Voss

16

IN the absence of its present owners, the Parburys, on a pleasure voyage to Europe, the Radclyffes had taken the old house for at least six months, so that the children might benefit by the sea air and their mother enjoy such distractions as Sydney had to offer. So the whole household was transplanted — maids, nurses, governesses, a selection of grooms, the canaries, which otherwise would have been neglected, and Mrs Radclyffe’s favourite pug. Mr Radclyffe, who was grown rather red and fleshy, although still most personable, did not allow the management of his property at Merivale to prevent him paying occasional visits to his family. He derived great satisfaction from their sojourn in the house at Potts Point, and would entertain the children with humorous, not to say satirical reminiscences of the life lived there when it had belonged to their grandparents, twenty years before. But Mrs Radclyffe was divided in her feelings.

Belle, of course, had always been rather sentimental. Now she cherished the past, and would decorate some aspects of it with an extravagance that she was forced to hide. If she had not been at the same time, a practical woman, loving wife, and devoted mother, she might have made a religion of it, but a pretty, gentle, saffron-coloured one, like Buddhism perhaps. Belle Radclyffe was never for the swords and saints of religious faith, nor would she blow her way to Heaven with assistance of the leather bellows. To accept, to respect, to let live: these were enough. Her own beauty and goodness were a pledge that she found confirmed repeatedly in what she saw around her. On returning to the old house she had picked flowers in such reckless quantities, her husband had complained that she was cluttering the rooms, and that the pollen made him sneeze; he even sneezed to prove it. So she had been forced to curb herself, in that, as in many other ways, and to set store by recollection. She would remember flowers, branches she had picked on this or that occasion, even down to wild things: she would remember the scents that had accompanied certain incidents; she would remember pet animals she had kept, and the eyes of children at whom she had smiled in the street.

‘Belle is still perfect,’ said old Mrs Pringle, emerging at one point from her bronchitis and bezique.

‘I am glad to say she is not,’ replied Mr Radclyffe, as if he meant it.

Indeed, had he stopped to think he could have written out a long list of his wife’s shortcomings, and without having recourse to pen and paper the fact that she rarely attended to what he said, that she encouraged children in noisy games, that she had but a superficial knowledge of most subjects, and that she slept with her eyes open, were unfortunate defects that easily came to mind. Thanks to her indulgence, he himself had become quite intolerable, but of this, perhaps her greatest sin, he remained in blissful ignorance.

Belle, however, who might have been less happy if she had had time to consider, was at her happiest that year, in what had been her parents’ house.

During the spring a cabbage tree had flowered in the wilderness at the bottom of the garden, providing an object for expeditions so little adventurous that nobody else wished to share them. This was their virtue in Mrs Radclyffe’s eyes. She would often visit the tree alone, but best in the morning, after she had given her orders, and before her husband, engrossed in the news, had begun to issue his. She would quickly lose herself in the garden. She would hum the songs she had sung, and forgotten, and now remembered in that clinging, reminiscent air. She would even whistle, very loud, although this was a gift that had never met with her mother’s approval. And she would stoop to free or coax a plant, but mockingly, because what could one do for the plants of other people? All of the garden was hers and not. So she would hurry on, to establish herself by reaching her goal. Her rash skirts rushed, down the steps, of which time had reduced the scale, past an attempt at a grotto, in which the moss had died, past the corner where her father himself had tended the barrel of liquid manure, down, down, through the evergreen tunnels of memory, until, there at the end, in a circle of light, was the cabbage tree. According to the day, the miraculous spire did not stir from its trance of stillest, whitest wax, or shuddered stiffly on the verge of breaking free, or rejoiced simply in its jewels of innocent and tinkling crystal. As she watched, so it was reflected in the face of the woman, who would return at last through the doorway of her own girlhood, convinced that she had been refreshed by the vision of the tree.

Only the supreme torturer would have tweaked the curtain of illusion, yet, very occasionally, it could have been after a sleepless night, or if the morning was a sultry one, her glance would waver, as if it had encountered the danger of distinguishing what has been given from what has been withheld. Then she would turn aside crumpling up her handkerchief in a way she had when her children were ill, and go back through the suffocating, rented garden, holding up her skirts as she climbed the steep and clammy steps, and, above all, on approaching the snails that it pained her so very much to destroy.

So she resumed her orderly and happy life. She was most fortunate, she assured herself, in everything, not least that their visit to Sydney had enabled her again to enjoy the company of her cousin, who would walk over on Sundays for midday dinner, and on rare occasions allow herself to be brought by carriage of an evening for tea and music.

