Voss

by Patrick White

  So it was come to pass.

  Mr Sanderson smiled, and continued:

  ‘I would like you to meet my friend Judd.’

  The leaves of the trees were clapping.

  She was faced with an elderly, or old-looking man, of once powerful frame, in the clothes they had provided for him, good clothes, fashionable even, to which he had not accustomed himself. His large hands, in the absence of their former strength, moved in almost perpetual search for some reassuring object or position, just as the expressions were shifting on his face, like water over sand, and his mouth would close with a smile, attempt briefly to hold it, and fail.

  ‘So this is Judd, the convict,’ said Miss Trevelyan, less harshly than stating a fact, since she must stand on trial with him.

  Judd nodded.

  ‘I earned my ticket-of-leave two years, no, it would be four years before the expedition left.’

  All the old wounds had healed. He could talk about them now. He could talk about anything.

  His lips parted, Colonel Hebden watched quite greedily. Old Sanderson was bathed in a golden glow of age. Such warmth he had not experienced since the lifetime of his dear wife.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he contributed. ‘Judd was a neighbour of mine in the Forties. He joined the expedition when it passed through. In fact, I was responsible for that.’

  Miss Trevelyan, whose attention had been engaged by the ferrule of her parasol, realized that she was expected to speak. Judd waited, with his hands hanging and moving. Since his return, he had become accustomed to interrogation by ladies.

  ‘And were you able to resume your property?’ Miss Trevelyan asked, through her constricted throat.

  There was something that she would avoid. She would avoid it to the end. So she looked gravely at the ferrule of the parasol, and continued to interrogate a man who had suffered.

  ‘Resume?’ asked Judd, managing his tongue, which was round like that of a parrot. ‘No. It was gone. I was considered dead, you know.’

  ‘And your family?’ the kind woman asked.

  ‘All dead. My wife, she went first. It was the heart, I think they told me. My eldest boy died of a snakebite. The youngest got some sickness, I forget what.’ He shook his head, which was bald and humble above the fringe of white hair. ‘Anyways, he is passed on.’

  The survivor’s companions expressed appropriate sympathy.

  But Judd had lived beyond grief. He was impressed, rather, by the great simplicity with which everything had happened.

  Then Colonel Hebden took a hand. He could still have been holding the lady by an elbow. He said:

  ‘You know, Judd, Miss Trevelyan was a friend of Mr Voss.’

  ‘Ah,’ smiled the aged, gummy man. ‘Voss.’

  He looked at the ground, but presently spoke again.

  ‘Voss left his mark on the country,’ he said.

  ‘How?’ asked Miss Trevelyan, cautiously.

  ‘Well, the trees, of course. He was cutting his initials in the trees. He was a queer beggar, Voss. The blacks talk about him to this day. He is still there – that is the honest opinion of many of them – he is there in the country, and always will be.’

  ‘How?’ repeated Miss Trevelyan. Her voice was that of a man. She dared anyone.

  Judd was feeling his way with his hands.

  ‘Well, you see, if you live and suffer long enough in a place, you do not leave it altogether. Your spirit is still there.’

  ‘Like a god, in fact,’ said Colonel Hebden, but laughed to show his scepticism.

  Judd looked up, out of the distance.

  ‘Voss? No. He was never God, though he liked to think that he was. Sometimes, when he forgot, he was a man.’

  He hesitated, and fumbled.

  ‘He was more than a man,’ Judd continued, with the gratified air of one who had found that for which he had been looking. ‘He was a Christian, such as I understand it.’

  Miss Trevelyan was holding a handkerchief to her lips, as though her life-blood might gush out.

  ‘Not according to my interpretation of the word,’ the Colonel interrupted, remorselessly, ‘not by what I have heard.’

  ‘Poor fellow,’ sighed old Sanderson, again unhappy. ‘He was somewhat twisted. But is dead and gone.’

  Now that he was launched, Judd was determined to pursue his wavering way.

  ‘He would wash the sores of the men. He would sit all night with them when they were sick, and clean up their filth with his own hands. I cried, I tell you, after he was dead. There was none of us could believe it when we saw the spear, hanging from his side, and shaking.’

  ‘The spear?’

  Colonel Hebden behaved almost as though he himself were mortally wounded.

  ‘But this is an addition to the story,’ protested old Mr Sanderson, who also was greatly perturbed. ‘You did not mention the spear, Judd. You never suggested you were present at the death of Voss, simply that you mutinied, and moved off with those who chose to follow you. If we understood you rightly.’

