Voss

6

OSPREY anchored after what would have been an uneventful voyage, if, during it, Turner had not woken from his drunken sleep in an almost disordered state of mind, babbling of some knife that he had in his possession and must find immediately. After rummaging through his box and tumbling his things, it had come to light, of black, bone handle and rather elegant blade. It was unlucky, he insisted, and come by in strange circumstances. The man was quite frenzied, till he had run to the side and flung the knife into the waves. Then he grew calmer, and the vessel was carried on and reached Newcastle.

It was evening when the party landed. They were met, as arranged, by Mr Sanderson, and taken to an inn on the outskirts of the town, where, he suggested, they would enjoy greater peace. Nobody objected. They were at the mercy of anyone at this stage. Voss drove with Mr Sanderson. They could not yet find living words, but offered dry communications which did not really convey, and were an embarrassment to each other. By the time they entered the yard of the inn, they had chosen silence as a state preferable to conversation. However, neither man was resentful, and they were drawn closer together by having to face the anomalous life of the inn, as they got down into the yellow patches of light, the scent of urine and roasting meats, the barking of a pointer, and a tangle of woolly advice from the inevitable drunkard.

Their sojourn at the inn was of the briefest, for Mr Sanderson had provided horses, and it was his intention that they should proceed the following morning to his station at Rhine Towers, a journey of several days, while such equipment as the party had brought from Sydney would follow by bullock-wagon, at easier pace.

Voss accepted this most reasonable plan, and, on the morning after landing, joined his host in heading the cavalcade that started out from Newcastle. None was more elated than young Harry Robarts, who had never been astride a horse before, and who was soon surveying from his eminence the fat lands of the settlers, and snuffing up the aromatic scents of the mysterious, blue bush, that rose up as they approached, and enveloped, and silenced. Soon there was only the clinking of metal, the calling of birds, and the aching of Harry’s thighs, that ticked regularly as a clock, in hot, monotonous, endless time.

‘Oh, Gawd,’ he moaned and rolled from side to side in attempts to ease himself.

But there was no relief. There were the pastures, there was the bush. There was the hot, red sun of Harry Robarts’ face set in his prickly head.

The country was by no means new to Voss, who had returned by land from Moreton Bay and the North, yet, on this significant occasion, he observed all things as if for the first time. It was a gentle, healing landscape in those parts. So he was looking about him with contented eye, drinking deep draughts of a most simple medicine. Sometimes they would leave the road, from the stones of which their horses’ feet had been striking little angry sparks, and take short cuts instead along the bush tracks, walking on leaves and silence. It was not the volcanic silence of solitary travel through infinity. The German had experienced this and had been exhausted by it, winding deeper into himself, into blacker thickets of thorns. Through this bushland, men had already blazed a way. Pale scars showed in the sides of the hairy trees. Voss was merely following now, and could almost have accepted this solution as the only desirable one. The world of gods was becoming a world of men. Men wound behind him, heads mostly down, in single file. He was no longer irritated by their coughing. Ahead of him sat the long, thin, civilized back of his host.

‘The country round here is divided up, for the greater part, into small holdings. That is to say, until we reach the boundaries of Rhine Towers, and Dulverton, which is the property of Ralph Angus,’ explained Sanderson, who would sometimes become embarrassed by silence, and feel it his duty to instruct his guests.

At places, in clearings, little, wild, rosy children would approach the track, and stand with their noses running, and lips curled in natural wonder. Their homespun frocks made them look stiffer. An aura of timelessness enveloped their rooted bodies. They would not speak, of course, to destroy any such illusion. They stood, and looked, out of their relentless blue, or hot chocolate eyes, till the rump of the last horse had all but disappeared. Then these children would run along the track in the wake of the riders, jumping the mounds of yellow dung, shouting and sniffing, as if they had known the horsemen all along, and always been brave.

Only less timid by a little were the mothers, who would run out, shaking the structure of a slab or wattle hut, dashing the suds from their arms, or returning to its brown bodice the big breast that had been giving suck. In spite of their initial enthusiasm, the mothers would stop short, and stand in the disturbed silence, after mumbling a few guilty words. It was for husbands to speak to emissaries from the world. So the squatters themselves would come up, in boots they had cobbled during winter nights. Their adam’s apples moved stiffly with some intelligence of weather, flocks, or crops. As they had hewn, painfully, an existence out of the scrub and rocks, so they proceeded to hew the words out of a poor vocabulary.

Voss appeared to glow.

‘These are good people. One can see,’ he said. ‘Have they all been free settlers?’

‘Some. Some are emancipists,’ Sanderson replied from over his shoulder. ‘There are both kinds. And there are good and bad of each.’

Because he was a better man than Voss, he also had fewer transitory illusions. Just then, exalted by hopes of regeneration, the German was ready to believe that all men were good.

‘It goes without saying there are such distinctions,’ he agreed, but with the air of suffering of one who has been misunderstood by a superficial companion. ‘If you will look into the skin of a beautiful young lady, you will see perhaps one or two blemishes: a patch of slight inflammation, let us say, the holes of the pores, even a pimple. But this is not to deny the essence of her beauty. Will you not concur?’

‘If it is a question of essence,’ Sanderson replied, with appropriate gravity.

The way he was placed, Voss could see only his host’s back, which was that long, discreet, civilized one already mentioned.

Sanderson was a man of a certain culture, which his passionate search for truth had rid of intellectual ostentation. In another age the landowner might have become a monk, and from there gone on to be a hermit. In the mid nineteenth century, an English gentleman and devoted husband did not behave in such a manner, so he renounced Belgravia for New South Wales, and learned to mortify himself in other ways. Because he was rich and among the first to arrive, he had acquired a goodish slice of land. After this victory of worldly pride, almost unavoidable perhaps in anyone of his class, humility had set in. He did live most simply, together with his modest wife. They were seldom idle, unless the reading of books, after the candles were lit, be considered idleness. This was the one thing people held against the Sandersons, and it certainly did seem vain and peculiar. They had whole rows of books, bound in leather, and were for ever devouring them. They would pick out passages for each other as if they had been titbits of tender meat, and afterwards shine with almost physical pleasure. Beyond this, there was nothing to which a man might take exception. Sanderson tended his flocks and herds like any other Christian. If he was more prosperous than most, one did not notice it unduly, and both he and his wife would wash their servants’ feet in many thoughtful and imperceptible ways.

‘We are how many miles now from your property?’ Voss would ask on and off.

And Sanderson would tell.

‘I am most anxious to see it,’ Voss said invariably.

Places yet unvisited can become an obsession, promising final peace, all goodness. So the fallible man in Voss was yearning after Rhine Towers, investing it with those graces which one hopes to find at the heart of every mirage, entering its mythical buildings, kindling a great fire in the expectant hearth. Its name glittered for him, as he rode repeating it to himself.

Sanderson accepted the eccentricity of his guest’s inquiries, because there was much of which he had been forewarned, even though his informant’s account seemed to diverge somewhat from fact. The German wore a blandness of expression, and appeared to be endowed with a simplicity of mind that was, indeed, unexpected. They rode on. In the clear, passionless afternoons of spring, the landowner wondered what evidence of passion he had anticipated. But his own mind could not conceive darkness. They forded streams in which nothing was hidden. A truth of sunlight was dappling the innocent grass. In this light, he felt, all that is secret must be exposed. But he could not accuse the German of a nature different from his own.

