Voss

by Patrick White

  So, now, the young grazier knew that he must ingratiate himself also with the hateful, the unfeeling, worst of all, the superior Judd, whose back it was ahead.

  ‘Judd!’ he called, lifting up his voice from the depths where it lay. ‘Judd, I have a suggestion to make.’

  Judd neither answered, nor turned, although it was evident that he was waiting to receive.

  Angus rode, or forced his horse almost level with the man who had become his leader.

  ‘Let us open the veins of one of these horses that are almost done. And wet our lips. Would it not be an idea?’

  Judd did not answer.

  Angus felt relieved that he was not quite level with the convict, and could fall back, bumping on his iron saddle, he who had once been a fine figure on a horse. In his mouth he could taste the clotting of disgust.

  But, now that he rode alone again, the young man could have cried for the distance that separated him from Judd.

  As they were approaching an outcrop of rock, an event in time such as these relics of human life seldom experienced now, Turner, who was in the rear, felt that a great weight had begun to drag him down. Magnificently, cruelly salient rocks, glassy-sharp, he knew he was not intended to reach them. So he threw up his sticks of hands, and was falling, falling. Nothing could have stayed him, except, perhaps, a suspension of personal destiny. Even so, when he struck the ground, which he did very lightly, on account of his poor condition – no umbrella, in fact, could have landed lighter – he set up a wildly importunate shrieking.

  ‘Save me, you beggars!’ Turner shrieked. ‘You devils! You are not leaving me to die?’

  His bowels were protesting at the last injustice humanity would inflict upon him. Then he lay, spread out, a thing of dried putrescence and the scars of boils. His skin was grinning.

  The rocks now became a most desirable goal for the two survivors, though what they would achieve by satisfaction of that desire was not at all clear. With terrible slowness, the horses approached their destination. The riders’ breath rose in a stench of almost mystical intensity. There was some possibility, of course, that Judd might open the cupboard of the rock, and step inside, to find himself at last. But Ralph Angus was haunted by a fear that he might not know how to die, when it came to the moment, in a manner befitting a gentleman.

  Naturally he could not expect reassurance or advice from the convict on such a matter. Moreover, they were already treading upon the outer defences of the citadel, where the young landowner’s horse stumbled, and he half jumped free, half was flung out of the saddle, to slide down the infernal incline of the first molten pyramid. Arrived at its base, he lay, and when he had recovered sufficiently, which he was allowed to do, began to knock his head against the soothing rock. So the great gong boomed in his ear and Ralph Angus died, as young ladies of his own class offered him tea out of Worcester cups. Deliciously their fingers of rose and lilac braided him up in their possessive hair. They smothered him, and mothered him, until, at the last, he was presented as a swaddled baby. In this, his beard could have caused doubts, but he had parted from it: there it was, sprouting from the sand, independently, like a plant.

  Judd now occupied the desert.

  If the convict was taking longer to die, it was because of his great physical resources, and because he was determined to find some shade.

  After slithering from the back of his horse, tearing his papery hands on several buckles, he had begun to shamble round the rocks. On this incalculable journey, which he was accomplishing in the manner of a surprised orang-outang, looking, and swaying, blinded by fatigue and mica, he was mumbling continually:

  ‘A little piece of shade. A little piece of shade.’

  Stumbling.

  ‘Oh, Lord,’ he sighed.

  He did not pause to consider whether his companions were already dead, let alone ponder over their way of dying, because death is such an absorbing matter; his mind could only contend with his own. That he would die now, he was fairly confident. Nor was he afraid at the prospect. It seemed the only right end to his plain, practical life.

  If only God would take him at once into His rocky bosom. He did earnestly pray for this, who had in his time seen animals lie squirming, and men too.

  Miraculously, he had found a little shade, very thin, against his own monument, and when he had got down, into the shadow of the rock, making himself as acceptable as he could, then he ventured:

  ‘If it is your will, Lord, let me die now.’