Although their dissimilar lives had even further increased the difference in their natures, the two women were still quite greedy for each other’s love. Belle was noted for an opulent and complaisant kindness. She would fall in with the most unpleasant suggestions, if she thought no positive harm could ensue and that, by doing so, she might be better liked. Not a little of her private thought was taken up with wondering how she stood in the opinion of others, nor could she bear to think that it might be ill. Laura, on the other hand, was stern. She rather liked to be disliked. It was the life she had led, in school, you know, Mrs Radclyffe would apologize to friends; a headmistress must adopt a certain attitude. For, on the death of both Miss Linsleys, Laura Trevelyan had inherited the Academy for Young Ladies on the edge of the Surry Hills.

A great many people died, Belle Radclyffe realized upon an uneasy morning in her father’s oppressive camellia grove. Rarely did she allow herself to think of death, but was receiving morning calls, or planning evening receptions, or kissing children, or carrying herself carefully on account of an expected baby. Now, for a moment in the shrubbery, her mind was choking with neglected thoughts, as the garden was with drifts of leaves. So she was forced to remember her mother’s crumpled face, and fragments of advice, though her mother was buried these many years, and her advice proved fallible. After they sold the house, Mr Bonner had gone to live in lodgings in Bent Street, where a decent woman attended to his wants. A cheerful dotard, he would run out and claw at almost anyone to discuss the weather, and look most offended when acquaintance or stranger did not appreciate his prophecies. The weather was his sole remaining interest. Belle Radclyffe, while loving her father in theory, had to admit that she found him terribly tedious in fact.

Aghast that she should harbour unkind thoughts, Mrs Radclyffe was relieved the following moment to receive an onslaught of younger children, who came flinging down the path, released from Latin, or French, or scales, to bury in her soft amplitude their hard inky little bodies.

How she loved that which had been torn out of her. Such was her appetite for her children, she frequently had to remind herself that her husband was their father, and entitled to his share.

Now several of those children were kicking and shouting.

‘We tasted the sillabub,’ they cried.

‘May I stay up tonight, Mamma?’

‘I will stay up.’

‘Who said?’

‘I did.’

‘If you do not stop kicking me, Tom!’

‘That is enough,’ said Mrs Radclyffe.

Only Laura, the eldest, who had accompanied the children, not as a sister, but as a condescending deity, preserved a godlike silence. Beneath her coils of grown-up hair she made a mystery out of almost everything.

‘Everyone will stay up,’ Mrs Radclyffe announced, in the accents of a just and rational mother. ‘Not the babies, of course, and some longer than others, according to ages. You must agree that that would only be right.”

Whether they shared her opinion or not, all were agreed that their mother did conceive the most lovely ideas, and this could be one of them.

Mrs Radclyffe had determined to give a party to which she would invite only those people she wished to have. So constituted that she was always persuaded to see the best in human nature, it promised to be a gathering of fairly ill-assorted guests, rich with poor, which is daring enough, past with present, which can be more distasteful, age with youth, in which soil can germinate rare seeds of bitterness and cruelty. Yet, Mrs Radclyffe was resolved to dare. Nor had she devised any set plan of entertainment, but, owing again to her soft and trustful character, would leave it to the guests to amuse themselves, to illuminate by conversation, or to console with music, to answer questions on slips of paper, to eat and drink without shame, to flirt, or to wander solitary in the cool of the garden, which is, for some individuals, the only solution of a party.

Of the whole pantomime, Mrs Radclyffe had always loved best the transformation scene, and here she was, staging one of her own. As night fell and the moon rose behind the net of trees, the woman’s hands would have turned hot and childish but for the clattering of cold rings.

‘Belle!’ her husband was calling. ‘Belle!’ Through the expectant house. ‘Your dog has relieved himself on my boot.’

‘Oh, Tom! It could be any one of a variety of liquids. Or did you see him with your own eyes?’

‘It can only be Pug,’ Mr Radclyffe had decided. ‘I am convinced of that.’

He always was.

‘Oh, dear!’ said his wife, but was concerned about other matters.

‘I will not be answerable for the disaster you insist upon courting,’ said Tom Radclyffe, as they were standing together, in anticipation, under the globes of blue gas.

‘You will not be required to,’ Belle replied, raising her chin slightly.

Not that she had any great confidence in her own powers, but did believe in allowing a situation to arrange itself.

Mr Radclyffe could not but smile, both for his superior knowledge and for her dazzling face. He was very pleased with his wife, though even more with his own perspicacity in choosing her.

She, who all her life had reflected the sun, was the colour of moonlight on this occasion. Thanks to various devices of an ingenious dressmaker, including the judicious use of mother o’ pearl, she was shimmering like blue water. The moon itself could have rained upon her hair, in a brief shower of recognition, and as she floated through the altered room, a big, conquered, white rose dropped its tribute of petals at her feet.

