Voss

4

FEW people of attainments take easily to a plan of self-improvement. Some discover very early their perfection cannot endure the insult. Others find their intellectual pleasure lies in the theory, not the practice. Only a few stubborn ones will blunder on, painfully, out of the luxuriant world of their pretensions into the desert of mortification and reward.

To this third category belonged Laura Trevelyan. She had been kept very carefully, put away like some object of which the precious nature is taken for granted. She had a clear skin, distinction, if unreliable beauty. Her clothes were soothing, rather moody, exactly suited to her person. No one in that household could write a more appropriate note on occasions of mourning, or others calling for tact, in that version of the Italian hand which courts the elegant while eschewing the showy. She was the literate member of the family, even frighteningly so, it seemed to the others, and more by instinct than from concentrated study. Not that the merchant had denied his girls the number of governesses requisite to their social position, and the French Mademoiselle, and the music master, it need not be added. The niece’s knowledge of the French tongue, modest, though sufficient, was terribly impressive to some, and on evenings when her aunt entertained, she would be persuaded to perform, with admirably light touch, one of the piano pieces of Mendelssohn or Field.

If she was a prig, she was not so far gone that she did not sometimes recognize it, and smart behind the eyes accordingly. But to know is not to cure. She was beset by all kinds of dark helplessnesses that might become obsessions. If I am lost, then who can be saved; she was egotist enough to ask. She wanted very badly to make amends for the sins of others. So that in the face of desperate needs, and having rejected prayer as a rationally indefensible solution, she could not surrender her self-opinion, at least, not altogether. Searching the mirror, biting her fine lips, she said: I have strength, certainly, of a kind, if it is not arrogance. Or, she added, is it not perhaps — will?

One morning, while the curtains were still keeping the sun at bay, Laura Trevelyan set her mouth, and resolved to exercise that will in accepting the first stages of self-humiliation. As she had been giving the matter thought since quite an early hour, all the young woman’s pulses were beating and her wrists were weak by the time Rose arrived to admit the light.

The girl watched the thick arms reach up and jerk in that abrupt manner at the curtains. Then, when the room had received back its shape, and the can of water was standing in the basin, and one or two things that had fallen had been picked up and set to rights, the woman said:

‘You have not slept, miss.’

‘I would not say that I had not slept,’ Laura replied. ‘How can you tell, Rose?’

‘Oh, I know. There are things you can tell by knowing.’

‘You are determined to mystify me,’ laughed the girl, and immediately frowned to think how she must run the gauntlet of her servant’s intuition.

‘I am a simple woman,’ Rose said.

Laura held her face away. The yellow light was blinding her.

‘I do not know what you are, Rose. You have never shown me.’

‘Ah, now, miss, you are playing on my ignorance.’

‘In what way?’

‘How am I to show you what I am? I am not an educated person. I am just a woman.’

Laura Trevelyan got up quickly. She would have liked to open a cupboard, and to look inside. Her feelings would not have been disturbed by such a reasonable act and sight of inanimate objects. However, nothing important is easy. So she looked instead at Rose, and saw her struggling lip. In moments of distress, or even simple bewilderment, this would open like a live wound.

They were both exposed now in the centre of the thick carpet. They could have been trembling for a common nakedness. In the girl’s case, of course, her nightgown was rather fine.

‘There, miss,’ said Rose, covering her mistress with usual skill. ‘The mornings are still fresh.’

The two women were touching each other, briefly.

‘They are not really,’ shivered Laura Trevelyan, for whom all intimacies, whether of mind or body, were still a plunge.

Then she walked across the room, combing out her hair that the night had thickened.

‘Rose,’ she said, ‘you must see that you take care now. That you do nothing unnecessarily strenuous. That you do not lift weights, for instance, nor run downstairs.’

She was ashamed of the clumsiness, the ugliness of her own words, then, of their coldness, but she had not learnt to use them otherwise. She was, in final appraisal, without accomplishment.

‘You must not hurt yourself,’ she said ridiculously.

Rose was breathing. She was arranging things.

‘I’ll not harm,’ she said at last. ‘I have come through worse. I have been laid right open in my time.’

She did not expect exemption.

‘I shall resist all attempts to make me suffer, or to bring suffering to others,’ said the younger woman, to whom it was still a matter of will and theory.

