Patrick White - Voss

‘No doubt others will have made up their minds by morning,’ Voss said. ‘Gentlemen, I will wish you good night. You have several hours. The nights are still cold, and will favour thought.’

Then he crawled into his tent, and was not altogether ungainly in doing so, it was realized.

The situation did crystallize, if painfully, under the stars, and by morning each knew what he must confess. In some cases, the decision was too obvious to require putting into words. There would have been no hope for Frank Le Mesurier, for instance, on any course other than his leader’s, and Voss, who had read what was written, would not have dreamt of asking for proof of loyalty. Frank was busy strapping and buckling. Somewhere he had stowed his book, that he valued still, but in which he no longer wrote, as if all were said.

Turner was gabbling. The prospect of a return to sanity had brought out the streak of madness that is hidden in all men.

‘I will not eat, Albert,’ he was saying craftily, ‘and the load will be so much lighter for the provisions we do not have to carry. It is surprising how little a man need eat. I will be the headpiece, you will see. Food, they say, only numbs the brain.’

Just then, the German came across, and insisted upon a fair division of stores. He and Judd arranged these matters quite naturally and amicably, in the pale morning. Although they were shivering, and their teeth chattering, it was from the cold.

‘And the compass!’ laughed Voss, who had become a thin, distinguished, reasonable being.

‘There is no need for any compass,’ laughed the big, jolly Judd.

As Ralph Angus approached them, he was terribly uncertain in his certainty, and in need of that macassar, which provided half the assurance of young, personable gentlemen.

‘I have decided,’ he said, who had been deciding all night.

‘Yes?’ asked Voss, who knew, and who would have let him off.

‘I have decided to throw in my lot,’ said Angus, sweating in the cold, ‘to go with Judd. It seems to me questionable to continue any farther into this wilderness. I have enough land,’ he finished rather abruptly, and did not mention the acreage, for this would have been in bad taste.

‘You are rich, then,’ remarked Voss, with elaborate seriousness.

‘I mean,’ stuttered the unhappy young man, ‘there is land enough along the coast for anyone to stake a reasonable claim.’

At that moment, his leader, as Judd the convict had become, put his strong hand on the landowner’s arm and asked him to do something.

‘All right,’ said Ralph Angus, surlily, but with every intention of obeying.

He went to do it, and at the same moment gave his life into the keeping of Judd. As the latter’s hands were capable ones, it could have been a wise move, although the young man himself felt he was betraying his class, both then, and for ever.

All was got ready in quickest time. Nobody could have criticized the almost unbroken smoothness and amiability with which their departure was prepared. When the moment came, however, movements grew abrupt and unnatural. As the two parties were separating, each man remembered how the others knew him far too intimately, with the consequence that nobody experienced any real desire to look back.

Only Harry Robarts called to his mate:

‘Good-bye then, Mr Judd.’

They had forgotten about Harry, who was, of course, a lad, and a simpleton. Even Judd had forgotten, who had sensed the boy’s affection, while always knowing that he must lose him.

‘Ah, good-bye, Harry,’ the convict replied, now that he had been accused.

When he had cleared a passage in his throat, he added rather furrily:

‘You are leaving me. And I would not have expected it.’

Although it was not true.

‘I would come with you,’ the boy began, and hesitated.

Then why would not Harry come? There was no reason, except that it was not intended.

‘I would come if I wanted to,’ he shouted into his friend’s face.

And began to dig his heels into the sides of his horse.

‘But I do not,’ he cried. ‘Get on, then! Arr, get on! Or I will bust your ribs open!’

The two parties now rode in opposite directions. With the exception of Harry Robarts, whose fate was tormenting him, the spirits of all were considerably revived. The blackfellow Jackie, who rode still at the German’s right hand, was grinning as he bounced upon his horse’s shambly skeleton. There was a great deal the young native found incomprehensible but, at least, he was not dead. So the invisible rope that joined the cavalcade was slowly broken, and then, in the immediate landscape, nothing remained of the expedition except a small cairn of stones that marked the grave of Mr Palfreyman.

ALTHOUGH the money he had made was enough to have bought him absolution of his origins, Mr Bonner had never thought to aspire to gentle birth. That was a luxury he left to his wife, who did enjoy immensely both the triumphs and the punishments involved. The merchant enjoyed the money, having experienced the condition of errand lad, of blameworthy assistant, and of confidential clerk to several hard men. Ah, he did love the fortune that rendered him safe, so he considered, from attack by life, for, in the course of living, Mr Bonner had forgotten that the shell-less oyster is not more vulnerable than man. Safe in life, safe in death, the merchant liked to feel. In consequence, he had often tried to calculate, for how much, and from whom, salvation might be bought and, to ensure that his last entrance would be made through the right cedar door, had begun in secret to subscribe liberal sums to all denominations, including those of which he approved.

Intellectual, to say nothing of spiritual inquiry, was not, however, a serious occupation for a man. He was content to leave it to the women, or to some slightly comical specialist. If he had experienced yearnings of the spirit, he had come closest, though still not very close, to satisfying them by going out and thinning the buds from his camellia bushes, those fine, shiny, compact, inpenetrable shrubs that he had planted himself, and which had increased with his own magnificence. Although their flowers suffered in the end from perfection, and their reliable evergreen charms became a bore as the season progressed, that was really what he liked: the unchanging answer to his expectations. Take his God, for instance. If his God had not been a bore, Mr Bonner might have suspected Him. Instead, his respect for the Divine Will had approximated very closely to the respect in which he held his own. Associated for many years in what he had supposed an approved commerce, it had begun only now to dawn upon the draper that some cruel surprise was being prepared.

It was his niece, Laura Trevelyan, who had caused Mr Bonner’s world of substance to quake.

‘We hope to persuade Miss Trevelyan to try the sea-water bathing.’

On this occasion he had come round the glass partition, and waited for Palethorpe, his right hand, to close the ledger the latter had been fingering.

‘What is your opinion of sea-water bathing, Palethorpe?’ Mr Bonner asked, which was humble, indeed, for him.

Palethorpe, who had decided early in life that opinions were dangerous, replied rather carefully:

‘It depends, sir, altogether, I should say, upon the constitution of the person concerned.’

‘That could well be,’ agreed his disappointed employer.

‘Without studying the constitution, it would not be possible to express any opinion at all.’

Palethorpe hoped that he was saved.

But Mr Bonner churned the cash in his trouser pocket, his good money, out of which Palethorpe was paid, by all standards liberally. The merchant was generous enough, for he hated dispute and discomfort. Now, as was only natural, he felt himself to be cheated of his rights.