Night had indeed, taken possession. The solid scents of jasmine and pittosporum that were pressing through the open window had drugged the youngest children to the extent that they were clutching drowsily at their mother’s hoops to stay their inevitable fall.

‘You must leave us now,’ she said softly, loosening the tight grip of their hands.

Then she kissed them, in order, before they were carried out. Very small children, she had decided, would only have lain about in heaps and run the risk of being trodden on.

Soon after this, the guests began to arrive.

There was no lack of rank and fashion, it appeared, and all were vociferous in their admiration of Mrs Radclyffe’s candid beauty, while hastening to detect its blemishes. For instance, her throat, of which other mothers had always predicted the worst, had thickened undeniably. If the world of fashion overlooked the generosity of her glance, it was because such virtues embarrassed it, even destroyed the illusion of its power. Belle, in her simplicity, secretly admired those who were light and meretricious, imagining they had found the key to some freedom she had never yet experienced, nor would, because she did not dare. This diffidence, far from diminishing her beauty, enhanced it in the eyes of the elegant by restoring the strength they had been in danger of losing. They would declare:

‘My dear, there is none lovelier than Belle Radclyffe, although she is not what she was as a bride. Do you remember?’

Here would follow noises suggestive of severe colic.

‘Yet, one might say she is improved, in a certain sense. Such spirituality!’

More noises, less physical, but more mysterious.

‘Many a hard outline would be softened if its owner possessed but half of Belle’s charm.’

Here someone was demolished.

‘But would you describe Mrs Radclyffe as an entertaining companion?’

‘Entertaining? It rather depends upon what you wish the word to imply. I do know others who might be described as more entertaining than Mrs Radclyffe. But no woman, of course, is endowed with all the qualities. And Belle is so sweet.’

‘And dresses so beautifully. If not after the highest fashion.’

‘More of an individual style.’

‘I must say it does require considerable courage to appear with such an ornament in the hair.’

‘The moonstones.’

‘The moonstones? Effie! The Moon!’

‘Sshhh!’

‘Effie, do you not realize that Belle Radclyffe has come as the Moon?’

A thin laughter continued to uncoil.

Guests were circling and wondering which others they should avoid. Only their iridescence mingled. The men, in black, were clinging together for protection.

‘Mrs de Courcy, it was so kind of you to come,’ Mrs Radclyffe said, advancing.

Learning phrases from the more accomplished, she did not learn them well enough and spoke them with a hesitation, which did charm momentarily even the crueller women.

‘You know that I would die for you, Belle. I would die for you alone,’ said old Effie de Courcy, who was doing something to her chignon and looking round.

It was doubtful to which of the gentlemen that lady would offer the cold remains of her looks, but to one she must, out of habit.

Now the insignificant figures of several poor or grotesque individuals, known to most of the company, began unaccountably to make their appearance. There was a Dr Bass. Nobody would have guessed that the worthy physician had any other function beyond the prescription of pills. There was Topp, the music-master, who had been coming to everybody’s house for years, to the exasperation of everybody’s girls, and naturally Topp had always been allowed a slice of madeira cake and a glass of port, but in isolation, of course. There was that old Miss Hollier, a fright in pink net, who could recite pedigrees by the yard, and from whom one escaped only by buying a lotion for removing freckles. The presence of such persons provided the first unmistakable evidence that something was amiss. A Member of the Legislative Assembly was frowning, and several ladies were look-at their long kid gloves and giving them a tweak. Then it was noticed that children also were present, both of the house, and other young people, lumpy girls, and youths at the age of down and pimples. Strangest of all, Willie Pringle had arrived. Certainly Willie had grown up, which nobody had ever expected. That he had remained ridiculous, nobody was surprised. On returning from France, where he had lived for some years in a state of obscure morality, he had painted, and was still painting, a collection of what no one could describe as pictures; it was a relief to be able to admire the gold frames.

Immediately on entering the Radclyffes’ drawing-room, Willie Pringle kissed his hostess because he loved her. This drew a gasp of horror from the guests.

‘What kind of entertainment can Mrs Radclyffe be preparing for us?’ the Member wondered to his immediate circle.

Mr Radclyffe would have remonstrated with Pringle if he had not held him in the highest contempt. He was also uneasy at the prospect of his own approaching nakedness, which would coincide with the arrival of his wife’s cousin. He still hated Laura Trevelyan.

Belle Radclyffe moved amongst her guests, and now, surprisingly, said to some, who were most resentful of it:

‘I have asked you all toinght because I value each of you for some particular quality. Is it not possible for each to discover, and appreciate, that same quality in his fellow-guests, so that we may be happy together in this lovely house?’

It was most singular.

The doors and windows were standing open, and the blue night was pouring in. Two little boys, with scrubbed, party faces, had fallen asleep upon an upright sofa, but their dreams were obviously filled with an especial bliss.

