O childhood of moonlight and monkey-puzzles, and the solid statues! How solid, I broke off an arm to prove, and the smell of the wound was the smell of gunpowder and frost. Often the footsteps were not mine that fell along the gravel paths, but yew and laurel intervened; other voices would carry my song out of my control; the faces were not the faces I knew. All were turning gravely in the dance, only I was the prisoner of stone.
When I no longer expected, then I was rewarded by knowing: so it is. We do not meet but in distances, and dreams are the distance brought close. The glossy mornings are trampling horses. The rescue-rope turns to hair. Prayer is, indeed, stronger, but what is strong?
O childhood, O illusions, time does not break your chain of coloured handkerchiefs, nor fail to produce the ruffled dove….
During the reading of the poem, Voss hated and resented it. As mad people will turn in the street, and stare, and enter into a second mind, and mingle with the most personal thoughts, and understand, so this poem turned upon the reader, and he was biting his nails to find himself accused.
If he continued to glance through the notebook, and peer at the slabs of dark scribble, on the smudged pages, with the fluffy edges, he no longer did so with enthusiasm. To be perfectly honest, he did not wish to see, but must. The slow firelight was inexorable.
So his breath pursued him in his search through the blurred book. At that hour of night, sound was thin and terrible. Even the sleepers, who would stir, normally, and call to one another, were turned to rock, a dust of pale sleep lying on their rigid forms, of pale brown.
Then Voss found the poem, and was tearing the book apart, the better to see it. This poem had been headed by the poet Conclusion, in the same rather diffident hand, with a deep, defensive line scored underneath. He had written:
I
Man is King. They hung a robe upon him, of blue sky. His crown was molten. He rode across his kingdom of dust, which paid homage to him for a season, with jasmine, and lilies, and visions of water. They had painted his mysteries upon the rock, but, afraid of his presence, they had run away. So he accepted it. He continued to eat distance, and to raise up the sun in the morning, and the moon was his slave by night. Fevers turned him from Man into God.
II
I am looking at the map of my hand, on which the rivers rise to the North-east. I am looking at my heart, which is the centre. My blood will water the earth and make it green. Winds will carry legends of smoke; birds that have picked the eyes for visions will drop their secrets in the crevices of rock; and trees will spring up, to celebrate the godhead with their blue leaves.
III
Humility is my brigalow, that must I remember: here I shall find a thin shade in which to sit. As I grow weaker, so I shall become strong. As I shrivel, I shall recall with amazement the visions of love, of trampling horses, of drowning candles, of hungry emeralds. Only goodness is fed.
Until the sun delivered me from my body, the wind fretted my wretched ribs, my skull was split open by the green lightning.
Now that I am nothing, I am, and love is the simplest of all tongues.
IV
Then I am not God, but Man. I am God with a spear in his side.
So they take me, when the fires are lit, and the smell of smoke and ash rises above the smell of dust. The spears of failure are eating my liver, as the ant-men wait to perform their little rites.
O God, my God, if suffering is measured on the soul, then I am damned for ever.
Towards evening they tear off a leg, my sweet, disgusting flesh of marzipan. They knead my heart with skinny hands.
O God, my God, let them make from it a vessel that endures.
Flesh is for hacking, after it has stood the test of time. The poor, frayed flesh. They chase this kangaroo, and when they have cut off his pride, and gnawed his charred bones, they honour him in ochre on a wall. Where is his spirit? They say: It has gone out, it has gone away, it is everywhere.
O God, my God, I pray that you will take my spirit out of this my body’s remains, and after you have scattered it, grant that it shall be everywhere, and in the rocks, and in the empty waterholes, and in true love of all men, and in you, O God, at last.
When Voss had finished this poem, he clapped the book together.
‘Irrsinn!’ said his mouth.
He was protesting very gutturally, from the back of his throat, from the deepest part of him, from the beginning of his life.
If a sick man likes to occupy himself in this fashion, he decided.
But the sane man could not assert himself enough in the close cave.
He lay down again on his blanket, and was trembling. His mouth and throat were a funnel of dry leather.
I am exhausted, he explained, physically exhausted. That is all.
There remained his will, and that was a royal instrument.
Once during the night she came to him, and held his head in her hands, but he would not look at her, although he was calling: Laura, Laura.
So a mother holds against her breast the head of a child that has been dreaming, but fails to take the dream to herself; this must remain with the child, and will recur for ever.
So Laura remained powerless in the man’s dream.
11
THAT winter two ships of Her Majesty’s Navy, cruising in Southern waters, put in at Sydney for the purpose of refitting, and at once it seemed to the inhabitants that, for a very long time, their lives had been wanting in some important element. Whether commerce or romance, depended upon sex and temper, but many a citizen, walking at the water’s edge, in good nankeen or new merino, did entertain secret hopes, as the vessels rode woodenly upon the accommodating little waves. If one or two professional sceptics, possibly of Irish descent, remarked that Nautilus and Samphire were insignificant and very shabby, nobody listened who did not wish to; moreover, everybody knew that a coat of paint will work wonders, and that the gallant ships were already possessed of those noble proportions and inspiring lines, which confirm one’s faith in human courage and endeavour, as one young lady recorded in her diary.
It was not long before genteel society was on terms of intimate friendship with the officers from these vessels, assuaging its own boredom and nostalgia for Home, by discovering in the strangers the finest qualities of English manhood. Pregnant though she was, Mrs Pringle, for one, could have eaten the commanding officer of Nautilus, with whom the official bond was Hampshire.
‘I find it difficult to speak too highly of him,’ she confided in Mrs Bonner. ‘Such true tact and admirable firmness are seldom found united in one and the same man. Mr Pringle,’ she hastened to add, ‘has quite taken to him.’
‘I am happy to think you have been so fortunate in your acquaintance,’ murmured Mrs Bonner, who had not yet succeeded in meeting any of the visiting officers.
‘Have you received them in your own house?’ she inquired somewhat languidly of Mrs Pringle.
‘On Friday evening, several of them,’ the latter replied. ‘All jolly, yet respectful young men. We prepared a punch cup, and several cold dishes. It was all so quickly arranged, my dear, there was little opportunity to send over for your girls.’
‘On Friday evening,’ said Mrs Bonner, ‘our girls were otherwise engaged. They had been promised a fortnight to the Ebsworths, although, at the last moment, Laura refused to go.’
Then it was Mrs Pringle’s turn to murmur.
‘And how is the baby?’
Mrs Bonner no longer cared for Mrs Pringle, but had decided it would be politic to keep her as a friend.