It was true, too, that there was no difference — at that moment, and in that place. An admirable courtliness and forbearance had possessed Voss. He would ride back along the line informing himself on the welfare of his party, point out features of interest, ask opinions, offer suggestions, and return to his position in file behind his host, there to drink fresh draughts of his new friend’s benevolence, for which, it appeared, he had a perpetual thirst.

All but Sanderson were in some way conscious of this.

Harry Robarts accepted gladly that his idol should deceive their host by borrowing the latter’s character. This was not theft, that Mr Voss had demonstrated to be honest. But Le Mesurier and Turner sniffed, as dogs that have been caught before by kind words, and then kicked. And Palfreyman looked and listened, in conflict between the scientific study of behaviour, and his instinctive craving to believe that man is right, even if, to establish this, he would have to prove that he himself had been wrong.

Late in the afternoon of their arrival, the party descended from the hills into a river valley, of which the brown water ran with evening murmur and brown fish snoozed upon the stones. Now the horses pricked their ears and arched their necks tirelessly. They were all nervous veins as they stepped out along the pleasant valley. They were so certain. Which did, indeed, inspire even strangers with a certain confidence and sense of homecoming.

Soon domestic cows had run to look, and horned rams, dragging their sex amongst the clover, were being brought to fold by a youthful shepherd. But it was the valley itself which drew Voss. Its mineral splendours were increased in that light. As bronze retreated, veins of silver loomed in the gullies, knobs of amethyst and sapphire glowed on the hills, until the horseman rounded that bastion which fortified from sight the ultimate stronghold of beauty.

‘Achhh!’ cried Voss, upon seeing.

Sanderson laughed almost sheepishly.

‘Those rocks, on that bit of a hill up there, are the “Towers” from which the place takes its name.’

‘It is quite correct,’ said the German. ‘It is a castle.’

This was for the moment pure gold. The purple stream of evening flowing at its base almost drowned Voss. Snatches of memory racing through him made it seem the more intolerable that he might not finally sink, but would rise as from other drownings on the same calamitous raft.

Sanderson, too, was bringing him back, throwing him simple, wooden words.

‘You can see the homestead. Down there in the willows. That is the shed where we shear our sheep. The store, over by the elm. And the men’s cottages. We are quite a community, you see. They are even building a church.’

Skeins of mist, or smoke, had tangled with the purple shadows. Dogs dashed out on plumes of dust, to mingle with the company of riders, and bark till almost choked by their own tongues. The men were silent, however, from the magnificence through which they had passed, and at the prospect of new acquaintanceships. Some grew afraid. Young Harry Robarts began to shiver in a cold sweat, and Turner, who had now been sober several days, feared that in his nakedness he might not survive further hazards of experience. Even Palfreyman realized he had failed that day to pray to God, and must forfeit what progress he had made on the road where progress is perhaps illusory. So he was hanging back, and would not have associated with his fellows if it had been possible to avoid them.

A woman in grey dress and white apron, holding a little girl by the hand, approached, and spoke with gravity and great sweetness.

‘Welcome, Mr Voss, to Rhine Towers.’ To which immediately she added, not without a smiling confusion: ‘Everybody is, of course, welcome.’

Sanderson, who had jumped down, touched his wife very briefly, and this woman, of indeterminate age, was obviously strengthened. For a second, it was seen, she forgot other duties. Then her husband called, and two grooms came, parting the fronds of the willows, to take the horses.

‘Come on, Voss. They will be seen to,’ Sanderson announced. ‘Are you so in love with the saddle? Come inside, and we shall hope to make you comfortable.’

‘Yes,’ said Voss.

But he continued to sit, thoughtful, with his mouth folded in.

The serpent has slid even into this paradise, Frank Le Mesurier realized, and sighed.

Everyone was expecting something.

‘I did not think to impose upon you to this extent, Mr Sanderson,’ the German released his lip and replied. ‘It would embarrass me to think such a large party should inconvenience you by intruding under your roof-tree. I would prefer to camp down somewhere in the neighbourhood with my men, with our own blankets, beside a bivouac fire.’

Mrs Sanderson looked at her husband, who had turned rather pale.

‘It would not enter my head,’ said the latter.

Since it had entered the German’s, his eyes shone with bitter pleasure. Now the beauty of their approach to Rhine Towers appeared to have been a tragic one, of which the last fragments were crumbling in the dusk. He had been wrong to surrender to sensuous delights, and must now suffer accordingly.

Those to whom such mortification remained a mystery, groaned and shifted in their saddles. Those who were more enlightened, composed their mouths.

‘But the beds are all aired,’ ventured the bewildered Mrs Sanderson.

Voss’s jaws were straining under the hurt he had done to the others, and, more exquisitely, to himself.

It was doubtful whether even the admirable Sanderson could have led them out of the impasse to which they had come, when Palfreyman sighed deeply, and began to crumple forward, and to slide down, which shocked the company into doing something. Everyone was taking part. Everyone breathed relief, except Palfreyman himself.

‘Is he ill?’ asked Mrs Sanderson. ‘Poor man, it could be exhaustion.’

As they carried the unconscious Palfreyman towards the house, Voss related how his colleague had sustained a fall from a horse a short time ago, and although pronounced fit, it was not his personal opinion that Palfreyman was sufficiently recovered to take part in the expedition. Voss kept wiping his neck with a handkerchief, but seemed to find no relief. His explanations assumed the tone of threats.

When they reached the veranda of the house, which was a low-built, slab edifice, in colour a faded yellow ochre, with whitewashed posts and window-frames, a thick-set strong-looking individual appeared and took the body of the unconscious man, although nobody had asked him to do so.

To Mr Sanderson, it appeared perfectly natural.

‘This is Mr Palfreyman, the ornithologist. Who has fainted,’ he explained for the benefit of the stranger. ‘He has not long recovered from an illness. Take him to the corner room, if you will, so that my wife and I shall be near him, and able to give attention.’

Regaining consciousness soon after in a strange room, Palfreyman’s chief concern was to find someone to whom he might apologize. At his pillow was standing rather a thick-set man, to whom he was preparing to speak, when the individual went away.

The incident of the ornithologist’s collapse did at least cut the knot: in the confusion, explanations and comradeship that followed, Voss and Le Mesurier had also accepted quarters in the house, while Turner and Harry Robarts had been led off to the back by the grooms. Nobody referred to the strange objections raised by Voss. It was possible that he himself had forgotten, until such times as he would torment himself by reviving painful memories of all his past perversities.

Such night-growths withered quickly at the roots in that house, in which little children ran clattering and calling over the stone floors, maids came with loaves of yellow bread and stiffly laundered napkins, and dogs were whining and pointing at the smells of baking meats. In the big, low-ceilinged room in which the company was to eat, a fire of ironbark had been kindled. The clear, golden light flickered in patterns on the white cloth, until the advent of several mellow lamps. Finally, Mrs Sanderson herself, who had obeyed vanity to the extent of doing something different to her hair, brought her own contribution of light, and a branch of home-made candles to set upon the mantelpiece.