  Two horses still stood drooping in the sun as the man lay beneath his eyelids, but horses, he remembered, could take a long time, then go off with very little fuss.

  *

  All night long the hoofs of horses were stumbling back and forth.

  In the early hours, while a moon still lay upon the muddy surface of the waterhole, Colonel Hebden awoke, breaking a particularly horrible dream, of which he could not remember the details. Since he had decided to abandon his mission, it was only natural that he should await somewhat anxiously the approach of daylight, and with it the opportunity to inform his companions of his intention. The morning finally came, and it was with obvious relief and delight that the members of the expedition found they were of one mind. To none had it occurred that others might have been harbouring the same secret thoughts. So that animal spirits were let loose, and there was much laughter and joking as these hitherto solitary individuals emerged from their isolation, to make plans for a hopeful future, while consuming their normal breakfast of muddy tea, dusty damper, and splintery strips of dried beef.

  When the two aboriginals had brought in the hobbled horses, which had struggled back as always in the direction from which they had come, it did not take long to prepare for departure. Only Colonel Hebden himself gave one last look to westward, and at those inhospitable rocks in the near distance. Perhaps the fact that they were the only feature in the landscape made them most terrible.

  So the expedition turned back.

  That he had failed, was, of course, obvious to the Colonel, but he did not altogether blame himself. He blamed the boy Jackie, who had become, because of his elusiveness, the key to all secrets. Trailing back with his party in the direction of Jildra, Colonel Hebden’s private resolve was eventually to find Jackie, or to ‘apprehend’, as he noted that night in his journal.

  He remained unsatisfied, however. If he had but known – there was a great deal that Colonel Hebden did not know; it was almost as if there had been a conspiracy against him – if he had but known, Death had just apprehended Jackie, crossing a swamp, during a thunderstorm, at dusk. The boy had not attempted to resist. He lay down, and was persuaded to melt at last into the accommodating earth, all but his smile, which his tight, white, excellent teeth showed every sign of perpetuating.

  16

  IN the absence of its present owners, the Parburys, on a pleasure voyage to Europe, the Radclyffes had taken the old house for at least six months, so that the children might benefit by the sea air and their mother enjoy such distractions as Sydney had to offer. So the whole household was transplanted – maids, nurses, governesses, a selection of grooms, the canaries, which otherwise would have been neglected, and Mrs Radclyffe’s favourite pug. Mr Radclyffe, who was grown rather red and fleshy, although still most personable, did not allow the management of his property at Merivale to prevent him paying occasional visits to his family. He derived great satisfaction from their sojourn in the house at Potts Point, and would entertain the children with humorous, not to say satirical reminiscences of the life lived there when it had belonged to their grandparents, twenty years before. But Mrs Radclyffe was divided in her feelings.

  Belle, of course, had always been rather sentimental. Now she cherished the past, and would decorate some aspects of it with an extravagance that she was forced to hide. If she had not been at the same time, a practical woman, loving wife, and devoted mother, she might have made a religion of it, but a pretty, gentle, saffron-coloured one, like Buddhism perhaps.
Belle Radclyffe was never for the swords and saints of religious faith, nor would she blow her way to Heaven with assistance of the leather bellows. To accept, to respect, to let live: these were enough. Her own beauty and goodness were a pledge that she found confirmed repeatedly in what she saw around her. On returning to the old house she had picked flowers in such reckless quantities, her husband had complained that she was cluttering the rooms, and that the pollen made him sneeze; he even sneezed to prove it. So she had been forced to curb herself, in that, as in many other ways, and to set store by recollection. She would remember flowers, branches she had picked on this or that occasion, even down to wild things: she would remember the scents that had accompanied certain incidents; she would remember pet animals she had kept, and the eyes of children at whom she had smiled in the street.

  ‘Belle is still perfect,’ said old Mrs Pringle, emerging at one point from her bronchitis and bezique.

