Voss

3

SOON after this it happened that Rose Portion, the Bonners’ servant, was taken suddenly sick. One afternoon, just after Mrs Bonner and the young ladies had finished a luncheon of cold ham, with pickles, and white bread, and a little quince jelly, nothing heavy like, because of the Pringles’ picnic party that afternoon, Rose simply fell down. In her brown gown she looked a full sack, except that she was stirring and moaning, even retching. Dry, however. Mrs Bonner, who was a Norfolk girl, remembered how cows used to fall into the dikes during the long winter nights, and moan there, so far off, and so monotonously; nothing, it seemed, would ever be done.

Yet here was Rose upon the floor, half in the dining-room, half in the passage to the pantry, and for Rose something must be done at once.

‘Rose, dear! Rose!’ called the young ladies, leaping, and kneeling, and slapping the backs of her hands.

‘We must burn a feather,’ decided Mrs Bonner.

But Miss Laura ran and fetched her dark green smelling-bottle, which was a present from a girl called Chattie Wilson, with whom they were in the habit of exchanging visits and presents.

Then, when Rose’s head had been split almost in two by that long, cold smell, she got up rather suddenly, moaning and crying. She was holding her fists together at the brown knuckles, and shaking.

‘Rose, dear, please do tell us you are recovered,’ implored Belle, who was herself frightened and tearful; she would cry for people in the street who appeared in any way distressed. ‘Do stop, Rose!’

But Rose was not crying, not exactly; it was an animal mumbling, and biting of her harelip.

‘Rose,’ said Aunt Emmy at last, quite dryly, and unlike her, ‘Edith will give you a hand to clear the rest of the things. Then you must lie down and rest.’

Aunt Emmy sounded and looked drained, although perhaps it was the salt-cellar, one of the good Waterford pair, that should never have been used, and of which she was now picking up the fragments; it could have been this that had caused her some pain.

Then Laura Trevelyan, her niece, who was still kneeling, understood otherwise. It was awful. And soon even Belle knew, who was young, but not too young. The instincts of all three women were embracing the same secret.

They knew that Rose Portion, the emancipist servant, was with child.

Rose had come to work at Bonners’ only after she was freed. The merchant would not have employed a convict, as a matter of conscience, and on account of petty thefts. If they are free, he used to say, there is a chance that they are innocent; if they are not free, it is taken for granted that the assigned servant is to blame.

Free or restrained, it was the same to Rose. Fate, her person seemed to suggest, had imposed far heavier, far more dreadful, because invisible, chains. This did not affect her constitution, however. Though shackled, she would work like an ox. When Mr Bonner was laying out the rockeries that afterwards became so nice, she was carrying baskets of earth and stone, and leaving her heavy imprint on the original sand, while Jack Slipper and the lad were grumbling, and dragging and leaning, and even disappearing. Rose was not compelled to lend herself to heavy labour. Nor to sit up. Yet, there she was, when the young ladies went to balls, or lectures, or musical evenings, as they frequently did, she would be sitting up, her heavy chin sunk in her bosom, with her hands pressed together, almond-shape, in her great lap. Then she would jump up, still glittery from sleep, without smiling, but pleased, and help the young ladies out of their dresses. She would brush Miss Laura’s hair, even when the latter did not wish it.

‘Go now, Rose,’ Miss Trevelyan would say. ‘That is enough.’

But Rose would brush, as if it were her sacred duty, while her mistress remained a prisoner by her hair.

Because she was ugly and unloved, Rose Portion would attempt to bind people to her in this way. Yet Laura Trevelyan could not begin to like her maid. She was kind to her, of course. She gave her presents of cast-off garments and was careful to think about her physical well-being. She would make a special effort to smile at the woman, who was immediately grateful. Kindness made her whole body express her gratitude, but it was her body that repelled.

So it was, too, in the case of Jack Slipper, that other individual, as Mr Bonner almost always referred to him after the man had been sent away. Of undisclosed origin, the latter had performed odd jobs, scoured the pans and beat the carpets, worked in the garden although it was distasteful to him, and even driven the carriage at a pinch, in improvised livery, when Jim Prentice was down with the bronchitis. But whatever duties were allotted to him, Jack Slipper had always found time to loiter in the yard, under the lazy pepper trees, scratching his armpits, and chewing a quid of tobacco on the quiet. So Laura would remember, and again see him spit a shiny stream into the molten laurels. He used to wear his sleeves cut back for greater freedom, right to the shoulder, so that in his thin but sinewy arms the swollen veins were visible. He was all stains, and patches of shade, and spots of sunlight, if ever Laura was compelled to cross the yard, as, indeed, sometimes she was. It must be admitted he had always acknowledged her presence, though in such an insolent and familiar manner that invariably she would turn the other way on confirming that the man was there. Jack Slipper ended in the watch-house. The rum was his downfall. The night they took him up, you could have lit the breath upon him, they said. So he received a sentence. Mr Bonner went down and spoke to him, telling him it was his habit to stand by those he employed, but seeing as he did not care for Jack’s behaviour, he would have dismissed him, even without sentence being passed. The fellow only laughed. He wiped his hairy nose with his wrist, and said he would have gone, anyway.

So that was the end of Jack.

