Patrick White - Voss

He began to bite his nails in the darkness.

‘You are upset,’ he said, ‘because you would like to pity me, and you cannot.’

‘If that were the case, I would certainly have cause to be upset,’ she blurted most wildly.

‘You would like to mention me in your prayers.’

By this time Laura Trevelyan had become lost somewhere in the dark of the garden. But I, too, am self-sufficient, she remembered, with some lingering repugnance for her dead prayers.

‘I do not pray,’ she answered, miserably.

‘ Ach ,’ he pounced, ‘you are not atheistisch? ’

‘I do not know,’ she said.

She had begun to tear a cluster of the white camellias from that biggest bush. In passing, she had snapped the hot flowers, which were now poor lumps of things. She was tearing them across, as if they had not been flesh, but some passive stuff, like blotting-paper.

‘Atheists are atheists usually for mean reasons,’ Voss was saying. ‘The meanest of these is that they themselves are so lacking in magnificence they cannot conceive the idea of a Divine Power.’

He was glittering coldly. The wind that the young woman had promised had sprung up, she realized dully. The stars were trembling. Leaves were slashing at one another.

‘Their reasons,’ said Laura, ‘are simple, honest, personal ones. As far as I can tell. For such steps are usually taken in privacy. Certainly after considerable anguish of thought.’

The darkness was becoming furious.

‘But the God they have abandoned is of mean conception,’ Voss pursued. ‘Easily destroyed, because in their own image. Pitiful because such destruction does not prove the destroyer’s power. Atheismus is self-murder. Do you not understand?’

‘I am to understand that I have destroyed myself. But you, Mr Voss,’ Laura cried, ‘it is for you I am concerned. To watch the same fate approaching someone else is far, far worse.’

In the passion of their relationship, she had encountered his wrist. She held his bones. All their gestures had ugliness, convulsiveness in common. They stood with their legs apart inside their innocent clothes, the better to grip the reeling earth.

‘I am aware of no similarity between us,’ Voss replied.

He was again cold, but still arrested. Her hands had eaten into his wrist.

‘It is for our pride that each of us is probably damned,’ Laura said.

Then he shook her off, and the whole situation of an hysterical young woman. He was wiping his lips, which had begun to twitch, though in anger, certainly, not from weakness. He breathed deeply. He drank from the great arid skies of fluctuating stars. The woman beside him had begun to suggest the presence of something soft and defenceless.

Indeed, Laura Trevelyan did not feel she would attempt anything further, whatever might be revealed to her.

‘For some reason of intellectual vanity, you decided to do away with God,’ Voss was saying; she knew he would be smiling. ‘But the consequences are yours alone. I assure you.’

It was true; he made her know.

‘I feel you may still suspect me,’ he continued. ‘But I do believe, you must realize. Even though I worship with pride. Ah, the humility, the humility! This is what I find so particularly loathsome. My God, besides, is above humility.’

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Now I understand.’

It was clear. She saw him standing in the glare of his own brilliant desert. Of course, He was Himself indestructible.

And she did then begin to pity him. She no longer pitied herself, as she had for many weeks in the house of her uncle, whose unfailingly benevolent materialism encouraged the practice of self-pity. Love seemed to return to her with humility. Her weakness was delectable.

‘I shall think of you with alarm,’ she said. ‘To maintain such standards of pride, in the face of what you must experience on this journey, is truly alarming.’

‘I am not in the habit of setting myself limits.’

‘Then I will learn to pray for you.’

‘Oh dear, I have caught you out doubly,’ he laughed. ‘You are an Apostle of Love masquerading as an atheist for some inquisitorial purpose of your own. My poor Miss Trevelyan! I shall be followed through the continent of Australia by your prayers, like little pieces of white paper. I can see them, torn-up paper, fluttering, now that I know for certain you are one of those who pray.’

‘I have failed to be. But I will learn.’

These simple ideas were surrounded with such difficulties they would scarcely issue out of her inadequate mind.

Then he was touching her, his hand was upon her shoulder-blades, and they realized they had returned into their bodies.

‘Is it not really very cold?’ she said at once, shivering.

‘People will come to look for you. You are lost in the garden.’

‘They are too agreeably occupied.’

‘I have been hateful to you this evening,’ confessed the German, as if it had just occured to him, but she did not resent it; in her state of recovered conviction his defects were even welcome.

‘We were unwise,’ he said, ‘to flounder into each other’s private beings.’

She smiled.

‘I know you are smiling,’ he said. ‘Why?’ he asked, and laughed.

‘It is our beings that pleases me,’ she replied.

‘Is it not expressive, then?’

‘Oh, it is expressive, I dare say, in its clumsiness.’

The beautiful, but rather tentative young girl of that evening, in her smouldering, peacock dress, and the passionate but bewildered soul of the woman that had flapped and struggled in the dark garden in its attempt to rescue (let us not say: subdue) were being dispossessed by a clumsy contentment of the flesh.

‘I have long given up trying to express myself,’ she sighed warmly.

The man yawned.

He knew that he did enjoy the company of this young woman, who was exhausted, and standing as naturally in her shoes as her careful upbringing would allow.

‘When I was younger,’ said this girl, as if it had been a long time ago, ‘I kept a diary. Oh, I wrote down everything, everything. I could not express too much. And how proud I was to read it. Then I no longer could. I would stare at a blank page, and that would appear far more expressive than my own emptiness.’

The man yawned again. He was not bored, however, but very happy. He, too, was rather exhausted by what had happened, but his physical exhaustion was sealing up the memory of it.

‘While I am engaged on this expedition,’ he said, ‘I will, of course, keep a journal, that you will read afterwards, and follow me step by step.’

Even his pride had grown tired and childlike.

‘The official journal of the expedition,’ murmured the young woman, not ironically, to the tired child.

‘Yes. The official journal,’ he repeated, in grave agreement.

It was obvious that she would read it with that interest women took in the achievements of men.

Ah, I must pray for him, she said, for he will be in need of it.

He was inexplicably flattered by her no longer communicative presence in the darkness, and very contented.

Then Mrs Bonner had emerged from the square light, and was puckering up her face at darkness, and trying to read its mind.

She called:

‘Laura! Laura, dear, where are you? Laur- a .’

So that her niece felt it her duty to approach. In leaving, she barely touched Voss upon the hand. He was not sure whether he was intended to go or stay, but followed immediately.

They came out into the light almost together. Almost as if they had been sleep-walking, Aunt Emmy feared.

‘My dear child, you will be frozen,’ she began to complain, and frowned.

But as if she did not see Voss.