The rather strange situation made her speak almost to herself, or to an impersonal companion. Since she had begun to prise the other’s close soul, she herself was opening stiffly.

‘I did not expect to suffer,’ Rose Portion was telling. ‘I was a young girl, in service in a big house. I was in the stillroom, I remember, under as decent a woman as ever you would be likely to find. It was a happy place, and in spring, when the blossom was out, you should have seen it, miss. It was the picture of perfection. That was it, perhaps. I did trust, and expect over much. Well, it is all past. I loved my little boy that was given me, but I would not have had him suffer. That was what they did not understand. They said it was a thing only a monster could have done, and all considered, I was getting off light with a sentence of transportation for life. But they had not carried my little boy, nor lain with all those thoughts, all those nights. Well, there it is. I was not meant to suffer, not then, or now — you would have said. But sufferin’ creeps up. And in different disguises. You do not recognize it, miss. You will see.’

Soon after this, as she had done what she had to do, the squat woman went out of Laura Trevelyan’s room. The girl remained agitated, moved certainly by Rose’s story, but disturbed rather by dangers she had now committed herself to share.

So that when Aunt Emmy, in the days that followed, was going about the house, wondering what should be done about Rose, her niece did not know.

‘You are no help at all, Laura,’ Mrs Bonner complained, ‘when you are usually so bright, and full of clever ideas. Nor can I expect help from Mr Bonner, who is too upset by that German. If it is not one thing, it is another. I must admit I am quite distracted.’

‘We shall think, Aunt,’ said Laura, who was rather pale.

But thought, which should be an inspiration, was clogging her.

Laura is becoming heavy, Aunt Emmy said, and would add this worry to her collection.

Then, she hit upon a cure, so simple, but infallible, at least to Mrs Bonner, for to cure herself was to cure her patients. She would give a party. It would revive all spirits, soothe all nerves, even the frayed German ones. For Mrs Bonner loved conviviality. She loved the way the mood would convey itself even to the candle-flames. She loved all pretty, coloured things; even the melancholy rinds of fruit, the slops of wine, the fragments of a party, recalled some past magic. Whether as a prospect or a memory, a party made her quite tipsy — figuratively speaking, that is — for Mrs Bonner did not touch strong drink, unless on a very special occasion, a sip of champagne, or on hot evenings, a glass of delicious brandy punch, or sometimes of a morning, for the visitor’s sake a really good madeira, or thimbleful of dandelion wine.

‘Mr Bonner,’ she now said, seriously, though holding her head upon one side in case she might not be taken so, ‘it is but a week, do you realize, to the departure of Mr Voss and his friends. It is only right that you, in your position, and we, naturally, as your family, should celebrate in some way. I have been thinking,’ she said.

‘Eh?’ said her husband. ‘I am not interested in that German except in so far as I am already committed. Let the relationship remain plain; it is so distasteful to me. It would be hypocritical to add trimmings, not to mention the expense.’

‘I understand,’ said Mrs Bonner, ‘that he is something of a disappointment. But let us leave aside the character of Mr Voss. I would like to see you do justice to yourself, and to this — I cannot very well refer to it as anything but an event of national significance.’

She did not know she had achieved that, until she had, and then was very pleased.

Her husband was surprised. He shifted.

After coughing a confident though genteel cough, Mrs Bonner produced the flag she intended to plant upon the summit of her argument.

‘An historical occasion,’ she pursued, ‘made possible by the generosity of several, but which you, originally — do not deny it, my dear — which you, and only you, inspired!’

‘It remains to be seen,’ said Mr Bonner, more kindly because it concerned himself, ‘whether it was an inspiration or calamity.’

‘I thought now,’ said his judicious wife, ‘that we might give a little party, or not a party, something simple, a pair of birds and a round of beef, with a few nice side dishes. And a good wine. Or two. And as for the friends of Mr Voss, I do not intend to invite all and sundry, for some, I understand, are just common men, but one or two who are comme il foh, and used to mix with ladies and young girls. Belle has a new dress that nobody has seen, and Laura, of course, can look charming in anything.’

So Mr Bonner was gently pressed, and finally kissed upon the forehead.

