Voss

by Patrick White

  The merchant, to whom the effort of extricating himself from the brougham had given a congested look, was still holding his pears. It was a grey, gritty afternoon.

  He did not consider it desirable to stimulate the flow of intelligence from this girl, a thin thing in her inherited dress, so he confined himself to uttering a few sounds that could not possibly have been construed as human.

  ‘Ah, Mr Bonner,’ said his wife, upon the stairs, and less avoidable, ‘I was on the point of sending. It is Laura. She is desperately ill. I brought Dr Bass. He left but a moment ago, most unsatisfactory. That young man, I will have it known amongst all our acquaintance, turned the pages of a book in my presence, to diagnose, if you please. When anyone of experience, when even I know, it is a brain fever. Mr Bonner, I must confess I am distracted.’

  Indeed, her rings were scratching him unpleasantly.

  Mr Bonner mounted higher on the spongy stairs. The ripe fruit had become dislodged inside the little box, and for all its sensuous perfection, was jumping and jostling as if it had been cheap and woody. He no longer cared for this house; it was since Belle had gone, Belle the golden, who would smell of ripe pears – or was he confused? – on those untroubled days between hateful summer and vicious winter.

  ‘Well, then, we will send for Dr Kilwinning,’ Mr Bonner heard his strange voice.

  ‘Oh, dear, you are so good, we have always known.’ His wife was mopping her eyes with a shred of cambric and a handful of rings.

  No one of all Mrs Bonner’s acquaintance was ignorant of what Dr Kilwinning would dare to charge, and that he was become accordingly the best physician in town.

  But the Bonners were not a great comfort to each other as they went towards their niece’s door. Life was exceeding their capacities.

  Laura was lying in her handsome bed, looking at nothing and at everything. During the crisis, which no one had explained very well to the perplexed merchant, the aunt had unbraided her niece’s hair. Now, the dark, hot hair appeared disagreeable to the uncle, who disliked anything that suggested irregularity. Nor could he remember when he had last entered his niece’s room, which gave him the impression of being littered with fragile secrets, so that he was forced to walk delicately, his every step an apology, and his thick, fleshy body looked quite grotesque.

  Laura had to turn her head. She said:

  ‘I am sorry to be such an inconvenience to you.’

  It was difficult, but her rather thin lips had managed that ridiculous sentence.

  Mr Bonner sucked his teeth, and was moving even more delicately to atone for his deficiencies.

  ‘You must lie still,’ he whispered, imitating somebody he had once heard in a sick-room.

  ‘It is really nothing,’ said Laura. ‘But one of those stupid indispositions. That are difficult to explain.’

  How gravely her jaws contended with speech. Her stiff and feverish form, inside which she could move about quite freely, was by now of little importance; it was, truthfully, nothing. Yet, between bouts of fever, she was idiotically comfortable, and could even enjoy the fumbling sympathies of her uncle and aunt.

  ‘Oh, dear, dear, dear Laura,’ Aunt Emmy was crying, ‘that we should suffer this. I cannot bear not knowing whatever it may be, but your uncle will bring the good doctor, who will explain everything.’

  In times of stress Mrs Bonner transferred her own simplicity to those about her, and would address them as if they were, in fact, little children.

  ‘You will see,’ she added.

  She was touching, and touching her young niece. To cover her up. Or to discover a reason for their suffering.

  Looking at those two children from her tragic distance, Laura Trevelyan felt intolerably old. If she could have done something for them, but she could not. Even restored to full health, there would be nothing she could do, she realized, for her uncle and aunt.

  Then Mr Bonner cleared his throat. Rescued by his wife’s words, he said in a young man’s voice:

  ‘Yes. The doctor. I will send Jim round. He will be here in two shakes. Yes. I will write a note.’

  ‘And if he should be at his dinner?’ remembered his wife.

  ‘I will make it worth his while to leave any dinner,’ said the merchant.

  Given favourable circumstances, he was a man of power and influence.

  Now he went about this business, after abandoning on a console table in the shadows of the room the unfortunate pears. These soft, innocent fruit seemed to proclaim a weakness that he would have liked to keep secret.

