Voss

2

SUSSEX STREET was not yet set so rigid that a cock might not shatter its importance, or blunt-nosed bullock, toiling over ruts, snuff at the dusty urban air, or piano scatter its distracted notes, from the house of Topp, Professor of Music, which was situated halfway down. The house itself was rather solemn, awkwardly conceived and executed, lacking in the grandeur which stone should create, for stone it was, honestly revealing how painfully it had been hewn. There in its almost weathered sides were the scars where the iron had entered in, like livid ribs, and in certain lights the dumpy house suggested all suffering. The rooms were agreeable enough, although centipedes would invade in the course of a humid summer, and green mould grow upon the boards, to the extent that Mrs Thompson, the old woman who attended to the needs of Topp, the proprietor, and any lodger, would begin to complain about her bones. How she would complain; but Topp was fortunate, his friends ventured to suggest, to have secured the services of a decent widow, without encumbrances, as it is said. Certainly there were sons, but distributed, and at a distance, where they were engaged in clearing and populating their adopted land. Primitive in appearance and of classic behaviour, her employer suspected the old woman of being the original Thompson. Often at evening, after tidying her excellent person, she would declaim the Thompson narrative for poor Topp, who had listened so often he had learnt to prompt the voice of legend. But they were both, perhaps, comforted.

Topp, the music master, and a single gentleman, was comparatively silent and unprolific. He was a small, white, worried man, with small, moist, white hands, shameful in that country of dry, yellow callouses. All he made was music, for which he was continually apologizing, and hoping he might not be called upon to explain what useful purpose his passion served. So he would hurry past the doorways of hotels, from which laughter came, and dream of an ideal state in which the official tongue was music. Although he taught the pianoforte, visiting select homes during the morning hours, Topp played the flute for pleasure. Exquisite, pearly, translucent notes would flower on that unpromising wood, and fall from the windows as they faded, causing bullock teams to flick their tails, or some drunkard to invoke Jesus Christ. On days when Topp played his flute the dumpy house was garlanded with music, and it did sometimes happen that people passing in the street, through dust or mud, would grow gladder without thinking to discover why.

To Johann Ulrich Voss, lying on the iron bed in one of the two upper rooms for which he paid the music master, the music was also homage of a kind. At intervals he might lift a hand, graciously acknowledging a phrase, but out of that great distance to which he was so often withdrawn. Men came to see him now, going straightway up the narrow stairs, or waiting in the street, on step or mounting-block, if the German happened to be from home. He is about the business of this great expedition, the old woman Mrs Thompson would explain on such occasions, and did also let it be understood that she could have revealed the nature of that business, only discretion would not allow. Go up, though, my dear, and make yourself comfortable, we are long enough on earth, she advised those she favoured. Or: Wait, she would command of those she suspected; this is a gentleman’s rooms, let me remind you, not a cockpit; if you will rest a while upon the step, you will find it clean, God knows, scrubbed down every day, and the weather permittun.

In the absence of the German, Harry Robarts was always forced to wait upon the steps. It was not that she disliked the lad, just that she could not take to him, poor fellow, with his wide mouth and reddish cheeks. Christian though she was, or hoped, she could not let her health suffer by sympathizing unduly with every simple boy; there were limits to what a widow might be expected to bear.

One evening that spring, when the street was already dissolving, and amiable pedestrians were calling to one another in friendship, and Topp’s pupil had caught the brilliance of the sunset if only for a few bars, Harry Robarts came to Voss, and ran up the stairs unimpeded by Mrs Thompson, because her gentleman was there. The boy went in and found his friend examining a list, of ropes, and waterbags, and other tackle, as well as an increased quantity of flour, for which the German had yet to contract with recommended firms.

‘It is me, sir,’ panted the lad, twirling a cap of kangaroo skin that he had bought from a hawker on landing in the Colony.

‘What is it, then?’ asked the German, and continued to suck the end of a beautifully sharpened lead pencil.

‘Nothing,’ said the boy. ‘I came. That is all.’

The German did not frown, as he might have in other circumstances, at other people. Poor Harry Robarts was an easy shadow to wear. His wide eyes reflected the primary thoughts. Voss could sit with him as he would with still water, allowing his own thoughts to widen on it.

