Patrick White - Voss

‘Who is this Thorndike?’ the German asked, although he was not interested in knowing more.

‘That is difficult to answer. Thorndike is just a man. Comes and goes. Does a job here and there. He is of no importance, but useful. Brings things, you know. Mail.’

The simplicity of the clay-coloured landscape was very moving to the German. For a moment everything was distinct. In the foreground some dead trees, restored to life by the absence of hate, were glowing with flesh of rosy light. All life was dependent on the thin lips of light, compressed, yet breathing at the rim of the world.

‘That will be convenient then, and I shall leave at once on the arrival of Thorndike.’

Never had an issue of greater importance been decided so conclusively by an apparently insignificant event.

‘Take it easy, though,’ laughed Boyle, who began to suspect that other spurs had been applied to his particular friend.

‘Oh, it is natural to regret the waste of time,’ Voss shrugged and fenced. ‘And to wish to make amends for it.’

So he explained, but did not tell, absorbed as he was in his discovery: that each visible object has been created for purposes of love, that the stones, even, are smoother for the dust.

As darkness fell upon a world emptied for its complete reception, the German began to tremble in a cold sweat, with the consequence that, when the black woman brought the inevitable leg of charred mutton, he announced to his astonished host:

‘I do not think I will eat tonight. I am suffering from some derangement of the intestines.’

And avoided further explanation under cover of the difficulties of language.

For an hour or more he proceeded to pace up and down by himself, only interrupting his walk to stoop and pat the station dogs. These animals were quick to sense a desire to express tenderness, and, indeed, he was shaking with it.

To what extent would he be weakened? He could not help but wonder, fear, and finally resent.

As they waited for Thorndike, the strange moons continued to hang above Jildra, and even by day there would appear to be a closed eye, which signified the presence of a moon. Voss was for ever biting his whiskers and cracked lips. How thirsty the days were already, the ground opening in cracked mouths, in spite of that good rain, which people will always tell you has fallen. The German would go to the water-bag, and drink down pannikins full of the tepid canvassy water, which flushed his stomach. He already felt physically sick. Somewhere behind his knee-cap a time was beating, as he waited for the man Thorndike to arrive.

Early on a certain morning, the leader was suddenly moved to issue orders.

‘I will have all cattle, goats, and sheep that we are taking with us, mustered and driven into the vicinity of the homestead,’ he announced to Boyle. ‘Dugald and Jackie must go with Turner and the boy. Ralph’ — he addressed the young grazier — ‘I will put in charge of these operations. Tomorrow we will make a start.’

‘You are not waiting, then, for this feller Thorndike?’ Boyle asked.

‘Yes,’ said Voss. ‘It is certain. He will come before evening.’

Boyle was rather diverted by this intelligence.

‘The smoke messages have got going?’ he inquired lazily.

‘Mr Judd,’ Voss called, going out into the languid morning of young, silky air, ‘I wish you to make a careful count of all firearms, tools, instruments, und so weiter , that nothing is overlooked. You, and Frank, will see that horses and mules are brought in and securely hobbled tonight.’

Soon dogs were barking, children laughing, threads of dust weaving in and out of one another as a pattern began to form upon the bare earth at Jildra. Harry Robarts was by now brave enough to jab spurs into his horse’s sides, so that it would leap into action and execute proud and important figures. Harry himself had become leaner, for the distance had thinned him out. Yet, paradoxically, his once empty face was filled with those distances. They possessed, but they eluded him; he was still, and perhaps would remain always, lost.

Now, however, Harry and those with him were riding forth. Their purposes were set in motion.

Mr Judd went immediately, with his quartermaster stride, and began to account for such tackle as was in his charge. Frank Le Mesurier had already spotted the mules and horses, and their attachment of tails, occupied in the shade some little distance off. He would ride over later, as they moved to open pastures with the cool, and turn them with his whip, and they would drum the depths out of the earth as they raced up the flat towards the homestead, and pull up sharp at the yards, on their knees almost. The sky would be peacock-coloured then.

In the heat, after the men had left to muster, Mr Judd was proceeding methodically. He had a scrap of crumpled paper, on which he would make his own signs. There was a stub of lead pencil in his mouth. One of his thumbs had been badly crushed by a sledge-hammer long ago, and had grown, in place of a nail, a hard, yellow horn. Now as he worked, he experienced a sense of true pride, out of respect for what he was handling, for those objects, in iron, wood, or glass did greatly influence the course of earthly life. He could love a good axe or knife, and would oil and sharpen it with tender care. As for the instruments of navigation, the mysticism of figures from which they were inseparable made him yet more worshipful. Pointing to somewhere always just beyond his reach, the lovely quivering of rapt needles was more delicate than that of ferns. All that was essential, most secret, was contained for Judd, like his own spring-water, in a nest of ferns.

Sometimes he would breathe upon the glass of those instruments, and rub it with the cushiony part of his hand, of which the hard whorls of skin and fate were, by comparison, indelicate.

But now he complained:

‘Frank, I cannot find that big prismatic compass in the wooden frame.’

‘It cannot have got far, a big thing like that,’ answered Le Mesurier, who was not greatly interested.

‘These blacks would thieve any mortal thing, I would not be surprised,’ the convict said.

He was sweating, as big men will, in sheets, but his upper lip was marked by little stationary points of exasperation, anxiety, even cold despair.

He was looking everywhere for that compass.

‘Frank,’ he said, ‘it has got me bested. It will not be found.’

Then he went down to the gunyas, and cursed the black gins that were squatted there, looking in one another’s hair, laughing with, and tumbling the small, red-haired children. The black gins did not understand. Their breasts became sullen.

To Judd, the peculiar problem of the lost instrument was as intricate as the labyrinth of heat, through which he trudged back.

Mr Voss was furious, of course, because he had been expecting something, if not necessarily this.

Judd went away.

In the late afternoon when the other men rode in, and were watering their horses and coiling their whips, they were closely questioned, but there was not a single one could honestly feel the compass concerned him personally. At best amused, at worst they were irritated at having to turn out their packs.

Voss, who had come down to the tents, a prophetic figure in his dark clothes, said that the instrument must be found.

Boyle, too, had come across. He had questioned the blacks at the camp, and was pretty certain no native was withholding the prismatic compass.

‘Then there is no explanation,’ Judd cried, and flung his own saddle-bags from side to side, so that some of the onlookers were put in mind of the flapping, of a pair of great, desperate wings.

‘It is as if I was dreaming,’ the convict protested.