  ‘It was me who closed his eyes,’ said Judd.

  In the same instant that the Colonel and Mr Sanderson looked across at each other, Miss Trevelyan succeeded in drawing a shroud about herself.

  Finally, the old grazier put an arm round the convict’s shoulders, and said:

  ‘I think you are tired and confused, eh, Judd? Let me take you back to your lodgings.’

  ‘I am tired,’ echoed Judd.

  Mr Sanderson was glad to get him away, and into a hired brougham that was waiting.

  Colonel Hebden became aware that the woman was still standing at his side, and that he must recognize the fact. So he turned to her awkwardly at last, and said:

  ‘Your saint is canonized.’

  ‘I am content.’

  ‘On the evidence of a poor madman?’

  ‘I am content.’

  ‘Do not tell me any longer that you respect the truth.’

  She was digging at the tough roots of grass with the ferrule of her parasol.

  ‘All truths are particoloured. Except the greatest truth of all.’

  ‘Your Voss was particoloured. I grant you that. A perfect magpie!’

  Looking at the monstrous ants at the roots of the grass, Miss Trevelyan replied:

  ‘Whether Judd is an impostor, or a madman, or simply a poor creature who has suffered too much, I am convinced that Voss had in him a little of Christ, like other men. If he was composed of evil along with the good, he struggled with that evil. And failed.’

  Then she was going away, heavily, a middle-aged woman, over the grass.

  Now, as they sat in the crowded room, full of the deceptive drifts of music and brutal explosions of conversation, Mercy Trevelyan alone realized the extent to which her mother had been tried by some experience of the afternoon. If the daughter did not inquire into the origin of the mother’s distress, it was because she had learnt that rational answers seldom do explain. She was herself, moreover, of unexplained origin.

  In the circumstances, she leaned towards her mother from where she sat upon her stool, the whole of her strong young throat swelling with the love she wished to convey, and whispered:

  ‘Shall we not go into another room? Or let us, even, go away. It is simple. No one will miss us.’

  Then Laura Trevelyan released the bridge of her nose, which her fingers had pinched quite white.

  ‘No,’ she said, and smiled. ‘I will not go. I am here. I will stay.’

  Thus she made her covenant.

  Other individuals, of great longing but little daring, suspecting that the knowledge and strength of the headmistress might be accessible to them, began to approach by degrees. Even her beauty was translated for them into terms they could understand. As the night poured in through the windows and the open doors, her eyes were overflowing with a love that might have appeared supernatural, if it had not been for the evidence of her earthly body: the slightly chapped skin of her neck, and the small hole in the finger o
f one glove, which, in her distraction and haste, she had forgotten to mend.

  Amongst the first to join Miss Trevelyan was the invertebrate Willie Pringle, who, it transpired, had become a genius. Then there was Topp, the music-master. Out of his hatred for the sour colonial soil upon which he had been deposited many years before had developed a perverse love, that he had never yet succeeded in expressing and which, for that reason, nobody had suspected. He was a grumpy little man, a failure, who would continue to pulse, none the less, though the body politic ignore his purpose. To these two were added several diffident persons who had burst from the labyrinth of youth on that night, and were tremblingly eager to learn how best to employ their freedom.

  The young person in the gown of white tarlatan, for instance, came close to the group and spread her skirts upon the edge of a chair. She balanced her chin upon her hand and blushed. Although nobody knew her, nobody asked her name, since it was her intention that mattered.

  Conversation was the wooden raft by which their party hoped eventually to reach the promised shore.

  ‘I am uncomfortably aware of the very little I have seen and experienced of things in general, and of our country in particular,’ Miss Trevelyan had just confessed, ‘but the little I have seen is less, I like to feel, than what I know. Knowledge was never a matter of geography. Quite the reverse, it overflows all maps that exist. Perhaps true knowledge only comes of death by torture in the country of the mind.’

  She laughed somewhat painfully.

  ‘You will understand that. Some of you, at least, are the discoverers,’ she said, and looked at them.

  That some of them did understand was the more marvellous for their realization of it.

  ‘Some of you,’ she continued, ‘will express what we others have experienced by living. Some will learn to interpret the ideas embodied in the less communicative forms of matter, such as rock, wood, metal, and water. I must include water, because, of all matter it is the most musical.’