While they were waiting, their host had poured wine for Voss, Le Mesurier, and himself.

‘From our own grapes,’ he explained. ‘It is one of my aims to become self-supporting.’

And he went on to draw their attention to various bowls and jugs that he had modelled himself in local clay, and on which his wife had painted designs and then fired in their own kiln. If the clear colours and honest forms of their pottery had, in the one case, run, in the other, been distorted by the intense heat in which that had been tried, its poignance had increased.

That was the quality which predominated in the dining-room, in the whole homestead at Rhine Towers, a quality of poignance, for heights scaled painfully, or almost scaled. Incidental failure did not rob the Sandersons of success. It was perhaps the source of their perfection.

‘I do congratulate you for your remarkable achievement here in the wilderness,’ said Voss, whose wine was hot in his mouth. ‘And envy, too.’

Sanderson replied rather harshly.

‘It is for anyone to achieve who wishes to.’

Voss himself knew this.

‘But achievements differ in different men. It is not for me, unfortunately so, to build a solid house and live in it the kind of life that is lived in such houses. That is why’ — and he began guzzling his wine — ‘it is disturbing,’ he said. ‘Honest people can destroy most effectually such foundations as some of us have.’

He put down his glass.

‘I cannot express myself in English.’

Mrs Sanderson, who had sensed more than her husband would allow himself to, looked unhappy. She held her thin, though strong, hands to the fire, so that they looked transparent, and said:

‘It is time the others came.’

Le Mesurier, also seated at the hearth, and sensible of his leader’s mood even as their hostess was, bent down then and picked up a little girl in his arms.

‘What do you like best?’ he asked, with no trace of that cynicism with which he would protect himself from the omniscience of children.

The child answered, out of what had never really been a doubt:

‘Treacle tart.’

She was fingering the skin of his face, gravely, as he held her, and drowning him in her eyes. Of all the enchantments at work in that room, in which the fire was crackling and a dog hunting dream hares, this was perhaps the most powerful — until Angus broke the spell.

It was immediately apparent that this must be Angus who had burst in. He would be forgiven almost anything, even his wealth and his ignorance, by all but the most disgruntled, for handsome, clumsy, oblivious young men, together with thoroughbred horses and gun-dogs, cannot be held responsible. Because his face concealed nothing, withdrawn souls felt guilty for their secrets, and hastened to make amends by coming into the open. He was so amiable, reddish of hair, and ruddy of skin, with a smile that was particularly white.

‘You are late, of course, Ralph,’ Sanderson did not complain; ‘but I suppose punctuality is past praying for.’ For the benefit of Voss, he added: ‘This is a second Ralph. I am the first.’

The thought of being duplicated, even in name, seemed to give great pleasure to the host.

Voss accepted the handsome young man with some caution, remembering that Angus had been promised to his expedition. He did not, however, confess to this knowledge, just as Angus thought better than to mention the agreement that had been reached. Mentally they were stalking round each other as they stood making conversation with their hosts.

‘I think if we ring for Mr Judd,’ Mrs Sanderson finally decided.

The bell echoed through Voss. Remembering the convict to whom Mr Bonner had referred, the German realized it was this that he dreaded most of all.

Presently Palfreyman appeared, walking frailly, his lips composed, but a dark yellow in colour. At his side was the thick-set man who had taken possession of him on arrival.

‘Do you think this is wise?’ Sanderson asked.

‘Perfectly,’ smiled Palfreyman. ‘It was a passing weakness. That is all. I have rested these two hours on a good bed, and Mr Judd has very kindly fed me with rum out of a spoon.’

So the thick-set individual was Judd.

He was there now, not far from Palfreyman’s elbow. He seemed to have appointed himself nurse, which the patient accepted as a natural arrangement.

Judd was introduced to Voss, and the two men shook hands.

The former convict was in every way discreet, which was the more noticeable in anyone of his bulk and strength. He was, in fact, a union of strength and delicacy, like some gnarled trees that have been tortured and twisted by time and weather into exaggerated shapes, but of which the leaves still quiver at each change, and constantly shed shy, subtle scents. He was rather grizzled, deeply wrinkled on the back of his neck. It was difficult to estimate his age, but he was not old. He was quietly, even well spoken. What he knew could have been considerable, though would not escape from him, one suspected, even if pincers were brought to bear. Not that he mistrusted men. Rather had the injustice and contempt that he had experienced during a certain period sealed him up. Risen from the tomb of that dead life, he could not yet bring himself to recognize it as a miracle, and perhaps he would not, and perhaps it was not.

‘Now that we are all here, let us sit down at once,’ Mrs Sanderson suggested. ‘I expect you are hungry, Mr Angus.’

‘I am always hungry,’ said the agreeable young man, but somewhat tight-lipped.

For Mrs Sanderson was disposing her guests at the table.

‘And you, Mr Angus there. And Mr Judd.’

Angus was all vagueness and colour as his hand touched the back of the chair. Whereas Mr Judd seemed possessed of a sad irony for some situation that he had experienced before.

Voss realized then that they were about to sit down with the former convict, and that the prospect occupied the young landowner’s mind to the exclusion of all other thought or feeling. The German wondered whether his own crimes, to which he would admit on days of candour, exceeded those that Judd had committed. Here he might possess, he felt, a salve for some future sore. But he quickly threw it away. His own distaste was rising. He did not object to Judd as a convict, but already suspected him as a man.

‘Come, then,’ said Mr Sanderson irritably, ‘is nobody going to sit down?’

Because he was daring them not to, and because of the respect they bore him as an unquestionably superior being, everybody did sit, while saving up their grievances.

Then the girls were bringing a big soup, and thick, homely plates.

‘I understand Mr Judd is a squatter in these parts’ — the German did not quite accuse.

His face professed kindness, but was prepared to examine any visible wounds.

The emancipist barely turned his eyes, and opened his mouth. He expected his host to save him, which Sanderson hastened to do.

‘Mr Judd has taken up a few acres on our boundary,’ he explained. ‘So you see, we are close neighbours. Fortunately for us, as it means we are able to take advantage of his assistance and advice.’

Judd began to eat his soup, which was of a milky, potatoey consistence, speckled with sweet herbs, and eminently soothing. The convict was taking Sanderson’s defence of him for granted, or so it seemed. Some of those present adjusted their opinion of him from that instant, considering that they themselves would have spoken up. But Judd continued to eat his soup. The opinion of others did not affect him any more.

The company enjoyed their dinner. They had a big, crisp, crinkled saddle of baked mutton, and a dish of fresh, scented plums, and conversation, which by degrees, and with the warmth of wine, sounded agreeable to everyone.

