Patrick White - Voss

Mrs Bonner searched greedily for some evidence of discomfort or sickliness in the sleeping child, of ugly dangers threatening it, but found no more than a bruise or two. Nature had favoured the baby that lay so unperturbed in Laura’s arms. Then Mrs Bonner looked in the latter’s face and was a bit afraid, as if she had been present at a miracle. She did not know what to make of it.

Nor did Laura attempt to explain her own state, even to herself. Those ensuing days she was exhausted, but content. They were the baby’s days. There was a golden fuzz of morning in the garden. She could not bring herself to tread upon the tender flesh of rose petals that were showered at her feet. To avoid this, she would walk round by another way, though it meant running the gauntlet of the sun. Then her duty was most delicious. She was the living shield, that rejoiced to deflect the most savage blows. Other pains, of desert suns, of letters unwritten, of the touch of his man’s hands, with their queer pronounced finger-joints, would fluctuate, as she carried her baby along the golden tunnels of light.

There was no doubt that the child was hers; nor did the blood mother protest, lying on her hot pillows in the shuttered, best room. Rose Portion took all for granted. She would receive the child and feed it at her breast whenever she was told. She would look from her distance at its crinkled face. It was obvious that she had paid the penalty for some monstrous sin, but not the most seductive religion, not even her own baby, could have convinced her the sinner is pardoned. So the flies stood transfixed on wiry legs in the corners of the baby’s eyes. So the wool lace on the backs of the chairs stared back with a Gothic splendour. All was marvellous, but sculpture, to the frozen woman. Her stiff mouth would not move. Her hands had reached the position of infinite acceptance.

Then the mistress would begin to frown for the maid’s omissions.

‘Look, Rose, at the flies on Baby’s face. Disgusting things! They could do her some harm,’ she would scold in true concern. ‘We must ask Mr Bonner to bring us a gossamer from town.’

She herself would take up the baby in its parcel of expensive clothes, and rock it in her arms, or hold it to her shoulder, to listen to its bubbles. The mistress was very soon appeased. She forgot her irritating maid on recovering her child. The young woman would glow and throb with the warmth of the baby, whereas the maid, on surrendering her share in its transparent life, was content to relapse into her own opaque flesh, in its dull shroud of days, into which she had been sewn by circumstance.

‘What will you call the baby?’ Belle Bonner asked her cousin.

‘I do not know,’ said Laura Trevelyan. ‘We must ask Rose.’

‘Poor Rose!’ said Belle.

‘Why poor ?’ asked Laura, quickly.

Belle laughed. She could not say.

Since her return from the Pringles’, the tawny Belle was also changed. She was a lioness prowling in the passages. Laura had escaped, she felt, leaving her alone in the empty cage.

Laura, however, would often remember, and look back affectionately at Belle.

‘Let us go together,’ she tried now to make amends, and touched, ‘let us go and ask Rose.’

Belle smiled sadly, but did consent to come, at a distance.

‘Rose,’ began Laura, very kindly, ‘what would you like to call your baby?’

Rose, who had risen from her bed, but continued to sit in the cool room, waiting to recover her strength, did not hesitate.

‘Mercy,’ she said.

Belle laughed, and Laura blushed.

‘That is a modest name,’ replied Belle.

‘Mercy, and nothing more?’ asked Laura.

‘Nothing,’ said Rose.

She cleared her throat. She looked down. She would have been better left alone.

‘I can see Mercy all in grey,’ Belle sang dreamily.

For the future was a dream.

‘You take Mercy, Rose, for a little,’ suggested Laura, offering the parcel of her child.

‘She is as well with you, miss,’ said the woman, quite unmoved and positive.

‘You are suited to each other,’ she added.

It did, indeed, seem as though this grey-skinned woman were made of a different stuff.

So that Laura felt wrung.

‘But if people should laugh at “Mercy”,’ she had to protest, ‘could we not give her a second name? Mary, for instance?’

‘Ah, people!’ Rose replied.

Then Laura knew that she herself must suffer any derision or opprobrium.

During this intercourse Belle was to some extent mollified by discovering Mercy to be the most amusing creature.

‘A whole chain of dreadful bubbles! Give her to me, Lolly,’ she insisted.

‘Then if Mercy it must be, I will speak to my uncle, and ask him to arrange with Mr Plumpton,’ Laura said. ‘There is no reason why the christening should not take place at once.’

‘Thank you, miss,’ said Rose.

So it was arranged.

But the morning that Mercy was dressed for the font, they began to suspect that her mother had overslept, and on going at last to rouse her maid, Laura Trevelyan discovered that she was gone.

Rose Portion had turned aside her face. The watery blood had stained the pillow, her leather tongue was already stiff, in fact, this poor animal had suffered her last indignity, with the result that the girl who had arrived breathless, blooming with expectation and the roses she had pinned at her throat, was herself turned yellow by the hot wind of death. She was chafing her arms for some time beside the bed. She was gulping uglily, and touching the poor, living hair of the dead woman, her friend and servant.

The christening of Mercy was, very properly, postponed. Instead, her mother was buried at the Sand Hills after a day or two had elapsed, and to that burying-ground the Bonners drove, in the family carriage and a hired fly, for there was the grateful Mr Plumpton to be considered, and Cassie, who was remembering Ireland, and Edith, the young girl, her red knuckles stuffed for the occasion into a first pair of gloves. The mourners smelled of fresh crêpe, supplied by the George Street store, and of the refreshment with which some of the weaker had fortified themselves. These sad smells were soon straying amongst those of baked ivy and thirsty privet at the cemetery gates, where there was an urn, besides, in which someone had left half a dozen apples to rot. The poor, sandy soil soon provided most difficult going, especially for the women, whose heels sank, and whose skirts dragged dreadfully. There were times when it seemed to the ordinarily unimpeded Belle that they were making hardly any progress; nor could the merchant help but suspect, while holding up his distressed wife, that the sun was burning a hole in his back. As for Mrs Bonner, she did suffer a good deal, less in sorrow for her dead servant, than from the presence, the very weight of Death, for while she had been struggling up the crumbly slope, recalling the different illnesses that had carried off her relatives and friends, He had mounted pick-a-back, and there He rode, regardless of a lady’s feelings.

Rather an isolated part of the cemetery had been chosen for the grave of Rose Portion, the emancipist servant, but, of course, as the conciliatory Mr Plumpton pointed out, the whole ground would in time be opened up. So they straggled on towards the mound, and a tree from which wind or insects had torn the foliage, leaving its essential form, or bones.

Now, when the party stood before the grave, and sun and wind were fighting for possession of the black clothes, it was Laura Trevelyan who saw clearest. The bright new box tossed and bumped as they lowered it. Then there was a thump and a spurt of sand, to reply to such human life as persisted in its arrogance. The girl who was watching flung aside the bitter hair that was blowing across her mouth. The terrible body of the dead woman, with its steady nostrils and its carved hands, was altogether resigned, she saw again, through the intervening lid. But what of her own expectant soul, or tender roseflesh of the child? Each grain of merciless sand suggested to the girl that her days of joy had been, in a sense, illusory.