But Rose remained, her breasts moving in her brown dress. Laura Trevelyan had continued to feel repelled. It was the source of great unhappiness, because frequently she was also touched. She would try to keep her eyes averted, as she had from Jack Slipper. It is the bodies of these servants, she told herself in some hopelessness and disgust, while wondering how her aunt would have received her thoughts, if spoken. Similar obsessions could not have haunted other people. I will put all such things out of my mind, she decided; or am I a prig? So she wondered unhappily, and how she might correct her nature.

Now, when this calamity had felled the unfortunate Rose, Laura Trevelyan was more than ever unhappy. As life settled back, and the things were removed from the dining-table, and the smallest pieces of the Waterford salt-cellar had been recovered, she held herself rigid. Nobody noticed, however. Because she was practised in disguising her emotions, only someone with more than eyes in their head would have seen.

Aunt Emmy did not, who was holding a pretty but useless little handkerchief to her troubled lips. Aunt Emmy said:

‘Now, girls, this is something between ourselves, most emphatically. It is providential that the dining-room does not communicate directly with the kitchen, so that Cassie and Edith need not suspect. Mr Bonner must be told, of course, and will perhaps offer a helpful suggestion. Until then — nothing.’

‘We have forgotten the Pringles’ picnic, Mamma,’ said Belle, who was hearing the grandfather clock strike.

No event was so disastrous that Belle could not recover from it. She was still at that age.

Her mother began to suck her teeth.

‘Dear, yes,’ she said. ‘Mrs Pringle will be provoked. And the carriage is for half past, if Mr Prentice can rouse himself. Rose,’ she called, ‘ask Edith to run across to Jim, and remind him to bring the carriage round. Dear, we shall be late.’

Going at once to change her dress, Laura Trevelyan regretted all picnics. A strong day was bending the trees. The garden was a muddle of tossed green, at which she frowned, patting a sleeve, or smoothing hair. Most days she walked in the garden, amongst the camellia bushes, which were already quite advanced, and the many amorphous, dark bushes of all big hospitable gardens, and the scurfy native paperbarks. At one end of the garden were some bamboos, which a sea-captain had brought to Mr Bonner from India. Originally a few roots, the bamboos had grown into a thicket, which filled the surrounding air with overwhelming featheriness. Even on still evenings, a feathery colloquy of the bamboos was clearly audible, with sometimes a collision of the stiff masts, and human voices, those of passers-by who had climbed the wall, and lay there eating pigs’ trotters, and making love. Once Laura had found a woman’s bonnet at the foot of the bamboos. A tawdry thing. Once she had found Rose Portion. It is me, miss, said her servant’s form; it was that airless in the house. Then Rose was pressing through the thicket of bamboos. On occasions the night would be full of voices, and unexplained lights. The moist earth was pressed at the roots of the bamboos. There were the lazy, confident voices of men, and the more breathless, women’s ones. I have give you a fright, miss, Jack Slipper once said, and got up, from where he had been propped upon his elbow beside the darkness. He was smoking. Laura had felt quite choked.

Now this young woman was holding her hands to her head in the mirror. She was pale, but handsome, in moss green. If Laura had more colour, she would be a beauty, Aunt Emmy considered, and advised her niece always to drop her handkerchief before entering a room, so that the blood would rush to her cheeks as she stooped to pick it up.

‘Laura!’ called Belle. ‘The carriage is here. Mamma is waiting. You know what Mrs Pringle is.’

Then Laura Trevelyan shook her shawl. She was really handsome in her way, and now flushed by some thought, or by the wind which was assaulting the trees of the garden with greater force. There were the needles from trees falling through the window upon the carpet. There was the dry sighing of the bamboos.

When the party had disposed itself in the carriage, and Mrs Bonner had felt for her lozenges and tried to remember whether she had closed the window on the landing, when they had gone a little way down the drive, as far as the elbow and the bunya bunya, there, if you please, was the figure of that tiresome Mr Voss, walking up springily, carrying his hat, his head wet with perspiration.

Oh dear, everybody said, and even held hands.

But they pulled up. They had to.

‘Good afternoon, Mr Voss,’ said Mrs Bonner, putting out her head. ‘This is a surprise. You are quite wicked, you know, with your surprises. When a little note. And Mr Bonner not here.’

Mr Voss was opening his mouth. His lips were pale from walking. His expression suggested that he had not yet returned from thought.

‘But Mr Bonner,’ he was forming words, ‘is not at the store no more than here. He is gone away, they say. He is gone home.’

He resented bitterly the foreign language into which he had been thrown back thus precipitately.

‘He is gone away, certainly,’ said Mrs Bonner gaily, ‘but is not gone home.’

Occasions could make her mischievous.

Belle giggled, and turned her face towards the hot upholstery of the dark carriage. They were beautifully protected in that padded box.

‘I regret that they should have misinformed you so sadly,’ Mrs Bonner pursued. ‘Mr Bonner has gone to a picnic party at Point Piper with our friends the Pringles, where we will join him shortly.’

‘It is not important,’ Voss said.

He was glad, even. The niece sat in the carriage examining his face as if it had been wood.

She sat, and was examining the roots of his hair, the pores of his skin, but quite objectively, from beneath her leaden lids.

‘How tiresome for you,’ said Mrs Bonner.

‘It is not, it is not of actual importance.’

Voss had put his hat back.

‘Unless you get in. That is it,’ Mrs Bonner said, who furiously loved her own solutions. ‘You must get in with us. Then you can give Mr Bonner such information as you have. He would be provoked.’

So the step was let down.