Mrs Bonner conceived her plan upon the Friday, exactly one week before the projected departure of the expedition by sea to Newcastle. On Friday afternoon, Jim Prentice, after saddling Hamlet, took the cards, that were in Miss Trevelyan’s fine Italian hand, to drop at the lodgings of Mr Voss and Mr Topp, and those of Mr Palfreyman, who, it had been decided, might be considered comme il foh. And there was a Miss Hollier, whom people invited when they were in a scrape for an extra lady. Miss Hollier was a person of modest income and middle age, but of really excellent spirits. Well trained in listening to others, she would sometimes pop such good ideas into their heads they would immediately adopt her suggestions as their own. Moreover, and appropriate to the occasion, the lady was a distant connexion of Mr Sanderson of Rhine Towers, one of the patrons of the expedition. Lastly, there was Tom Radclyffe. If the Lieutenant had been omitted from Mrs Bonner’s list of those who were to receive cards, it was because he remained in a state of almost constant communication with a certain person. It was taken for granted Tom would come.

These, then, were the guests who were bidden for the following Wednesday.

It proved to be a night of drifting airs. Belle Bonner had come, or floated into her cousin’s room to show her dress of light. It was a dress of pure, whitest light, streaming and flashing from her. Her hands and arms would pass through those shafts of light to smooth out any encroaching shadow. Her hair, too, shone — her rather streaky, but touching hair, still drenched with sunlight, and smelling of it.

‘Oh, Belle!’ said Laura, when she saw.

The girls kissed with some tenderness, though not enough to disarrange.

‘But it does not fit,’ said Belle, becoming desperately herself. ‘I shall split open. You will see.’

‘And ruin us!’ Laura cried.

They were both laughing, unreasonably, dreadfully, deliriously. They could well die of it.

‘At least Miss Hollier will not see,’ Laura burst out, too loud, through her laughter; ‘not if you were standing in your worst chemise and petticoat. She is far too well brought up.’

‘Stop, Laura!’ Belle begged.

She was mopping herself.

‘I insist, Laura. You really must. Perhaps not Miss Hollier, but somebody else. I do believe Mr Voss notices everything.’

Almost immediately it was felt they must remember their age, and they set to work, sighingly, to repair themselves.

If Laura would be noticed less than Belle, it was because she was beautiful on that night. This became slowly clear. Belle ravished, like any sudden spring flower, but Laura would require her own climate in which to open. She wore a dress of peacock colours that did not take to full light, but brooded and smouldered in subtle retirement, which did, in fact, invite her arms and shoulders to emerge more mysteriously. Her head was a jewel, but of some dark colour, and of a variety such as people overlook because they have not been taught to admire.

‘Let us go down,’ Belle suggested, ‘before Mamma is there, and have a quiet sip of something to give us courage.’

So the two girls, smelling of French chalk and lavender water, were winding down. It was a heady staircase. They had pinned clusters of camellias at their breasts, and were holding themselves rather erect, lest some too sudden gesture or burst of emotion should turn the petals brown.

That night anything could happen. Two big lamps had transformed the drawing-room into a perfect, luminous egg, which soon contained all the guests. These were waiting to be hatched by some communication with one another. Or would it not occur? The eyes appeared hopeful, if the lids were more experienced, themselves enclosed egg-shapes with uncommunicative veins. All the while the white threads of voices tangled and caught. Men’s voices that had come in, toughened the fibre. But nobody said what they intended to say. This was sidetracked, while the speakers stood smiling at what had happened, and adopted, even with traces of sincerity, the words which had been put into their mouths. It was still rather a merciless dream at that early hour.

Until Tom Radclyffe, who was blazing with scarlet, and whose substantial good-fortune was the best reason for self-confidence, burst out of the awkward dream and took reality by the hand. The stuff of her surprising dress caused him little shivers of devotion as it brushed along his skin. Everyone else, sharing his devotion, was agreed that Belle was the belle.

Even Mr Voss suffered a pang for cornfields and ripe apples.

‘Seldom have I regrets for the Germany I have left,’ he remarked to Miss Hollier, ‘although I will suddenly realize I have a yearning to experience another German summer. The fields are sloping as in no other land, with such slow sweeps. The trees are too green, even under dust. And the rivers, ah, how the rivers flow!’

So that the excellent Miss Hollier felt quite melancholy.

