Patrick White - Voss

Oh dear, if I could but describe in simple words the immensity of simple knowledge.

We are close to each other, my dearest, and shall strengthen each other. Better than that I cannot do.

I must tell you of something pathetic that occurred lately, and which has affected us all. You may remember a woman called Rose Portion, an emancipist servant, employed here in my uncle’s house. Rose recently had a child, by whom, I cannot bring myself to say, but a pretty little girl called Mercy. On Rose’s dying a few weeks after giving birth to her baby, never having recovered, we are now positive, from the ministrations of an ignorant and rapacious midwife, I took this child, and am caring for her as if she were my own. Together with yourself, she is my greatest joy. Can you understand, dear Ulrich? She is my consolation, my token of love.

If I continue to dwell unduly upon the death of Rose, it is because of the great impression it left upon me, the morning I found her lying in her bed, and again, at the funeral. We buried her at the Sand Hills on an indescribable day, of heat, and cloud, and wind. As I stood there (I hesitate to write you all this, except that it is the truth), as I stood, the material part of myself became quite superfluous, while my understanding seemed to enter into wind, earth, the ocean beyond, even the soul of our poor, dead maid. I was nowhere and everywhere at once. I was destroyed, yet living more intensely than actual sunlight, so that I no longer feared the face of Death as I had found it on the pillow. If I suffered, it was to understand the devotion and suffering of Rose, to love whom had always been an effort!

Finally, I believe I have begun to understand this great country, which we have been presumptuous enough to call ours , and with which I shall be content to grow since the day we buried Rose. For part of me has now gone into it. Do you know that a country does not develop through the prosperity of a few landowners and merchants, but out of the suffering of the humble? I could now lay my head on the ugliest rock in the land and feel at rest.

My dear Ulrich, I am not really so proud as to claim to be humble, although I do attempt, continually, to humble myself. Do you also? I understand you are entitled, as a man, to a greater share of pride, but would like to see you humbled. Otherwise, I am afraid for you. Two cannot share one throne . Even I would not wash your feet if I might wash His. Of that I am now certain, however great my need of you may be. Let us understand this, and serve together .

How many people pass over that word, I wonder, and take it for granted. I will tell you something. In my foolishness I had made up my mind to work it in wool, for what purpose I had not decided, but to embroider it in some way for my own pleasure. First, I sketched the design on paper, and had actually begun in a variety of coloured wools: blue for distance, brown for the earth, crimson, why, I cannot say, except that I am obsessed by that colour. However, as I worked, the letters were soon blazing at me with such intensity that the most witless person alive must have understood their significance. So I put the work away, and now it is smouldering in the darkness of a cupboard.

My dearest, at this distance, what can I do to soften your sufferings, but love you truly. Now that you have left behind the rich and hospitable country you have described, probably for some heartless desert, I pray that you are not filled with doubts. The moments of severest trial are surely the obscure details of a design that will be made clear at last — if we can endure till then, and for that purpose are we given to one another.

Although my own happiness is incomplete , we continue here in a state of undisturbed small pleasures: picnics; morning calls (which you so despise, I seem to remember); a Mr McWhirter gave a lecture on the Wonders of India at the School of Arts at which my Aunt E. slept and toppled over. My Cousin Belle Bonner will dance her feet right off before she marries Lieut. Radclyffe. That event, for which we are already busily preparing, should take place in the early spring. There is every indication that Belle will reap all the rewards for her sweetness and beauty. I do hope so, for I love her dearly. Mr Radclyffe is resigning his commission, and they plan to settle on some land he has taken up in the Hunter Valley, at no great distance, I understand, from your friends the Sandersons.

Now, dear, I can only pray that this will reach you, which I must finish without further ado, as my Uncle is calling from below and Mr Bagot (our messenger to Moreton Bay) is impatient to leave.

I thank you for your kindness, and your thoughts, and await most anxiously the letter I know you will hasten to send me at the first opportunity for doing so.

Ever your sincere

LAURA TREVELYAN

‘Laura!’ they were calling. ‘Laura! Mr Bagot cannot wait.’

‘I am coming,’ cried Laura’s dry voice, which rattled the window-panes, ‘in one minute.’

But she had to read first.

Then she was appalled.

‘Oh,’ she protested, ‘I am not as bad as all this.’

As she blistered her fingers on the sealing-wax.

Immediately, her childishness, prolixity, immodesty, blasphemy, and affectations were intensified. They were opened up like wounds at which she would be for ever probing.

‘Laura!’

Yet, at the time, I was sincere, she persisted, from the depths of her disillusion.

Her own opinion did not console, however, and she went from her room, carrying in her hands extinguished fire.

SEVERAL of the mules had disappeared. Unlike such major disasters as the theft of the cattle on Christmas Eve, and the quiet death of the first sheep, with its neck outstretched along the ground, the latest incident was passed over lightly by the members of the expedition. Riding on towards the west, they were, naturally, the lighter for each loss, and so, must gain more easily on that future which remained a dusty golden to each pair of eyes.

They rode, and they came eventually to a ridge of abrupt hills, dappled and dancing with quartz, at the foot of which some black women were digging with their sticks for yams. Such meetings had come to be accepted by all. The blacks squatted on their haunches, and stared up at the men that were passing, of whom they had heard, or whom they had even seen before. Once, the women would have run screaming. Now they scratched their long breasts, and squinted from under their bat’s-skin hands. Unafraid of bark or mud, they examined these caked and matted men, whose smell issued less from their glands than from the dust they were wearing, and whose eyes were dried pools. As for the men, obsessed by their dream of distance and the future, they glanced at the women as they would into crevices in hot, black rock, and rode on.

By some process of chemical choice, the cavalcade had resolved itself into immutable component parts. No one denied that Mr Voss was the first, the burning element, that consumed obstacles, as well as indifference in others. All round the leader ranged the native boy, like quicksilver, if he had not been bronze. Jackie was always killing things, or scenting a waterhole, or seeing smoke in the distance, or just shambling off on his horse and standing on the fringes of liberty.

Some way behind the advance party would come the spare horses and the pack-mules driven by Le Mesurier and Palfreyman. These two exchanged all manner of kindnesses and sympathy, but not their thoughts. Palfreyman was not sure which god Le Mesurier worshipped. Le Mesurier would address Palfreyman very distinctly, and smile encouragingly out of his dark lips, as if the ornithologist had been a foreigner. Well, he was, too, in that he was another man. Grown paler beneath the scales of salt, Palfreyman was sad, who would have melted with other men in love. Whenever he failed, he would blame himself, for he was by now persuaded of his inability to communicate, a shortcoming that made him more miserable, in that the salvation of others could have depended on him.