The evening progressed. It would not be one in which to discuss matters of importance. This was implicit in the light and temper of it. Mrs Sanderson kept her guests deliberately on the surface, and began to enjoy herself, remembering parties of her girlhood, with music and games. She became quite flushed, and looked frequently at her husband, who was preventing the collision of their friends by his own methods. He had begun to give some account of their existence at Rhine Towers, since they arrived there on bullock wagons, with all their possessions and their white skins, and were at first burnt, then blistered, finally calloused, but above all, grappled for ever to their land by the strong habits of everyday life that they formed upon it. Many simple images were conveyed most vividly to the minds of his audience, there to stay, as he told of prime beasts, a favourite gun, springs of cold water he had found in the hills, or a wild dog he had failed to tame. Once, treading through the bracken, his horse’s hoof had struck against a human skull, probably that of some convict, escaped from the coastal settlements in search of the paradise those unfortunates used to believe existed in the North.

The narrator presented the skull with such detachment that Ralph Angus could almost feel the downy bracken growing through the sockets of his own eyes.

Judd, too, observed the skull, in silence. His silences, Voss could feel at times, were most formidable.

After an interval, when the company was broken into groups in the tattered firelight, or dozed singly and fitfully between the flickering of eyelids, the German approached the convict, who was seated just a little to one side, and resolved to talk to him. Leaning with his forearm against the wall, and crossing his ankles in prim support, always leaning, and yet with a kind of awkward formality, he said:

‘Tell me, Mr Judd, you own this property, and yet see fit to leave it for so long a period as the expedition will require?’

For he would offer the convict a loophole.

‘Yes,’ answered the solid man. ‘I have an able wife, and two boys who were brought up to hardship.’

No shadow of doubt was revealed in this reply.

‘You must feel very strongly on the necessity for such voyages of discovery,’ said Voss, always looking down at Judd.

The explorer recalled finding on his previous journey a mass of limestone, broken by nature into forms that were almost human, and filled with a similar, slow, brooding innocence.

The convict said:

‘I have had some experience of the country to the north-west. As you have been told. And I consider it my duty to offer my services to the Colony on the strength of that experience.’

‘In spite of certain injustices of the Crown?’

The German was honestly interested in such a conundrum of human behaviour. Although an expert in perversity, this had a strangeness that even he did not understand. So he continued to look at the emancipist, as though their positions were reversed, and Judd were the foreigner in that land.

Judd was moving his lips.

‘In spite of — yes, in spite of it,’ he replied, and did not look at Voss.

‘I shall take pleasure in knowing you better in the course of time,’ the German said.

The emancipist made a wry mouth, and sound of regret or doubt, of which Voss, preoccupied with his own deficiencies, remained unaware. Indeed, the pleasure he promised himself in learning to understand Judd did seem illusory, for rock cannot know rock, stone cannot come together with stone, except in conflict. And Voss, it would appear, was in the nature of a second monolith, of more friable stone, of nervous splinters, and dark mineral deposits, the purposes of which were not easily assessed.

Judd excused himself, saying:

‘I am a simple man.’

Which can read: most complex, Voss suspected.

‘But I am pledged to give of my best. If it is only with my hands. You see, I have received no education worth speaking of. I have not read the books. All my gifts are for practical things. Then, too, I have a “bush sense”, it has been proved. So there, sir, are my qualifications in a nutshell. Oh, I forgot to mention endurance. But that goes without saying. I have survived till now.’

All these words were placed upon one another broodily, like stones.

Voss, who was looking down all the time upon the man’s massive, grizzled head, could not feel superior, only uneasy at times. It was necessary for him to enjoy complete freedom, whereas this weight had begun to threaten him. So he was chewing his moustache, nervously, his mouth quite bitter from a determination to resist, his head spinning, as he entered in advance that vast, expectant country, whether of stone deserts, veiled mountains, or voluptuous, fleshy forests. But his. His soul must experience first, as by some spiritual droit de seigneur, the excruciating passage into its interior. Nobody here, he suspected, looking round, had explored his own mind to the extent that would enable him to bear such experience. Except perhaps the convict, whose mind he could not read. The convict had been tempered in hell, and, as he had said, survived.

Mr Sanderson, who was very sensitive to the limits of human intercourse, now got up, kicked together the remainder of the burnt logs, startled a dog or two, and suggested that his guests should turn in, so that they might inspect his property in the morning with renewed strength. Young Angus at once jumped up, to return as he had come, on horseback, to his own station, and to avoid by an immediate start the company of Judd. For both these men had but ridden in for the evening, to make the acquaintance of the other members of the expedition, which would be camped at Rhine Towers at least a week, resting, choosing horses, and assembling the mules that would act as baggage animals on the journey.

As the hoofs of the horse ridden by Angus spattered away into the darkness, Mr Sanderson stood on the steps of the house with a lantern to guide his other departing guest to the gate. Of the rest, only Voss and Palfreyman were with him, for Le Mesurier, by some radiant discovery of vocation, was helping their hostess carry sleeping children to their beds.

Now Palfreyman, who had been silentest of all those present since his weakness wrested him from their company earlier in the evening, was looking at the stars, and said:

‘I am glad that my knowledge of astronomy is very poor.’

‘Why so?’ asked Voss.

‘To understand the stars would spoil their appearance.’

Voss snorted for the defencelessness of such a statement, which might permanently prevent him from taking Palfreyman into account.

Yet the German himself appreciated a poetry of the stars, as did each of the other men, a different one. It was the simplicity, hence the ridiculousness, of Palfreyman’s words that caused Voss inwardly to rage, and those stars at which he happened to be staring, to flash with cold fire.

‘There will be frost again tonight,’ shivered Sanderson, and the lantern shook.

‘Are you all right then, sir?’ asked Judd, lowering his voice, and touching Palfreyman on the elbow.

‘Why, yes, I was never better,’ said Palfreyman, who had forgotten his earlier indisposition.

The two men were speaking for each other, so the tone of their voices suggested. Something, Voss realized, had been established between them.

Then he almost experienced a state of panic for his own isolation — it was never to him that people were saying good-bye — and he had come down another step in an attempt to see what was in the faces of the convict and the ornithologist.

If he had but known, Palfreyman was remembering how, earlier that evening, the convict had brought him a shallow iron basin of water, and a lump of crude, yellow soap, and although this humble man had waited on him, they had gratefully sensed they were equal in each other’s eyes.

Now Voss, looking from one to the other, was trying to trap their shy secret, but could not succeed. There was a flickering of light, of willow trees.

In consequence, he said, with rather too anxious a warmth:

‘Good-bye, Mr Judd. I will come in search of you one day. Before we leave. I would see your land.’

But the emancipist murmured, and got upon his horse, and went.

Why, then, have I been foolish? the German asked himself; no man is strong who depends upon others. And as he went inside, he thought of the contempt he bore Palfreyman.

He has been rubbed up again in some way, Sanderson saw, as they were saying good night.

Indeed, Voss was scarcely present at any of that ceremony, nor saw the face of his host, who went away at last to his own room.

‘Do you think Mr Voss will be able to endure the sufferings of an explorer?’ asked his wife, who was brushing her hair by candlelight.

‘He subjects himself continually to such mental suffering, he well may,’ the husband answered.

‘But a great explorer is above human suffering, for his men’s eyes, at least.’

‘That is where he may come to grief. Not that his suffering is human. But other men will interpret it as such.’

