin shoe, which a high-spirited young subaltern, a second cousin of Chattie Wilson, had carried off, it was whispered, from the dressing-room of an Italian singer. Many of the women blushed for what they knew, others were crying, as if for some tragedy at which they had but lately assisted in a theatre, and a few criticized the bride for carrying a sheaf of pear-blossom, which was original, to say the least.

  Standing upon the steps of the church, in the high wind, Laura Trevelyan watched her cousin, in whose oblivious arms lay the sheaf of black sticks, of which the flowerets threatened to blow away, bearing with them tenderly, whitely, imperceptibly, the myth of all happiness.

  12

  ALTHOUGH the past winter had proved unusually wet in almost every district, it was naturally wettest in that country in which the expedition of Johann Ulrich Voss was forcibly encamped, for men are convinced early in their lives that the excesses of nature are incited for their personal discomfiture. Some who survive the trial persuade themselves they had been aware all along, either through their instinct, or their reason, of the existence of the great design, yet it is probable that only the wisest, and most innocent, were not deceived at first.

  Now, as winter became spring, the members of the expedition were beginning to crawl out of their cave and watch drowsily the grey water dwindle into yellow slime. They no longer blamed their sins for their predicament. Although physically weak, and disgusting to smell, their importance was returning by human leaps and bounds. Their weak eyes were contending with the stronger sun. Already the higher ground showed green promise of a good season. So the men were stretching their muscles, and flattering themselves, on the strength of their survival, that all the goodness which emanated from the earth was for their especial benefit, that it was even the fruit of their suffering, when one day a small, grey bird, whacking his beak against the bough of a tree which hung beside the entrance to the cave, seemed to cast some doubt upon their recovered confidence.

  It was obvious that the fearless bird could not conceive that respect was due to men, not even as Turner shot him dead.

  When Palfreyman remonstrated with the successful sportsman, the latter cheerfully replied:

  ‘What’s the odds! If I had not of knocked ’im off, something else would of got ’im.’

  The sun was blaring with golden trumpets. Tinged with gold after weeks in the musty cave, the fellow forgot the grey louse he had always been.

  So he cleared his throat and added:

  ‘And you scientific gentlemen should know that a bird is only a bird.’

  His almost foetal eyes were twinkling. Never before had he felt himself the equal of all men.

  Palfreyman was distressed.

  ‘Poor thing,’ he said, touching the dead bird with the tip of his toe.

  ‘Do not tell me you never killed a bird!’ cried Turner.

  Compassion in the other had caused him to scent a weakness. Now he was perhaps even a gentleman’s superior.

  ‘I have killed many, to my knowledge,’ Palfreyman replied, ‘and could be responsible for much that I do not realize.’

  As he spoke, it seemed that he was resigning his part in the expedition.

  Turner was angry. He kicked the dead bird, so that it went shooting away across the mud and water. He himself slithered off, over rocks, in search of something else to kill, but constrained still by the great expanse of wet.

  Palfreyman wished that he could have employed himself in some such easy, physical way and, in so doing, have re-discovered a purpose. There comes a moment when an individual who is too honest to take refuge in the old illusion of self-importance is suspended agonizingly between the flat sky and the flat earth, and prayer is no more than a slight gumminess on the roof of the mouth.

  At this period, between flood and dry, owing to some illusion of sky and water, the earth appeared very flat indeed, particularly at early morning, when the leader of the expedition, Mr Voss, would walk out to test the ground. His trousers rolled to the middle of his calves, and wearing a stout reefer jacket, for the cold was still considerable in the early hours, he would proceed awkwardly across the mud, but soon become bogged. Then he would throw his feet to the winds, to rid them of that tragic sock. In different circumstances, he could have appeared a ridiculous figure to those watching from the shingly platform in front of the cave. Now they would not have dared laugh, for fear of the sounds that might have issued out of their mouths. Nor did they speak as much as formerly. Words that did not belong to them – illuminating, true, naked words – had a habit of coming out.

  When he had gone a certain distance, the leader would perceive the folly of continuing, and stand a while, motionless upon his stilts of legs, reflected in the muddy water or watery mud. Then, I must return to those men, he would realize, and the thought of it was terrible. Nothing could have been more awful than the fact that they were men.