  ‘I am glad to say she is not,’ replied Mr Radclyffe, as if he meant it.

  Indeed, had he stopped to think he could have written out a long list of his wife’s shortcomings, and without having recourse to pen and paper the fact that she rarely attended to what he said, that she encouraged children in noisy games, that she had but a superficial knowledge of most subjects, and that she slept with her eyes open, were unfortunate defects that easily came to mind. Thanks to her indulgence, he himself had become quite intolerable, but of this, perhaps her greatest sin, he remained in blissful ignorance.

  Belle, however, who might have been less happy if she had had time to consider, was at her happiest that year, in what had been her parents’ house.

  During the spring a cabbage tree had flowered in the wilderness at the bottom of the garden, providing an object for expeditions so little adventurous that nobody else wished to share them. This was their virtue in Mrs Radclyffe’s eyes. She would often visit the tree alone, but best in the morning, after she had given her orders, and before her husband, engrossed in the news, had begun to issue his. She would quickly lose herself in the garden. She would hum the songs she had sung, and forgotten, and now remembered in that clinging, reminiscent air. She would even whistle, very loud, although this was a gift that had never met with her mother’s approval. And she would stoop to free or coax a plant, but mockingly, because what could one do for the plants of other people? All of the garden was hers and not. So she would hurry on, to establish herself by reaching her goal. Her rash skirts rushed, down the steps, of which time had reduced the scale, past an attempt at a grotto, in which the moss had died, past the corner where her father himself had tended the barrel of liquid manure, down, down, through the evergreen tunnels of memory, until, there at the end, in a circle of light, was the cabbage tree. According to the day, the miraculous spire did not stir from its trance of stillest, whitest wax, or shuddered stiffly on the verge of breaking free, or rejoiced simply in its jewels of innocent and tinkling crystal. As she watched, so it was reflected in the face of the woman, who would return at last through the doorway of her own girlhood, convinced that she had been refreshed by the vision of the tree.

  Only the supreme torturer would have tweaked the curtain of illusion, yet, very occasionally, it could have been after a sleepless night, or if the morning was a sultry one, her glance would waver, as if it had encountered the danger of distinguishing what has been given from what has been withheld. Then she would turn aside crumpling up her handkerchief in a way she had when her children were ill, and go back through the suffocating, rented garden, holding up her skirts as she climbed the steep and clammy steps, and, above all, on approaching the snails that it pained her so very much to destroy.

  So she resumed her orderly and happy life. She was most fortunate, she assured herself, in everything, not least that their visit to Sydney had enabled her again to enjoy the company of her cousin, who would walk over on Sundays for midday dinner, and on rare occasions allow herself to be brought by carriage of an evening for tea and music.

  Although their dissimilar lives had even further increased the difference in their natures, the two women were still quite greedy for each other’s love. Belle was noted for an opulent and complaisant kindness. She would fall in with the most unpleasant suggestions, if she thought no positive harm could ensue and that, by doing so, she might be better liked. Not a little of her private thought was taken up with wondering how she stood in the opinion of others, nor could she bear to think that it might be ill. Laura, on the other hand, was stern. She rather liked to be disliked. It was the life she had led, in school, you know, Mrs Radclyffe would apologize to friends; a headmistress must adopt a certain attitude. For, on the death of both Miss Linsleys, Laura Trevelyan had inherited the Academy for Young Ladies on the edge of the Surry Hills.

  A great many people died, Belle Radclyffe realized upon an uneasy morning in her father’s oppressive camellia grove. Rarely did she allow herself to think of death, but was receiving morning calls, or planning evening receptions, or kissing children, or carrying herself carefully on account of an expected baby. Now, for a moment in the shrubbery, her mind was choking with neglected thoughts, as the garden was with drifts of leaves. So she was forced to remember her mother’s crumpled face, and fragments of advice, though her mother was buried these many years, and her advice proved fallible. After they sold the house, Mr Bonner had gone to live in lodgings in Bent Street, where a decent woman attended to his wants. A cheerful dotard, he would run out and claw at almost anyone to discuss the weather, and look most offended when acquaintance or stranger did not appreciate his prophecies. The weather was his sole remaining interest. Belle Radclyffe, while loving her father in theory, had to admit that she found him terribly tedious in fact.