‘I fear he may be ill,’ Mrs Sanderson ventured.

She came and laid her cheek against her husband’s. That others did not share the perfection of their life would fill her at times with a sense of guilt, and now especially was she guilty, by such golden light.

‘Have you been watching him to that extent?’ laughed her husband.

‘It is not necessary to watch. One can feel it. I wish it were possible to heal him.’

‘Rocks will not gash him deeper, nor sun cauterize more searingly than human kindness,’ said her husband with affectionate sententiousness.

Going to bed in the best room the Sandersons could offer, between exquisitely clean sheets and a lingering scent of verbena, Voss was not long with his body, and those thoughts which had been buzzing like blowflies in his head. At once the hills were enfolding him. All that he had observed, now survived by touch. So he was touching those same hills and was not surprised at their suave flesh. That which would have been reprehensible, nauseating, frightening in life, was permissible, even desirable, in sleep. And could solve, as well as dis-solve. He took the hand to read it out aloud, whatever might be printed on it. Here there were hills, too. They would not be gone around. That is the hill of love, his voice said, as if it had been most natural. That, she pointed, was burnt in the fire of the kiln as I pushed the clay in, and, insignificant though it is, will show for life. Then, roughly, he threw away the hand, which broke into pieces. Even in dreams he was deceived by the appearance of things, and had taken the wrong hand. Here it is, she said without grudge, and brought him another, which had not been baked. It was of white grain. It still had, most terribly, most poignantly, its semblance of flesh. So he shut it up in his bosom. He was afraid to look at it again. Till she bent down from her horse. The woman with the thumping breasts, who had almost got trampled, and whose teeth had been currying black horsehair, began to shout: Laura, Laura. For assistance. All that happens, happens in spite of the horsehair woman, who is, in fact, stuffed. Laura is smiling. They are sharing this knowledge. Then, how are names lost, which the hands have known by touch, and faces, like laborious, raw jugs? Laura is the name. But the name, all is lost, the veil is blowing, the wind. Is it not the same stuff with which the hills are shrouded, and of which the white word is, ach, Musselin, natürlich, but what else?

In the grey light and first house-sounds, Voss woke and lay with his face against the pillow, whose innocent down was disputing possession of him with the day. For a while the man lay there, trying to remember what he had dreamt, but failing. Irritated at first, he then remembered that it is enough to have dreamt. So he continued to lie, and the faded dream was still part of him. It was, he sensed, responsible for the state of complete well-being which possessed him, at least for that hour.

Sanderson himself brought a jug of hot water, and stood it in the basin. It pleased him to wait upon his guests in small ways, once he had learnt that this is the true way. But he did not address the German, as it was still too early. At that hour of day words might defile the pure pleasure of living.

Voss lay and listened to the people of the house begin to go about their business. Some of the girls were exchanging the plain, country dreams they had dreamt. They were giggling, and slapping, and protesting, until their mistress hushed them, and told them to bring brooms and buckets. The man heard the scratch and slop from these utensils as industry increased. He heard the methodical skirts of the mistress ever passing in the passage.

During the days which followed, the healing air of Rhine Towers worked upon Voss almost to the extent his hosts would have wished. In company with the amiable Mr Sanderson, he rode slowly about the paddocks, inspecting horses, mules, and a few head of cattle that they would take North for their requirements. (Additional beasts, a mob of sheep, and a herd of goats were awaiting them on the Downs, at Mr Boyle’s.)

While their leader was thus engaged, other members of the party were occupied in different ways: mending their clothes, writing in their journals, snoozing, casting flies for fish, chewing the long juicy grass, or yarning to the hands and Mrs Sanderson’s disbelieving maids. When Voss appeared, however, they would jump to it, eager to obey what now seemed to them his perfectly reasonable commands. All responsibility was taken from them by his presence, a fact of which they were most appreciative at this stage. They did not have to think, but could screw up their eyes at the sun. He was the leader.

At times the German was quite fatherly, too. This was a part strange enough for him to fancy. Authenticity was added by the first grey hairs which were appearing in his beard; those lines round the eyes were, of course, the signs of kindliness; while the eyes themselves encouraged confidences, of a sort that most men would think twice about giving into the keeping of anyone else.

During the stay at Rhine Towers, some of them did tell the German. For instance, Harry Robarts confessed how his father had hung him by the ankles, with chains, above a fire of sea-coals, to watch the sweat run out of him. Turner was next. The sun slowed his voice dangerously the day he told of the house in Kentish Town, in which, it was suggested, he had lodged, in which some man had died, in which people were looking at himself, and looking at him, on landings and stairs, until he had run away rather than endure their eyes, and had come of his own free will to this country, where others were expiating their sins by force. After he had told, Turner looked at Voss, sideways, but the sun was too hot for him to regret possible rashness just then.

Voss received these confidences, and locked them up quickly, both because they were valuable and because it repelled him to share the sins of human vermin on their infected wall. Yet that same disgust drove him to invite further confidences.

There was one, though, who would not tell. There was Frank Le Mesurier.

The German realized he had seen little of the young man since their arrival at Rhine Towers, and on one occasion went so far as to say so.

‘How you employ your time, Frank, is something of a mystery,’ he said, and smiled.

The young man was embarrassed.

‘What can I say?’ he answered. ‘Whatever I do, I have nothing to hide.’

Because, he had, of course, something.

‘I was joking,’ said the German, kindly. ‘This is a period of rest. You do right to use it.’

But he looked at the young man, who went outside soon after.

Already the evening of his arrival, upon scenes of splendour such as he had known to exist but never met, Frank Le Mesurier had begun to change. The sun’s sinking had dissolved all hardnesses. Darkness, however, had not fallen; it seemed, rather, to well forth, like the beating and throbbing of heart and pulse in the young man’s body, to possess the expectant hills. Only the admirable house resisted. Later that night he had gone outside to watch the light from the lamps and candles, with which every window appeared to be filled. Isolation made that rather humble light both moving and desirable. So the days began to explain. Grasses were melting and murmuring. A child laid its cheek against him. The sun, magnificently imperious, was yet a simple circle that allowed him to enter, with the result that he was both blinded and illuminated.

Finally, on one occasion, he had run into the cool, still room that he was occupying during their visit, and rummaged inside his pack for an old journal which an insignificance of facts had caused him to abandon, and had sat there for a moment with the book held in his daring fingers. So he began.

All that this man had not lived began to be written down. His failures took shape, but in flowers, and mountains, and in words of love, which he had never before expressed, and which, for that reason, had the truth of innocence. When his poem was written, it was burning on the paper. At last, he had done this. But although he was the stronger for it, he put his poem away, afraid that someone might accuse him of a weakness. Often he took it out, and if some of it had died, for then, there opened out of it other avenues of light. It was always changing, as that world of appearances which had given him his poem. Yet, its structure was unchanged.

So, he was truly strong.

Sometimes he longed to reveal his strength to some other man, but was held back from doing so.

Frank is hiding something, Voss saw.