Now it was Voss who was provoked, who had come that day, less for a purpose, than from a vague desire for his patron’s company, but had not bargained for all these women.

He bumped his head.

Then he was swallowed by the close carriage with its scents and sounds of ladies. It was an obscure and wretched situation, in which his knees were pressed together to avoid skirts, but of which, soft suggestions were overflowing.

He found himself beside the pretty girl, Miss Belle, who had remained giggly, as she sat holding her hands in a ball. Opposite were the mother and her niece, rocking politely. Although he recognized the features of the niece, her name had escaped him. However, that was unimportant. As they rocked. In one place a stench of putrid sea-stuff came in at the window and filled the carriage. Miss Belle bit her lip, and turned her head, and blushed, while the two ladies seemed oblivious.

‘Fancy,’ said Mrs Bonner with sudden animation, ‘a short time ago a gentleman and his wife, I forget the name, were driving in their brougham on the South Head Road, when some man, a kind of bushranger, I suppose one would call him, rode up to their vehicle, and appropriated every single valuable the unfortunate couple had upon them.’

Everybody listened to conversation as if it were not addressed to them personally. They rocked, and took it for granted that someone would assume responsibility. Mrs Bonner, at least, had done her duty. She looked out with that brightness of expression she had learnt to wear for drives in the days when they first owned a carriage. As for the bushrangers, she personally had never encountered such individuals, and could not believe in a future in which her agreeable life might be so rudely shaken. Bushrangers were but the material of narrative.

Presently they turned off along the sandy track that led down through Point Piper. The wheels of the carriage fell, as it were, from shelf to shelf of sandstone. Immediately the bones of the well-conducted passengers appeared to have melted, and the soft bodies were thrown against one another in ignominious confusion. In some circumstances this could have been comical, but something had made it serious. So the face of the grave young woman showed, and somehow impressed that gravity on the faces of the others. She withdrew her skirt ever so carefully from the rough black cloth that covered the German’s protuberant knees.

Some of the Pringle children came bursting through the scrub to show the way, and ran alongside, laughing, and calling up at the windows of the newly arrived carriage, and even directing rather impudent glances at a stranger who might not have had the Bonners’ full protection. The Pringles always arrived first at places. In spite of, or because of her fortune, for she was rich in her own right as well as through her husband, Mrs Pringle could have felt the need to mortify herself. She would march up and down with a watch in her hand, and shout at people quite coarsely, Mrs Bonner considered, shout at them desperately to assemble for departure, but it was all well intended. Irritation was a mark of her affection. She was most exacting of her husband, would raise her voice at him in company, and continually demand evidence of that superiority which he did not possess. These displays he met with a patient love, and had recently given her an eleventh child, which did mollify her for a little.

‘Ah, there you are,’ exclaimed Mrs Pringle, who with her assistants had been unpacking food behind the bushes in a circle of carriages and gigs.

The tone of her words expressed as much censure as politeness would allow. At her side, as almost always, was her eldest daughter, Una.

‘Yes, my dear,’ said Mrs Bonner, whom events had made mysteriously innocent. ‘If we are late, it is due to some little domestic upheaval. I fear you may have been anxious for us.’

When the Bonners were descended, the girls kissed most affectionately, although Una Pringle had always been of the opinion that Laura was a stick, worse still, possessed of brains, and in consequence not to be trusted. In general, Una preferred the other sex, though she was far too nice a girl to admit it to a diary, let alone a friend. Now, using the glare as an excuse, she was pretending not to examine the gentleman, or man, who had accompanied the Bonners, and who, it seemed, was also the most terrible stick. True to her nature, Una Pringle immediately solved a simple mathematical problem involving two sticks.

Mrs Bonner saw that she could no longer defer the moment of explaining the presence of the German, so she said:

‘This is Mr Voss, the explorer. Who is soon to leave for the bush.’

Formal in its inception, it sounded somehow funny at its end, for neither Mrs Bonner nor Mrs Pringle could be expected to take seriously a move so remotely connected with their own lives.

‘The gentlemen are down there,’ said Mrs Pringle, hoping to dispose of an embarrassment. ‘They are discussing something. Mr Pitt has also come, and Woburn McAllister, and a nephew or two.’

Many children were running about, in clothes that caught on twigs. Brightly coloured laughter hung from the undergrowth.

Voss would have liked to retire into his own thoughts, and did to a certain extent. He loked rather furry in his self-absorption. The nap of his hat had been roughed up, and he was cheaply dressed, and angular, and black. Nobody would know what to do with him, unless he did himself.

So Mrs Pringle and Mrs Bonner looked hopefully in that direction in which the gentlemen were said to be.

‘You girls go down with Mr Voss,’ insisted Mrs Pringle, conscripting an impregnable army, ‘while Mrs Bonner and I have a little chat.’

‘Shall we?’ asked Una, though there was no alternative.

They all walked decently off. Their long skirts made paths along the sand, dragged fallen twigs into upright positions, and swept ants for ever off their courses.

‘Do you like picnics?’ asked Una Pringle.

‘Sometimes,’ Belle replied. ‘It depends.’

‘Where is Lieutenant Radclyffe?’ Una asked.

‘It is his afternoon for duty,’ answered Belle, importantly.

‘Oh,’ said Una.

She was a tall girl, who would be married off quite easily, though for no immediately obvious reason.

‘Have you met Captain Norton of the Valiant?’ Una asked.

‘Not yet,’ yawned Belle, who aspired to no further conquests.

