Patrick White - Voss

So the divine spirit fled out, into the swirl of blown rain. The man that remained continued to watch the shiny grey soup of the prevailing flood, and for want of a better occupation, crushed an earthworm that had crawled for protection as far as the rocky platform on which he sat.

In the circumstances, it was not altogether surprising that a human figure should appear, and that this figure should develop into Judd, his head down to the new-blown rain, as he carried a quart pot.

‘I could not sleep, and as it was not raining at the time,’ the convict explained when he had approached, ‘I decided to find the goats, and have brought back a drop of milk for Mr Le Mesurier.’

Voss was furious.

‘Maybe such quantities of milk are not correct treatment for a man whose bowels are in a delicate condition.’

Judd did not answer at once. When he did, he said:

‘At all events, there is the milk.’

And he set the pot upon the floor of the cave.

During the morning, Voss administered another dose from the much reduced supply of laudanum and rhubarb. Then, after debating whether to throw out the contents of Judd’s quart, he decided on an opposite course. Seeing the convict seat himself in their vicinity, with the object of mending a broken bridle, the German persuaded the unwilling Le Mesurier to sip at the controversial milk, and was rewarded later by the patient’s suffering an access of diarrhoea.

‘Only as reason led me to expect,’ commented the physician, in pouring the milk away, again under the convict’s nose.

Judd, who had in his life experienced the cat, did not open his mouth.

‘Or else,’ said Voss, who could not let the matter drop, ‘one of the goats is sick.’

Then he began to clean up the invalid’s mess with equanimity, even love. Noble gestures of doubtful origin did stimulate him most of all. If they left him haggard, as from suffering — for he was aware of his human nature also — it was good that he should suffer, along with men.

So he looked deliberately at Judd. But the latter plied his saddler’s needle.

If it had not been for the journals that some of them kept, it would have been difficult for the members of the expedition to sense the passage of time. The days were possessed of a similarity, of sickness, and rain, and foraging for firewood, as they dripped slowly, or blew in gusts of passionate vengeance, or stood quite still for intervals of several hours, in which the only sound was that of passive moisture. Yet, a variety of incidents did also occur, or were created out of the void of inactivity, mostly quite trivial events, but which uneasy minds invested with a light of feverish significance.

There was the morning, for instance, when their cattle disappeared, such cattle as these had become, skeletons rather, from which the hair had not yet rotted. Then each of the shaggy men who had been abandoned began to wander about distraught, with his thumbs hung from the slits of his trouser pockets, looking for tracks, for dung, for some sign. If they did not communicate their distress to one another, it was because it was too great to convey, but a stranger would have read it in any of those faces, which were by now interchangeable, as the dumb creatures shambled up and down, snuffling after the rest of the herd.

A whole two days, Voss, Judd, Angus, and the blackfellow searched the country pretty thoroughly. Of all the expedition these men were the fittest, although in the case of Voss he would not have allowed himself to appear less. An effort on his part, it was an effort also on the part of Judd to continue to admire his leader, but as the convict was a fair man, he did make that effort. So they continued to roam the water looking for the lost cattle, and from a distance their employment appeared effortless.

Then they lost Jackie.

Ralph Angus cursed.

‘These blacks are all alike,’ he complained, and punished his horse’s mouth as the blackfellow did not offer himself. ‘In no circumstances are they to be relied upon.’

‘Some whites would pack their swags,’ said Judd, ‘if the road led anywhere.’

‘I have great confidence in this boy,’ Voss announced, and would continue to hope until the end, because it was most necessary for him to respect some human being.

The white men rode home, which was what the cave had become. Paths now wound from its mouth. Harry Robarts had washed his shirt, and was drying it on a string beside the fire.

The German was filled with terrible longing at this scene of homecoming. He was, after all, a man of great frailty, both physical and moral, and so, immediately upon entering the cave, he returned outside, preferring to keep company with the gusts of rain than to expose his weakness to human eyes, except possibly those of his wife.

She, however, was quite strong and admirable in her thick, man’s boots beneath the muddied habit. Her hands were taking his weakness from him, into her own, supple, extraordinarily muscular ones. Yet, her face had retained the expression he remembered it to have worn when she accepted him in spite of his composite nature, and was unmistakably the face of a woman.

Ah Laura, my dear Laura, the man was begging, or protesting.

As he stood in the entrance to the cave, he was resting his forehead against a boss of cold rock.

Thus he was seen by Frank Le Mesurier, who had recovered a little of his strength, and was moving on his bed, looking for some person with whom to feel in sympathy. Now he observed their leader. The young man was glad that Voss remained unnoticed by the others, since only those who have known the lowest depths are unashamed. For some reason obscure to himself, he began also to recall, as he did frequently in those desert places, the extraordinary young woman that had ridden down to the wharfside. He remembered her swollen lips, and what had appeared at that distance to be the dark shadows under her eyes, how she had been enclosed strictly in her iron habit, and how, while inclining her head to talk with evident sincerity to Mr Palfreyman, she had remained innerly aloof.

For some reason, obscurer still, the visionary felt carried closer to his leader, as the woman rode back into his life. He lay amongst his blankets, and let the moon trample him, and was filled with love and poetry, as is only right, between the spasms of suffering.

That night, when the rather tender, netted moon rose between layers of cloud, Jackie returned, herding the lost cattle. Moonlight was glinting on the pointed horns, that at intervals could have contained the disc itself. The skin of the boy, who sat thin and terrified on his sombre horse, was inlaid with shining mother o’ pearl.

They looked out and saw him.

‘Here is Jackie come back,’ some of them said.

At once Voss was stumbling over bodies, to reach the mouth of the cave, to corroborate.

How glad he was, then.

‘One cattle no find,’ said the boy, and was beginning to sulk at the darkness which had but lately frightened him.

His nakedness chafed the horse as he slithered silkily down.

‘Even so, you have done well,’ said the German, relieved on a scale the others did not suspect, out of all proportion to the incident.

He could not talk in front of other people, but brought a lump of damper, which was left over from their evening meal.

‘There,’ he said to the hollow boy, and, almost angrily: ‘You will have to make do with that, because there is nothing more.’

Then the German returned abruptly to his bed, and of all those present, only the aboriginal, who was well practised in listening to silence, did not interpret their leader’s behaviour as contemptuous.

Nothing was added to the incident. Voss recorded it without comment in his journal: