Patrick White - Voss

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.