Two days before they were to leave for the North-west, the German was compelled to take a horse and go in the direction in which they said Judd’s selection lay. For some of the distance a faint road led across bare flats. Silly sheep on wooden legs stood and stamped at the horseman from amongst the patches of rusty sorrel. A shepherd was watching from the doorway of his wattle hut. Then the grey road petered out into a bush track, which could have been a shallow watercourse carved between the boulders and the trees. On the night he had returned from Sanderson’s homestead, Judd must have trusted to providence and the instincts of his horse, though the track exhilarated Voss by day. He no longer rode consciously, but was carried onward by sensation. He was touching the bark of those trees that were closest to him (they were, in fact, very close; he could see the gummy scabs on healed wounds, and ants faring through the fibre forests). He was singing, too, in his own language, some shining song, of sunlight and of waterfalls. As the words of the song were few, or those with which he was familiar, they would recur, which stressed their shape, and emphasized their mystical errand in the silence of the grey bush.

Presently the path, which had reached a razorback, bristling with burnt stumps, wound suddenly, violently, through a crop of shiny, black rocks, and plunged down. The saddle shot forward over the horse’s withers. The sober gelding propped on his four legs, before himself starting down. All was, indeed, headed downward. The world was slanted that way, a herd of goats clinging to it. The hoofs of these animals clicked, their horns slashed, their pellets spattered, as they slit the scrub open, or nibbled at the blades of grey grass. Yellow eyes looked only once at the rider. Then the goats were dashing down, down, down, deeper than all else. Soon their bobbing tails were lost.

The horse had faith that paths do lead somewhere, and did follow, but the country itself was legendary. Birds plunged songless through the leaves in heavy flight. Dark birds, mostly. It was strange that such soft things could explode the silence, but they did, most vehemently, by their mere passage through it.

Voss was jubilant as brass. Cymbals clapped drunkenly. Now he had forgotten words, but sang his jubilation in a cracked bass, that would not have disgraced temples, because dedicated to God.

Yes. GOTT. He had remembered. He had sung it. It rang out, shatteringly, like a trumpet blast.

Even the depths lead upward to that throne, meandered his inspired thoughts. He straightened his shoulders, lying back along the croup of the crazily descending horse. It had become quite clear from the man’s face that he accepted his own divinity. If it was less clear, he was equally convinced that all others must accept. After he had submitted himself to further trial, and, if necessary, immolation.

I shall worship you, suddenly said the voice of the cold girl.

It was she who had wrestled with him in the garden, trying to throw him by some Christian guile, or prayers offered.

I shall pray for you, she said then.

‘Jesus,’ murmured the man, making it sweet, soft, pitiful. Because ineffectual.

Then he laughed, and spat it out.

Almost at once, Voss realized that he was righting himself upon the saddle because it was no longer necessary to lean back. They had come to the bottom, and there was a woman looking at him.

The old gelding stood on the flat bottom of a rock enclosure, directly at the foot of the mountain. Almost wholly enfolded by rocky cliffs, this considerable pocket opened out farther on, gently, cautiously, it could be seen, into a blue and noble plain.

But, for the present, it was the foreground that prevailed. In it the woman stood watching, after the manner of animals, like the horse which had come down from the mountain, and the herd of brown goats, which was now gathering gravely on its own ground.

‘I am seeking for a Mr Judd,’ said Voss, to whom alone, of all those present, he himself was not strange.

‘Ah,’ said the woman, stirring. ‘This is his place. But he is not here.’

‘He will come, though.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Oh, yes.’

She was standing in front of a house, or hut, of bleached slabs, that melted into the live trunks of the surrounding trees. The interstices of the slab hut had been daubed with a yellow clay, but this, too, had weathered, and formed part of a natural disguise. Only smoke gave some sign of human occupation, drifting out of the chimney, always taking fresh shapes.

‘You are his wife, perhaps?’ suggested Voss.

The woman, who was bending a twig, waited for it to snap, and said:

‘Yes.’

Thus she realized time was passing.

‘I am in the middle of making the butter,’ she said, or tossed out. ‘I cannot leave it. You can hitch the horse over there.’

She walked, or stamped, round the side of the hut, a heavy woman, in whom purpose took the place of grace. Some of the goats were following her. She went inside a smaller hut, from which there soon came the sound of butter tumbling crumbly in a wooden churn, awkward, but created.

Walking on numb legs, Voss went over presently to the smaller hut. He had every intention of examining the woman as if she had been an animal. She was, though.

By this time she had lifted the butter from the churn, and was pressing and squeezing, squelching with her strong hands, not all as labour, but some for pleasure. There was a milky perspiration still upon the mound of white butter.

‘He will not be long,’ she said, after she had prepared her voice for the adventure. ‘He is down at the lamb-marking with the two boys. They should have finished yesterday, only the dusk come while there was a few left.’

Then she paused. Her throat had contracted. All her strength was in her red hands.

‘Why is the butter white?’ asked Voss.

‘It is the goats.’ She laughed.

Some of these had come in, and were nibbling at the stranger’s buttons.

‘He is going on this great expedition,’ continued the woman after some pause. ‘You know, to find an inland sea. Or is it gold?’ She laughed, because she knew better.

‘Was your husband telling you that?’ the stranger asked.

‘I do not remember,’ said the woman, rubbing at a cheek with her shoulder, at a hair, or gnat. ‘I heard somewhere. People talk. They tell you things.’

‘What will you do when your husband goes?’

‘What I always do.’

She was washing the butter. The lapping of the water would not allow the silence to wrap her for very long. She reduced the butter, then built it up again, a solid fortress of it.

‘I will be here,’ she said, ‘for ever now.’

‘Have you no wish for further experience of life?’

She was suspicious of the words the stranger used. An educated gentleman.

‘What else would I want to know?’ she asked, staring at her fat butter.

‘Or revisit loved places?’

‘Ah,’ she said, lifting her head, and the shadows hanging from it, slyly sniffing the air at some ale-house corner, but almost immediately she dropped the lids over her searing eyes. ‘No,’ she said, sulkily. ‘I do not love any other place, anyways enough to go back. This is my place.’

When she raised her eyes again, he did believe it. Her glance would not betray the honest shape of her possessions. These were her true eyes, looking through ferns at all wonders, animal-black, not wishing to interpret.

‘He is restless, though,’ she continued, brisker, laughingly. ‘He is a man. Men know more about things. And want to know more. He has got a telescope to look at the stars, and would tell you about them if you asked him; they are no concern of mine. The stars!’ She laughed. ‘He is a quiet one. But deep. Sits there by the coals, and feels his knuckles. I would never know all what he knows. Nor would not ask. And make things! He can put a gun together, and a clock, only the clock is broke now for good. It was no fault of his; something essential, he says, is missing. So we watch the sun now.’

She had begun to slap the butter with broad wooden pats, that left a nice grain upon it.

‘Sir, there would be no man more suitable than him to lead this great expedition, not if they had thought a hundred years.’

The stranger heard the thwack.

The woman raised her head again, with that same cunning which had shown itself once before, plumb in the middle of her honesty.

‘Would you, perhaps, have an interest in the expedition, that you are come to see him?’

‘Yes,’ said the stranger. ‘Voss.’

