Patrick White - Voss

‘I am seeking for a Mr Judd,’ said Voss, to whom alone, of all those present, he himself was not strange.

‘Ah,’ said the woman, stirring. ‘This is his place. But he is not here.’

‘He will come, though.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Oh, yes.’

She was standing in front of a house, or hut, of bleached slabs, that melted into the live trunks of the surrounding trees. The interstices of the slab hut had been daubed with a yellow clay, but this, too, had weathered, and formed part of a natural disguise. Only smoke gave some sign of human occupation, drifting out of the chimney, always taking fresh shapes.

‘You are his wife, perhaps?’ suggested Voss.

The woman, who was bending a twig, waited for it to snap, and said:

‘Yes.’

Thus she realized time was passing.

‘I am in the middle of making the butter,’ she said, or tossed out. ‘I cannot leave it. You can hitch the horse over there.’

She walked, or stamped, round the side of the hut, a heavy woman, in whom purpose took the place of grace. Some of the goats were following her. She went inside a smaller hut, from which there soon came the sound of butter tumbling crumbly in a wooden churn, awkward, but created.

Walking on numb legs, Voss went over presently to the smaller hut. He had every intention of examining the woman as if she had been an animal. She was, though.

By this time she had lifted the butter from the churn, and was pressing and squeezing, squelching with her strong hands, not all as labour, but some for pleasure. There was a milky perspiration still upon the mound of white butter.

‘He will not be long,’ she said, after she had prepared her voice for the adventure. ‘He is down at the lamb-marking with the two boys. They should have finished yesterday, only the dusk come while there was a few left.’

Then she paused. Her throat had contracted. All her strength was in her red hands.

‘Why is the butter white?’ asked Voss.

‘It is the goats.’ She laughed.

Some of these had come in, and were nibbling at the stranger’s buttons.

‘He is going on this great expedition,’ continued the woman after some pause. ‘You know, to find an inland sea. Or is it gold?’ She laughed, because she knew better.

‘Was your husband telling you that?’ the stranger asked.

‘I do not remember,’ said the woman, rubbing at a cheek with her shoulder, at a hair, or gnat. ‘I heard somewhere. People talk. They tell you things.’

‘What will you do when your husband goes?’

‘What I always do.’

She was washing the butter. The lapping of the water would not allow the silence to wrap her for very long. She reduced the butter, then built it up again, a solid fortress of it.

‘I will be here,’ she said, ‘for ever now.’

‘Have you no wish for further experience of life?’

She was suspicious of the words the stranger used. An educated gentleman.

‘What else would I want to know?’ she asked, staring at her fat butter.

‘Or revisit loved places?’

‘Ah,’ she said, lifting her head, and the shadows hanging from it, slyly sniffing the air at some ale-house corner, but almost immediately she dropped the lids over her searing eyes. ‘No,’ she said, sulkily. ‘I do not love any other place, anyways enough to go back. This is my place.’

When she raised her eyes again, he did believe it. Her glance would not betray the honest shape of her possessions. These were her true eyes, looking through ferns at all wonders, animal-black, not wishing to interpret.

‘ He is restless, though,’ she continued, brisker, laughingly. ‘He is a man. Men know more about things. And want to know more. He has got a telescope to look at the stars, and would tell you about them if you asked him; they are no concern of mine. The stars!’ She laughed. ‘He is a quiet one. But deep. Sits there by the coals, and feels his knuckles. I would never know all what he knows. Nor would not ask. And make things! He can put a gun together, and a clock, only the clock is broke now for good. It was no fault of his; something essential, he says, is missing. So we watch the sun now.’

She had begun to slap the butter with broad wooden pats, that left a nice grain upon it.

‘Sir, there would be no man more suitable than him to lead this great expedition, not if they had thought a hundred years.’

The stranger heard the thwack.

The woman raised her head again, with that same cunning which had shown itself once before, plumb in the middle of her honesty.

‘Would you, perhaps, have an interest in the expedition, that you are come to see him?’

‘Yes,’ said the stranger. ‘Voss.’

And did click his heels together funny, the woman related ever after.

‘Ah, I heard tell.’

Her voice was trailing.

‘Sir,’ she said, blunt, ‘I am a woman that gets little practice with talkin’, and that is why it has been comin’ out of me by the yard. It is one of my weaknesses. In those days, they would punish me for it. I was often reported. But no one can say I do not work.’

And she hit the butter.

Voss laughed and, looking through the doorway, remarked:

‘Here, I do believe, is the leader of the expedition.’

‘Sir,’ decided the woman, coming round the sturdy bench, ‘that is something he would never claim. It was me, truly, sir. Because all men will lead, some of the time, anyways, even the meanest of ’em. It is in their nature. And some are gifted different, whether it is for shootin’ the wicks off candles, or divinin’ water, or catchin’ rats. You will be well advised to let them have their glory, take it from me.’

Just then her lord approached, accompanied by their sons, a pair of strapping boys, each bare to the middle. All three were spotted with dry blood, and had a smell upon them, of young, waxy lambs.

When the German and the convict had come together, neither was certain how to proceed. The sons of the latter knew that this meeting was no concern of theirs, so stood stroking their bare skins, their faces grown wooden.

The mother had gone inside.

‘I am ridden in this direction, because I have wished to see your place,’ the German began.

‘My place is of no consequence,’ the other answered.

He began to bring the visitor out of earshot of his family, because he was a different person in conversation with acquaintances.

‘I like to see people, how they live,’ said Voss. ‘They become easier to understand.’

The convict laughed, as far as his straight mouth would let him.

‘I am nothing to understand.’

His expression was guilty, but he could also have been pleased.

They walked on through a grove of saplings, that stirred, and bent, and invited strolling. Beyond stood a shed where the family shore their flock in season, very plain, of the same grey slabs, with races for the sheep to enter by, the pens below, of wattle and split posts, as in the Old Country. In one corner there was something resembling a gallows, furnished with ropes and pulleys. It was one of those erections that will rise up against the sky on immense evenings, though the present occasion, with its lambs’-wool clouds and pink sun, was not of that scale.

‘What is that gibbet?’ asked Voss to revive the conversation.

‘Gibbet?’ flashed the man, very bloodshot.

Then, when he had seen, he explained with his usual decent calm.

‘That is where we kill. You can string a sheep up there. Or a beast.’

They continued, as if by agreement, to stroll along the edge of the plain, but in the shadow of the sheltering mountain, until it became apparent the squatter had purposely led his guest to a cleft where a spring welled into a basin of amber water. Black, rocky masses, green, skeleton ferns, the pale features of men, all fluctuated in the mirror of water. Taking off his shirt, Judd got upon his knees, and was washing off the lambs’ blood with a piece of crude soap already there on a rock ledge