Several kinder guests were murmuring how entertaining, how sweet, following upon the speech by their hostess, but most took refuge immediately in their own chatter and the destruction of their friends.

Amongst the gentlemen, the talk was principally of the discovery of the wild white man, said to be a survivor from the expedition led by that mad German twenty years before. The man, who professed to have been living all those years with a tribe of aboriginals, had been brought to Sydney since his rescue, and had attended the unveiling of a memorial to his leader that same day in the Domain.

Now everyone was pushing in their attempt to approach old Mr Sanderson of Rhine Towers, and Colonel Hebden, both of whom had been present at the ceremony.

‘Is it a fraud?’ voices were heard to ask.

‘It is something trumped up to discredit the Government for its slowness in developing the country,’ others maintained.

Mr Sanderson would only smile, however, and repeat that the man was a genuine survivor from the expedition, known to him personally. The assurances of the old grazier, who was rather confused by his own goodness and the size of the gathering, were a source of irritation to the guests. Colonel Hebden could have been a statue, in stone or metal, he was so detached, hence impregnable, but the people might have vented their spite on old Sanderson if something had not happened.

Just then, rather late, for she had been detained at her school by a problem of administration, Miss Trevelyan, the headmistress, arrived. Her black dress, of a kind worn by some women merely as a covering, in no way detracted from the expression of her face, which at once caused the guests to differ sharply in opinion. As she advanced into the room, some of the ladies, glittering and rustling with precious stones, abandoned their gauzy conversations and greeted her with an exaggerated sweetness or girlishness. Then, resentful of all the solecisms of which they had ever been guilty, and it appeared their memories were full of them, they seized upon the looks of this woman after she had passed, asking one another for confirmation of their own disgust:

‘Is she not plain? Is not poor Laura positively ugly? And such a freakish thing to do. As if it were not enough to have become a schoolmistress, to arrive late at Belle’s party in that truly hideous dress!’

In the meantime Miss Trevelyan was receiving the greetings of those she recognized. Her face was rather white. Holding her head on one side, she murmured, with a slight, tremulous smile, that could have disguised a migraine, or strength:

‘Una, Chattie, Lizzie. Quite recovered, Elinor, I hope.’

‘Who is this person to whom all the ladies are curtseying?’ asked Mr Ludlow, an English visitor, recommended to the Radclyffes by a friend.

‘That is Miss Trevelyan. I must attempt to explain her,’ volunteered the Englishman’s neighbour.

The latter immediately turned away, for the object of their interest was passing them. It happened that the speaker was Dr Kilwinning. Even more richly caparisoned than in the past, the physician had continued to resent Miss Trevelyan as one of the few stumbling blocks he had had the misfortune to encounter in his eminently successful career.

‘I will tell you more presently,’ he said, or whispered loudly into the wall. ‘Something to do with the German explorer, of whom they have just been speaking.’

‘What a bore!’ guffawed Mr Ludlow, to whom every aspect of the colonial existence was incredible. ‘And the young girl?’

‘The girl is the daughter,’ whispered Dr Kilwinning, still to the wall.

‘Capital,’ laughed the Englishman, who had already visited the supper room. ‘A green girl. A strapping, sonsy girl. But the mother!’

People who recognized Miss Trevelyan, on account of her connexions and the material glories of the past, did not feel obliged to accept Mercy. They received her with flat smiles, but ignored her with their eyes. Accustomed to this, she advanced with her chin gravely lowered, and an expression of some tolerance. Her glance was fixed on that point in her mother’s vertebrae at which enemies might aim the blow.

Then Laura met Belle, and they were sisters. At once they erected an umbrella in the middle of the desert.

‘Dearest Laura, I would have been here to receive you, but had gone up to Archie, who is starting a cold.’

‘I could not allow you to receive me in our own house.’

‘Do you really like the gas? I loved the lamps.’

‘To sit reading beside the lamps!’

‘After the tea had been brought in. You are tired, Laura.’

‘I am rather tired,’ the schoolmistress admitted.

It was the result of her experience of that afternoon, for Mr Sanderson had been so kind as to send Miss Trevelyan a card for the unveiling of the memorial.

‘You should have come, too, Belle.’

‘I could not,’ Belle replied, and blushed.

Small lies are the most difficult to tell.

The cousins had arrived at a stiff and ugly chair. It was one of those pieces of furniture that become cast up out of an even life upon the unknown, and probably perilous shores of a party, there to stay, marooned for ever, it would seem.

‘I shall sit here,’ said Laura.

No one else would have dared, so evident was it that the stern chair belonged to its absent owners.

‘Now you can see,’ people were saying.

‘Is she not a crow?’

‘A scarecrow, rather!’