And did click his heels together funny, the woman related ever after.

‘Ah, I heard tell.’

Her voice was trailing.

‘Sir,’ she said, blunt, ‘I am a woman that gets little practice with talkin’, and that is why it has been comin’ out of me by the yard. It is one of my weaknesses. In those days, they would punish me for it. I was often reported. But no one can say I do not work.’

And she hit the butter.

Voss laughed and, looking through the doorway, remarked:

‘Here, I do believe, is the leader of the expedition.’

‘Sir,’ decided the woman, coming round the sturdy bench, ‘that is something he would never claim. It was me, truly, sir. Because all men will lead, some of the time, anyways, even the meanest of ’em. It is in their nature. And some are gifted different, whether it is for shootin’ the wicks off candles, or divinin’ water, or catchin’ rats. You will be well advised to let them have their glory, take it from me.’

Just then her lord approached, accompanied by their sons, a pair of strapping boys, each bare to the middle. All three were spotted with dry blood, and had a smell upon them, of young, waxy lambs.

When the German and the convict had come together, neither was certain how to proceed. The sons of the latter knew that this meeting was no concern of theirs, so stood stroking their bare skins, their faces grown wooden.

The mother had gone inside.

‘I am ridden in this direction, because I have wished to see your place,’ the German began.

‘My place is of no consequence,’ the other answered.

He began to bring the visitor out of earshot of his family, because he was a different person in conversation with acquaintances.

‘I like to see people, how they live,’ said Voss. ‘They become easier to understand.’

The convict laughed, as far as his straight mouth would let him.

‘I am nothing to understand.’

His expression was guilty, but he could also have been pleased.

They walked on through a grove of saplings, that stirred, and bent, and invited strolling. Beyond stood a shed where the family shore their flock in season, very plain, of the same grey slabs, with races for the sheep to enter by, the pens below, of wattle and split posts, as in the Old Country. In one corner there was something resembling a gallows, furnished with ropes and pulleys. It was one of those erections that will rise up against the sky on immense evenings, though the present occasion, with its lambs’-wool clouds and pink sun, was not of that scale.

‘What is that gibbet?’ asked Voss to revive the conversation.

‘Gibbet?’ flashed the man, very bloodshot.

Then, when he had seen, he explained with his usual decent calm.

‘That is where we kill. You can string a sheep up there. Or a beast.’

They continued, as if by agreement, to stroll along the edge of the plain, but in the shadow of the sheltering mountain, until it became apparent the squatter had purposely led his guest to a cleft where a spring welled into a basin of amber water. Black, rocky masses, green, skeleton ferns, the pale features of men, all fluctuated in the mirror of water. Taking off his shirt, Judd got upon his knees, and was washing off the lambs’ blood with a piece of crude soap already there on a rock ledge

He is strong, mused Voss, considering not so much the thick body as some strength of silence of which the man was possessed.

‘When we first come here,’ Judd began dreamily, ‘this was all we had.’ He lathered himself with dreamy soap. ‘I mean, we got here in a dray, along the plain that runs to the South. We had an axe, of course, and a bag of flour, and shovels and things. We had the mattresses. But nothing of importance. I never owned anything of value, except once a gold chain, that got took off me in the street. At home.’

He was lathering his neck and his armpits, which made the dream seem silky, subtler.

‘Then, here was this spring. We found it.’

It was, indeed, as seductive as the lesser jewels. (Is not the poetry of topaz or moonstone more nostalgic than that of diamonds?) Looking at those wet pebbles over which the water was welling, Voss could have put one in his pocket, as if he had been still a boy.

‘I soon was owner of the spring,’ said Judd, soaping himself. ‘I would come and sit here of an evening.’

Circles expanding on the precious water made it seem possible that this was the centre of the earth.

‘Then, you wish to leave all this, all that you have found, and all that you have made, for the possibility of nothing?’ Voss asked, as softly as his foot, which was probing the brown crooks of ferns.

He was very thoughtful.

Judd, who had sluiced himself quickly and brutally, once it had come to that point, had turned round, and was groping for his shirt. The man’s back, the German saw, was laced with scars, of an ugly purple, and the shameful white of renewed skin.

‘Yes,’ said Judd.

He was looking at the water.

‘It is not mine,’ he said, ‘any more than that gold chain, which somebody shook in the street. And when they would take the cat to me, I would know that these bones were not mine, neither. Oh, sir, I have nothing to lose, and everything to find.’

In some agitation, which was only just visible in that thick body and still mind, he began to hurry his visitor away. They walked across the rather harsh bush grass, and skirted a clearing in which, on a rock platform, on a tripod, was the telescope that the convict’s wife had mentioned. It was a somewhat larger instrument than Voss had visualized.

‘What is that?’ he asked, in spite of knowing.

Judd murmured.

‘That is a telescope,’ he said, ‘that I rigged up to look at the stars. But you would not see nothing. It is too weak.’

He hurried the visitor past. He did not wish to communicate anything further, and was, moreover, ashamed of himself for any speculation upon which he had ventured. He was noted, rather, for his practical resourcefulness and physical strength. These were the qualities which had recommended him to Mr Sanderson.

When they had reached hut and horse, Voss held out his hand, and said:

‘We shall assemble at Rhine Towers the day over tomorrow.

‘The day after tomorrow,’ laughed Judd, with strong teeth.

They were liking each other now.

As the light was already bronzed, Voss did not delay in mounting his horse, and was soon climbing the sharp ridge that lay between there and Sandersons’.

That night his hosts told him something of the Judds’ history, in no sustained narrative, however, for what they knew had been put together from fragments, some of which, they admitted, did not fit together. For what crime Judd had been transported, they were not certain, but, on arrival in the Colony, he had been subjected to the greatest brutality and most rigorous kinds of physical labour. He had attempted once to escape, but had been dragged back while still upon the lower slopes of the mountains, through the intervention of God, it would seem, considering the fate of those who remained at large. On another occasion, involved in a mutiny, the ringleaders of which were summarily shot, Judd had been overlooked, again, it would appear, by divine favour. As one of those unfortunate beings who took part in the premature colonization of Moreton Bay, he had met his wife, herself a convict. There were those who doubted whether their union had received the blessings of the Church. If this were true, it had not prevented the tie from enduring many years since the first touch of hands under the giant grasses and teeming moisture of Moreton Bay. The latter part of their sentences the Judds had served more happily in the employment of a Judge-Advocate at Sydney, and it was from his home and upon his recommendation that they had received their pardons.

Voss listened to this with some, though not with great, interest, because he had not discovered it for himself.

But Palfreyman was greatly moved.

‘I will not easily forget,’ he said, ‘my first meeting with the man, and the almost Christlike humility with which he tended one responsible, in a sense, for all his sufferings.’

Voss jerked his head.

‘Your sentiments, Mr Palfreyman, are sometimes stirred to sickliness. However great your sympathy for this individual, it is unreasonable to want to take upon yourself the guilt of a felon, which it must be admitted, he was, to greater or lesser degree.’

Palfreyman looked at Voss.

‘I cannot overcome my convictions, for you, or for anyone, Mr Voss.’