  There the pears were, however, even if they remained temporarily unnoticed by Laura Trevelyan and Mrs Bonner. The latter continued desperately to tend her niece, bringing in succession a little toast-water, a good, strong broth that had slopped over while being conveyed from the kitchen, and a milk jelly in a pretty shape. When all these had been refused the aunt cried out passionately:

  ‘What more can I do? My dear, tell me, and I will do it.’

  As if there had been a grudge between them.

  ‘I do not ask you to do anything,’ said Laura Trevelyan.

  She had closed her eyes, and was smiling a smile that Mrs Bonner would have liked to interpret, but the girl was, in fact, so suffused with fire and weakness that she could not have borne her aunt even an imaginary grudge.

  Notwithstanding, her niece’s defenceless eyelids exposed Mrs Bonner to fresh attacks of remorse.

  ‘It is always easier,’ she complained, ‘for those who are ill. They may lie there, while we who have our health must suffer. We are the weak, helpless ones.’

  In the last resort of that helplessness, she held to her niece’s forehead a handkerchief soaked far too liberally in eau de Cologne, while continuing to disinter her own buried sins.

  So the evening passed in activity and frustration. Dr Kilwinning came, and Dr Bass returned. Men’s boots commanded the stairs, and much masculine self-importance was expended. If the ignorance of young Dr Bass could at least be blamed, it had yet to be discovered what purpose the knowledge and experience of Dr Kilwinning would serve, although the eminent physician himself did drop several hints, together with many ornamental smiles, that he kept saved up for the consolation of ladies. Mrs Bonner had, in addition, great confidence in his beautiful cuffs, linked by lozenges of solid gold, in which were set rubies, though in most tasteful proportion.

  ‘And the very lightest diet,’ said the important doctor. ‘Soups.’

  He smiled, and it became a mystic word, dimly steaming upon his tongue.

  Mrs Bonner was compelled to smile back.

  ‘So nourishing,’ she sighed, herself by now nourished.

  But her husband would not respond to such treatment. He began to look cunning. He was making his eyes small. As Dr Kilwinning remarked in confidence afterwards to a lady of his acquaintance, the merchant spoke with a directness that one would only expect from a very ordinary man. Mr Bonner said:

  ‘Yes, Doctor. But what is this sickness my niece has got?’

  His wife feared at first that his want of delicacy might give offence.

  ‘It is still too early, Mr Bonner,’ the doctor said, ‘to diagnose the illness with anything like certainty. It could be one of several fevers. We must observe. And care for the patient.’ Here he smiled at Mrs Bonner, who returned his smile devotedly.

  ‘Hm,’ said the merchant.

  ‘I still declare it is a brain fever,’ ventured Mrs Bonner.

  ‘It could well be,’ sighed the doctor.

  ‘I would like to know the reason for this fever,’ said the merchant. ‘A reason can be found for everything.’

  Then the doctor gave one of those jolly, indulgent laughs, and patted Mr Bonner on the elbow, and went away, followed by Dr Bass, whose shamefully honest ignorance Mrs Bonner had by this time forgotten.

  That night Laura Trevelyan was racked by her fever, and called out repeatedly that the hair was cutting her hands. Her own hair was certainly very hot and heavy. But soft. Mrs Bon
ner made several attempts to arrange it in some way that might lessen the patient’s discomfort.

  ‘Oh, mum, it is terrible,’ said Betty, the new girl, ‘it is terrible to think they may take it off. Such lovely hair. There was Miss Hanrahan had the whole of her hair taken from her for the scarlet fever. But sold it to a lady who wanted to make pads for her own. So it was not quite lost. And Miss Hanrahan growing another lovely head.’

  ‘Go to bed, Betty,’ said Mrs Bonner.

  ‘I will sit up with Miss Trevelyan, if I may, mum,’ the girl proposed.

  But Mrs Bonner was determined to bear her own cross.

  ‘I would never forgive myself,’ she cried, ‘if anything were to happen. And to my own niece.’