Then Mrs Bonner, who had a surprise for Mr Voss, brought a book she had remembered, that some governess had left, it could have been, of German verses, evidently.

‘There,’ she said, with an amusing laugh, as if patting bubbles upward.

‘Ach,’ breathed Voss, down his nose.

But he seemed pleased.

He began to read. It was again a dream, Laura sensed, but of a different kind, in the solid egg of lamplight, from which they had not yet been born.

Voss read, or dreamed aloud:

‘Am blassen Meeresstrande

Sass ich gedankenbekümmert und einsam.

Die Sonne neigte sich tiefer, and warf

Glührote Streifen auf das Wasser,

Und die weissen, weiten Wellen,

Von der Flut gedrängt,

Schäumten und rauschten näher und näher.…’

He closed up the book rather abruptly.

‘What is it, Mr Voss?’ Mrs Bonner asked. ‘You must tell,’ she protested.

‘Ah, yes,’ begged Miss Hollier. ‘Do translate for us.’

‘Poetry will not bear translation. It is too personal.’

‘That is most unkind,’ said Mrs Bonner, who would pursue almost morbidly anything she did not understand.

Laura now turned her back. She had touched hands with the German, and exchanged smiles, but not those of recognition. She did not wish for this. He was rather sickly when moved by recollection of the past, as he was, in fact, when collected and in the present. She was glad when the dinner was served and they could give their attention to practical acts.

All went well, although Cassie had overdone the beef. Mr Bonner frowned. Dishes were in profusion, and handed with unexpected skill, by Rose Portion, whose condition was not yet obvious beneath her best apron, and an elderly man, lent by Archdeacon Endicott who lived in the same road. The Archdeacon’s man was of awful respectability, in a kind of livery and cotton gloves, and only once put his cotton thumb in the soup. In addition to these, there was the invisible Edith, whose oo-errr was heard once from behind doors, and who would gollop the remainders of puddings before walking home.

Voss ate with appetite, taking everything for granted. That is how it ought to be, Laura had to tell herself. She was annoyed to find that she was fascinated by his method of using a knife and fork, and determined to make some effort to ignore.

‘I would be curious to read little Laura’s thoughts,’ remarked Tom Radclyffe, with the pomposity of one who was about to become her cousin.

It did amuse him to be hated, at least by those who could be of no possible use.

Laura, however, would not hate just then.

‘If I take you at your word, you may regret it,’ she replied, ‘because I have been thinking of nothing in particular. Which is another way of saying: almost everything. I was thinking how happy one can be sitting inside a conversation in which one is not compelled to take part. Words are only sympathetic when they are detached from their obligations. Under those conditions I am never able to resist adding yet another to my collection, just as some people are moved to make collections of curious stones. Then, there was the pretty dish of jellied quinces that I saw in the kitchen this evening as I passed through. Then, if you still wish to hear, Miss Hollier’s garnet brooch, which I understand she inherited from an aunt, and which I would like to think edible, like the quinces. And there was the poem read by Mr Voss, which I did understand in a sense, if not the sense of words. Just now, it was the drumstick on Mr Palfreyman’s plate. I was thinking of the bones of a dead man, uncovered by a fox, it was believed, that I once saw in Penrith churchyard as I walked there with Lucy Cox, and how I was not upset, as Lucy was. It is the thought of death that frightens me. Not its bones.’

Mrs Bonner, who feared that the limits of convention had been exceeded, was making little signs to her niece, using her mouth and the corner of a discreet napkin. But Laura herself had no wish to continue. It was obvious that her last remark must be the final one.

‘Dear me, if these educated young ladies are not the deuce,’ said Tom Radclyffe, whose turn it was to hate.

Ideas disturbed his manliness.

‘I am sorry, Tom, to have given you literally what you asked for,’ Laura said. ‘You must take care not to run the risk in future.’

‘I am sorry that you should have such horrid thoughts on a jolly occasion. The bones of a dead man in a grave!’ Miss Hollier said. ‘Mr Palfreyman has been telling me such delightful, really interesting and instructive things about birds.’

Mr Palfreyman appeared sad.

He was, in fact, happiest with birds, and realized this as he watched Miss Hollier’s shining teeth. But he was wrong, he knew, unreasonably so. Some people cannot bear to touch the folded body of a dead bird. He, on the other hand, must learn to overcome his impulse to retreat from kind hands.