Voss got up. His black boots were squeaking.

‘I detest humility,’ he said. ‘Is man so ignoble that he must lie in the dust, like worms? If this is repentance, sin is less ugly.’

He appeared to be greatly agitated. His skin was a dark yellow in the candlelight. His darker lips were rather twisted.

Palfreyman did not answer. He had composed his hands into an inviolable ball.

Afterwards Voss relented, but most of all towards himself. He was looking about somewhat jerkily in that half-lit room in which his words had fallen. There was a faint tinkling of crystal drops, suspended by silver wires from the sockets of the candlesticks.

Now, in this tinkly silence, he began also to excuse himself after a fashion to Mrs Sanderson, who had averted her face halfway through the foregoing scene, which, obviously, she had found most distasteful.

Ignoring his apologies, she said, however, very kindly:

‘I recommend you to drink a cup of warm milk before you retire to bed. When one is over-tired, it works wonders.’

Voss did not think he would accept her advice, but his eyes were for the moment grateful.

He is a handsome man, of a kind, she saw again, and, I do believe, asking to be saved. She wondered whether she would one day mention this to her husband.

That night Voss dreamed of the goat butter, in which the convict’s wife was about to mould a face. But which face? It was imperative to know. The necessity made his skin run with sweat, long after the inconclusive dream was done, and he lay there turning and tossing in the grey impersonality of sleep.

Next day, their last at Rhine Towers, was a gentle one. On such occasions are last testaments composed. Much was forgiven. The men spent hours conversing with little children. The day had never been more beautiful in that valley, nor had withdrawn more quickly from it in long robes of gold, and blue, and purple.

Just at evening, Voss had gone down to the river of ghostly trout. He was purged since yesterday, possessed even of some of the humility which Palfreyman extolled as a virtue. Standing by the brown waters of the friendly river as it purled and swirled over the stones, and looking back to where the house was fastened, so it appeared, to the bank, with much hopefulness and trust by human hands, the man was drawn nostalgically towards that strength of innocence which normally he would have condemned as ignorance, or suspected as a cloak to cover guile.

So, watching the clumsily-conceived but eventually beautiful house, of which the material structure had begun to dissolve, windows flower with the blurry clocks of candlelight, he could remember the elbows of the young woman as she sat at the piano and played through some insignificant nocturne. Woodenly. For all her grace and superficial self-possession, her cold mouth and warm eye, her small ears, which he now recalled in extraordinary detail, down to the last transparent curve, it was in the quality of rather stubborn innocence that her greatest strength lay. She herself was probably unconscious of what he had but now discovered. So, too, in the baleful garden, when she was indeed a wooden woman, of some ugliness, but strength, her words had struck deeper for their clumsy innocence, and could have delivered, as he had feared, or desired, a coup de grâce.

He continued to think about the young woman, there on the banks of the river, where the points of her wooden elbows glimmered in the dusk. Then, as it was time and he was tired, he climbed the slope and returned into the house.

Later that night, Voss searched in his valise for paper and his box of pens, and, after seating himself within range of a pair of candles, at a convenient little table covered with a cloth that Mrs Sanderson herself had worked, began to write to those of his patrons who wished to be kept informed, whenever possible, of his movements: rather pompous letters, which they expected, and of which he was capable.

Then, when he had done, he took pen again, almost immediately, and was writing with what would have appeared to an observer in a public room as an intensity of purpose, combined, if it were not so contradictory, with a strange lack of personal control.

Voss wrote recklessly upon the neat sheet of paper:

Rhine Towers,

Oct., 1845

Dear Miss Trevelyan,

It will be surprising for you at this stage to receive such a letter from me, but my recollections of you, together with the peaceful beauty of this country where we have even passed several days of idyllic unemployment in the hands of the most considerate of hosts, have compelled me to put pen to paper, and unite by conscious thought and sentiment all that would appear to have been present by fragments in my mind. For, it would seem that, beneath the cares of responsible preparation for this great expedition, and the many agreeable incidents of the journey thus far, I have ever been aware of your friendliness, and sincere interest in our welfare, as well as the great value I myself place upon our connexion, however slight this may present itself at first, and subordinate in the plan of life that fate has prepared for each of us.

I would hesitate to express my feelings in such personal terms, if I were not aware already of your moral strength and discernment, and that you have happily grasped certain grounds of my character. The gifts of destiny cannot be returned. That which I am intended to fulfil must be fulfilled. Consequently, I am aware that a companion must stumble almost daily over the savage rocks of circumstance, but that a companion of strength and judgement, such as I have already perceived to exist, would be forearmed against destruction.

Materially, I have nothing to offer. I am convinced, however, that my mission will be accomplished; this I would pledge against any quantity of gold or bonds. Dear Miss Trevelyan, do not pray for me, but I would ask you to join me in thought, and exercise of will, daily, hourly, until I may return to you, the victor.

In the meantime, also, I would ask your allowance that I may write to your Uncle, Mr Bonner, with necessary formality, for your hand.

So, I have little more to say at this late hour, and tomorrow start by lanternlight. At Jildra, the property of Mr Boyle on the Darling Downs, I can receive your answer, if you are so agreeable. Weigh carefully every possible consideration, but do not overweigh, for Jildra is my last chance!

From Jildra also I hope to write you interesting details of flora and fauna encountered, and to include some account of our behaviour on the march. I will give this now to Mr Sanderson, whose men descend periodically by wagon to Newcastle, and hope that from there it will be dispatched with all possible speed and safety into your kind hands.

Yours most respectfully,

JOHANN ULRICH VOSS

Next morning, while the lamps of friendship hovered touchingly in the dew and darkness, and naked voices offered parting advice, the company began to move northward, with the intention of crossing New England. It was a good season, and the land continued remarkably green, or greyish-green, or blue-grey, the blue of smoke or distance. These were sparkling, jingling days, in which sleek horses, blundering cattle, even the sour-heeled mules had no immediate cause for regret. Men shouted to their mates, their voices whipping the blue air, or else were silent, smiling to themselves, dozing in their well-greased saddles under the yellow sun, as they rubbed forward in a body, over open country, or in Indian file, through the bush. At this stage they were still in love with one another. It could not have been otherwise in that radiance of light. The very stirrup-irons were singing of personal hopes.

As the party advanced, settlers came down to show it kindnesses, or to hang about, if too shy, with every sign of respectful curiosity. The especial object of all these individuals was to catch a glimpse of the foreigner, with whom, of course, even the boldest did not presume to communicate on account of the peculiarities of his speech. However careful he was to imitate their own, the settlers preferred to address a member of his party; the honour of his presence was enough. The foreigner himself remained indifferent. Seated on his horse and intent on inner matters, he would stare imperiously over the heads of men, possessing the whole country with his eyes. In those eyes the hills and valleys lay still, but expectant, or responded in ripples of leaf and grass, dutifully, to their bridegroom the sun, till all vision overflowed with the liquid gold of complete union.

The demands Voss made on his freshly-formed relationship were frequent and consuming, but, although exhausted by an excess of sensuousness, it was a period of great happiness to him and, in consequence, of unexplained happiness to everyone else.