  Yes, yes. Topp, the bristling, unpleasant little thing, was sitting forward. In the headmistress’s wooden words, he could hear the stubborn music that was waiting for release. Of rock and scrub. Of winds curled invisibly in wombs of air. Of thin rivers struggling towards seas of eternity. All flowing and uniting. Over a bed of upturned faces.

  The little Topp was distracted by the possibility of many such harmonies. He began to fidget and snatch at his trouser leg. He said:

  ‘If we do not come to grief on our mediocrity as a people. If we are not locked for ever in our own bodies. Then, too, there is the possibility that our hates and our carnivorous habits will unite in a logical conclusion: we may destroy one another.’

  Topp himself was sweating. His face was broken up into little pinpoints of grey light under the globes of blue gas.

  It fascinated Willie Pringle.

  ‘The grey of mediocrity, the blue of frustration,’ he suggested, less to inform an audience than to commit it to his memory. He added at once, louder and brisker than before: ‘Topp has dared to raise a subject that has often occupied my mind: our inherent mediocrity as a people. I am confident that the mediocrity of which he speaks is not a final and irrevocable state; rather is it a creative source of endless variety and subtlety. The blowfly on its bed of offal is but a variation of the rainbow. Common forms are continually breaking into brilliant shapes. If we will explore them.’

  So they talked, while through the doorway, in the garden, the fine seed of moonlight continued to fall and the moist soil to suck it up.

  Attracted by needs of their own, several other gentlemen had joined the gathering at the farther end of the large room. Old Sanderson, arrived at the very finish of his simple life, was still in search of tangible goodness. Colonel Hebden, who had not dared approach the headmistress since the episode at the unveiling, did now stalk up, still hungry for the truth, and assert:

  ‘I will not rest, you know.’

  ‘I would not expect it,’ said Miss Trevelyan, giving him her hand, since they were agreed that the diamonds with which they cut were equal both in aim and worth.

  ‘How your cousin is holding court,’ remarked Mrs de Courcy, consoling herself with a strawberry ice.

  ‘Court? A class, rather!’ said and laughed Belle Radclyffe.

  Knowing that she was not, and never would be of her cousin’s class, she claimed the rights of love to resent a little.

  At one stage, under pressure, Mrs Radclyffe forgot her promise and brought the headmistress Mr Ludlow. Though fairly drunk with brandy punch, the latter had remained an Englishman and, it was whispered by several ladies in imported poult-de-soie, the younger brother of a baronet.

  Mr Ludlow said:

  ‘I must apologize for imposing on you, madam, but having heard so much in your favour, I expressed a wish to make your acquaintance and form an opinion of my own.’

  The visitor laughed for his own wit, but Miss Trevelyan looked sad.

  ‘I have been travelling through your country, forming opinions of all and sundry,’ confessed Mr Ludlow to his audience, ‘and am distressed to find the sundry does prevail.’

  ‘We, the sundry, are only too aware of it,’ Miss Trevelyan answered, ‘but will humbly attempt to rise in your opinion if you will stay long enough.’

  ‘How long? I cannot stay long,’ protested Mr Ludlow.

  ‘For those who anticipate perfection – and I would not suspect you of wishing for less – eternity is not too long.’

  ‘Ohhhh dear!’ tittered Mr Ludlow. ‘I would be choked by pumpkin. Do you know that in one humpy I was even faced with a stewed crow!’

  ‘Did you not also sample baked Irish?’

  ‘The Irish, too? Ohhh dear!’

  ‘So, you see, we are in every way provided for, by God and nature, and consequently, must survive.’

  ‘Oh, yes, a country with a future. But when does the future become present? That is what always puzzles me.’

  ‘Now.’

  ‘How – now?’ asked Mr Ludlow.

  ‘Every moment that we live and breathe, and love, and suffer, and die.’

  ‘That reminds me, I had intended asking you about this – what shall we call him? – this familiar spirit, whose name is upon everybody’s lips, the German fellow who died.’

  ‘Voss did not die,’ Miss Trevelyan replied. ‘He is there still, it is said, in the country, and always will be. His legend will be written down, eventually, by those who have been troubled by it.’

  ‘Come, come. If we are not certain of the facts, how is it possible to give the answers?’

  ‘The air will tell us,’ Miss Trevelyan said.

  By which time she had grown hoarse, and fell to wondering aloud whether she had brought her lozenges.