Puddings had by this time been brought: brittlest baskets of caramel, great gobbets of meringue. When the big, thick, but somehow thoughtful woman who was waiting at table set down among them the jellied quinces, Voss saw that it was indeed a pretty dish, of garnet colour, with pale jade lozenges, and a somewhat clumsy star in that same stone, or angelica.

Then the German looked across at the niece, who had been avoiding him all the evening, it seemed, though until that moment he had not felt the need for her attention. Without intending it sardonically, he smiled and asked:

‘If you have not understood the poem by the words, how would you interpret it?’

Laura Trevelyan frowned slightly.

‘You yourself have made the excuse that must always be made for poetry,’ she replied.

Just at that moment, under the influence of discussion, everyone else at the table was deaf to the German and the young woman, who were brought together for the first time since the Pringles’ picnic, rather more closely than Laura would have wished.

However, she now returned his smile, and said:

‘You must allow me my secrets.’

He wondered whether she was being sincere, or just womanly, but as he had drunk several glasses of wine, he did not really care. Her head, he noticed, was glittering in its setting of candlelight, either with the hysteria of a young girl, or that sensibility at which she hinted, and which he rather despised unless he could learn its secrets.

He kept looking at her on and off, while she bent her head and knew that some kind of revelation must eventually take place, terrible though the prospect was.

In the course of ritual, after the ladies had abandoned the gentlemen to the port and everyone had been bored for a little, Mrs Bonner pounced on Mr Topp and smiled and asked: Would he? It was obvious that he had been invited only for this moment. As it was invariably the case, he was neither surprised nor offended, but addressed himself to the pianoforte with such relief that the susceptibilities of his hosts would have been hurt if they had but considered. Mrs Bonner, however, was creating groups of statuary. This was her strength, to coax out of flesh the marble that is hidden in it. So her guests became transfixed upon the furniture. Then Mrs Bonner, having control, was almost happy. Only, thought and music eluded her. Now she was, in fact, standing in her own drawing-room with this suspicion on her face, of something that had strayed. If she could have put her finger on it, if she could have turned infinity to stone, then she would have sunk down in her favourite chair, with all disposed around her, and rested her feet upon a little beaded stool.

Mr Topp played and played. He would have continued all night, as he had developed the vice of playing for himself, but Miss Hollier had to be pressed, and was eventually persuaded to execute that piece in which she crossed her wrists several times, ever so gracefully, above the keys.

Then Tom Radclyffe must stand up to sing Love’s Witchcraft. He had a high bass. Real fervour filled his scarlet coat, and caused some vibration amongst the objects in glass and china on the shelves of cabinets. Belle Bonner’s skin had turned a cloudy white.

‘Maiden look me in the face,’

the Lieutenant sang;

‘Steadfast, serious, no grimace!

Maiden, mark me, now I task thee

Answer quickly, what I ask thee!

Steadfast look me in the face.

Little vixen, no grimace!’

Now Belle was neither flesh nor marble. She was enveloped in, and had herself become, a cloud of the most assiduous tenderness. To have remained in such a trance, of cloud wrapping cloud, would have been perpetual bliss, but her practical nature led her out and away, and she was walking along the gravel paths surrounding a house in which she was established, with every sign of prosperity and elegance — and Love; Love, of course. Love approached along that same gravel, smelling familiarly of macassar, or, assuming another of his forms, stroked with the skins of seven babies. Until Belle blushed, and those who had been looking for it, saw.

By that hour, before the tea-things were brought in, the lamplight, which in the beginning had been a solid, engrossed yellow, was suffused with the palpitating rose colours. The petals that had fallen on mahogany were reflected upward. The big, no longer perfect roses were bursting with scent and sticky stamens. And it was rather warm.

Partly for that reason Laura Trevelyan had gone out through the moths to the terrace where the stone urns were, and where somebody had been crushing geranium, but the heavy air of darkness was, if anything, more distasteful to her than that of the rapt, cloying room. As she strolled she was still attended by the light from lamps. This, however, could not be stretched much farther, and she did hesitate. It was now possible that the usually solid house, and all that it contained, that the whole civil history of those parts was presumptuous, and that the night, close and sultry as savage flesh, distant and dilating as stars, would prevail by natural law.

