Patrick White - Voss

And began with some ostentation choosing a pen and a large sheet of very clean paper to compose a letter to a tradesman. He liked to feel that, just beyond his occupations, other people were waiting on him.

‘Well, Harry, what shall we discuss?’

In addressing Harry, or any young person, or puppy, Le Mesurier would compose his dark mouth with conscious irony. For protection. Young things read the thoughts more clearly, he sensed. And this idiot.

‘Eh?’ he asked of the boy, holding his neck in a certain manner.

‘I dunno,’ said Harry, gloomily, and crushed a fly with his forefinger.

‘You were never helpful, Harry,’ Le Mesurier sighed, seating himself, and stretching out his rather elegant legs; ‘when we should stick together. Hopeful flotsam in the antipodes.’

‘You were never nothun to me,’ said Harry.

‘That is candid, at least.’

‘And I am no flotsam, whatever that be.’

‘What are you, then?’ asked Le Mesurier, though he had tired.

‘I dunno what I am,’ said Harry, and looked for help.

But Voss was reading through his letter. Whether he had heard, it was not possible to tell.

Doubting that he could count upon his patron’s protection, Harry Robarts grew more miserable. Many disturbing and opaque thoughts began to move in his clear mind. What am I? What is it necessary to be? His thick boots had become a weight of desolation, and his rough jacket suddenly smelled of animals. He was nothing except when near to Mr Voss, but this nearness was being denied him. Once he had opened his protector’s cupboard and touched the clothes hanging there, even stuck his nose into the dark folds, and been assured. But this was of the past. He was now faced with the terrifying problem of his own category propounded by Mr Le Mesurier.

‘You are perhaps subtler than you know,’ the enemy sighed, and felt his own cheek.

There were several nicks where the razor had sought out stubble in the early furrows of his face, which was almost the colour of a citron on that afternoon. Oh, Lord, why had he come? His own skin was repulsive to him. The young man remembered a haycock on which he had lain as a little boy, and the smell of milk, or innocence. Recognizing something of that same innocence in Harry Robarts’ harmless eyes, he resented it, as a refuge to which he might never again retreat.

Now he too must rely upon the German. But the latter was reading and reading his wretched letter, and biting his nails, not badly, it must be said, perhaps one especial nail. Frank Le Mesurier, who was fastidious in some respects, loathed this habit, but continued to watch and wait because he was in no position to protest.

‘I will ask you to deliver this letter, Harry — not now, it will keep till morning — to Mr O’Halloran, the saddler, in George Street,’ Voss said.

What did he know? It was not, however, his policy to expose the weaknesses of others unless some particular advantage could be gained.

‘You will be pleased to hear that I have received favourable news,’ he announced.

He was speaking rather brightly, in a manner that he might have learnt, in a foreign tongue, from some brisk, elderly lady talking men’s talk to men. The fact that it was not his own manner did add somewhat to the strain.

Harry Robarts pursued the situation desperately with his eyes in search of something he could understand. He would have liked to touch his saviour’s skin. Once or twice he had touched Voss, and it had gone unnoticed.

‘I cannot believe that this infernal expedition is really about to materialize,’ grumbled Le Mesurier.

Risen to the surface again, he was indifferent to everything. His long legs, disposed in front of him, were downright insolent.

‘In less than two weeks we shall board the Osprey ,’ said Voss. ‘The five of us. And set sail for Newcastle, with our fundamental stores. From there we shall proceed to Rhine Towers, the property of Mr Sanderson.’

For reading and writing the German wore a pair of neat spectacles.

‘The five of us?’ said Le Mesurier, smouldering a little. ‘There is Palfreyman, of course. Oh, yes, one forgets Turner.’

‘Turner will be here presently, I expect.’

‘And we will be ridin’ horses as you said?’ asked Harry Robarts.

‘Or mules,’ said Voss.

‘Or mules.’

‘Though I expect it will be one horse to a man, and mules as pack animals. That will rest with Mr Sanderson, however, and Mr Boyle of Jildra.’

So much did rest with other people, but these were the immaterial, material things. So he frequently deceived his friends. So also in the darkening room a man and a boy continued to wait for moral sustenance. Instead he chose cheerful phrases which were not his own. His sallow cheeks had even grown pink, as a disguise. But I shall lead them eventually, he considered, because it is intended I shall justify myself in this way. If justify was a plain word, it was but a flat occasion. Inspiration descends only in flashes, to clothe circumstances; it is not stored up in a barrel, like salt herrings, to be doled out. In the confused mirror of the darkening room, he was not astonished that his face should have gained in importance over all other reflected details. Cheerfully he could have forgotten his two dissimilar disciples. They were, indeed, an ill-assorted pair, alike only in their desperate need of him.

Presently Topp’s old housekeeper sighed her way to the upper landing with a nice sweetbread for their lodger’s supper, and a glass of wine that the latter knew would taste of cork.

‘Sitting in the dark, almost,’ said Mrs Thompson, in the tone she kept for children and the opposite sex.

Then she lighted a pair of candles, and set them on the little, rickety cedar table to which the German had taken his tray. Soon the room was swimming with light.

Voss was eating. There was no question of his offering anything to his two dependants. They were so far distant from him now in the fanciful light that they gloated over him without shame, and the crumbs that fell from his mouth.

‘Is it nice, then?’ asked Mrs Thompson, who throve on the compliments of her gentlemen.

‘Excellent,’ said the German, as a matter of course.

Actually, he did not stop to think. The quicker done, the better. But he won her with his answers.

He is a greedy-looking pig, really, thought Frank Le Mesurier. A German swine. And was surprised at himself.

‘You should eat slower,’ said the old woman. ‘A lady told me you should chew your food thirty-seven times.’

He was a handsome-looking man.

‘And build yourself up.’

Thin about the face, with veins in the forehead. She recalled all the sick people she had ever nursed, especially her husband, who had been carried off by a consumption shortly after arrival on those shores.

She sighed.

Topp came in, bringing with him a bottle and glasses, knowing that Voss would not have offered anything, for that was his way. The music master did not blame him. Great men were exempt from trivial duties, and if the German was not great, his landlord would have liked him to be. Once Topp himself had composed a sonata for piano and flute. He had never dared own it, however, and would introduce it to his pupils as: ‘A little piece that we might run through.’

Usually modest, tonight he was also melancholy.

‘It is the southerly winds that get into one’s bones,’ he said, ‘after the heat of the day.’

Mrs Thompson was prepared to enlarge upon the climatic disadvantages of the Colony, but heard a lady of her acquaintance calling her from the street.

‘If it is not one wind, it is another. Ah, dear, it is terrible I Though on days when there is none, a person soon wishes there would be. This is the most contrariest place,’ was all she had time to say.