Patrick White - Voss

In any event, Mr Voss, I do thank you once again for your kind letter, and shall intercede as ever for your safety and your happiness.

Your sincere,

LAURA TREVELYAN

Then Boyle, who had been dozing in a pleasant apathy of tobacco and half-digested meat, opened his eyes, and asked:

‘Nothing bad, I hope, Voss?’

‘Why should it be bad? No,’ said the German, who was getting up, and mislaying and dropping other papers. ‘On the contrary, I have received nothing but favourable news.’

And he tied the string tightly and methodically on his papers.

‘I am glad of that,’ answered Boyle. ‘Nothing can upset a man’s digestion like doubtful news. For that reason, I am glad I no longer receive letters, except those in black and white.’

‘None of my acquaintances is in the habit of corresponding with coloured inks,’ said Voss. ‘I think I will turn in soon, Boyle, so as to make this early start that we have anticipated.’

Now he went out into the darkness, ostensibly to issue last orders to his men, though in fact to hide himself, and failed in his real purpose, as he embraced the past tremblingly beneath a vast audience of stars.

On his return he began to notice Palfreyman, who had been there all the time, seated within the candlelight, sketching for his own pleasure a big, dreamy lily propped in a tin mug.

‘What is this?’ asked Voss, with unduly warm interest.

‘It is a lily,’ said Palfreyman, with grave concentration on his silvery sketch, ‘which I found in the red soil along the second of the waterholes.’

Voss made a lazy guess at the variety.

‘With these seeds?’ asked Palfreyman.

Voss squinted. They were of a distinct shape, like testes, attached to the rather virginal flower.

When the German had undressed and was lying in his blanket, he and Palfreyman began to recall other botanical specimens they had found, of unorthodox seed formation. Boyle had retired by now, and it was a pleasant, drowsy conversation that drifted between the two men, containing friendship, because it made no effort to.

Perhaps it is I who am frequently to blame, Palfreyman decided, and would not move for fear of breaking the spell.

‘Will you not go to bed, Palfreyman?’ Voss yawned at last. ‘We start tomorrow early.’

‘It is the lily,’ Palfreyman said, and sighed. ‘We may never see it again in all its freshness.’

Voss yawned.

‘It may be very common.’

‘It may,’ Palfreyman agreed.

Their voices were somehow complementary to each other. Like lovers.

Then Voss began to float, and those words last received. But together . Written words take some time to thaw, but the words of lilies were now flowing in full summer water, whether it was the water or the leaves of water, and dark hairs of roots plastered on the mouth as water blew across. Now they were swimming so close they were joined together at the waist, and were the same flesh of lilies, their mouths, together, were drowning in the same love-stream. I do not wish this yet, or nie nie nie, niemals. Nein . You will, she said, if you will cut and examine the word. Together is filled with little cells. And cuts open with a knife. It is a see seed. But I do not. All human obligations are painful, Mr Johann Ulrich, until they are learnt, variety by variety. But gold is painful, crushing, and cold on the forehead, while wholly desirable, because immaculate. Only resist the Christ-thorn. Tear out the black thing by the roots before it has taken hold. She was humbly grateful for it, however. In her kneeling position, she continued to bathe her hair in all flesh, whether of imperial lilies, or the black, putrefying, human kind.

After one of those pauses, in which the sleeper dries up, in which his tongue is a little pebble, and the blanket is grafted on his side, he said:

I do accept the terms. It was the sweat that prevented me from seeing them.

You are in no position to accept. It is the woman who unmakes men, to make saints.

Mutual. It is all mutual.

It was his tongue that would not come unstuck.

You have gained that point, the mouth was laughing.

Two zusammen should gain by numbers, but lose in fact. Numbers weaken.

The weaker is stronger, O Voooos.

So that the sleeper sat up, the better to look into the mouth of the lily. Instead, he found darkness and the smell of a wick, for Palfreyman was finished, and had gone to bed.

Then Voss lay down again, and pretended his sleep had not been interrupted, for he did not wish to be told that he had spoken during his dream. He was dubiously happy. He remembered whole lines of Laura Trevelyan’s letter. And her voice speaking. He would have liked to be told, in that voice, what to do next, since consummation is not an end in itself.

Next morning, in a tunnel of red light and bowed grass, Voss took his leave of Boyle, who, as the cavalcade moved forward with a surge of sacrificial animals and dedicated men, stood for a long time looking sorrowfully like something that had been abandoned on the edge of life. An old boot, in fact.

With very little warning the day opened like a square-cut, blazing jewel on the expedition, holding it almost stationary in the prison of that blue brilliance. Its progress and humble dust did begin to seem rather pitiable. The goats were obviously bewildered by the extreme imprudence of man. The sheep, on the other hand, could have possessed some understanding of foolishness, as they pushed on scraggily, staggily, through the tussocks, leaving bits of wool on the bushes, their pulsating throats already resigned. Round and about moved the magnificent men, correcting any blunders on the part of the cattle, in whose horns the long whips were frequently entwined. The men were impressing themselves, although towards noon their sense of purpose was less definite, and what had been a compact mob of moiling beasts had worn into a thin trickle.

So that after the midday halt, which was spent in the shade of some brigalow scrub, Voss called his men and divided his strength into several parts, of sheep together with goats, of cattle, and of pack animals. Thenceforth they followed at their several speeds the river-bed which Boyle had identified for Voss as the C—. Voss himself rode forward with the two blacks, Dugald and Jackie, and in that way was freed momentarily from further responsibility, and strengthened by his vision of uninterrupted space.

He was happiest with his loyal subjects.

‘You were foolish to bring along that fine coat,’ he said to the old native. ‘Now, if you lose your life, you will lose your coat too.’

Then he laughed.

The old native followed suit, bouncing lightly on his grey horse. No one had ever spoken to him like this. There was a certain absence of the expected in the white man’s words which made him shy, however.

The white man was singing:

‘Eine blosse Seele ritt hinaus

Dem Blau’ ent-ge-gen.…’

He would pause, and think, and continue to sing.

‘Sein Rock flog frei .

Sein Schimmel mit den Wol-ken

Um die Ehre rrrann.…’

He was very pleased with his song. He was singing it at the sky.

‘Nur der edle Rock zu Schaden kam,

Die Fetzen fie-len,

Den Hi-im-mel ent-lang.’

All the time the young native was keeping up a chatter to his mentor, Dugald, who was lost between several worlds.

The white man was laughing.

‘Ach, Dugald, Wörter haben keine Bedeutung. Sinnlos!

‘Nonsense,’ he added, and asked: ‘Do you understand non-sense? ’

Dugald smiled. He was shy. But they were happy together.

By now the light had softened and was beginning to reveal more. Voss thought how he would talk eventually with Laura Trevelyan, how they had never spoken together using the truly humble words that convey the innermost reality: bread, for instance, or water. Obsessed by the struggle between their two souls, they had threatened each other with the flashing weapons of abstract reasoning, while overlooking the common need for sustenance. But now we shall understand each other, he said, glancing about. At that hour fulfilment did appear to prevail, in the dry river, with its recurring pot-holes of greenish-brown water, in the drifts of white flood grass tinkling on bushes, in the ugly, thumping lizards and modest birds. Through the marriage of light and shadow, in the infinite distances of that dun country of which he was taking possession, all, finally, would be resolved.