Patrick White - Voss

So the Bonners rambled helplessly, thinking of that transparent child whom nature had so heartlessly removed from them, and of this darker, opaque one, who had never really been theirs.

Once in the night, Laura Trevelyan, who was struggling to control the sheets, pulled herself up and forward, leaning over too far, with the natural result that she was struck in the face when the horse threw up his head. She did not think she could bear the pain.

‘The martingale!’ she cried out, willing herself not to flinch. ‘We have left the martingale at the place where we rested.’

When she was more controlled, she said very quietly:

‘You need not fear. I shall not fail you. Even if there are times when you wish me to, I shall not fail you.’

And again, with evident happiness:

‘It is your dog. She is licking your hand. How dry your skin is, though. Oh, blessed moisture!’

Whereupon, she was moving her head against the pillow in grateful ecstasy.

Such evidence would have delighted the Palethorpes, and mystified the Bonners, but the former were not present, and the latter were drooping and swaying in their own sleep on their mahogany chairs.

*

So the party rode down the terrible basalt stairs of the Bonners’ deserted house, and onward. Sometimes the horses’ hooves would strike sparks from the outcrops of jagged rock.

Since the expedition had split in two, the division led by Voss seemed to move with greater ease. It was perhaps obvious that it should. Those under his command, including the aboriginal boy, were struck by the incandescence of the man who was leading them. They were in love with that rather gaunt, bearded head, and would compel themselves to ignore the fact that it was a skull with a candle expiring inside.

In the prevailing harmony of souls, anything that could detract from human dignity — the incident of the raft, for instance, or that of the missing compass — was forgotten. All the members of the party, even the unhappy Harry Robarts, who was being torn intermittently in two directions, were as emanations of the one man, their leader. The blackfellow was a doubtful quantity, but there was nobody, except perhaps the leader himself, who did not expect to discard him. In fact, the others longed to be one less, so that they might enjoy their trinity.

It was the mules and few surviving horses that deserved pity, for these were without the benefit of illusion. They endured their fate, the former sullenly, the latter with a tired patience, no longer looking for a vegetation that did not exist. If they were to be allowed to die, they would. But from time to time they were thrown small handfuls of hope: once it was a patch of grey grass upon a hummock of red sand; once they devoured the thatch from some old native huts, swallowing and groaning, and afterwards stood still, the long, unnatural hairs quivering upon their withered lips. Temporarily, their bellies were filled, but not the days.

Nights were, by contrast, short and exquisite both to animals and men, for desires and intentions, no longer burning, were abandoned in favour of comradeship, dreaming, and astronomy, in the case of men, or pure being, in that of horses. Nobody, except Voss, was concerned whether his bones would rise again from the earth, when his green flesh, watered by the dew, was shooting nightly in celestial crops.

Relinquishing the pretence of tents, which in any event they would have been too weak and exhausted to erect, the three white men huddled close together at the fire. So, too, the wrecks of horses appeared to derive comfort from closeness, and would lie with the ridges of their backbones exposed to the darkness, not far from their irrational masters. All were united then, in the scent of sweat and the tentative warmth of bodies.

Voss said once:

‘Are you not sorry, Harry, that you did not return with your friend?’

‘What friend?’ asked the lad dreamily.

‘Judd, of course.’

‘Was he my friend?’

‘How am I to tell, if you cannot?’

The German was half angry, half pleased.

Presently the boy said, looking in the fire:

‘No, sir. If I had gone, I would not a known what to do when I got there. Not any more.’

‘You would have learnt again very quickly.’

‘I could have learnt to black your boots, if you had a been there, sir. But you would not a been. And it would not be worth it. Not since you learnt me other things.’

‘What things?’ asked Voss quietly, whose mind shouted.

The boy was quiet then, and shy.

‘I do not know,’ he said at last, shyly. ‘I cannot say it. But know. Why, sir, to live, I suppose.’

He blushed in the darkness for the blundering inadequacy of his own words, but in his weak, feverish condition, was vibrating and fluctuating, like any star — living, in fact.

‘Living?’ laughed the German.

He was shouting with laughter to hide his joy.

‘Then I have taught you something shameful. How they would accuse me!’

‘I am happy,’ said Harry Robarts.

The German was shivering with the cold that blew in from the immense darkness, and which was palpitating with little points of light. So, in the light of his own conquest, he expanded, until he possessed the whole firmament. Then it was true; all his doubts were dissolved.

‘And what about you, Frank?’ he said, or shouted again, so recklessly that one old mare pricked up her drowsing ears.

‘Have I not taught you anything?’ he asked.

‘To expect damnation,’ said Le Mesurier, without considering long.

In the uncompromising desert in which they were seated, this answer should have sounded logical enough, just as objects were the quintessence of themselves, and the few remaining possessions of the explorers were all that was necessary in that life.

But Voss was often infuriated by rational answers. Now the veins were swollen in his scraggy neck.

‘That is men all over,’ he cried. ‘They will aim too low. And achieve what they expect. Is that your greatest desire?’

Either Le Mesurier did not hear, or else one of his selves did not accept the duties of familiar. It was the lad who replied to the question in the terms of his own needs.

‘I would like to eat a dish of fat chops,’ he said. ‘And fresh figs, the purple ones. Though apples is good enough. I like apples, and could put up with them instead.’

‘That is your answer,’ said Le Mesurier to Voss. ‘From a man going to his execution.’

‘Well, if I was asked what I would take for me last dinner,’ said the boy. ‘And who would not eat? What would you choose?’

‘Nothing,’ said Le Mesurier. ‘I would not eat for fear that I might miss something of what was happening to me. I would want to feel the last fly crawling on my skin, and listen to my conscience in case it should give up a secret. Out of that experience I might even create something.’

‘That would not be of much good,’ said Harry Robarts, ‘not if you was to die.’

‘Dying is creation. The body creates fresh forms, the soul inspires by its manner of leaving the body, and passes into other souls.’

‘Even the souls of the damned?’ asked Voss.

‘In the process of burning it is the black that gives up the gold.’

‘Then he will give up the purest,’ said Voss.

He pointed to the body of the aboriginal boy, whom they had forgotten, but who was lying within the light of the fire, curled in sleep, like some animal.

Of the three souls that were dedicated to him, Voss most loved that of the black boy. Such unimpaired innocence could only be the most devoted. Whereas, the simplicity of Harry Robarts was not entirely confident — it did at times expect doom — and the sophistications of Frank Le Mesurier could have been startling echoes of the master’s own mind.