  When the girl was gone, she prepared herself as if for a journey, with shawls, and plaids, and a book of sermons that she always held in an emergency, and presently her husband came, who could no longer sit alone in the desert that the house had become. Not suddenly, not tonight, not to Mr Bonner alone. These two people, looking at each other at intervals, in hope of rescue, had begun to realize that their whole lives had been a process of erosion. Oases of affection had made the desert endurable, until now the fierce heat of unreason threatened to wither any such refuge.

  So the Bonners rambled helplessly, thinking of that transparent child whom nature had so heartlessly removed from them, and of this darker, opaque one, who had never really been theirs.

  Once in the night, Laura Trevelyan, who was struggling to control the sheets, pulled herself up and forward, leaning over too far, with the natural result that she was struck in the face when the horse threw up his head. She did not think she could bear the pain.

  ‘The martingale!’ she cried out, willing herself not to flinch. ‘We have left the martingale at the place where we rested.’

  When she was more controlled, she said very quietly:

  ‘You need not fear. I shall not fail you. Even if there are times when you wish me to, I shall not fail you.’

  And again, with evident happiness:

  ‘It is your dog. She is licking your hand. How dry your skin is, though. Oh, blessed moisture!’

  Whereupon, she was moving her head against the pillow in grateful ecstasy.

  Such evidence would have delighted the Palethorpes, and mystified the Bonners, but the former were not present, and the latter were drooping and swaying in their own sleep on their mahogany chairs.

  *

  So the party rode down the terrible basalt stairs of the Bonners’ deserted house, and onward. Sometimes the horses’ hooves would strike sparks from the outcrops of jagged rock.

  Since the expedition had split in two, the division led by Voss seemed to move with greater ease. It was perhaps obvious that it should. Those under his command, including the aboriginal boy, were struck by the incandescence of the man who was leading them. They were in love with that rather gaunt, bearded head, and would compel themselves to ignore the fact that it was a skull with a candle expiring inside.

  In the prevailing harmony of souls, anything that could detract from human dignity – the incident of the raft, for instance, or that of the missing compass – was forgotten. All the members of the party, even the unhappy Harry Robarts, who was being torn intermittently in two directions, were as emanations of the one man, their leader. The blackfellow was a doubtful quantity, but there was nobody, except perhaps the leader himself, who did not expect to discard him. In fact, the others longed to be one less, so that they might enjoy their trinity.

  It was the mules and few surviving horses that deserved pity, for these were without the benefit of illusion. They endured their fate, the former sullenly, the latter with a tired patience, no longer looking for a vegetation that did not exist. If they were to be allowed to die, they would. But from time to time they were thrown small handfuls of hope: once it was a patch of grey grass upon a hummock of red sand; once they devoured the thatch from some old native huts, swallowing and groaning, and afterwards stood still, the long, unnatural hairs quivering upon their withered lips. Temporarily, their bellies were filled, but not the days.

  Nights were, by contrast, short and exquisite both to animals and men, for desires and intentions, no longer burning, were abandoned in favour of comradeship, dreaming, and astronomy, in the case of men, or pure being, in that of horses. Nobody, except Voss, was concerned whether his bones would rise again from the earth, when his green flesh, watered by the dew, was shooting nightly in celestial crops.

  Relinquishing the pretence of tents, which in any event they would have been too weak and exhausted to erect, the three white men huddled close together at the fire. So, too, the wrecks of horses appeared to derive comfort from closeness, and would lie with the ridges of their backbones exposed to the darkness, not far from their irrational masters. All were united then, in the scent of sweat and the tentative warmth of bodies.

  Voss said once:

  ‘Are you not sorry, Harry, that you did not return with your friend?’

  ‘What friend?’ asked the lad dreamily.

  ‘Judd, of course.’

  ‘Was he my friend?’

  ‘How am I to tell, if you cannot?’

  The German was half angry, half pleased.

  Presently the boy said, looking in the fire:

  ‘No, sir. If I had gone, I would not a known what to do when I got there. Not any more.’

  ‘You would have learnt again very quickly.’

  ‘I could have learnt to black your boots, if you had a been there, sir. But you would not a been. And it would not be worth it. Not since you learnt me other things.’