‘Do not bring me anyone,’ Laura Trevelyan enjoined. ‘I would not care to be an inconvenience. And I have never succeeded in learning the language. I shall sit and watch them wearing their dresses.’

This woman, of the mysterious, the middle age, in her black clothes, was now commanding the room that she had practically repudiated. One young girl in a dream of white tarlatan, who was passing close enough to look, did so, right into the woman’s eyes and, although never afterwards was she able to remember exactly what she saw, had been so affected at the time that she had altered her course immediately and gone out into the garden. There she was swept into a conspiracy of movement, between leaf and star, wind and shadow, even her own dress. Of all this, her body was the struggling core. She would have danced, but her heels were still rooted, her arms had but reached the point of twitching. In her frustration the young person attempted, but failed, to remember the message of the strange woman’s eyes, so that it appeared as though she were intended to remain, at least a little longer, the victim of her own inadequacy.

Laura Trevelyan continued to sit in the company of Mercy, who did not care to leave her mother. Bronze or marble could not have taken more inevitable and lasting shapes than the stuff of their relationship. The affection she received from one being, together with her detachment from all others, had implanted in the daughter a respectful love for the forms of all simple objects, the secrets of which she was trying perpetually to understand. Eventually, she must attempt to express her great preoccupation, but in what manner, it was not yet clear. That its expression would be true was obvious, only from looking at her neat brown hair, her strong hands, and completely pleasing, square face.

In the meantime, seated upon a little stool at the feet of her mother, she was discussing with the latter the war between Roman Catholic and Protestant maids that was disturbing the otherwise tranquil tenor of life at their school.

‘I did not tell you,’ Mercy informed, ‘Bridget has blackened Gertrude’s eye, and told her it will match the colour of her soul.’

‘To decide the colour of truth! If I but had Bridget’s conviction!’

The two women were grateful for this humble version of the everlasting attempt. Laura was smiling at Mercy. It was as though they were seated in their own room, or at the side of a road, part of which they had made theirs.

Strangers came and went, of course. Young people, moved by curiosity. An Englishman, a little drunk, who wished to look closely at the schoolmistress and her bastard daughter. A young man with a slight talent for exhibiting himself had sat down at the piano and was reeling off dreamy waltzes, whereupon Mrs de Courcy persuaded the Member of the Legislative Assembly to take a turn, and several youths were daring to drift with several breathless girls.

At one stage, the headmistress began to knead the bridge of her nose. She had, indeed, been made very tired by the episode in the Domain.

The platform had groaned with officials and their wives, to say nothing of other substantial citizens — old Mr Sanderson, who was largely responsible for the public enthusiasm that had subscribed to the fine memorial statue, Colonel Hebden, the schoolmistress who had been a friend of the lost explorer, and, of course, the man they had lately found. All of these had sat listening to the speeches, in the pleasant, thick shade.

Johann Ulrich Voss was by now quite safe, it appeared. He was hung with garlands of rarest newspaper prose. They would write about him in the history books. The wrinkles of his solid, bronze trousers could afford to ignore the passage of time. Even Miss Trevelyan confessed: it is agreeable to be safely dead. The way the seats had been fixed to the platform, tilted back ever so slightly, made everybody look more official; hands folded themselves upon the stomach, and chins sank in, as if intended for repose. The schoolmistress was glad of some assistance towards the illusion of complacency. Thus, she had never thirsted, never, nor felt her flesh shrivel in crossing the deserts of conscience. No official personage has experienced the inferno of love.

So that she, too, had accepted the myth by the time the Premier, still shaky from the oratory prescribed for an historic occasion, pulled the cord, and revealed the bronze figure. Then the woman on the platform did lower her eyes. Whether she had seen or not, she would always remain uncertain, but applause informed her that here was a work of irreproachable civic art.

Soon after this everyone regained solid ground. Clothes were eased, civilities exchanged, and Miss Trevelyan, smiling and receptive, observed the approach of Colonel Hebden.

‘You are satisfied, then?’ he asked, as they were walking a little apart from the others.

‘Oh, yes,’ she sighed. ‘I am satisfied.’ She had to arrange the pair of little silken acorns that hung from the handle of her parasol. ‘Though I do wish you had not asked it.’

‘Our relationship is ruined by interrogation,’ laughed the Colonel, rather pleased with his command of words.

Each recalled the afternoon in Mrs de Courcy’s summer-house.

‘Years ago I was impressed by your respect for truthfulness,’ he could not resist saying, although he made of it a very tentative suggestion.

‘If I am less truthful now, it is owing to my age and position,’ she cried with surprising cynicism, almost baring her teeth at him.

‘No.’ She recovered herself. ‘I am not dishonest, I hope, except that I am a human being.’

Had he made her tremble?