Belle Bonner had adopted a flat, yet superior expression, because Una Pringle was one of those girls for whom she did not care, while forced by circumstance to know. Force of circumstance, indeed, had begun to inform the whole picnic. Till several children came, pulling, and jumping, shouting through shiny lips, inspiring Belle, whom they sensed to be an initiate, with a nostalgia for those games which she had scarcely left off playing. The boisterous wind soon flung her and several bouncing children amongst the fixed trees. Her blood was at the tips of her fingers. Her rather thick but healthy throat was distended. She herself was shouting.

‘Such vitality Belle has,’ sighed Una, who was left with that Laura and the foreigner.

‘Do you run and jump, Mr Voss?’ she inquired with an insipid malice.

‘Please?’ asked the German.

‘I expect he does,’ said Laura Trevelyan, ‘if the occasion demands it. His own very private occasion. All kinds of invisible running and jumping. I do.’

Voss, who was brought back too abruptly to extract the full meaning from her words, was led to understand that this handsome girl was his ally. Though she did not look at him. But described some figure on the air with a muff of sealskin that she was carrying for the uncertain weather, and as a protection against more abstract dangers.

Trevelyan was her name, he remembered. Laura, the niece.

The gay day of wind and sharp sunlight had pierced the surface of her sombre green. It had begun to glow. She was for ever flickering, and escaping from a cage of black twigs, but unconscious of any transformation that might have taken place. This ignorance of her riches gave to her face a tenderness that it did not normally possess. Many tender waves did, besides, leap round the rocky promontory along which they were stumbling. There was now distinctly the sound of sea. As they trod out from the trees and were blinded, Laura Trevelyan was smiling.

‘There are the men,’ said Una rather gloomily, and did not bother to refrain from squinting, for all those gentlemen to whom she had pointed were already known to her.

The other members of her party held their hands above their eyes, and then distinguished, through the sea glaze, the elderly gentlemen perched on golden rocks, and younger men who had taken off their hats, and boys wrestling or throwing stones. The drama of that male black was too sudden against the peacock afternoon.

‘We had better go down,’ said Laura, ‘and deliver Mr Voss.’

‘But I would interrupt,’ protested the German. ‘What are they talking about?’

‘Whatever men do talk about,’ said Laura.

‘Business,’ suggested Una.

Some situations were definitely not his.

‘And the English packet. And the weather.’

‘And vegetables. And sheep.’

As they descended relentlessly towards that male gathering, the girls’ fears for their ankles would sometimes crack the enamelled confidence of their voices. In the circumstances they would accept a hand or two. And Mr Voss had a strong wrist. He flung himself into this activity less in the cause of chivalry than in an endeavour to remain occupied.

They did arrive, however, and there were many eyes, looking up, showing their whites, because it was not yet evident what defences would have to be erected.

Only Mr Bonner leaped all incipient barricades, clapped his protégé on the shoulder, and cried in a very red voice:

‘Welcome, Voss. If I did not suggest you take the steps you have clearly taken of your own accord, it is because I was under the impression it might not be in your line. That is, you are of rather a deep dye. Although, I am of the opinion nevertheless, that every man has something for his fellow, and it is only a matter of hitting on it. In any event, here you are.’

Mr Bonner bristled with apologies for anyone who needed them.

Some of the younger men, with leathery skins and isolated eyes, braced their calves, and shook hands most powerfully with the stranger. But two elderly and more important gentlemen, who would be Mr Pringle and the unexplained Mr Pitt, and whose stomachs were too heavy, and whose joints less active, merely cleared their throats and shifted on their rocks.

Then it was told how Voss had come. He smiled a great deal. Anxious to convey goodwill, he succeeded only in looking hungry.

‘He was a godsend,’ said Laura, hearing the unnatural tones the situation was forcing her to adopt. ‘We used him as a protection against bushrangers.’

The younger men laughed immoderately. Those of them with whom she was acquainted did not care for Laura Trevelyan, who was given to reading books.

Mr Pringle and Mr Pitt were slower in their mirth, more sceptical, for it was they who had been conducting that dialogue of almost mystical banality which had suffered interruption.

Mr Bonner continued to look red. His pride in his German could not rise above his shame. So men will sweat for some secret gift they have failed to reveal to others, and will make subtle attempts openly to condemn what is precious to them.

‘Voss, you know, is to lead this expedition we are organizing. Sanderson is behind it, and Boyle of Jildra, and one or two others. Young Angus of Dulverton is to be a member,’ he added for those of his audience who were of the same age and temper as the young landowner.

The younger men looked smilingly incredulous in a solid majority of tight, best cloth. They had folded their arms. Their seams and their muscles cracked.

‘It is a great event,’ said the congested Mr Bonner, ‘and may well prove historical. If they bring back their own bones. Eh, Voss?’

Everybody laughed, and Mr Bonner was relieved to have made his sacrifice with an almost imperceptible movement of the knife.

Voss could always, if necessary, fail to understand. But wounds will wince, especially in the salt air. He was smiling and screwing up his eyes at the great theatre of light and water. Some pitied him. Some despised him for his funny appearance of a foreigner. None, he realized with a tremor of anger, was conscious of his strength. Mediocre, animal men never do guess at the power of rock or fire, until the last moment before those elements reduce them to — nothing. This, the palest, the most transparent of words, yet comes closest to being complete.

Mr Pringle cleared his throat. Because his material status entitled him to attention before anyone else present, he would speak slowly, and take a long time.