So that, if he was weak in wit, Harry did enjoy certain other advantages. And muscular strength too. He was white-skinned, but heavy-shouldered. For one instance, there was the mahogany box, the corners bound in brass, the hasps brass, and handles jangling with the same metal, in which the German kept his things. At the shipside on London River, in the stench of green water and rotting fruit, Voss had stood looking at his box. He would, in fact, often experience fits of humiliating helplessness in the face of practical obstacles. In the night, and light off green, lisping water, it seemed that he would never free himself from his inherent helplessness, when Harry came, uninvited, out of the darkness, asked what it was, swung the box — it could have been a canvas thing — upon his shoulder, glad to offer his services to someone who might think for him. He was all breathless, not from the weight, but from enthusiasm; was he not embarked for new worlds in that same vessel as the gentleman? All that night in the black ship, beneath the swinging lanterns, Voss felt weak with knowledge, and the boy beside him strong with innocence.

Harry stuck to Voss. The German explained to him the anatomy of the flying fish, and named the stars. Or Harry would perform feats of strength, without his shirt, his white skin now ablaze with the tropics; he would stand on his hands, or break the links of a chain, not through vanity, but in an exchange of gifts.

Harry was always present, until Voss accepted it, and afterwards at Sydney, when he was not at work — he had been taken on as a carrier’s lad — would run up the stairs, when the German was at his lodging, and say in one breath, as on the present occasion:

‘It is me, sir. Harry. I have come.’

That same evening Le Mesurier came up. Voss always knew when it would be Frank. The latter’s steps were thoughtful. He was somewhat moody. He would be looking at a spider, or into the grain of the balusters, or out of a little, deep-set window that opened upon a yard at the back, in which were kegs, and iron, and long ropes of ivy, and a grey coat with a yellow eye. Frank Le Mesurier could not look too much, though what he did with what he saw was not always evident. He did not communicate at once. His skin was yellowish. His thin lips were dark in that livery skin, his hollow eyes had dark lids, his nose, less fleshy than most, was rather proud.

‘Can you tell me,’ Le Mesurier had asked as they were standing on the white planks of the same ship, ‘if you are coming to this damned country for any particular purpose?’

‘Yes,’ answered Voss, without hesitation. ‘I will cross the continent from one end to the other. I have every intention to know it with my heart. Why I am pursued by this necessity, it is no more possible for me to tell than it is for you, who have made my acquaintance only before yesterday.’

They continued to look at the enormous sea.

‘And what, may I ask in return, is your purpose? Mr Le Mesurier, is it?’

Some sense of kinship with the young man had made the German’s accent kind.

‘Purpose? So far, no purpose,’ Le Mesurier said. ‘But time will show, perhaps.’

It was clear that the vast glass of ocean would not.

The German felt himself drawn even closer to the young man, as they steadied themselves against the swell. If I were not obsessed, Voss reflected, I would be purposeless in this same sea.

The dark, young, rather exquisite, but insolent fellow did not cling like Harry Robarts; he would reappear at intervals. Frank would stick at nothing long. Since his arrival at Sydney he had been employed by several business houses, had worked for a settler in the Hunter Valley, even as a groom at a livery stable, but at all times was careful to polish his boots. His waistcoats were still presentable, and would rouse comment in hotels from those who bored him. He did not listen long to the conversation of others, having thoughts of his own of greater importance, and would sometimes slip away with no warning at all, with the result that he soon became detested by those talkers who had their professional pride. He was a snob, too. He would go so far as to suggest that he had more education than others, which, of course, was true. Somebody soon discovered that he had written a poem on a metaphysical theme, for details of which nobody dared ask. It was known, however, that he liked to discuss God, after he was drunk, on rum for choice, ploughing through the dark treacle of seductive words and getting nowhere at two o’clock in the morning. Getting nowhere. If he had become coolly cynical rather than embittered, it was because he still entertained a hope that it might be revealed which part he was to play in the general scheme.

Voss had encountered Le Mesurier one evening at dusk amongst the scrub and rocks gathered together above the water on the northern side of the Domain, and asked, as it seemed the time and place:

‘Have you discovered that purpose, Frank, that we have discussed already on board the ship?’

‘Why, no, I have not, Mr Voss,’ said the elusive Frank, and the goose-flesh overcame him.

He began to pitch stones.

‘I rather suspect,’ he added, ‘it is something I shall not discover till I am at my last gasp.’