  But a crust did form at last upon the slimy surface of the earth, and the party was able finally to ride forward.

  Moreover, the land was celebrating their important presence with green grass that stroked the horses’ bellies, or lay down beneath them in green swathes. The horses snatched at the grass, until they were satisfied, or bloated, and the green scours had begun to run. Similarly, the eyes of the men became sated with the green of those parklands, although they continued to sing, like lovers or children, as they rode. They sang songs about animals that they remembered from childhood, or the vibrant songs they had hummed against their teeth as youths, waiting in the dusk against a stile. These latter songs were the more difficult to remember, in that they had never been sung for their words. The songs had poured forth in the beginning as the spasms and vibrations of the singers’ bodies.

  So love and anticipation inspired the cavalcade as it passed through the green country, still practically a swamp. The passionate cries of birds exploded wonderfully overhead. The muscular forms of cool, smooth, flesh-coloured trees rose up before the advancing horsemen. Yet the men themselves, for all their freedom and their joyful songs, only remotely suggested flesh. By this time, it is true, their stock of provisions was inadequate, but an abundant supply of game had arrived to celebrate the good season. The men did take advantage of this, to catch and eat, only never more than was necessary to prolong life, for deprivation and distance had lessened their desire for food. It was foreign to their wizened stomachs. They preferred to eat dreams, but did not grow fat on these, quite the reverse.

  Into this season of grass, game, and songs burst other signs of victorious life. In a patch of scrub stood a native, singing, stamping, and gesticulating with a spear, of which the barbed head suggested the snout of a crocodile. Three or four companions were grouped about the singer in the bower of scrub, but the others were more diffident, or else they lacked the gift to express their joy.

  ‘He is doubtless a poet,’ said Voss, who had grown quite excited. ‘What is the subject of his song, Jackie?’

  But Jackie could not, or would not say. He averted his face, beneath which his throat was swelling, either with embarrassment or longing.

  The enthusiasm of their leader had made several of the white men sullen.

  ‘There is no reason why the boy should understand their dialect,’ said Ralph Angus, and was surprised that he had thought it out for himself.

  Voss, however, remained smiling and childlike.

  ‘Naturally,’ he replied, bearing no grudge against the individual who had censured him. ‘But I will ride over and speak with this poet.’

  The stone figures of his men submitted.

  Voss rode across, sustained by a belief that he must communicate intuitively with these black subjects, and finally rule them with a sympathy that was above words. In his limpid state of mind, he had no doubt that the meaning of the song would be revealed, and provide the key to all further negotiations.

  But the blacks ran away, leaving t
he smell of their rancid bodies in the patch of scrub.

  When the rejected sovereign returned, still smiling generously, and said: ‘It is curious that primitive man cannot sense the sympathy emanating from relaxed muscles and a loving heart,’ his followers did not laugh.

  But their silence was worse. Each hair was distinct in their cavernous nostrils.

  During the days that followed, mobs of blacks appeared to accompany the expedition. Although the natives never showed themselves in strength, several dark skins at a time would flicker through pale grass, or come to life amongst dead trees. At night there was frequent laughter, a breaking of sticks, more singing, and a thumping of the common earth.

  Voss continued to question Jackie.

  ‘Is there no indication of their intentions?’ he asked, in some helplessness. ‘Blackfeller no tell why he come, why he sing?’

  They were glad, said the boy.

  It seemed obvious in the sunsets of plenty. At evening the German watched a hand daub flat masses of red and orange ochre above the already yellowing grass. Each evening was a celebration of the divine munificence. Accepting this homage, the divine presence himself was flaming, if also smiling rather thinly.

  Although less appreciative of cosmic effects than was his master, the black boy would have prolonged the sunset. He kept close to the German at the best of times, but now, when the night fell, he had taken to huddling outside the fly of the small tent, where the terrier had been in the habit of lying.

  This dog – in appearance terrier, in fact a stout-hearted mongrel – presented to Voss in the early stages by a New England settler, had disappeared, it was suddenly noticed.