  Aghast that she should harbour unkind thoughts, Mrs Radclyffe was relieved the following moment to receive an onslaught of younger children, who came flinging down the path, released from Latin, or French, or scales, to bury in her soft amplitude their hard inky little bodies.

  How she loved that which had been torn out of her. Such was her appetite for her children, she frequently had to remind herself that her husband was their father, and entitled to his share.

  Now several of those children were kicking and shouting.

  ‘We tasted the sillabub,’ they cried.

  ‘May I stay up tonight, Mamma?’

  ‘I will stay up.’

  ‘Who said?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘If you do not stop kicking me, Tom!’

  ‘That is enough,’ said Mrs Radclyffe.

  Only Laura, the eldest, who had accompanied the children, not as a sister, but as a condescending deity, preserved a godlike silence. Beneath her coils of grown-up hair she made a mystery out of almost everything.

  ‘Everyone will stay up,’ Mrs Radclyffe announced, in the accents of a just and rational mother. ‘Not the babies, of course, and some longer than others, according to ages. You must agree that that would only be right.”

  Whether they shared her opinion or not, all were agreed that their mother did conceive the most lovely ideas, and this could be one of them.

  Mrs Radclyffe had determined to give a party to which she would invite only those people she wished to have. So constituted that she was always persuaded to see the best in human nature, it promised to be a gathering of fairly ill-assorted guests, rich with poor, which is daring enough, past with present, which can be more distasteful, age with youth, in which soil can germinate rare seeds of bitterness and cruelty. Yet, Mrs Radclyffe was resolved to dare. Nor had she devised any set plan of entertainment, but, owing again to her soft and trustful character, would leave it to the guests to amuse themselves, to illuminate by conversation, or to console with music, to answer questions on slips of paper, to eat and drink without shame, to flirt, or to wander solitary in the cool of the garden, which is, for some individuals, the only solution of a party.

  Of the whole pantomime, Mrs Radclyffe had always loved best the transformation scene, and her
e she was, staging one of her own. As night fell and the moon rose behind the net of trees, the woman’s hands would have turned hot and childish but for the clattering of cold rings.

  ‘Belle!’ her husband was calling. ‘Belle!’ Through the expectant house. ‘Your dog has relieved himself on my boot.’

  ‘Oh, Tom! It could be any one of a variety of liquids. Or did you see him with your own eyes?’

  ‘It can only be Pug,’ Mr Radclyffe had decided. ‘I am convinced of that.’

  He always was.

  ‘Oh, dear!’ said his wife, but was concerned about other matters.

  ‘I will not be answerable for the disaster you insist upon courting,’ said Tom Radclyffe, as they were standing together, in anticipation, under the globes of blue gas.

  ‘You will not be required to,’ Belle replied, raising her chin slightly.

  Not that she had any great confidence in her own powers, but did believe in allowing a situation to arrange itself.

  Mr Radclyffe could not but smile, both for his superior knowledge and for her dazzling face. He was very pleased with his wife, though even more with his own perspicacity in choosing her.

  She, who all her life had reflected the sun, was the colour of moonlight on this occasion. Thanks to various devices of an ingenious dressmaker, including the judicious use of mother o’ pearl, she was shimmering like blue water. The moon itself could have rained upon her hair, in a brief shower of recognition, and as she floated through the altered room, a big, conquered, white rose dropped its tribute of petals at her feet.

  Night had indeed, taken possession. The solid scents of jasmine and pittosporum that were pressing through the open window had drugged the youngest children to the extent that they were clutching drowsily at their mother’s hoops to stay their inevitable fall.