‘It seems to me, though, from such evidence as we have collected — which is inconsiderable, mark you — as the result of mere foraying expeditions from the fringes, so to speak, it seems that this country will prove most hostile to anything in the nature of planned development. It has been shown that deserts prefer to resist history and develop along their own lines. As I have remarked, we do not know. There may, in fact, be a veritable paradise adorning the interior. Nobody can say. But I am inclined to believe, Mr Voss, that you will discover a few black-fellers, and a few flies, and something resembling the bottom of the sea. That is my humble opinion.’

Mr Pringle’s stomach, which was less humble, rumbled.

‘Have you walked upon the bottom of the sea, Mr Pringle?’ the German asked.

‘Eh?’ said Mr Pringle. ‘No.’

His eyes, however, had swum into unaccustomed depths.

‘I have not,’ said Voss. ‘Except in dreams, of course. That is why I am fascinated by the prospect before me. Even if the future of great areas of sand is a purely metaphysical one.’

Then he threw up a little pebble, which had been changing colour in his hand, turning from pale lavender to purple, and caught it before it reached the sun.

The audience of healthy young men laughed at this German cove, their folded arms stretching the cloth still tighter on their backs.

Poor Mr Bonner was desperately ashamed. He would have liked to push the fellow off somewhere, and intended in future to reserve the luxury of their association for private occasions, although the present one was certainly no fault of his.

He thought of his wife. And frowned at his niece.

Laura Trevelyan was at that moment tracing with her toe the long, ribbony track of some sea-worm, as if it had been important. In the rapt afternoon all things were all-important, the inquiring mouths of blunt anemones, the twisted roots of driftwood returning and departing in the shallows, mauve scum of little bubbles the sand was sucking down, and the sun, the sun that was hitting them over the heads. She was too hot, of course, in the thick dress that she had put on for a colder day, with the result that all words became great round weights. She did not raise her head for those the German spoke, but heard them fall, and loved their shape. So far departed from that rational level to which she had determined to adhere, her own thoughts were grown obscure, even natural. She did not care. It was lovely. She would have liked to sit upon a rock and listen to words, not of any man, but detached, mysterious, poetic words that she alone would interpret through some sense inherited from sleep. Herself disembodied. Air joining air experiences a voluptuousness no less intense because imperceptible.

She smiled a little at this solution of sea and glare. It was the sun that was reddening her face. The hem of her skirt had become quite irregular, she saw, with black scallops of heavy water.

‘I say, Laura,’ said Willie Pringle, coming up, ‘we have had no races this picnic, and a picnic is not a picnic without races, do you think?’

Willie Pringle was a boy, or youth, or young man by courtesy, who was rather loosely made, or had not hardened yet, with a rather loose, wet, though obviously good-natured mouth, and eyes that so far nobody had suspected of understanding. He had but recently joined the firm of his father and uncles, the solicitors, as office boy or very junior clerk, and was still feeling important.

‘Do you really think races are necessary?’ asked Laura, who had raced in the past, but who was now tracing through some slow necessity of her own the path of the sea-worm with her toe.

‘Well, no, races are not necessary. But are they not the sort of thing that people do at a picnic?’ Willie said, who wanted very badly to do those things which people did.

‘Silly Willie!’ Laura laughed, lazily but lovingly.

Willie laughed too.

He would have liked to share with Laura esoteric jokes and tastes. Once he had done a drawing of her, not because he was in love, he had not thought about that, but because her image had invaded his mind with immense power and brooding grief. Then, because his drawing was an empty, aching thing, his recurring failure, he had quickly torn it up.

‘No,’ his voice shouted, at a picnic. ‘It is not NECESSARY. But everyone is waiting. All these children. Let us do something.’

But Laura would not join in.

Mrs Bonner wished that Willie Pringle had been a few years older, which perhaps would have simplified matters; things do arrange themselves by propinquity, and Willie was an eldest son, of prospects, if not physical charms. Mrs Pringle, however, did not share Mrs Bonner’s wish. Herself more than rich, she did naturally aspire to consort with money. Moreover, she held a private opinion, very private indeed, that Laura Trevelyan was sly.

One young man, in bone and orange skin, had begun to tell of the prevalence of worms in his merino flock at Camden. His elders followed his account with appeased eyes. Everyone was glad after the rankling experience of demoniac words to which they had been subjected by the German, who still stood there, though reduced, picking at his finger-nails.

For two pins I would run him down the beach by his coat collar, said Mr Bonner, who had sided finally with the sheep.

‘But we must do something,’ protested Willie Pringle. ‘If not races, then I must think of some idea. You, Laura, if only you would help. Some game, or something. Or they might collect driftwood, and pile it into a heap, and light a bonfire.’

‘Are you so desperate?’ asked Laura Trevelyan.

He was, but did not know it yet.

‘They are wasting the afternoon!’

His mouth worked, upon the beginnings of words, or laughter, and gave up.

Even as a little boy Willie Pringle had a suspicion that a great deal depended on him, but what it was he had not found out. So far his efforts had been confined to desperate attempts to copy the behaviour, to interpret the symbols of his class, and thus solve the mystery of himself. But all truths were locked. So he would look at the heartbreaking beauty and simplicity of a common table or kitchen chair, and realize that in some most important sense their entities would continue to elude him unless he could escape from the prison of his own skull. Sometimes he would struggle like an epileptic of the spirit to break out. The situation had made his hands moist and his limbs more rubbery and ineffectual than they should have been. People laughed at him a good deal. They had not yet made up their minds whether he was a monster, or a sleepwalker, or what. Later, when they found out, they would probably shun him.

