Patrick White - Voss

‘That is all very well,’ said the surgeon, ‘and sentimental, and stoical. The past is desirable, more often than not, because it can make no demands, and it is in the nature of the present to appear rough and uncharitable. But when it comes to the future, do you not feel that chances are equal?’

He had rather blunt, white teeth, set in a trap, in his crisp beard.

‘I feel,’ she said slowly, and was already frightened at what she was about to admit, ‘that the life I am to live is already utterly beyond my control.’

Even the dependable Dr Badgery could not have rescued her from that sea, however much she might have wished it. That she did wish, must be recorded, out of respect for her rational judgement and his worthiness. But man is a rational judge only fleetingly, and worthiness is too little, or too much.

So the surgeon returned presently to his ship, and had soon restored the shape to his orderly life, except that on occasions the dark waters would seep between the timbers. Then he would welcome them, he would be drowning with her, their transparent fears would be flickering in and out of their skulls, trailing long fins of mutual colours.

Long after Dr Badgery had fallen asleep in his brassbound cabin, on the night of his last meeting in the flesh with Laura Trevelyan, the ball at Bright’s Dancing Academy, Elizabeth Street, the much discussed, and finally legendary ball that the Pringles gave for Belle, continued to surge and sound. O the seas of music, the long blue dreamy rollers, and the little, rosy, frivolous waves. All was swept, all was carried up and down. To swim was the only natural act, although the eyes were smarting, as the fiddles continued to flick the golden spray, although, in the swell of dawn, question and answer floated out of reach.

‘It is really too much to expect of you, dear Mrs Pringle,’ said Mrs Bonner. ‘Let me order the horses. Could you not simply slip away? Or, supposing I were to go amongst the dancers, and hint to one or two of the more responsible girls, that it is almost morning? I am sure they would listen to reason.’

O reason, O Mrs Bonner, speak to the roses and the mignonette. They will be trampled, rather, or float up and down in the silver seas of morning, together with the programmes and the used napkins.

‘Oh, Mrs Pringle, it has been the most lovely, lovely ball,’ said Belle Bonner, as she woke from her dream of dancing.

Her cheek was still hot.

‘Thank you, Mrs Pringle,’ smiled Laura Trevelyan, who offered a frank hand, like a man. And added: ‘I have enjoyed myself so much.’

Because she was a woman, she was also dishonest whenever it was really necessary.

Then all the dancers were going. Some of the girls, although well acquainted with the Bonners, carefully guided their skirts past Laura Trevelyan, who had observed them all that night as from a promontory, her eyes outlined in black.

When the Bonners returned that morning, and had kissed, and sighed, and gone to their rooms, Laura sat down at her writing-desk, as if she had been waiting to satisfy a desire, and scrabbled in her trayful of pens, and immediately began to write:

My dear Johann Ulrich,

We have this moment come in from a ball, at which I have been so miserable for you, I must write, not knowing by what means in the world it will be possible to send the letter. Except by miracle, it will not be sent, and so, I fear, it is the height of foolishness.

But write I must. If you, my dear, cannot hope to benefit, it is most necessary for me. I suppose if I were to examine my thoughts honestly, I should find that self-pity is my greatest sin, of which I do not remember being guilty in the past. How strong one was, how weak one always is! Was the firm, upright, reliable character one seemed to have been, a myth? …

The reddish light of morning had begun to flow into the rooms of the sleeping house. The tender rooms were like transparent eggs, from which the protective shell had been removed.

The young woman, whose eyelids were turned to buckram, was writing in her red room. She wrote:

… It would seem that the human virtues, except in isolated, absolved, absurd, or oblivious individuals are mythical. Are you too, my dearest, a myth, as it has been suggested? …

The young woman, whose stiff eyelids had been made red and transparent by the unbearably lucid light of morning, began to score the paper, with quick slashes, of her stricken, scratching pen.

Ah, God, she said, I do have faith, if it is not all the time.

Odd lumps of prayer were swelling in her mouth. Her movements were crippled as she stumbled about her orderly room that the red light made dreadful. She was tearing the tough writing-paper, or attempting to, for it was of an excellent quality; her uncle saw to it that she used no other. So that, in the end, the paper remained twisted up. Her breath was rasping, or retching out of her throat.

Mercifully, she fell upon her bed soon after, recovering in sleep that beauty which was hers in private, and which, consequently, many people had never seen.

*

After a very short interval, it seemed, Belle Bonner was married to Tom Radclyffe, at St James’s, on a windy day. If Mrs Bonner had swelled with the material importance of a wedding, the disbelieving father appeared much shrunken as he supported his daughter up the aisle. How Belle felt, almost nobody paused to consider, for was not the bride the symbol of all their desires? Indeed, it could have been that Belle herself did not feel, so much as vibrate, inside the shuddering white cocoon from which she would emerge a woman. A remote, a passive rapture veiled her normally human face. To Laura Trevelyan, a bridesmaid who did not match the others, there was no longer any means of communicating with her cousin. She would have resented it more, and dreaded the possibility that their intimacy might never be restored, if she, too, was not become temporarily a torpid insect along with everyone else.

So satin sighed, lozenges were discreetly sucked, and the scented organ meandered through the melodious groves of flowers.

Then, suddenly, the bells were beginning to tumble.

Everyone agreed that the Bonner wedding was the loveliest and most tasteful the Colony had witnessed. Afterwards, upon the steps, emotion and colour certainly flared high, as the wind took veil, hair, and shawl, rice stung, carriages were locked together in the crush, and the over-stuffed and excited horses relieved themselves copiously in the middle of the street. There was also an episode with a disgraceful pink satin shoe, which a high-spirited young subaltern, a second cousin of Chattie Wilson, had carried off, it was whispered, from the dressing-room of an Italian singer. Many of the women blushed for what they knew, others were crying, as if for some tragedy at which they had but lately assisted in a theatre, and a few criticized the bride for carrying a sheaf of pear-blossom, which was original, to say the least.

Standing upon the steps of the church, in the high wind, Laura Trevelyan watched her cousin, in whose oblivious arms lay the sheaf of black sticks, of which the flowerets threatened to blow away, bearing with them tenderly, whitely, imperceptibly, the myth of all happiness.

ALTHOUGH the past winter had proved unusually wet in almost every district, it was naturally wettest in that country in which the expedition of Johann Ulrich Voss was forcibly encamped, for men are convinced early in their lives that the excesses of nature are incited for their personal discomfiture. Some who survive the trial persuade themselves they had been aware all along, either through their instinct, or their reason, of the existence of the great design, yet it is probable that only the wisest, and most innocent, were not deceived at first.