Drifting in that nihilistic darkness with agreeable resignation, the young woman bumped against some hard body and immediately recovered her own.

‘I beg your pardon, Miss Trevelyan,’ said Voss. ‘You also have come out in search of refreshment.’

‘I?’ said Laura. ‘Yes, it was stuffy. The first hot nights of the season are difficult. But so deceptive. Dangerous, even. A wind may spring up in half an hour from now, and we shall be shivering.’

She was already, despite the fact that they were swathed in a woollen darkness. Down there, round the bay, there was still a rushy marsh, from which a young man who had recently gone in search of mussels had contracted a fever, it was told, and died.

But Voss was not at that moment interested in climatic peculiarities.

To what extent is this girl dishonest? he wondered.

Unaccustomed to recognize his own dishonesties, he was rather sensitive to them in others.

It is disgraceful, of course, Laura realized; I have come out here for no convincing reason. She was defenceless. Perhaps even guilty.

‘I try to visualize your life in this house,’ said Voss, facing the honeycomb of windows, in some of which dark figures burrowed for a moment before drowning in the honey-coloured light. ‘Do you count the linen?’

He was truly interested, now that it did seem to affect him in some way not yet accounted for.

‘Do you make pastry? Hem sheets? Or are you reading novels in these rooms, and receiving morning calls from acquaintances, ladies with small waists and affectations?’

‘We indulge in a little of each,’ Laura admitted, ‘but in no event are we insects, Mr Voss.’

‘I have not intended to suggest,’ he laughed. ‘It is my habit of approach.’

‘Is it so difficult then, for a man, to imagine the lives of poor domesticated women? How very extraordinary! Or is it that you are an extraordinary man?’

‘I have not entered into the minds of other men, so that I cannot honestly say with any degree of accuracy.’

But he would keep his private conviction.

‘I think that I can enter into the minds of most men,’ said the young woman, softly. ‘At times. An advantage we insect-women enjoy is that we have endless opportunity to indulge the imagination as we go backwards and forwards in the hive.’

‘And in my instance, what does your imagination find?’

He was laughing, of course, at the absurdity of that which he expected to be told. But he would have liked to hear practically anything.

‘Shall we go a little?’ he invited.

‘Walking in this darkness is full of dangers.’

‘It is not really dark. When you are accustomed to it.’

Which was true. The thick night was growing luminous. At least, it was possible almost to see, while remaining almost hidden.

The man and woman were walking over grass that was still kindly beneath their feet. Smooth, almost cold leaves soothed their faces and the backs of their hands.

‘These are the camellia bushes Uncle planted when he first came here as a young man,’ Laura Trevelyan said. ‘There are fifteen varieties, as well as sports. This one here is the largest,’ she said, shaking it as if it had been an inanimate object; it was so familiar to her, and now so necessary. ‘It is a white, but there is one branch that bears those marbled flowers, you know, like the edges of a ledger.’

‘Interesting,’ he said.

But it was an obscure reply, of a piece with the spongy darkness that surrounded them.

‘Then you are not going to answer my question?’ he asked.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘that silly claim I made! Although, to a certain extent, it is true.’

‘Tell me, then.’

‘Everyone is offended by the truth, and you will not be an exception.’

That it would take place, they both knew now.

Consequently, when she did speak, the sense of inevitability that they shared made her sound as if she were reading from a notebook, only this one was her head, in which her memorandum had been written, in invisible ink, that the night had breathed upon; and as she read, or spoke, it became obvious to both that she had begun to compile her record from the first moment of their becoming acquainted.

‘You are so vast and ugly,’ Laura Trevelyan was repeating the words; ‘I can imagine some desert, with rocks, rocks of prejudice, and, yes, even hatred. You are so isolated. That is why you are fascinated by the prospect of desert places, in which you will find your own situation taken for granted, or more than that, exalted. You sometimes scatter kind words or bits of poetry to people, who soon realize the extent of their illusion. Everything is for yourself. Human emotions, when you have them, are quite flattering to you. If those emotions strike sparks from others, that also is flattering. But most flattering, I think, when you experience it, is the hatred, or even the mere irritation of weaker characters.’

‘Do you hate me, perhaps?’ asked Voss, in darkness.