Belle solved Willie’s immediate problem by an inspiration of her own. She came running, together with two Pringles, two little girls, who had to hold on, either to her flying skirt, or preferably to some part of her inspired form. They would manacle her wrists with hot hands whenever she stopped short. Belle had taken her bonnet off. Her hair fell gold. Her skin, too, was golden, beneath the surface of which the blood was clearly rioting, and as she breathed, it did seem almost as though she was no longer the victim of her clothes.

‘Wait, Belle! Wait!’ cried the little girls.

‘Wait for us,’ called several others.

Ah, Belle is released, Laura Trevelyan saw, and was herself closer to taking wing.

Belle had a spray of the crimson bottlebrush that she had torn off recklessly. It was quite a torch flaming in her hand. She had in her skirt several smooth pebbles, in dove colours, and a little, flat, red tile, and a lump of green glass, which the bubbles made most desirable.

‘Where are we going?’

The little girls’ voices were imperious, if frail.

Several boys left off torturing one another and ran in the wake of the girls, demanding a dénouement.

‘We are going to build a temple,’ Belle called.

Blood will veil blushes. Besides, she was very young herself.

‘Anyone would think that Belle was twelve,’ complained Una Pringle, who arranged the flowers most mornings for her mother.

‘What temple?’ some screamed.

Boys were pressing.

‘Of a goddess.’

‘What goddess?’

Sand flew.

‘We shall have to decide,’ Belle called over her shoulder.

A great train of worshippers was now ploughing the sand, making it spurt up, and sigh. Some of the boys tossed their caps in the air as they ran, and allowed them to plump gaily upon the golden mattress of the beach.

‘Belle has gone mad,’ said Willie Pringle, with dubious approval.

Matters had been taken out of his hands. This was usually the case. Trailing after Belle’s votaries, he stopped to touch periwinkles and taste the shining scales of salt, and although he had not yet learnt to resign himself to his nature and his lot, his senses did atone in very considerable measure for his temporary discontent.

At least, the men talking upon the rocks were no longer paramount. This was clear. Something had been cut, Una and Laura both knew, whether the German did or not; in any event, the latter was himself a man.

Men are certainly necessary, but are they not also, perhaps, tedious? Una Pringle debated.

Una and Laura began to extricate themselves.

‘Woburn McAllister, the one who has been telling about the worms, is the owner of a property that many people consider the most valuable in New South Wales,’ Una remembered, and cheered up. ‘He must, by all accounts, be exceedingly rich.’

‘Oh,’ said Laura.

Sometimes her chin would take refuge in her neck; it could not sink low enough, or so it felt.

‘In addition to his property, Woburn Park, he has an interest in a place in New England. His parents, poor boy,’ continued Una, as she had been taught, ‘both died while he was a baby, so that his expectations were exchanged for a considerable fortune right at the beginning. And there are still several uncles, either childless or bachelors. With all of whom, Woburn is on excellent terms.’

Laura listened to Voss’s feet following her shame in soft, sighing sand. Una did look round once, but only saw that German, who was of no consequence.

‘And such a fine fellow. Quite unspoilt,’ said Una, who had listened a lot. ‘Of excellent disposition.’

‘I cannot bear so much excellence,’ Laura begged.

‘Why, Laura, how funny you are,’ said Una.

But she did blush a little, before remembering that Laura was peculiar. There is nothing more odious than reserve, and Una knew very little of her friend. But for the fact that they were both girls, they would have been in every way dissimilar. Una realized that she always had disliked Laura, and would, she did not doubt, persist in that dislike, although there was every reason to believe they would remain friends.

‘You take it upon yourself to despise what is praiseworthy in order to appear different,’ protested the nettled Una. ‘I have noticed this before in people who are clever.’

‘Oh dear, you have humbled me,’ Laura Trevelyan answered simply.

‘But Miss Pringle is right to admire such an excellent marriage party as Mr McAllister,’ contributed Voss, drawing level.

Shock caused the two girls to drop their personal difference.

‘I was not thinking of him as exactly that,’ Una declared.

Although, in fact, she had been. Lies were not lies, however, if told in the defence of honour.

‘Still,’ she added, ‘one cannot help but wonder who will get him.’

‘Quite right,’ agreed Voss. ‘Mr McAllister is obviously one of the corner-stones.’

He was kicking the sand as he walked, so that it flew in spurts of blue-whiteness before becoming wind.

‘I have passed through that property,’ he said. ‘I have seen his house. It will resist time indefinitely, as well as many of the insect pests.’

Una had begun to glow.

‘Have you been inside?’ she asked. ‘Have you seen the furniture? It is said to be magnificent.’

Laura could not determine the exact reason for her own sadness. She was consumed by the intense longing of the waves. The forms of burnt rock and scraggy pine were sharpening unbearably. Her shoulders felt narrow.

‘I would not want,’ she began.

The disappearing sand that spurted up from Voss’s feet did fascinate.

‘What?’ Una asked severely.

‘I would not want marriage with stone.’

Una’s laugh was thin.

Though what she did want, Laura did not know, only that she did. She was pursued by a most lamentable, because so unreasonable, discontent.

