Patrick White - Voss

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Voss: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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Set in nineteenth century Australia,
is the story of the passion between an explorer and a naive young woman. Although they have met only a few times, Voss and Laura are joined by overwhelming, obsessive feelings for each other. Voss sets out to cross the continent. As hardships, mutiny and betrayal whittle away his power to endure and to lead, his attachment to Laura gradually increases. Laura, waiting in Sydney, moves through the months of separation as if they were a dream and Voss the only reality.
From the careful delineation of Victorian society to the sensitive rendering of hidden love to the stark narrative of adventure in the Australian desert, Patrick White’s novel is a work of extraordinary power and virtuosity.

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‘Because I am not going.’

‘You will deprive us of such pleasure?’ asked Tom Radclyffe, who had just arrived, and who was looking not at this thorny cousin, but at his own precious property.

‘When we are all expected!’ protested Mrs Bonner.

The latter would have gone with her leg sawn off rather than diverge by one inch from the intended course.

‘My baby is suffering from the wind, and I must stay with her for the very good reason that she needs me,’ Laura answered gravely.

‘Have you really also learnt to deflate babies?’ Tom Radclyffe asked.

But Mrs Bonner’s mind had conceived a tragedy grander than the detail of the baby’s wind at first suggested.

‘Your baby,’ she gulped. ‘Give me your arm, Tom, please. I will need it.’

Then she burst into tears, and they led her to the carriage.

Laura was now free. She wiped upon her apron those hands which the observant Dr Badgery had seen to be too red, and with which she had just been washing various small articles of the baby’s clothing, for she had decided in the beginning that this was a duty she must take upon herself. Now she returned upstairs.

The healthy baby had been no more than passingly fretful that afternoon. The young woman stood looking at her. No longer could anybody have doubted their relationship. They were looking at each other in the depths of their collusion, fingering each other’s skin and face. They were covered with the faintest silvery webs of smiles, when the blood began to beat, the shadow swept across the mother’s face, and suddenly she took up her child, and was walking up and down.

The young woman was going up and down, but, in the familiar room, amongst the stolid furniture, the two beings had been overtaken by a storm of far darker colours than human passions. As they were rocked together, tossed, and buffeted, helplessness and desperation turned the woman’s skin an ugly brown. What could she do? The baby, on beginning to sense that she had been sucked into some whirlpool of supernatural dangers, could at least let out a howl for her mother to save her, and was probably convinced she would be saved. The mother, however, was unable to enjoy the comfort of any such belief and, for the moment, must be presumed lost.

‘My darling, my darling,’ Laura Trevelyan whispered, kissing. ‘I am so afraid.’

Kisses did drug the child with an illusion of safety, and she calmed down, and eventually slept. The mother saw this mercy descend as she watched. Then it seemed to the young woman that she might pray to God for love and protection of greater adequacy, but she hesitated on realizing her own incapacity to save her trusting child. Only later in the afternoon did she become aware of the extent of her blasphemy, and was made quite hollow by it.

When finally she could bring herself to pray, she did not kneel, but crouched diffidently upon the edge of an upright chair. She formed the words very slowly and distinctly, hoping that, thus, they would transcend her mind. If she dared hope. But she did pray. Not for herself, she had abandoned herself, nor for her baby, who must, surely, be exempt at the last reckoning. She prayed for that being for whom the ark of her love was built. She prayed over and over, for JOHANN ULRICH VOSS, until, through the ordinary bread of words, she did receive divine sustenance.

That evening Laura Trevelyan sat beneath smooth hair and listened to her aunt recount to her uncle details of the Pringles’ picnic, although none was deceived as to the true direction of the narrative.

‘The air was most bracing,’ Mrs Bonner declared, still snuffing it recklessly. ‘Everyone was agreeable, and some even well-informed, for a much-travelled man cannot fail to acquire instructive scraps of information. Did I perhaps forget to mention that several of the officers from Nautilus and Samphire were present? It is not surprising if I did. I am scattered from here to Waverley. Such a jolting, and worst of all down a fiendish lane where we were driven at last to the home of Judge de Courcy — whose wife is a lady of the very best connexions, it appears, in Leicestershire — and were shown their glasshouses and gardens. In the course of this little excursion, I received a most interesting lecture on topiary from Mr Badgery — you will have heard tell, Mr Bonner, the surgeon of Nautilus , who accompanied Una Pringle on the occasion of her last visit.’

Mr Bonner could sit whole evenings without answering his wife, but they understood each other.

‘Now, it appears, Mr Badgery is known to Mrs de Courcy, and that he is quite well connected, through his mother, with whom he lives when at home, for in spite of his many excellent qualities, he has remained a bachelor.’

Laura, too, in spite of her resolutions, could have strolled along the paths between the solid, masculine, clipped hedges, and touched them with her hand. All that is solid is at times nostalgic and desirable.

Mrs Bonner had paused, and was knotting a thread that her work demanded.

‘I am sorry, Laura, that I have not inquired after Mercy,’ she said. ‘Earlier in the afternoon, I myself was so very much upset.’

‘I am sorry, Aunt, if we have caused you unhappiness of any kind,’ Laura replied. ‘As it happened, it was only a slight indisposition. But I cannot run the risk of neglecting what I have sworn to do.’

Mrs Bonner could not answer. At this point, however, her husband was beginning to stir. A stranger might have failed to perceive the subtle sympathy that did exist between the couple, for coupled they were, even in irritation, by many tough, tangled, indestructible, instinctive links.

So, when the tea was brought in, Mr Bonner began. He stood upon the hearth, which was the centre of their house, and where a small fire of logs had been lit, because the nights remained chilly. He said:

‘Now, Laura, you are a reasonable girl, and we must come to a decision about this child.’

Laura did not answer. She was cold, and had twisted her fingers together as she watched the flames writhing in the oblivious grate.

‘You must realize that your own position is intolerable, however laudable your intentions, in keeping someone else’s child.’

‘It is unnatural that you should become so stubbornly attached. A young girl.’ Mrs Bonner sighed.

‘If I were a married woman,’ Laura Trevelyan answered, ‘I do not think it would be so very different.’

The pitiful fire was leaping out in sharp, thin, desperate tongues.

Mrs Bonner clucked.

‘But a baby without a name,’ she said. ‘I am surprised, to say the least, that you should not find us worthy of consideration.’

‘I am aware of my debt, and shall attempt to repay you,’ Laura replied, ‘but please, please, in any other way. As Mercy is guilty of being without a name, and this offends you, the least I can do is give her my own. I should have thought of that. Of course.’

‘But consider the future, how such a step would damage your prospects,’ said the uncle.

‘My prospects,’ cried the niece, ‘are in the hands of God.’

She was holding her head. The wood-smoke was unbearable, with its poignance of distances.

Then she dragged herself forward a little in her chair, and said:

‘I will suffer anything you care to inflict on me, of course. I, too, can endure.’

Mrs Bonner was looking round, in little, darting glances, at her normal room.

‘Oh, she is hysterical,’ she said, tugging at the innocent thread that joined her needle to the linen. And then: ‘We only wish to help you, Laura dear. We love you.’

They did. Indeed, it was that which made it most terrible.

Fortunately, just then, Belle ran across the terrace and into the room. She had accompanied the Pringles home for supper, and had returned in the brougham of the two Miss Unwins who also lived at Potts Point.

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