Then Voss, who had sat down in a clearing in the scrub and larger, ragged trees, warmed more than ever to the young man, knowing what it was to wrestle with his own daemon. In the darkening, yellow light, the German’s arms around his knees were spare as willow switches. He could dispense with flesh.

Le Mesurier continued to throw stones, that made a savage sound upon the rocks.

Then Voss had said:

‘I have a proposition to make. My plans are forming. It is intended that I will lead an expedition into the interior, westward from the Darling Downs. Several gentlemen of this town are interested in the undertaking, and will provide me with the necessary backing. Do you care to come, Frank?’

‘I?’ exclaimed Le Mesurier.

And he pitched a particularly savage stone.

‘No,’ he said, lingeringly. ‘I am not sure that I want to cut my throat just yet.’

‘To make yourself, it is also necessary to destroy yourself,’ said Voss.

He knew this young man as he knew his own blacker thoughts.

‘I am aware of that,’ laughed Frank. ‘But I can do it in Sydney a damn sight more comfortably. You see, sir,’ he added longingly, ‘I am not intended for such heights as you. I shall wallow a little in the gutter, I expect, look at the stars from a distance, then turn over.’

‘And your genius?’ said the German.

‘What genius?’ asked Le Mesurier, and let fall the last of his ammunition.

‘That remains to be seen. Every man has a genius, though it is not always discoverable. Least of all when choked by the trivialities of daily existence. But in this disturbing country, so far as I have become acquainted with it already, it is possible more easily to discard the inessential and to attempt the infinite. You will be burnt up most likely, you will have the flesh torn from your bones, you will be tortured probably in many horrible and primitive ways, but you will realize that genius of which you sometimes suspect you are possessed and of which you will not tell me you are afraid.’

It was dark now. Tempted, the young man was, in fact, more than a little afraid — his throbbing body was deafening him — but as he was a vain young man, he was also flattered.

‘That is so much, well, just so much,’ protested Le Mesurier. ‘You are mad,’ he said.

‘If you like,’ said Voss.

‘And when does this here expedition of yours intend to leave?’

It was too ridiculous, and he made it sound so.

‘One month. Two months. It is not yet decided,’ said the voice of Voss through the darkness.

He was no longer interested. He was even bored by what he had probably achieved.

‘All right then,’ said Le Mesurier. ‘What if I come along? At least I shall think it over. What have I got to lose?’

‘You can answer that better than I,’ Voss replied.

Though he did, he suspected, know the young man pretty well.

As the moment of reality had receded, they now began to walk away, in soothing sounds of dark grass. Both men were somewhat tired. The German began to think of the material world which his egoism had made him reject. In that world men and women sat at a round table and broke bread together. At times, he admitted, his hunger was almost unbearable. But young Frank Le Mesurier was now thrilled by the immensity of darkness, and resented the approach of those lights which would reveal human substance, his own in particular.

Later, of course, he was able to recover the disguise of his cynicism, and was clothed with it the evening he reached the top of the stairs, and discovered Voss at home in his room, with that miserable boy Harry Robarts, who was killing flies on the window-sill.

Harry looked up. Because he did not always understand his speech, as well as for other reasons, he suspected Mr Le Mesurier.

‘Ah, Frank,’ said Voss, who dared at once to test his power while remaining occupied at his desk; ‘since you made up your mind, I believe you are afraid that I will give you the slip.’

‘I could not hope to be so happy,’ said Le Mesurier, and did in a sense mean it.

For he was always halfway between wanting and not.

Voss laughed.

‘You must speak with Harry for a little,’ he said.

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.

Voss had sat back and was picking his teeth of the sweetbread. He also belched once, as if he had been alone with his thoughts.

‘I do meet scarcely a man here,’ he said, ‘who does not suspect he will be unmade by his country. Instead of knowing that he will make it into what he wishes.’

‘It is no country of mine,’ declared Topp, who had poured the wine, ‘except by the unfortunate accident of my being here.’

Such was his emotion, he slopped the wine.

‘Nor mine, frankly,’ said Le Mesurier. ‘I cannot think of it except as a bad joke.’

‘I came here through idealism,’ said Topp, feverish with his own situation, ‘and a mistaken belief that I could bring nicety to barbarian minds. Here, even the gentry, or what passes for it, has eaten itself into a stupor of mutton.’

‘I see nothing wrong with this country,’ dared Harry Robarts, ‘nor with havin’ your belly full. Mine has been full since the day I landed, and I am glad.’

