Patrick White - Voss

Yet, it seemed to Laura Trevelyan, those moments of her life which had been of most importance were both indistinct and ugly. The incident with the German in the garden had been indescribably ugly, untidy, painful. She could not help recalling that, and in doing so, there came into her mouth a bad taste, as of blood oozing, as if she had lost a tooth. She bit her lip, but was reminded of his rather pointed teeth as he stood talking that morning at the wharf.

Then Belle, who was finally overwhelmed by the moist, windblown afternoon, began to be afraid.

‘Laura,’ she said, very quietly.

She was as determined to press against her cousin, as the latter was to hold her off.

But Belle could not bear it. She was both afraid, and filled with a desire to mingle with what she did not understand, which was the future, perhaps, hence her necessity.

‘Laura,’ she asked, ‘what has come over us? What is happening?’

She was crying, and pressing herself against the mysterious body of her cousin.

‘It is nothing. It is you who imagine,’ said Laura, resisting with her voice, with all her might.

Persistent touch was terrifying to her.

But neither could resist the force of that afternoon. Seeking protection, they were swept together, in softest sympathy.

‘Tell me, Laura,’ cried Belle, ‘what is it?’

Her hot tears shocked the other’s colder skin.

‘But I cannot,’ Laura cried, ‘when there is nothing — nothing to tell.’

As they rocked together on the balcony, in the shaggy arms of the honest trees, in the bosom of the all-possessing wind, they were soothed to some extent, and the light, touching the cumquats on the little bamboo table, turned these into precious stones, the perfection of which gave further cause for hope.

OSPREY anchored after what would have been an uneventful voyage, if, during it, Turner had not woken from his drunken sleep in an almost disordered state of mind, babbling of some knife that he had in his possession and must find immediately. After rummaging through his box and tumbling his things, it had come to light, of black, bone handle and rather elegant blade. It was unlucky, he insisted, and come by in strange circumstances. The man was quite frenzied, till he had run to the side and flung the knife into the waves. Then he grew calmer, and the vessel was carried on and reached Newcastle.

It was evening when the party landed. They were met, as arranged, by Mr Sanderson, and taken to an inn on the outskirts of the town, where, he suggested, they would enjoy greater peace. Nobody objected. They were at the mercy of anyone at this stage. Voss drove with Mr Sanderson. They could not yet find living words, but offered dry communications which did not really convey, and were an embarrassment to each other. By the time they entered the yard of the inn, they had chosen silence as a state preferable to conversation. However, neither man was resentful, and they were drawn closer together by having to face the anomalous life of the inn, as they got down into the yellow patches of light, the scent of urine and roasting meats, the barking of a pointer, and a tangle of woolly advice from the inevitable drunkard.

Their sojourn at the inn was of the briefest, for Mr Sanderson had provided horses, and it was his intention that they should proceed the following morning to his station at Rhine Towers, a journey of several days, while such equipment as the party had brought from Sydney would follow by bullock-wagon, at easier pace.

Voss accepted this most reasonable plan, and, on the morning after landing, joined his host in heading the cavalcade that started out from Newcastle. None was more elated than young Harry Robarts, who had never been astride a horse before, and who was soon surveying from his eminence the fat lands of the settlers, and snuffing up the aromatic scents of the mysterious, blue bush, that rose up as they approached, and enveloped, and silenced. Soon there was only the clinking of metal, the calling of birds, and the aching of Harry’s thighs, that ticked regularly as a clock, in hot, monotonous, endless time.

‘Oh, Gawd,’ he moaned and rolled from side to side in attempts to ease himself.

But there was no relief. There were the pastures, there was the bush. There was the hot, red sun of Harry Robarts’ face set in his prickly head.

The country was by no means new to Voss, who had returned by land from Moreton Bay and the North, yet, on this significant occasion, he observed all things as if for the first time. It was a gentle, healing landscape in those parts. So he was looking about him with contented eye, drinking deep draughts of a most simple medicine. Sometimes they would leave the road, from the stones of which their horses’ feet had been striking little angry sparks, and take short cuts instead along the bush tracks, walking on leaves and silence. It was not the volcanic silence of solitary travel through infinity. The German had experienced this and had been exhausted by it, winding deeper into himself, into blacker thickets of thorns. Through this bushland, men had already blazed a way. Pale scars showed in the sides of the hairy trees. Voss was merely following now, and could almost have accepted this solution as the only desirable one. The world of gods was becoming a world of men. Men wound behind him, heads mostly down, in single file. He was no longer irritated by their coughing. Ahead of him sat the long, thin, civilized back of his host.

‘The country round here is divided up, for the greater part, into small holdings. That is to say, until we reach the boundaries of Rhine Towers, and Dulverton, which is the property of Ralph Angus,’ explained Sanderson, who would sometimes become embarrassed by silence, and feel it his duty to instruct his guests.

At places, in clearings, little, wild, rosy children would approach the track, and stand with their noses running, and lips curled in natural wonder. Their homespun frocks made them look stiffer. An aura of timelessness enveloped their rooted bodies. They would not speak, of course, to destroy any such illusion. They stood, and looked, out of their relentless blue, or hot chocolate eyes, till the rump of the last horse had all but disappeared. Then these children would run along the track in the wake of the riders, jumping the mounds of yellow dung, shouting and sniffing, as if they had known the horsemen all along, and always been brave.

Only less timid by a little were the mothers, who would run out, shaking the structure of a slab or wattle hut, dashing the suds from their arms, or returning to its brown bodice the big breast that had been giving suck. In spite of their initial enthusiasm, the mothers would stop short, and stand in the disturbed silence, after mumbling a few guilty words. It was for husbands to speak to emissaries from the world. So the squatters themselves would come up, in boots they had cobbled during winter nights. Their adam’s apples moved stiffly with some intelligence of weather, flocks, or crops. As they had hewn, painfully, an existence out of the scrub and rocks, so they proceeded to hew the words out of a poor vocabulary.

Voss appeared to glow.

‘These are good people. One can see,’ he said. ‘Have they all been free settlers?’

‘Some. Some are emancipists,’ Sanderson replied from over his shoulder. ‘There are both kinds. And there are good and bad of each.’

Because he was a better man than Voss, he also had fewer transitory illusions. Just then, exalted by hopes of regeneration, the German was ready to believe that all men were good.

‘It goes without saying there are such distinctions,’ he agreed, but with the air of suffering of one who has been misunderstood by a superficial companion. ‘If you will look into the skin of a beautiful young lady, you will see perhaps one or two blemishes: a patch of slight inflammation, let us say, the holes of the pores, even a pimple. But this is not to deny the essence of her beauty. Will you not concur?’