‘You would prefer sand?’ Voss asked.

He stooped and picked up a handful, which he threw, so that it glittered, and some of it stung their faces.

Voss, too, was laughing.

‘Almost,’ said Laura, bitterly now.

She was the third to laugh, and it seemed with such freedom that she was no longer attached to anyone.

‘You will regret it,’ laughed Voss, ‘when it has all blown.’

Una Pringle began to feel that the conversation was eluding her, so that she was quite glad when the solid form of her mother appeared on the edge of the scrub, ostensibly calling for added assistance with cups and things.

This left Voss and Laura to follow vaguely. It was not exactly clear what they should do, only that they were suddenly faced with a great gap to fill, of space, and time. Peculiarly enough, neither of them was appalled by the prospect, as both might have been earlier that afternoon. Words, silences, and sea air had worked upon them subtly, until they had undergone a change.

Walking with their heads agreeably bowed beneath the sunlight, they listened to each other’s presence, and became aware that they were possibly more alike than any other two people at the Pringles’ picnic.

‘Happy is the assured Miss Pringle,’ Voss was then saying, ‘in her material future, in her stone house.’

‘I am not unhappy,’ Laura Trevelyan replied, ‘at least, never for long, although it is far from clear what my future is to be.’

‘Your future is what you will make it. Future,’ said Voss, ‘is will.’

‘Oh, I have the will,’ said Laura quickly. ‘But I have not yet grasped in what way I am to use it.’

‘This is something which perhaps comes later to a woman,’ said Voss.

Of course, he could be quite insufferable, she saw, but she could put up with it. The light was gilding them.

‘Possibly,’ she said.

Actually, Laura Trevelyan believed distinction between the sexes to be less than was usually made, but as she had remained in complete isolation of ideas, she had never dared speak her thoughts.

It was so calm now that they had rounded a buttress of rock. The trees were leaning out towards them with slender needles of dead green. Both the man and the woman were lulled into living inwardly, without shame, or need for protection.

‘This expedition, Mr Voss,’ said Laura Trevelyan suddenly, ‘this expedition of yours is pure will.’

She turned upon him an expression of such limpid earnestness that, in any other circumstances, he would have been surprised.

‘Not entirely,’ he said. ‘I will be under restraint by several human beings, to say nothing of the animals and practical impedimenta my patrons consider necessary.’

‘It would be better,’ he added abruptly, ‘that I should go barefoot, and alone. I know. But it is useless to try to convey to others the extent of that knowledge.’

He was grinning in a way which made his face most irregular, leaner. His lips were thin and cracked before the season of thirst had set in, and there was a tooth missing at one side. Altogether, he was unconvincing.

‘You are not going to allow your will to destroy you,’ she said rather than asked.

Now she was very strong. For a moment he was grateful, though he would not have thanked. He sensed how she would have taken his head, and laid it against her breast, and held it with firm hands. But he had never allowed himself the luxury of other people’s strength, preferring the illusion of his own.

‘Your interest is touching, Miss Trevelyan,’ he laughed. ‘I shall appreciate it in many desert places.’

He was trying to bring her down.

But she had crossed her fingers against the Devil.

‘I do not believe in your gratitude,’ she said wryly; ‘just as I do not believe that I fully understand you. But I will.’

As they continued to walk beneath the black branches of the trees, the man and woman were of equal stature, it seemed, and on approaching the spot at which the most solemn rites of the picnic were in the course of being celebrated, in the little clearing, with its smell of boiling water and burnt sticks, its jolly faces and acceptable opinions, the expression of the two late arrivals suggested that they shared some guilty secret of personality. Only, nobody noticed.

The men, who had climbed up from the rocks by a less circuitous way, were herding together. Pressed by Mrs Pringle herself, a governess, and two children’s nurses, everybody was busy eating. Little boys were holding chops over the coals on sticks specially sharpened by the coachmen, so that an incense of green bark mingled with the odour of sacrificial fat. Girls blew on hot tea, and dreamily watched circles widen. Ladies, suffering the occasion on carpet stools that had been brought out and set amongst the tussocks, were nibbling at thin sandwiches and controlling their shawls.

Now it could have been noticed that the German fellow was still standing at the side of Laura Trevelyan, no longer for protection, rather, one would have said, in possession. He was lording it, and it was by no means disagreeable to the girl, who accepted food without, however, looking up.

Only once she did look down, upon his wrist, where the cuff cut into it, pressing the little dark hairs.

‘As I was saying, a slight domestic upheaval,’ confided Mrs Bonner, made more mysterious by the passes of her recalcitrant shawl. ‘More than slight, perhaps. Time will decide. Rose Portion has given us cause for anxiety.’

‘Oh, dear,’ groaned Mrs Pringle, as if she were suffering internally.

And waited.

Mrs Bonner caught the shawl.

‘I am in honour bound, Mrs Pringle, not to go into details.’

But she would, of course.

Both ladies nursed this prospect deliciously on their unreliable stools.

Then Laura Trevelyan saw Rose standing in her brown dress, her knuckles pressed tight together. The harelip was fearful.

‘No, thank you, Mr Voss,’ Laura said. ‘Not another crumb.’

And with that decision, she moved, so that she was standing somewhere else, protected by smeary children.

‘Look, Laura,’ said Jessie Pringle, ‘how I have polished the bone of my chop.’

‘She is a dog,’ said Ernest.

Then there were blows.

