Patrick White - Voss

The doctor himself was remarkably neat, and particularly about his full, well-cut, black back, which Mrs Bonner determined in future not to notice.

He was carrying a little cardboard box.

‘I propose to let some blood,’ he explained. ‘Now. Although I had intended waiting until this evening.’

The old couple drew in their breath.

Nor would Mrs Bonner consent to look at those naked leeches, lolling upon the moist grass, in their little box.

As the day promised scorching heat, they had already drawn the curtains over the sun, so that the young woman’s face was sculptured by shadow as well as suffering. But for a painful breathing, she might not have been present in her greenish flesh, for she did not appear directly aware of anything that was taking place. She allowed the doctor to arrange the leeches as if it were one of the more usual acts of daily life, and only when it was done did she seem concerned for the ash, which, she said, the wind was blowing into their faces from off the almost extinguished fires.

Once she roused herself, and asked:

‘Shall I be weakened, Doctor, by losing blood?’

The doctor pursed his mouth, and answered to humour her:

‘On the contrary, you should be strengthened.’

‘If that is the truth,’ she said. ‘Because I need all my strength. But people have a habit of making truth suit the occasion.’

And later on:

‘I think I love truth best of all.’ Pausing. ‘That is not strictly true, you know. We can never be quite truthful.’

All the time the leeches were filling, until they could no longer twitch their tails. Mrs Bonner was petrified, both by words that she did not understand, and by the medusa-head that uttered them.

Laura Trevelyan said:

‘Dear Christ, now at last I understand your suffering.’

The doctor frowned, not because his patient’s conclusion approached close to blasphemy, but because he was of a worldly nature. Although he attended Church, both for professional reasons and to please his rather fashionable wife, the expression of faith outside its frame of organized devotion, scandalized, even frightened this established man.

‘You see,’ he whispered to Mrs Bonner, ‘how the leeches have filled?’

‘I prefer not to look,’ she replied, and had to shudder.

Laura’s head — for all that remained of her seemed to have become concentrated in the head — was struggling with the simplicity of a great idea.

When she opened her eyes and said:

‘How important it is to understand the three stages. Of God into man. Man. And man returning into God. Do you find, Doctor, there are certain beliefs a clergyman may explain to one from childhood onward, without one’s understanding, except in theory, until suddenly, almost in spite of reason, they are made clear. Here, suddenly, in this room, of which I imagined I knew all the corners, I understand!’

The doctor was prepared to speak firmly, but saw, to his relief, that she did not require an answer.

‘Dear God,’ she cried, gasping for breath, ‘it is so easy.’

Beyond the curtains the day was now blazing, and the woman in the bed was burning with a similar light.

‘Except,’ she said, distorting her mouth with an irony which intensified the compassion that she felt, and was now compelled to express, ‘except that man is so shoddy, so contemptible, greedy, jealous, stubborn, ignorant. Who will love him when I am gone? I only pray that God will.

‘O Lord, yes,’ she begged. ‘Now that he is humble.’

Dr Kilwinning had to tear at the leeches with his plump, strong hands to bring them away, so greedily were they clinging to the blue veins of the sick woman.

‘That is clear, Doctor?’ she asked.

‘What?’ he mumbled.

The situation had made him clumsy.

‘When man is truly humbled, when he has learnt that he is not God, then he is nearest to becoming so. In the end, he may ascend.’

By this time Dr Kilwinning’s cuffs had acquired a crumpled look. The coat had wrinkled up his back. Upon departure, he said quite sincerely:

‘This would appear to be a case where medicine is of little assistance. I suggest that Miss Trevelyan might care to talk to a clergyman.’

But when the eventuality was broached, Laura laughed.

‘Dear Aunt,’ she said, ‘you were always bringing me soups, and now it is a clergyman.’

‘We only thought,’ said Aunt Emmy; and: ‘All we do is intended for the best.’

It was most unfair. Everybody jumped upon her, even for those ideas which were not her own.

But Laura Trevelyan was temporarily comforted by some illusion. Or by the action of the leeches, hoped her uncle, against his natural scepticism. At all events, she did rest a little in the course of the afternoon, and when the breeze came, as it usually did towards four o’clock, a salt air mingled with the scent of cooling roses, she remarked in a languid voice:

‘Mercy will be there. They are taking her down out of the cart. I hope there are no wasps, for she will be playing a good deal, naturally, under the fruit trees. How I wish I might lay my head, if only for a little, in that long, cool grass.’

Suddenly she looked at her aunt, with those eyes which saw more than others.

‘Mercy went?’ she asked.

‘That was your wish,’ said Aunt Emmy, moistening her lips, and forced her handkerchief into a tighter ball.

‘I am glad,’ said Laura. ‘My mind is at rest.’

Mrs Bonner wondered whether she were not, after all, stronger than her niece.

*

Voss attempted to count the days, but the simplest sums would swell into a calculation of universal time, so vast that it filled his mouth with one whole mealy potato, cold certainly, but of unmanageable proportions.

Once he asked:

‘Harry? Wie lang sind wir schon hier? How many days? We must catch the horses, or we will rot as we lie in this one place.’

As if to rot were avoidable. By moving. But it was not.

‘We rot by living,’ he sighed.

Grace lay only in the varying speeds at which the process of decomposition took place, and the lovely colours of putrescence that some souls were allowed to wear. For, in the end, everything was of flesh, the soul elliptical in shape.

During those days many people entered the hut. They would step across the form of the white boy, and stand, and observe the man.

Once, in the presence of a congregation, the old blackfellow, the guardian, or familiar, put into the white man’s mouth a whole wichetty grub.

The solemnity of his act was immense.

The white man was conscious of that pinch of soft, white flesh, but rather more of its flavour, hot unlike that of the almond, which also is elliptical. He mumbled it on his tongue for a while before attempting to swallow it, and at once the soft thing became the struggling wafer of his boyhood, that absorbed the unworthiness in his hot mouth, and would not go down. As then, his fear was that his sinful wafer might be discovered, lying before him, half-digested, upon the floor.

He did, however, swallow the grub in time.

The grave blackfellows became used to the presence of the white man. He who had appeared with the snake was perhaps also of supernatural origin, and must be respected, even loved. Safety is bought with love, for a little. So they even fetched their children to look at the white man, who lay with his eyes closed, and whose eyelids were a pale golden like the belly skin of the heavenly snake.

In the sweet, Gothic gloom in which the man himself walked at times, by effort, over cold tiles, beneath gold-leaf, and grey-blue mould of the sky, the scents were ascending, of thick incense, probably, and lilies doing obeisance. It would also be the bones of the saints, he reasoned, that were exuding a perfume of sanctity. One, however, was a stinking lily, or suspect saint.