Patrick White - Voss

‘But I did not succeed. Most probably I shall never travel. Oh, I am content, of course. Our life is full of simple diversions. Only I envy the people who enjoy the freedom to make journeys.’

‘Even this journey? Of dust, and flies, and dying horses?’

The young woman, whose hand appeared to be rejecting the glare, or some particles of grit that had gathered on her face, said slowly:

‘Of course, I realize. I am not purely romantic.’

She laughed in rather a hard manner.

‘There will be dangers, I know. Won’t there?’

She began to search him, he saw, as if she suspected a knife might be hidden somewhere. A knife intended for herself.

‘On any expedition of this nature, there are always dangers,’ Palfreyman answered dryly.

‘Yes,’ she said.

Her own lips, that other emotions had been filling, were grown thin, and dry.

‘Oh, I would welcome dangers,’ she said. ‘One must not expect to avoid suffering. And the chance is equal for everyone. Is that not so?’

‘Yes,’ he said, wondering.

‘Then’ — she laughed a hard laugh — ‘if it is all equal.’

But Palfreyman was not convinced by what he heard and saw.

‘Though I do not care to think about the horses,’ she admitted, patting her mare’s neck. ‘It is different for men. Even a man of little or no religious faith. He creates his own logic.’

She spoke with such force of feeling, of contempt, or tenderness, that her hand was trembling on the horse’s skin. Palfreyman observed the stitching on her glove.

‘And is, therefore, less to be pitied,’ she said or, rather, begged.

Remembering a contentment she had experienced in the garden either from illumination or exhaustion, after the daemon had withdrawn from her, the dry mouth of any dying man was a thing of horror.

The girl’s lips, in spite of her youth, were dry and cracked, Palfreyman noticed with surprise.

Then the world of light was taking possession, the breeze becoming wind, and making the dust skip. The whole shore was splintering into grit and mica, as down from the town several equipages drove, with flashing of paint and metal, and drew near, bringing patrons or sceptics, and their wives, in clothes to proclaim their wealth and, consequently, importance.

So that Palfreyman and Miss Trevelyan were reduced to a somewhat dark eddy on the gay stream of trite encounters and light laughter that had soon enveloped them. They looked about them out of almost cavernous eyes, before Palfreyman could conform. He was the first, of course, because less involved. He suspected he would not become involved with any human being, but was reserved as a repository for confidences, until the final shattering would scatter all secrets into the dust. He looked at the hair of the young woman where it was gathered back smoothly, though not perfectly, from those tender places in front of the ears, and was saddened.

‘Here are your friends,’ he said, and smiled, twitching the rein of the horse he was holding. ‘I must leave you to them. There are one or two things that need my attention.’

‘Friends?’ she repeated, and was rising out of her dark dream. ‘I know nobody very well. That is, of course, we have very many acquaintances.’

She was looking about her out of her woken eyes.

Then she noticed the sad ones of the small man who was fidgeting on foot, and who had prevailed at last upon a lad to take the rein of her uncle’s horse.

‘I am most grateful to you,’ she said, ‘for our conversation. I shall remember it.’

‘Has it told you anything?’ he asked lightly.

It was easy now that he was going.

‘Not,’ she said, ‘not in words.’

Now she was become too wooden to struggle any further in the effort to express herself. She seemed altogether humble and contrite, small, even hunched, she who had been proud, on her powerful horse.

‘Laura,’ cried Belle, from the back of her old, gentle gelding, ‘the Wades are here, and the Kirbys, and Nelly and Polly McMorran. Poor Nelly has sprained her ankle, and will not come down from the carriage.’

Belle Bonner was looking and looking, drinking up the crowd with her eyes, that were always thirsty for people with whom she was slightly acquainted.

‘And here is Mr Voss himself,’ Lieutenant Radclyffe announced. ‘He has shaken the moths out of those whiskers for the occasion.’

Laura did turn then, too suddenly, for it alarmed her horse into springing sideways. But she was moulded to it by her will, Palfreyman saw, and she possessed, besides, an excellent pair of hands.

The Lieutenant heard, but did not interpret the long, agonized hiss of breath.

‘Sit her, Laura!’ he laughed.

How he disliked the thin line of her lips, from which forked words would dart at him on occasion, but which were now taut.

‘Laura, can you control her?’ called the frightened Belle.

‘Yes,’ breathed Laura Trevelyan, on her calmer, but still trembling, mare.

She looked towards Palfreyman. As he withdrew through the already considerable crowd, he received the impression of a drowning that he was unable to avert, in a dream through which he was sucked inevitably back.

Ah, Laura was crying out, bending down through that same dream, extending her hand in its black glove; you are my only friend, and I cannot reach you.

As it had to be, he left her to it. And she continued to sit sculpturally upon her mastered horse, of which the complicated veins were throbbing with blood and frustration.

Voss, who was by now walking amongst the crowd, had recovered authority, presence, joviality even, and worldliness. He was looking into the eyes of his patrons and forcing their glances eventually to drop, which did please and impress them, convincing them of the safety of the money they had invested in him. As for the ladies, some shivered. His sleeve brushed them as he passed. In one instance, surprisingly, he kissed the hand of a rich tradesman’s elderly wife, who withdrew her member delightedly, looked round, and giggled, showing the gaps in her side teeth.

What kind of man is he? wondered the public, who would never know. If he was already more of a statue than a man, they really did not care, for he would satisfy their longing to perch something on a column, in a square or gardens, as a memorial to their own achievement. They did, moreover, prefer to cast him in bronze than to investigate his soul, because all dark things made them uneasy, and even on a morning of historic adventure, in bright, primary colours, the shadow was sewn to the ends of his trousers, where the heels of his boots had frayed them.

Yet his face was a lesson in open hilarity.

‘No, no, no, Mr Kirby,’ he was saying. ‘If I fail, I will write your name and that of your good wife upon a piece of paper and seal it in a bottle and bury it beside me, so that they will be perpetuated in Australian soil.’

Even death and eternity he translated into a joke at which people might laugh by sunlight.

The simplicity of it all was making him enjoy himself. The terrible simplicity of people who have not yet been hurt, and whom it is not possible to love, he thought, and explored his laughing lips with his tongue.

Some of those present were patting him on the back, just to touch him.

Oh yes, he was enjoying himself.

Only once did Voss ask: Is all this happening to me, a little boy, clinging to the Heide by the soles of his boots, beneath a rack of cloud and a net of twisted trees?

At the wharf the sun was shining. It was the lovely, lyrical, spring sun, that had not yet become a gong.

Mr Bonner had returned from his stroll, and was standing between the German and his own horses. His back was square, his calves imperious. Laura would have been glad to shelter behind her uncle’s back, if it had not also been, on final consideration, pathetic.