‘I am fascinated by you,’ laughed Laura Trevelyan, with such candour that her admission did not seem immodest. ‘You are my desert!’

Once or twice their arms brushed, and he was conscious of some extreme agitation or exhilaration in her.

‘I am glad that I do not need your good opinion,’ he said.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Nobody’s opinion!’

He was surprised at the vehemence of feeling in this young girl. In such circumstances, repentance, he felt, might have been a luxury. But he did not propose to enjoy any such softness. Besides, faith in his own stature had not been destroyed.

He began to bite his nails in the darkness.

‘You are upset,’ he said, ‘because you would like to pity me, and you cannot.’

‘If that were the case, I would certainly have cause to be upset,’ she blurted most wildly.

‘You would like to mention me in your prayers.’

By this time Laura Trevelyan had become lost somewhere in the dark of the garden. But I, too, am self-sufficient, she remembered, with some lingering repugnance for her dead prayers.

‘I do not pray,’ she answered, miserably.

‘Ach,’ he pounced, ‘you are not atheistisch?’

‘I do not know,’ she said.

She had begun to tear a cluster of the white camellias from that biggest bush. In passing, she had snapped the hot flowers, which were now poor lumps of things. She was tearing them across, as if they had not been flesh, but some passive stuff, like blotting-paper.

‘Atheists are atheists usually for mean reasons,’ Voss was saying. ‘The meanest of these is that they themselves are so lacking in magnificence they cannot conceive the idea of a Divine Power.’

He was glittering coldly. The wind that the young woman had promised had sprung up, she realized dully. The stars were trembling. Leaves were slashing at one another.

‘Their reasons,’ said Laura, ‘are simple, honest, personal ones. As far as I can tell. For such steps are usually taken in privacy. Certainly after considerable anguish of thought.’

The darkness was becoming furious.

‘But the God they have abandoned is of mean conception,’ Voss pursued. ‘Easily destroyed, because in their own image. Pitiful because such destruction does not prove the destroyer’s power. Atheismus is self-murder. Do you not understand?’

‘I am to understand that I have destroyed myself. But you, Mr Voss,’ Laura cried, ‘it is for you I am concerned. To watch the same fate approaching someone else is far, far worse.’

In the passion of their relationship, she had encountered his wrist. She held his bones. All their gestures had ugliness, convulsiveness in common. They stood with their legs apart inside their innocent clothes, the better to grip the reeling earth.

‘I am aware of no similarity between us,’ Voss replied.

He was again cold, but still arrested. Her hands had eaten into his wrist.

‘It is for our pride that each of us is probably damned,’ Laura said.

Then he shook her off, and the whole situation of an hysterical young woman. He was wiping his lips, which had begun to twitch, though in anger, certainly, not from weakness. He breathed deeply. He drank from the great arid skies of fluctuating stars. The woman beside him had begun to suggest the presence of something soft and defenceless.

Indeed, Laura Trevelyan did not feel she would attempt anything further, whatever might be revealed to her.

‘For some reason of intellectual vanity, you decided to do away with God,’ Voss was saying; she knew he would be smiling. ‘But the consequences are yours alone. I assure you.’

It was true; he made her know.

‘I feel you may still suspect me,’ he continued. ‘But I do believe, you must realize. Even though I worship with pride. Ah, the humility, the humility! This is what I find so particularly loathsome. My God, besides, is above humility.’

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Now I understand.’

It was clear. She saw him standing in the glare of his own brilliant desert. Of course, He was Himself indestructible.

And she did then begin to pity him. She no longer pitied herself, as she had for many weeks in the house of her uncle, whose unfailingly benevolent materialism encouraged the practice of self-pity. Love seemed to return to her with humility. Her weakness was delectable.

‘I shall think of you with alarm,’ she said. ‘To maintain such standards of pride, in the face of what you must experience on this journey, is truly alarming.’

‘I am not in the habit of setting myself limits.’

‘Then I will learn to pray for you.’

‘Oh dear, I have caught you out doubly,’ he laughed. ‘You are an Apostle of Love masquerading as an atheist for some inquisitorial purpose of your own. My poor Miss Trevelyan! I shall be followed through the continent of Australia by your prayers, like little pieces of white paper. I can see them, torn-up paper, fluttering, now that I know for certain you are one of those who pray.’