To disguise the possibility, she had begun speaking quickly, in an even, kind voice, referring not so much to the immediate case as to the universal one:

‘Let none of us pass final judgement.’

‘Unless the fellow who has returned from the grave is qualified to judge. Have you not spoken to him?’

As her appearance suggested that she might not have heard, the Colonel added:

‘He appears to share the opinion you offered me at our first meeting: that Voss was, indeed, the Devil.’

Now, Miss Trevelyan had not met the survivor, although old Sanderson, all vague benevolence since time had cast a kinder light upon the whole unhappy affair, had gone so far as to promise him to her. Seated on the platform, listening to the official speeches, she had even been aware of the nape of a neck, somewhere in the foreground, but, deliberately, she had omitted to claim her right.

‘I do not wish to meet the man,’ she said, and was settling her shawl against a cold wind that was springing up.

‘But you must!’ cried Hebden, taking her firmly by the elbow.

Of dreadful metal, he towered above her, with his rather matted, grizzled hair, and burning desire for truth. Her mouth was dry. Was he, then, the avenging angel? So it appeared, as they struggled together.

If anybody had noticed, they would have made an ugly group, and he, of course, the stronger.

‘Leave me,’ she strained, out of her white mouth, ‘I beg of you, Colonel Hebden!’

At that moment, however, old Sanderson, whom no one of any compassion would willingly have hurt, emerged from the group still gathered round the statue, bringing with him a man.

‘Miss Trevelyan,’ said the grazier, smiling with genuine pleasure, ‘I do believe that, after all, I have failed to bring the two of you together, and you the most important.’

So it was come to pass.

Mr Sanderson smiled, and continued:

‘I would like you to meet my friend Judd.’

The leaves of the trees were clapping.

She was faced with an elderly, or old-looking man, of once powerful frame, in the clothes they had provided for him, good clothes, fashionable even, to which he had not accustomed himself. His large hands, in the absence of their former strength, moved in almost perpetual search for some reassuring object or position, just as the expressions were shifting on his face, like water over sand, and his mouth would close with a smile, attempt briefly to hold it, and fail.

‘So this is Judd, the convict,’ said Miss Trevelyan, less harshly than stating a fact, since she must stand on trial with him.

Judd nodded.

‘I earned my ticket-of-leave two years, no, it would be four years before the expedition left.’

All the old wounds had healed. He could talk about them now. He could talk about anything.

His lips parted, Colonel Hebden watched quite greedily. Old Sanderson was bathed in a golden glow of age. Such warmth he had not experienced since the lifetime of his dear wife.

‘Yes, yes,’ he contributed. ‘Judd was a neighbour of mine in the Forties. He joined the expedition when it passed through. In fact, I was responsible for that.’

Miss Trevelyan, whose attention had been engaged by the ferrule of her parasol, realized that she was expected to speak. Judd waited, with his hands hanging and moving. Since his return, he had become accustomed to interrogation by ladies.

‘And were you able to resume your property?’ Miss Trevelyan asked, through her constricted throat.

There was something that she would avoid. She would avoid it to the end. So she looked gravely at the ferrule of the parasol, and continued to interrogate a man who had suffered.

‘Resume?’ asked Judd, managing his tongue, which was round like that of a parrot. ‘No. It was gone. I was considered dead, you know.’

‘And your family?’ the kind woman asked.

‘All dead. My wife, she went first. It was the heart, I think they told me. My eldest boy died of a snakebite. The youngest got some sickness, I forget what.’ He shook his head, which was bald and humble above the fringe of white hair. ‘Anyways, he is passed on.’

The survivor’s companions expressed appropriate sympathy.

But Judd had lived beyond grief. He was impressed, rather, by the great simplicity with which everything had happened.

Then Colonel Hebden took a hand. He could still have been holding the lady by an elbow. He said:

‘You know, Judd, Miss Trevelyan was a friend of Mr Voss.’

‘Ah,’ smiled the aged, gummy man. ‘Voss.’

He looked at the ground, but presently spoke again.

‘Voss left his mark on the country,’ he said.

‘How?’ asked Miss Trevelyan, cautiously.

‘Well, the trees, of course. He was cutting his initials in the trees. He was a queer beggar, Voss. The blacks talk about him to this day. He is still there — that is the honest opinion of many of them — he is there in the country, and always will be.’

‘How?’ repeated Miss Trevelyan. Her voice was that of a man. She dared anyone.

Judd was feeling his way with his hands.

‘Well, you see, if you live and suffer long enough in a place, you do not leave it altogether. Your spirit is still there.’

‘Like a god, in fact,’ said Colonel Hebden, but laughed to show his scepticism.

Judd looked up, out of the distance.

‘Voss? No. He was never God, though he liked to think that he was. Sometimes, when he forgot, he was a man.’

