Patrick White - Voss

When the party had disposed itself in the carriage, and Mrs Bonner had felt for her lozenges and tried to remember whether she had closed the window on the landing, when they had gone a little way down the drive, as far as the elbow and the bunya bunya, there, if you please, was the figure of that tiresome Mr Voss, walking up springily, carrying his hat, his head wet with perspiration.

Oh dear, everybody said, and even held hands.

But they pulled up. They had to.

‘Good afternoon, Mr Voss,’ said Mrs Bonner, putting out her head. ‘This is a surprise. You are quite wicked, you know, with your surprises. When a little note. And Mr Bonner not here.’

Mr Voss was opening his mouth. His lips were pale from walking. His expression suggested that he had not yet returned from thought.

‘But Mr Bonner,’ he was forming words, ‘is not at the store no more than here. He is gone away, they say. He is gone home.’

He resented bitterly the foreign language into which he had been thrown back thus precipitately.

‘He is gone away, certainly,’ said Mrs Bonner gaily, ‘but is not gone home.’

Occasions could make her mischievous.

Belle giggled, and turned her face towards the hot upholstery of the dark carriage. They were beautifully protected in that padded box.

‘I regret that they should have misinformed you so sadly,’ Mrs Bonner pursued. ‘Mr Bonner has gone to a picnic party at Point Piper with our friends the Pringles, where we will join him shortly.’

‘It is not important,’ Voss said.

He was glad, even. The niece sat in the carriage examining his face as if it had been wood.

She sat, and was examining the roots of his hair, the pores of his skin, but quite objectively, from beneath her leaden lids.

‘How tiresome for you,’ said Mrs Bonner.

‘It is not, it is not of actual importance.’

Voss had put his hat back.

‘Unless you get in. That is it,’ Mrs Bonner said, who furiously loved her own solutions. ‘You must get in with us. Then you can give Mr Bonner such information as you have. He would be provoked.’

So the step was let down.

Now it was Voss who was provoked, who had come that day, less for a purpose, than from a vague desire for his patron’s company, but had not bargained for all these women.

He bumped his head.

Then he was swallowed by the close carriage with its scents and sounds of ladies. It was an obscure and wretched situation, in which his knees were pressed together to avoid skirts, but of which, soft suggestions were overflowing.

He found himself beside the pretty girl, Miss Belle, who had remained giggly, as she sat holding her hands in a ball. Opposite were the mother and her niece, rocking politely. Although he recognized the features of the niece, her name had escaped him. However, that was unimportant. As they rocked. In one place a stench of putrid sea-stuff came in at the window and filled the carriage. Miss Belle bit her lip, and turned her head, and blushed, while the two ladies seemed oblivious.

‘Fancy,’ said Mrs Bonner with sudden animation, ‘a short time ago a gentleman and his wife, I forget the name, were driving in their brougham on the South Head Road, when some man, a kind of bushranger , I suppose one would call him, rode up to their vehicle, and appropriated every single valuable the unfortunate couple had upon them.’

Everybody listened to conversation as if it were not addressed to them personally. They rocked, and took it for granted that someone would assume responsibility. Mrs Bonner, at least, had done her duty. She looked out with that brightness of expression she had learnt to wear for drives in the days when they first owned a carriage. As for the bushrangers, she personally had never encountered such individuals, and could not believe in a future in which her agreeable life might be so rudely shaken. Bushrangers were but the material of narrative.

Presently they turned off along the sandy track that led down through Point Piper. The wheels of the carriage fell, as it were, from shelf to shelf of sandstone. Immediately the bones of the well-conducted passengers appeared to have melted, and the soft bodies were thrown against one another in ignominious confusion. In some circumstances this could have been comical, but something had made it serious. So the face of the grave young woman showed, and somehow impressed that gravity on the faces of the others. She withdrew her skirt ever so carefully from the rough black cloth that covered the German’s protuberant knees.

Some of the Pringle children came bursting through the scrub to show the way, and ran alongside, laughing, and calling up at the windows of the newly arrived carriage, and even directing rather impudent glances at a stranger who might not have had the Bonners’ full protection. The Pringles always arrived first at places. In spite of, or because of her fortune, for she was rich in her own right as well as through her husband, Mrs Pringle could have felt the need to mortify herself. She would march up and down with a watch in her hand, and shout at people quite coarsely, Mrs Bonner considered, shout at them desperately to assemble for departure, but it was all well intended. Irritation was a mark of her affection. She was most exacting of her husband, would raise her voice at him in company, and continually demand evidence of that superiority which he did not possess. These displays he met with a patient love, and had recently given her an eleventh child, which did mollify her for a little.

‘Ah, there you are,’ exclaimed Mrs Pringle, who with her assistants had been unpacking food behind the bushes in a circle of carriages and gigs.

The tone of her words expressed as much censure as politeness would allow. At her side, as almost always, was her eldest daughter, Una.

‘Yes, my dear,’ said Mrs Bonner, whom events had made mysteriously innocent. ‘If we are late, it is due to some little domestic upheaval. I fear you may have been anxious for us.’

When the Bonners were descended, the girls kissed most affectionately, although Una Pringle had always been of the opinion that Laura was a stick, worse still, possessed of brains , and in consequence not to be trusted. In general, Una preferred the other sex, though she was far too nice a girl to admit it to a diary, let alone a friend . Now, using the glare as an excuse, she was pretending not to examine the gentleman, or man, who had accompanied the Bonners, and who, it seemed, was also the most terrible stick . True to her nature, Una Pringle immediately solved a simple mathematical problem involving two sticks.

Mrs Bonner saw that she could no longer defer the moment of explaining the presence of the German, so she said:

‘This is Mr Voss, the explorer. Who is soon to leave for the bush.’

Formal in its inception, it sounded somehow funny at its end, for neither Mrs Bonner nor Mrs Pringle could be expected to take seriously a move so remotely connected with their own lives.

‘The gentlemen are down there,’ said Mrs Pringle, hoping to dispose of an embarrassment. ‘They are discussing something. Mr Pitt has also come, and Woburn McAllister, and a nephew or two.’

Many children were running about, in clothes that caught on twigs. Brightly coloured laughter hung from the undergrowth.

Voss would have liked to retire into his own thoughts, and did to a certain extent. He loked rather furry in his self-absorption. The nap of his hat had been roughed up, and he was cheaply dressed, and angular, and black. Nobody would know what to do with him, unless he did himself.

So Mrs Pringle and Mrs Bonner looked hopefully in that direction in which the gentlemen were said to be.

‘You girls go down with Mr Voss,’ insisted Mrs Pringle, conscripting an impregnable army, ‘while Mrs Bonner and I have a little chat.’