‘I have failed to be. But I will learn.’

These simple ideas were surrounded with such difficulties they would scarcely issue out of her inadequate mind.

Then he was touching her, his hand was upon her shoulder-blades, and they realized they had returned into their bodies.

‘Is it not really very cold?’ she said at once, shivering.

‘People will come to look for you. You are lost in the garden.’

‘They are too agreeably occupied.’

‘I have been hateful to you this evening,’ confessed the German, as if it had just occured to him, but she did not resent it; in her state of recovered conviction his defects were even welcome.

‘We were unwise,’ he said, ‘to flounder into each other’s private beings.’

She smiled.

‘I know you are smiling,’ he said. ‘Why?’ he asked, and laughed.

‘It is our beings that pleases me,’ she replied.

‘Is it not expressive, then?’

‘Oh, it is expressive, I dare say, in its clumsiness.’

The beautiful, but rather tentative young girl of that evening, in her smouldering, peacock dress, and the passionate but bewildered soul of the woman that had flapped and struggled in the dark garden in its attempt to rescue (let us not say: subdue) were being dispossessed by a clumsy contentment of the flesh.

‘I have long given up trying to express myself,’ she sighed warmly.

The man yawned.

He knew that he did enjoy the company of this young woman, who was exhausted, and standing as naturally in her shoes as her careful upbringing would allow.

‘When I was younger,’ said this girl, as if it had been a long time ago, ‘I kept a diary. Oh, I wrote down everything, everything. I could not express too much. And how proud I was to read it. Then I no longer could. I would stare at a blank page, and that would appear far more expressive than my own emptiness.’

The man yawned again. He was not bored, however, but very happy. He, too, was rather exhausted by what had happened, but his physical exhaustion was sealing up the memory of it.

‘While I am engaged on this expedition,’ he said, ‘I will, of course, keep a journal, that you will read afterwards, and follow me step by step.’

Even his pride had grown tired and childlike.

‘The official journal of the expedition,’ murmured the young woman, not ironically, to the tired child.

‘Yes. The official journal,’ he repeated, in grave agreement.

It was obvious that she would read it with that interest women took in the achievements of men.

Ah, I must pray for him, she said, for he will be in need of it.

He was inexplicably flattered by her no longer communicative presence in the darkness, and very contented.

Then Mrs Bonner had emerged from the square light, and was puckering up her face at darkness, and trying to read its mind.

She called:

‘Laura! Laura, dear, where are you? Laur-a.’

So that her niece felt it her duty to approach. In leaving, she barely touched Voss upon the hand. He was not sure whether he was intended to go or stay, but followed immediately.

They came out into the light almost together. Almost as if they had been sleep-walking, Aunt Emmy feared.

‘My dear child, you will be frozen,’ she began to complain, and frowned.

But as if she did not see Voss.

‘In this treacherous wind.’

With that wretched man.

She half-arranged an invisible shawl as a protection against her own distress in such a situation.

‘Miss Hollier particularly wants to hear you play the Field nocturne, the one with the pretty tune towards the end, you know, that I so much like.’

They went into the rosy room, where Uncle had built his hands into a gable, and was explaining to Mr Palfreyman, whose eyeballs had grit behind them, the dangerous hold the sectarians, not to say Roman Catholics, already had upon the Colony. It was strange that things spiritual should make Mr Bonner’s flesh swell.

Laura Trevelyan immediately sat down at the piano, and gave rather a flat rendering of the Field nocturne.

The German, who had followed the ladies into the room, stood biting his lips, unconscious of the awkward, even embarrassing attitude of his body, listening, or so it appeared, as if the music propounded some idea above the level of its agreeable mediocrity. Then he went and flung himself down, boorishly, Miss Hollier remarked afterwards to a friend, flung himself upon an upright sofa that did not respond to him. He sat or sprawled there, passing his hand intermittently over his forehead and his closed eyes, and remained more or less oblivious after Laura had left the piano.

So he spent what remained of the evening. He himself could not have told exactly of what he was thinking. He would have liked to give, what he was not sure, if he had been able, if he had not destroyed this himself with deliberate ruthlessness in the beginning. In its absence there remained, in the lit room, a shimmering of music, and of the immense distances towards which he already trudged.