Then his courage failed, and he drank his wine down, right down, in a purple gurgle.

‘So all is well with Harry,’ said Le Mesurier, ‘who sees with his belly’s eyes.’

‘It will do me,’ said the sullen boy.

One day he would find the courage to kill this man.

‘And me, Harry,’ said Voss. ‘I will venture to call it my country, although I am a foreigner,’ he added for the company, since human beings have a habit of rising up in defence of what they repudiate. ‘And although so little of my country is known to me as yet.’

Much as he despised humility, other people expected it.

‘You are welcome,’ sighed Topp, although already the wine had made him happy.

‘So you see, Harry,’ said Le Mesurier, ‘you have a fellow-countryman, who will share your patriotism in embracing the last iguana.’

‘Do not torment him, Frank,’ said Voss, not because it was cruel to bait dumb animals, but because he wished to enjoy the private spectacle of himself.

Harry Robarts went so far as to wipe his grateful eyes. Like all those in love, he would misinterpret lovingly.

As for Voss, he had gone on to grapple with the future, in which undertaking he did not expect much of love, for all that is soft and yielding is easily hurt. He suspected it, but the mineral forms were an everlasting source of wonder; feldspar, for instance, was admirable, and his own name a crystal in his mouth. If he were to leave that name on the land, irrevocably, his material body swallowed by what it had named, it would be rather on some desert place, a perfect abstraction, that would rouse no feeling of tenderness in posterity. He had no more need for sentimental admiration than he had for love. He was complete.

The leader looked at his subordinates, and wondered whether they knew.

But an unidentified body was falling up the steep stairs of the house. It thumped, drawing all attention, then burst through the doorway of the upper room. Candles guttered.

‘It is Turner,’ said Voss, ‘and drunk.’

‘I am not what you would call sober,’ admitted the person in question, ‘nor yet drunk. It is the stringybark that has shook me up a bit. The stuff would rot your guts.’

‘I would not let it,’ replied the German.

‘A man’s nature will get the better of him,’ said Turner gloomily, and sat down.

He was a long, thin individual, whose mind had gone sour. He was rather squint-eyed, moreover, from examining the affairs of others while appearing not to do so, but wiry too, for all the miserable impression he made. He had been employed those two months at the brickfields, and there was almost always some of the dust from the bricks visible in the cracks of his skin and creases of his clothes.

‘I had news,’ Voss said to him, ‘but have almost decided it will not interest you.’

When Turner cried:

‘You do not intend to drop me on account of me nature, for which a man is not responsible! Anyone will tell yer that.’

‘If I take you, it will be because your nature will not receive much encouragement in those parts.’

And because of a morbid interest in derelict souls, Voss suspected. Still there was in Turner sober a certain native cunning that put him on his mettle. A cunning man can be used if he does not first use.

‘Mr Voss, sir,’ pleaded Turner, drunk, ‘I will strain every muscle in me back. I will do the dirty work. I will eat grass.’

‘Only too obviously another convert,’ said Frank Le Mesurier, and got up.

Anything that was physically repulsive to him, he would have trodden under foot. He would not have cared to brush against Turner, yet it was probable, riding through the long, yellow grass, their stirrup-irons would catch at each other in overtures of intimacy, or lying in the dust and stench of ants, wrestling with similar dreams under the stars, their bodies would roll over and touch.

If this German is really philanthropist enough to take the man, he reflected. Or is he a fool?

But Voss would not help him to distinguish.

‘Mr Topp,’ the German was saying, ‘if I had mastered the art of music, I would set myself the task of creating a composition by which the various instruments would represent the moral characteristics of human beings in conflict with one another.’

‘I would rather suggest the sublimity of perfection,’ said the innocent music master, ‘in great sweeps of pure sound.’

‘But in order to understand it, you must first find perfection, and that you will never do. Besides, it would be monotonous, not to say monstrous, if you did.’

Turner, who was holding his perplexed head in a kind of basket of fingers, exclaimed:

‘Oh, oh! Gawd save us!’

Then he remembered, and turned on Le Mesurier, who was ready to retire, a look of deliberate malice.

‘Converts, eh?’ Because it rankled. ‘You, with all your talk, are not such a saint, if gutters could tell. I seen you, in not such a Sunday wescoat, and mud on it, too. And whorin’ after women under the trees. And holdin’ forth to the public. Contracted with a practisin’ madman, you was, accordin’ to your own admission, for a journey to hell an’ back.’