  ‘What things?’ asked Voss quietly, whose mind shouted.

  The boy was quiet then, and shy.

  ‘I do not know,’ he said at last, shyly. ‘I cannot say it. But know. Why, sir, to live, I suppose.’

  He blushed in the darkness for the blundering inadequacy of his own words, but in his weak, feverish condition, was vibrating and fluctuating, like any star – living, in fact.

  ‘Living?’ laughed the German.

  He was shouting with laughter to hide his joy.

  ‘Then I have taught you something shameful. How they would accuse me!’

  ‘I am happy,’ said Harry Robarts.

  The German was shivering with the cold that blew in from the immense darkness, and which was palpitating with little points of light. So, in the light of his own conquest, he expanded, until he possessed the whole firmament. Then it was true; all his doubts were dissolved.

  ‘And what about you, Frank?’ he said, or shouted again, so recklessly that one old mare pricked up her drowsing ears.

  ‘Have I not taught you anything?’ he asked.

  ‘To expect damnation,’ said Le Mesurier, without considering long.

  In the uncompromising desert in which they were seated, this answer should have sounded logical enough, just as objects were the quintessence of themselves, and the few remaining possessions of the explorers were all that was necessary in that life.

  But Voss was often infuriated by rational answers. Now the veins were swollen in his scraggy neck.

  ‘That is men all over,’ he cried. ‘They will aim too low. And achieve what they expect. Is that your greatest desire?’

  Either Le Mesurier did not hear, or else one of his selves did not accept the duties of familiar. It was the lad who replied to the question in the terms of his own needs.

  ‘I would like to eat a dish of fat chops,’ he said. ‘And fresh figs, the purple ones. Though apples is good enough. I like apples, and could put up with them instead.’

  ‘That is your answer,’ said Le Mesurier to Voss. ‘From a man going to his execution.’

  ‘Well, if I was asked what I would take for me last dinner,’ said the boy. ‘And who would not eat? What would you choose?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Le Mesurier. ‘I would not eat for fear that I might miss something of what was happening to me. I would want to feel the last fl
y crawling on my skin, and listen to my conscience in case it should give up a secret. Out of that experience I might even create something.’

  ‘That would not be of much good,’ said Harry Robarts, ‘not if you was to die.’

  ‘Dying is creation. The body creates fresh forms, the soul inspires by its manner of leaving the body, and passes into other souls.’

  ‘Even the souls of the damned?’ asked Voss.

  ‘In the process of burning it is the black that gives up the gold.’

  ‘Then he will give up the purest,’ said Voss.

  He pointed to the body of the aboriginal boy, whom they had forgotten, but who was lying within the light of the fire, curled in sleep, like some animal.

  Of the three souls that were dedicated to him, Voss most loved that of the black boy. Such unimpaired innocence could only be the most devoted. Whereas, the simplicity of Harry Robarts was not entirely confident – it did at times expect doom – and the sophistications of Frank Le Mesurier could have been startling echoes of the master’s own mind.

  So that Voss was staring with inordinate affection at the black-gold body of the aboriginal.

  ‘He will be my footstool,’ he said, and fell asleep, exalted by the humility of the black’s perfect devotion and the contrast of heavenly perfection. Sleep did, in fact, crown man’s sweaty head with stars.

  But in the morning Jackie could not be found.

  ‘He will have gone to look for a strayed horse,’ said Voss at first, with the bland simplicity that the situation demanded.

  ‘Horses!’ cried Harry Robarts. ‘No horse of ours has the strength to stray.’

  ‘Or to find water,’ Voss persisted.

  ‘The waterholes are dry in hell,’ remarked Le Mesurier.

  ‘Then, he will come,’ said Voss. ‘Eventually.’

  There was still some brown muck left in their canvas water-bags, and this they held carefully in their mouths. They did delay a little, although it began to appear to all that it was immaterial whether the native returned or not.

  One of the horses, it was seen, would not get up again. The hair of its mane was spread out upon the ground, its bones barely supported the shabby tent of its hide, and the gases were rising in the belly, in one last protest, as the party pushed on.