Patrick White - Voss

Voss had sat back and was picking his teeth of the sweetbread. He also belched once, as if he had been alone with his thoughts.

‘I do meet scarcely a man here,’ he said, ‘who does not suspect he will be unmade by his country. Instead of knowing that he will make it into what he wishes.’

‘It is no country of mine,’ declared Topp, who had poured the wine, ‘except by the unfortunate accident of my being here.’

Such was his emotion, he slopped the wine.

‘Nor mine, frankly,’ said Le Mesurier. ‘I cannot think of it except as a bad joke.’

‘I came here through idealism,’ said Topp, feverish with his own situation, ‘and a mistaken belief that I could bring nicety to barbarian minds. Here, even the gentry, or what passes for it, has eaten itself into a stupor of mutton.’

‘I see nothing wrong with this country,’ dared Harry Robarts, ‘nor with havin’ your belly full. Mine has been full since the day I landed, and I am glad.’

Then his courage failed, and he drank his wine down, right down, in a purple gurgle.

‘So all is well with Harry,’ said Le Mesurier, ‘who sees with his belly’s eyes.’

‘It will do me,’ said the sullen boy.

One day he would find the courage to kill this man.

‘And me, Harry,’ said Voss. ‘I will venture to call it my country, although I am a foreigner,’ he added for the company, since human beings have a habit of rising up in defence of what they repudiate. ‘And although so little of my country is known to me as yet.’

Much as he despised humility, other people expected it.

‘You are welcome,’ sighed Topp, although already the wine had made him happy.

‘So you see, Harry,’ said Le Mesurier, ‘you have a fellow-countryman, who will share your patriotism in embracing the last iguana.’

‘Do not torment him, Frank,’ said Voss, not because it was cruel to bait dumb animals, but because he wished to enjoy the private spectacle of himself.

Harry Robarts went so far as to wipe his grateful eyes. Like all those in love, he would misinterpret lovingly.

As for Voss, he had gone on to grapple with the future, in which undertaking he did not expect much of love, for all that is soft and yielding is easily hurt. He suspected it, but the mineral forms were an everlasting source of wonder; feldspar, for instance, was admirable, and his own name a crystal in his mouth. If he were to leave that name on the land, irrevocably, his material body swallowed by what it had named, it would be rather on some desert place, a perfect abstraction, that would rouse no feeling of tenderness in posterity. He had no more need for sentimental admiration than he had for love. He was complete.

The leader looked at his subordinates, and wondered whether they knew.

But an unidentified body was falling up the steep stairs of the house. It thumped, drawing all attention, then burst through the doorway of the upper room. Candles guttered.

‘It is Turner,’ said Voss, ‘and drunk.’

‘I am not what you would call sober,’ admitted the person in question, ‘nor yet drunk. It is the stringybark that has shook me up a bit. The stuff would rot your guts.’

‘I would not let it,’ replied the German.

‘A man’s nature will get the better of him,’ said Turner gloomily, and sat down.

He was a long, thin individual, whose mind had gone sour. He was rather squint-eyed, moreover, from examining the affairs of others while appearing not to do so, but wiry too, for all the miserable impression he made. He had been employed those two months at the brickfields, and there was almost always some of the dust from the bricks visible in the cracks of his skin and creases of his clothes.

‘I had news,’ Voss said to him, ‘but have almost decided it will not interest you.’

When Turner cried:

‘You do not intend to drop me on account of me nature, for which a man is not responsible! Anyone will tell yer that.’

‘If I take you, it will be because your nature will not receive much encouragement in those parts.’

And because of a morbid interest in derelict souls, Voss suspected. Still there was in Turner sober a certain native cunning that put him on his mettle. A cunning man can be used if he does not first use.

‘Mr Voss, sir,’ pleaded Turner, drunk, ‘I will strain every muscle in me back. I will do the dirty work. I will eat grass.’

‘Only too obviously another convert,’ said Frank Le Mesurier, and got up.

Anything that was physically repulsive to him, he would have trodden under foot. He would not have cared to brush against Turner, yet it was probable, riding through the long, yellow grass, their stirrup-irons would catch at each other in overtures of intimacy, or lying in the dust and stench of ants, wrestling with similar dreams under the stars, their bodies would roll over and touch.

If this German is really philanthropist enough to take the man, he reflected. Or is he a fool?

But Voss would not help him to distinguish.

‘Mr Topp,’ the German was saying, ‘if I had mastered the art of music, I would set myself the task of creating a composition by which the various instruments would represent the moral characteristics of human beings in conflict with one another.’

‘I would rather suggest the sublimity of perfection,’ said the innocent music master, ‘in great sweeps of pure sound.’

‘But in order to understand it, you must first find perfection, and that you will never do. Besides, it would be monotonous, not to say monstrous, if you did.’

Turner, who was holding his perplexed head in a kind of basket of fingers, exclaimed:

‘Oh, oh! Gawd save us!’

Then he remembered, and turned on Le Mesurier, who was ready to retire, a look of deliberate malice.

‘Converts, eh?’ Because it rankled. ‘You, with all your talk, are not such a saint, if gutters could tell. I seen you, in not such a Sunday wescoat, and mud on it, too. And whorin’ after women under the trees. And holdin’ forth to the public. Contracted with a practisin’ madman, you was, accordin’ to your own admission, for a journey to hell an’ back.’

Then Turner began to laugh, and to wink great face-consuming winks at the listening boy.

‘If it was I, and I was drunk, then I cannot remember. Except that I have been drunk,’ said Le Mesurier, and they could see the gristle of his nose.

‘We are not the only sinners, eh, sonny?’ golloped the winking Turner.

He felt the necessity of drawing in the boy. It was always better two to one.

‘I am willing to admit I have been drunk,’ said Le Mesurier.

‘It is true,’ said the sullen boy, who would enjoy the luxury of taking sides once he had learnt the game.

‘It is sometimes necessary,’ frowned Le Mesurier.

‘Ho-ho!’ exploded Turner. ‘Tell the worms! As if they will not know about the moist.’

‘But there are droughts, Turner, that no worm will experience in his blunt head as he burrows in the earth. His life is blissfully blindly physical. The worst that can happen to your worm is that he may come up and be trodden on.’

‘You are a gentleman,’ said Turner, whose lips had been dogging every word, ‘and I do not follow all of that. But I have me suspicions.’

Le Mesurier would sometimes laugh in his nose.

‘And I will take your face off for it,’ Turner said.

He did get up, together with Harry Robarts, who was his friend of a few moments. The breathing was enormous. It seemed that the passion which had swelled and was filling the room was the all-important one.

Until Voss pricked it.

‘I am not interested in personal disagreements,’ he said; ‘who is drunk, who is a madman, who is disloyal. These are, in any event, of minor consideration. What distresses me more is my own great folly in continuing, like a worm, Frank, butting my head at whatsoever darkness of earth, once I have conceived an idea. You, Turner, Frank, are part of this strange, seemingly inconceivable idea. It distresses me that I cannot lay it aside, with all its component and dependent difficulties. But I cannot. Now you will go, please, out of this room, which is mine, you have forgotten. And you will remember also that the street is the property of all the citizens of this town. When we meet again, I trust you will have accepted one another’s faults, because we must be together for a long time.’