Then Turner began to laugh, and to wink great face-consuming winks at the listening boy.

‘If it was I, and I was drunk, then I cannot remember. Except that I have been drunk,’ said Le Mesurier, and they could see the gristle of his nose.

‘We are not the only sinners, eh, sonny?’ golloped the winking Turner.

He felt the necessity of drawing in the boy. It was always better two to one.

‘I am willing to admit I have been drunk,’ said Le Mesurier.

‘It is true,’ said the sullen boy, who would enjoy the luxury of taking sides once he had learnt the game.

‘It is sometimes necessary,’ frowned Le Mesurier.

‘Ho-ho!’ exploded Turner. ‘Tell the worms! As if they will not know about the moist.’

‘But there are droughts, Turner, that no worm will experience in his blunt head as he burrows in the earth. His life is blissfully blindly physical. The worst that can happen to your worm is that he may come up and be trodden on.’

‘You are a gentleman,’ said Turner, whose lips had been dogging every word, ‘and I do not follow all of that. But I have me suspicions.’

Le Mesurier would sometimes laugh in his nose.

‘And I will take your face off for it,’ Turner said.

He did get up, together with Harry Robarts, who was his friend of a few moments. The breathing was enormous. It seemed that the passion which had swelled and was filling the room was the all-important one.

Until Voss pricked it.

‘I am not interested in personal disagreements,’ he said; ‘who is drunk, who is a madman, who is disloyal. These are, in any event, of minor consideration. What distresses me more is my own great folly in continuing, like a worm, Frank, butting my head at whatsoever darkness of earth, once I have conceived an idea. You, Turner, Frank, are part of this strange, seemingly inconceivable idea. It distresses me that I cannot lay it aside, with all its component and dependent difficulties. But I cannot. Now you will go, please, out of this room, which is mine, you have forgotten. And you will remember also that the street is the property of all the citizens of this town. When we meet again, I trust you will have accepted one another’s faults, because we must be together for a long time.’

Afterwards, nobody remembered having seen his face. His words, though, they recalled, were cast in metal, and one of his feet had kicked a little lump of hard mud that had been lying on the carpet, and which had struck the wainscot rather loud.

When they had all gone, even poor Topp, who would have liked to stay and let the wine conduct some discussion of a philosophic nature, Voss went into the back room, took off his clothes quickly, and without thought, lay rather stiffly on the bed, as was his habit, and slept. He fell, straight, deeply into himself. It was not possible really, that anyone could damage the Idea, however much they scratched it. Some vomited words. Some coughed up their dry souls in rebounding pea-pellets. To no earthly avail. Out of that sand, through which his own feet, with reverence for velvet, had begun to pay homage, rose the Idea, its granite monolith untouched. Except by Palfreyman — was it? He could not distinguish the face, but the presence was pervading the whole dream. And now Voss was stirring on his straight bed. It was a humid night. His hands were attempting to free his body from the sweat with which it had been fastened.

On the following, and several successive mornings, which were all bright and shadowless, made keener by the red dust that would fill the street in sallies of grit, Voss went here and there in his tall, black, town hat. He decided on the pack-saddles of Mr O’Halloran. He negotiated with a Mr Pierce for an eight-inch sextant, prismatic compasses, barometers, thermometers, and sundry other instruments. Enough flour for two years was to be delivered direct to the vessel from Barden’s mill.

On the Thursday, as he noted briefly in his journal, he ‘met Palfreyman’, who arrived in town from Parramatta, where he had been recuperating from an illness at the property of a friend.

Palfreyman and Voss spent some time together, in fact, walking in the Botanic Gardens, talking, or in silence, accustoming themselves warily to each other, and considering some of those questions that would arise out of a partnership of many months.

Palfreyman was a shorter man than Voss, but the honest simplicity of his expression seemed to raise him to the height of most others. His face, of which the skin normally was burnt to the yellow-brown that colourless faces acquire in the sun, had been drained by his recent illness to a greenish white, the outline somewhat blurred. His eyes, of a light grey, were very straight-looking in their deep sockets, under the dark lids. Although his upper lip was exposed, whiskers of a good brown covered the lower parts of his face. He was dressed carefully, though without vanity, in several greys, with the result that the German’s hot coat and black sculptural trousers had an air of monumental slovenliness. Voss was, in fact, shamed into dusting spasmodically at his own sleeves as they walked, and once or twice twitched slightly at his cravat.