He hesitated, and fumbled.

‘He was more than a man,’ Judd continued, with the gratified air of one who had found that for which he had been looking. ‘He was a Christian, such as I understand it.’

Miss Trevelyan was holding a handkerchief to her lips, as though her life-blood might gush out.

‘Not according to my interpretation of the word,’ the Colonel interrupted, remorselessly, ‘not by what I have heard.’

‘Poor fellow,’ sighed old Sanderson, again unhappy. ‘He was somewhat twisted. But is dead and gone.’

Now that he was launched, Judd was determined to pursue his wavering way.

‘He would wash the sores of the men. He would sit all night with them when they were sick, and clean up their filth with his own hands. I cried, I tell you, after he was dead. There was none of us could believe it when we saw the spear, hanging from his side, and shaking.’

‘The spear?’

Colonel Hebden behaved almost as though he himself were mortally wounded.

‘But this is an addition to the story,’ protested old Mr Sanderson, who also was greatly perturbed. ‘You did not mention the spear, Judd. You never suggested you were present at the death of Voss, simply that you mutinied, and moved off with those who chose to follow you. If we understood you rightly.’

‘It was me who closed his eyes,’ said Judd.

In the same instant that the Colonel and Mr Sanderson looked across at each other, Miss Trevelyan succeeded in drawing a shroud about herself.

Finally, the old grazier put an arm round the convict’s shoulders, and said:

‘I think you are tired and confused, eh, Judd? Let me take you back to your lodgings.’

‘I am tired,’ echoed Judd.

Mr Sanderson was glad to get him away, and into a hired brougham that was waiting.

Colonel Hebden became aware that the woman was still standing at his side, and that he must recognize the fact. So he turned to her awkwardly at last, and said:

‘Your saint is canonized.’

‘I am content.’

‘On the evidence of a poor madman?’

‘I am content.’

‘Do not tell me any longer that you respect the truth.’

She was digging at the tough roots of grass with the ferrule of her parasol.

‘All truths are particoloured. Except the greatest truth of all.’

‘Your Voss was particoloured. I grant you that. A perfect magpie!’

Looking at the monstrous ants at the roots of the grass, Miss Trevelyan replied:

‘Whether Judd is an impostor, or a madman, or simply a poor creature who has suffered too much, I am convinced that Voss had in him a little of Christ, like other men. If he was composed of evil along with the good, he struggled with that evil. And failed.’

Then she was going away, heavily, a middle-aged woman, over the grass.

Now, as they sat in the crowded room, full of the deceptive drifts of music and brutal explosions of conversation, Mercy Trevelyan alone realized the extent to which her mother had been tried by some experience of the afternoon. If the daughter did not inquire into the origin of the mother’s distress, it was because she had learnt that rational answers seldom do explain. She was herself, moreover, of unexplained origin.

In the circumstances, she leaned towards her mother from where she sat upon her stool, the whole of her strong young throat swelling with the love she wished to convey, and whispered:

‘Shall we not go into another room? Or let us, even, go away. It is simple. No one will miss us.’

Then Laura Trevelyan released the bridge of her nose, which her fingers had pinched quite white.

‘No,’ she said, and smiled. ‘I will not go. I am here. I will stay.’

Thus she made her covenant.

Other individuals, of great longing but little daring, suspecting that the knowledge and strength of the headmistress might be accessible to them, began to approach by degrees. Even her beauty was translated for them into terms they could understand. As the night poured in through the windows and the open doors, her eyes were overflowing with a love that might have appeared supernatural, if it had not been for the evidence of her earthly body: the slightly chapped skin of her neck, and the small hole in the finger of one glove, which, in her distraction and haste, she had forgotten to mend.

Amongst the first to join Miss Trevelyan was the invertebrate Willie Pringle, who, it transpired, had become a genius. Then there was Topp, the music-master. Out of his hatred for the sour colonial soil upon which he had been deposited many years before had developed a perverse love, that he had never yet succeeded in expressing and which, for that reason, nobody had suspected. He was a grumpy little man, a failure, who would continue to pulse, none the less, though the body politic ignore his purpose. To these two were added several diffident persons who had burst from the labyrinth of youth on that night, and were tremblingly eager to learn how best to employ their freedom.

The young person in the gown of white tarlatan, for instance, came close to the group and spread her skirts upon the edge of a chair. She balanced her chin upon her hand and blushed. Although nobody knew her, nobody asked her name, since it was her intention that mattered.

Conversation was the wooden raft by which their party hoped eventually to reach the promised shore.

‘I am uncomfortably aware of the very little I have seen and experienced of things in general, and of our country in particular,’ Miss Trevelyan had just confessed, ‘but the little I have seen is less, I like to feel, than what I know. Knowledge was never a matter of geography. Quite the reverse, it overflows all maps that exist. Perhaps true knowledge only comes of death by torture in the country of the mind.’

