Patrick White - Voss

‘You will take every opportunity of sending back dispatches, of keeping us informed’ — he was issuing orders to his servant, saying the same thing over and over again in many different ways, as was his habit, to increase his own confidence.

Voss was smiling and nodding, to humour the man who considered himself the master.

And he patted the Lieutenant on the knee, beside whose horse he was passing, and raised his hat to the young ladies, as it was expected of him. None could have found fault with him on that morning.

Only that he did not raise his eyes higher than the saddle-flaps, Laura Trevelyan observed. She did not, however, censure this behaviour; she was, in fact, bitterly glad. She was perspiring. Her face must surely be greasy, and her jaw so controlled that she would have assumed the long, stubborn look which frequently displeased her in mirrors. It was her most characteristic expression, she had begun to suspect, after long and fruitless search for a better, without realizing that beauty is something others must surprise.

As she sat upon her horse, knowledge of her superficiality and ugliness was crushing her.

Mr Bonner, who had been trying all this time to take the German aside, to talk to him intimately, to possess him in front of all the others, was growing more and more preposterous, as he frowned, and shook the jowls of his heavy face, and made little stamping movements with his heel, which caused his spurs to jingle, and emphasized his opulent calves.

Finally he did succeed.

‘I want you to feel you may depend upon me,’ he said, when he had hedged the German off against a crude wooden barrow on which lay some stone-coloured pumpkins, one of them split open in blaze of orange. ‘Any requests that you care to make, I shall be only too willing to consider. Your family, for instance, you have not mentioned, but they are my responsibility, you know, if, in the event of, if you will only inform me of their whereabouts, write me a letter, you could, when you reach Rhine Towers, with any personal instructions.’

It was badly expressed, if honestly intended. Mr Bonner was honest, but also demanded submission, which he was not always certain of getting. So he picked at the German’s lapel, hoping to effect a closer relationship by touch, and it transpired that the crowd, at least, was impressed. Little ripples of admiration ran along the faces, as they appreciated the daring of this citizen whose hand was upon the foreign explorer. Mr Bonner’s anxiety subsided. He did now honestly love the man, who at times had appeared hateful to him, and scraggy. The merchant’s eye grew moist over a fresh relationship that he had created by magnanimity and his own hand.

Voss did not find this relationship distasteful, for he could not believe in it. It was not even ludicrous. It was simply unreal.

He fingered the seeds of the orange pumpkin, and considered what the merchant had said about his family.

‘My family,’ he began, arranging the pointed seeds of the pumpkin. ‘It is long since I corresponded with them. Do you not think that such arrangements of birth are incidental, even if in the beginning we try to persuade ourselves it is otherwise, and are grateful for the warmth, because still weak and bewildered? We have not yet learnt to admit that destiny works independently of the womb.’

Mr Bonner looked at the clear eyes, and did not understand.

‘Oh, well,’ he said. ‘Does it, though? Does it? Who can say?’

Not Mr Bonner.

‘But I will write, I expect, when it is time. My father is an old man. He is a timber merchant. He is perhaps dead. My mother is a very sentimental woman. Her own mother was Swedish, and the house is full of painted clocks. Na, ja ,’ he said, ‘striking at different times.’

This lack of synchronization alone was threatening to upset him. He smelled the stovy air of old, winter houses, and flesh of human relationships, a dreadful, cloying tyranny, to which he was succumbing.

Resentment of the past forced him out of himself, and he looked up into the face of that girl whose hands had been tearing the flesh of camellias. For an instant their minds were again wrestling together, and he experienced the melancholy pleasure of rejecting her offered prayers.

Laura Trevelyan was sitting her horse with a hard pride, it seemed, rather than with that humility which she had desired to achieve.

She is a cold, hard girl, he decided, and I could almost love her.

The less discriminate sunlight did.

Then Laura Trevelyan had to turn her face away from the glare, that was making her eyes glitter, or from the form of the German, that was filling her whole field of vision. I am, after all, too weak to withstand tortures, her eyes seemed to say.

And he turned away, too, no longer interested.

Just at that point the crowd parted to admit an open landau that was arriving with every sign of official importance. The liveries would have snubbed the most intrepid radical. Some mouths frankly hung open for the gold, and for the dash of scarlet that blazed and rocked above the black lacquer.

It was the Governor himself, some maintained.

But those who knew better were contemptuous of such ignorance, as if the Governor himself would arrive upon the scene in an unescorted vehicle.

Those who knew most, who were in touch with the Household, or whose cousin, even, had dined once at the vice-regal table, said that His Excellency was confined with a severe cold, and that this was Colonel Featherstonhaugh come to deputize for him at the leave-taking.

It was, in fact, the Colonel, together with some young anonymous Lieutenant, of sterling origins and pink skin, that apologized at every pore. The Colonel, however, was a man of self-opinion, of rigidity, and least possible flesh. He waited for the German to be led up and, because it was a duty, would acquit himself, it was suggested, with all dignity. His personal feelings were controlled behind his whiskers, or perhaps not quite; it was possible to tell he was an Englishman.

His Excellency the Governor wished Mr Voss and the expedition God-speed and a safe return, the Colonel said, with the littlest assistance from his fleshless face, which was of a rich purple where the hair allowed it to appear.

And he clasped the German’s hand in a gloveful of bones.

Colonel Featherstonhaugh did say many other things. Indeed, when a space had been cleared, he made a speech, about God, and soil, and flag, and Our Young, Illustrious Queen, as had been prepared for him. The numerous grave and appreciative persons who were surrounding the Colonel lent weight to his appropriate words. There were, for instance, at least three members of the Legislative Council, a Bishop, a Judge, officers in the Army, besides patrons of the expedition, and citizens whose wealth had begun to make them acceptable, in spite of their unfortunate past and persistent clumsiness with knife and fork. Important heads were bared, stiff necks were bent into attitudes that suggested humble attention. It was a brave sight, and suddenly also moving. For all those figures of cloth and linen, of worthy British flesh and blood, and the souls tied to them, temporarily, like tentative balloons, by the precious grace of life, might, of that sudden, have been cardboard or little wooden things, as their importance in the scene receded, and there predominated the great tongue of blue water, the brooding, indigenous trees, and sky clutching at all.

So that Mr Voss, the German, listening with the others to that talk of soil, flag, and Illustrious Queen, in music of speech at least, for he had taken refuge in his own foreignness as a protection from sense of words, was looking rightly sardonic. He was compelled to shift his gaze from the faces of men, and to cast it out into space. Any other attitude would have been hypocritical, but, on the other hand, no one else present was justified in aspiring to that infinite blue.