‘You will be strong enough already to undertake this journey, Mr Palfreyman?’ he asked, and frowned, at some thought, or wrinkle.

‘I am perfectly strong.’

Staring at bright sunlight the Englishman would often wear an amazed look, as if the light were too illuminating.

‘I have been fed on eggs and cream by the wife and daughters of my friend Strang for I don’t know how many weeks. It was an unfortunate business, though really no more than a slight twist to my back when the horse fell. I confess I was shaken at first. To be incapacitated permanently by some accident to my back is a fear under which I have always laboured. But here I am, perfectly recovered.’

Voss, who was also staring at the bright light, had been forced by it to smile. That is to say, the skin was tight against his teeth. He made quick, sucking noises to give Palfreyman the impression he was listening.

‘Besides,’ continued the ornithologist in his rather gentle voice, ‘it might be some time before I should receive an invitation to join another such expedition. It is an opportunity in which His Grace would, I feel, be personally interested.’

Mr Palfreyman had been commissioned by an English peer, a petulant one left over from a previous reign, who collected all manner of things, from precious stones and musical instruments, to stuffed birds and tigers. In his Palladian house, His Grace seldom looked at his possessions, except on sudden impulse, to tear out a drawer for an instant on a nest of poor eggshells, or to delight a mistress with a branch of wired humming-birds. But to collect, to possess, this was his passion. Until he was tired of all those lifeless objects. Then they were quickly swathed and handed to the nation.

In the service of this peer Mr Palfreyman had made the voyage to New South Wales. If the motive of his commission was largely whimsical, his professional integrity did not allow him to recognize it. He was a scientist. Dedication to science might have been his consolation, if it had not been for his religious faith. As it was, his trusting nature built a bridge in the form of a cult of usefulness, so that the two banks of his life were reconciled despite many an incongruous geographical feature, and it was seldom noticed that a strong current flowed between.

Now Mr Voss and Mr Palfreyman, who had been led here and there by conversation, were standing on a little, actual, rustic bridge in the Botanic Gardens. Circumstance was joining them, whether comfortably or not.

Mr Voss was saying, ‘I do not doubt you will have every opportunity, Mr Palfreyman, to further your patron’s interests, in virgin country, west of the Darling Downs. I was merely considering the question of your health.’

They were standing rather grotesquely on the ugly ornamental bridge. They were looking down, but without observing what it was that lay beneath them. (It was, in fact, a mess of dead water-lily leaves.)

‘My health,’ said Palfreyman, ‘has always been tolerably good.’

‘You are strong-willed, I see,’ laughed Voss.

For some reason, the latter knew, he-would have liked to dispose of Palfreyman, who answered:

‘It is not a question of my will, Mr Voss. It is rather the will of God that I should carry out certain chosen undertakings.’

Voss drew up his shoulder to protect himself from some unpleasantness. Then he was again normally tall, beside the smaller, but convinced Palfreyman, whose grey eyes were still engrossed beyond the withered lily leaves.

‘Your sentiments will recommend themselves to Mr Bonner,’ said Voss, ‘who is of the opinion that the rascals I have got together do not give a sufficiently moral tone to the expedition. Like most gentlemen well established in their materialism, Mr Bonner invokes moral approval.’

The German would have liked to make some further witticism, but it did not come naturally to him. Even his laughter sounded convulsive, against an agitation of banana palms, two or three of which were standing there behind them.

‘Look,’ said Palfreyman, pointing at a species of diaphanous fly that had alighted on the rail of the bridge.

It appeared that he was fascinated by the insect, glittering in its life with all the colours of decomposition, and that he had barely attended to the words of Voss.

The latter was glad, but not glad enough. He would have liked to be quite certain, not from any weakness in his own armour, but from his apparent inability to undermine his companion’s strength. Naturally it was unpleasant to realize this.

But it was only a matter of seconds. And there was the oblivious Palfreyman pointing with taut finger at the insect, which obviously was all that existed.

Immediately the fly had flown, the two men embarked on some further conversation of a practical nature, and Voss agreed to take Palfreyman to Mr Bonner the very next day.

‘He is an excellent man, you know,’ said Voss. ‘Generous, and trusting. The patron par excellence.’