Laura was glad of the opportunity to act, and was at once separating, admonishing, soothing, with the tact and firmness expected of her. She was saying:

‘Now, Jessie, there is no need to cry. Look. Wash your fingers in this tin of warm water, and dry them on your handkerchief. There. Everybody knew you to be a sensible girl.’

But Rose Portion was bringing hot water in the little brass can, which she wrapped in a towel, as if it had been precious, and left in the basin of the washing-stand. Rose Portion took the brush and brushed Laura’s hair, holding it in one long switch, brushing it out and down, in long sweeps. Sometimes the back of the brush thumped on Rose’s big breasts, as she brushed monotonously on.

Laura Trevelyan looked. It was impossible not to see the German where he was standing in the grey scrub, his dry lips the moister for butter, fuller in that light. The light was tangling with his coarse beard.

Ah, miss, said Jack Slipper, you have come out for a breather, well, the breeze has got up, can you hear it in the leaves? Whatever the source of the friction of the bamboos, it usually sounded cooler in their thicket. But in summer there were also the murmurous voices of insects, and often of men and women, which would create a breathlessness in that corner of the garden. Full moonlight failed to illuminate its secrets. There was a hot, black smell of rotting. The silver flags, breaking, and flying on high, almost escaping from their lacquered masts, were brought back continually by the mysterious ganglion of dark roots.

‘Come now, Laura,’ said Mrs Pringle, ‘many hands make light work. There are all these things to collect. We shall be late, as it is, for the children’s baths,’ she added, consulting a small watch in blue enamel suspended from her person by a little chain.

Laura Trevelyan had held back, dreaming, in her moss-green jacket. She was rather pale. Little points of perspiration glittered on her forehead, at the roots of her hair. In less oblivious company, her shame might have become exposed. As it was, she received Mrs Pringle’s suggestion with relief. She began to help Miss Abbey, the governess, to gather forks into bundles, scrape plates, wrap remainders. In this way she was able to avoid actual sight of the German, even if her mind’s eye dwelt on the masculine shape of his lips, and his wiry wrist with the little hairs. By moving still faster, she could perhaps destroy these impressions. So she did, in a fury of competence. He was terribly repulsive to her.

And the journey home was even more oppressive than the journey out, for Uncle had been added to those already in the enclosed carriage. He was all jokes, now that he need not be ashamed of Voss. He loved the German when he could openly admire the purpose for which the latter had been bought. He would tap his protégé on the knee, both to emphasize ownership, and to assist language.

But Voss grunted, and looked sideways out of the window. They were all tired of one another, all except Mr Bonner, one of those fleshy men who never for a moment suffer the loss of a dimension.

When they reached that place where the road turned into Potts Point, Voss at once edged forward, and said:

‘I will alight here, if you please.’

‘No, no, Voss,’ Mr Bonner protested, with that congestion of enthusiasm which suggests a throttling. ‘Stay with us till we reach the house. Then Jim will drive you to your lodgings.’

Regrettably, his kind offer sounded something like a command.

‘It is unnecessary,’ said Voss, wrestling with the wretched carriage door.

The sash was against him. He was tearing his nails.

Mrs Bonner began to make some sound that vaguely signified distress.

‘If you halt the carriage, I will descend here,’ repeated Voss, from the region of his knotted throat.

He was desperate to escape from that carriage.

Then Mr Bonner, by shouting, perhaps even by oaths, did attract the attention of Jim Prentice on the box, and as the vehicle stopped, himself leaned forward to touch with a finger the door that delayed the German’s freedom.

The trapped crow stalked out. Although rusty and crumpled, he had triumphed, and the last blaze of evening light will help enlarge most objects to heroic proportions. The man would be ludicrous, Laura saw, if it were not for his arrogance; this just saves him, terrible though it is. His eyes were glittering with it in the mineral light of evening.

‘I thank you for the pleasant Ausflug,’ he began, but struck his hands together in frustration; ‘for the pleasant day, Mrs Bonner,’ he added.

He had not quite escaped. Round him, words continued to writhe.

Aunt Emmy was, of course, charmed, and formed her mouth into several appropriate shapes.

Uncle, who was under the impression that foreigners understood only what was shouted at them, proceeded to mutter his views on a certain individual.

‘I will communicate with you, Mr Bonner,’ said Voss, looking in all other directions, ‘on any matter of importance. The time is now so short for me to impose upon your goodness.’

He was smiling slightly.

‘If I have been a burden.’

Everybody was astounded but Voss, who seemed to be enjoying himself. He was drinking down the evening air, as if no one could appreciate what he had suffered. Even his nostrils despised.

‘I thank you again,’ he said, completing some pattern of formality significant only to himself.

And did bow.

To himself, Laura saw.

All this queerness was naturally discussed as the carriage crunched onward, and the German, walking into the sunset, was burnt up. In the carriage three people were talking. Three held innocent opinions. The fourth was silent.

Laura did not speak, because she was ashamed. It was as if she had become personally involved. So the sensitive witness of some unfortunate incident will take the guilt upon himself, and feel the need to expiate it. So the young woman was stirring miserably in her stuffy corner, and would have choked, she felt, if they had not arrived, driving in sudden relief under the hollow-sounding portico. It was necessary, she knew, to humiliate herself in some way for the German’s arrogance. She could feel her nails biting her own pride.

Then Rose Portion, who had been waiting for them in the dusk, came out and opened the carriage door, and let down the little step for the masters’ feet.