She laughed somewhat painfully.

‘You will understand that. Some of you, at least, are the discoverers,’ she said, and looked at them.

That some of them did understand was the more marvellous for their realization of it.

‘Some of you,’ she continued, ‘will express what we others have experienced by living. Some will learn to interpret the ideas embodied in the less communicative forms of matter, such as rock, wood, metal, and water. I must include water, because, of all matter it is the most musical.’

Yes, yes. Topp, the bristling, unpleasant little thing, was sitting forward. In the headmistress’s wooden words, he could hear the stubborn music that was waiting for release. Of rock and scrub. Of winds curled invisibly in wombs of air. Of thin rivers struggling towards seas of eternity. All flowing and uniting. Over a bed of upturned faces.

The little Topp was distracted by the possibility of many such harmonies. He began to fidget and snatch at his trouser leg. He said:

‘If we do not come to grief on our mediocrity as a people. If we are not locked for ever in our own bodies. Then, too, there is the possibility that our hates and our carnivorous habits will unite in a logical conclusion: we may destroy one another.’

Topp himself was sweating. His face was broken up into little pinpoints of grey light under the globes of blue gas.

It fascinated Willie Pringle.

‘The grey of mediocrity, the blue of frustration,’ he suggested, less to inform an audience than to commit it to his memory. He added at once, louder and brisker than before: ‘Topp has dared to raise a subject that has often occupied my mind: our inherent mediocrity as a people. I am confident that the mediocrity of which he speaks is not a final and irrevocable state; rather is it a creative source of endless variety and subtlety. The blowfly on its bed of offal is but a variation of the rainbow. Common forms are continually breaking into brilliant shapes. If we will explore them.’

So they talked, while through the doorway, in the garden, the fine seed of moonlight continued to fall and the moist soil to suck it up.

Attracted by needs of their own, several other gentlemen had joined the gathering at the farther end of the large room. Old Sanderson, arrived at the very finish of his simple life, was still in search of tangible goodness. Colonel Hebden, who had not dared approach the headmistress since the episode at the unveiling, did now stalk up, still hungry for the truth, and assert:

‘I will not rest, you know.’

‘I would not expect it,’ said Miss Trevelyan, giving him her hand, since they were agreed that the diamonds with which they cut were equal both in aim and worth.

‘How your cousin is holding court,’ remarked Mrs de Courcy, consoling herself with a strawberry ice.

‘Court? A class, rather!’ said and laughed Belle Radclyffe.

Knowing that she was not, and never would be of her cousin’s class, she claimed the rights of love to resent a little.

At one stage, under pressure, Mrs Radclyffe forgot her promise and brought the headmistress Mr Ludlow. Though fairly drunk with brandy punch, the latter had remained an Englishman and, it was whispered by several ladies in imported poult-de-soie, the younger brother of a baronet.

Mr Ludlow said:

‘I must apologize for imposing on you, madam, but having heard so much in your favour, I expressed a wish to make your acquaintance and form an opinion of my own.’

The visitor laughed for his own wit, but Miss Trevelyan looked sad.

‘I have been travelling through your country, forming opinions of all and sundry,’ confessed Mr Ludlow to his audience, ‘and am distressed to find the sundry does prevail.’

‘We, the sundry, are only too aware of it,’ Miss Trevelyan answered, ‘but will humbly attempt to rise in your opinion if you will stay long enough.’

‘How long? I cannot stay long,’ protested Mr Ludlow.

‘For those who anticipate perfection — and I would not suspect you of wishing for less — eternity is not too long.’

‘Ohhhh dear!’ tittered Mr Ludlow. ‘I would be choked by pumpkin. Do you know that in one humpy I was even faced with a stewed crow!’

‘Did you not also sample baked Irish?’

‘The Irish, too? Ohhh dear!’

‘So, you see, we are in every way provided for, by God and nature, and consequently, must survive.’

‘Oh, yes, a country with a future. But when does the future become present? That is what always puzzles me.’

‘Now.’

‘How — now?’ asked Mr Ludlow.

‘Every moment that we live and breathe, and love, and suffer, and die.’

‘That reminds me, I had intended asking you about this — what shall we call him? — this familiar spirit, whose name is upon everybody’s lips, the German fellow who died.’

‘Voss did not die,’ Miss Trevelyan replied. ‘He is there still, it is said, in the country, and always will be. His legend will be written down, eventually, by those who have been troubled by it.’

‘Come, come. If we are not certain of the facts, how is it possible to give the answers?’

‘The air will tell us,’ Miss Trevelyan said.

By which time she had grown hoarse, and fell to wondering aloud whether she had brought her lozenges.