Palfreyman merely smiled, almost as if it had been the shadow of his illness on his greenish, full, contemplative face.

‘Now, look after yourself, my dear fellow, in this city of unexpected dangers,’ said Voss nicely, as they were taking leave of each other in the sun at the gates.

He could be very nice, and wanted badly to be nicer. He smiled with a genuine charm, although his teeth were inclined to be pointed. He put his hand on his colleague’s arm, which was an unusual gesture for him.

Then they parted. Palfreyman, who was frequently very happy in this insubstantial world, walked with the slowness of leisure. But Voss hurried about some business, the wind whipping his trouser legs.

During the days that followed, the German thought somewhat surreptitiously about the will of God. The nurture of faith, on the whole, he felt, was an occupation for women, between the preserving-pan and the linen-press. There was that niece of the Bonners’, he remembered, a formal, and probably snobbish girl, who would wear her faith cut to the usual feminine pattern. Perhaps with a colder elegance than most. Then, there were the few men who assumed humility without shame. It could well be that, in the surrender to selflessness, such individuals enjoyed a kind of voluptuous transport. Voss would sometimes feel embittered at what he had not experienced, even though he was proud not to have done so. How they merge themselves with the concept of their God, he considered almost with disgust. These were the feminine men. Yet he remembered with longing the eyes of Palfreyman, and that old Müller, from both of whom he must always hold himself aloof, to whom he would remain coldly unwedded.

So he went about, and the day was drawing close.

Again on several occasions he recalled that old Brother Müller. Earlier in the year Voss had spent several days as a guest of the Moravian Mission near Moreton Bay. It was the harvest, then. The colours of peace, however transitory, drenched the stubbled fields. The scene was carved: the low whitewashed cottages of the lay brothers, the slim, but strong forms of the greyish trees, the little wooden figures of the sunburnt children. They were all in the fields, harvesting. Several women had taken rakes and forks, and were raking the hay, or pitching it up to their husbands upon the drays. Even the two old ministers had come, exchanging black for a kind of smock, of very placid grey. So all were working.

It was the form of Brother Müller, who had founded their settlement, that seemed to predominate over all others. Such peace and goodness as was apparent in the earthly scene, in the light and shadow, and the abundance of fragrant, wilting hay, might indeed have emanated from the soul of the old quietist.

‘I will come and work with you,’ called Voss, who, up till then, in fact, all the days of his visit, had been walking about restlessly, chewing at a straw, plucking at leaves, carrying a book which conveyed nothing to him.

Nobody had questioned his aloofness from the work, but now the guest began to tear off his awkward clothes — that is, he flung aside his rusty coat, loosened the neck of his pricking shirt, rolled up the sleeves on his wiry arms, and was soon raking with frenzied movements beside Brother Müller. One of the women who was pitching the fodder up to the drays went so far as to laugh at their guest’s particular zeal, but everyone else present accepted it placidly enough, taking it for granted that even the apparently misguided acts obey some necessity in the divine scheme.

Then Voss, who had spent several nights in speculative argument with the old minister over glasses of goats’ milk sweetened with honey, called out in the lust of his activity:

‘I begin to receive proof of existence, Brother Müller. I can feel the shape of the earth.’

And he stood there panting, with his legs apart, so that the earth did seem to take on something of its true shape, and to reel beneath him.

But the old man continued to rake the hay, blinking at it, as if he had got something in his eye, or were stupid.

Then Voss said, generously:

‘Do not think, Brother, because we have argued all these nights, and I have sometimes caught you out in a friendly way, that I want to detract at all from God.’

He was laughing good-naturedly, and looked handsome and kind in his burnt skin, and besides, was straddling the world.

‘Ach,’ sighed the old man; haymaking could have been his vocation.

Then he leaned upon his rake. There was behind him a golden aureole of sun.

‘Mr Voss,’ he said, with no suggestion of criticism, ‘you have a contempt for God, because He is not in your own image.’

So Voss walked quicker through the streets of Sydney all those days preceding the departure of the great expedition, of which that world was already talking. Men of business took him by the shoulder as if they would have had some part of him, or intended to share a most earnest piece of information. Young girls, walking with servants or aunts, looked at the hems of their skirts as they passed, but identified him to their less observant companions immediately afterwards. That was Mr Voss, the explorer.

So that, for the explorer himself, the whole town of Sydney wore a splendid and sufficient glaze.