Voss

But write I must. If you, my dear, cannot hope to benefit, it is most necessary for me. I suppose if I were to examine my thoughts honestly, I should find that self-pity is my greatest sin, of which I do not remember being guilty in the past. How strong one was, how weak one always is! Was the firm, upright, reliable character one seemed to have been, a myth? …

The reddish light of morning had begun to flow into the rooms of the sleeping house. The tender rooms were like transparent eggs, from which the protective shell had been removed.

The young woman, whose eyelids were turned to buckram, was writing in her red room. She wrote:

… It would seem that the human virtues, except in isolated, absolved, absurd, or oblivious individuals are mythical. Are you too, my dearest, a myth, as it has been suggested? …

The young woman, whose stiff eyelids had been made red and transparent by the unbearably lucid light of morning, began to score the paper, with quick slashes, of her stricken, scratching pen.

Ah, God, she said, I do have faith, if it is not all the time.

Odd lumps of prayer were swelling in her mouth. Her movements were crippled as she stumbled about her orderly room that the red light made dreadful. She was tearing the tough writing-paper, or attempting to, for it was of an excellent quality; her uncle saw to it that she used no other. So that, in the end, the paper remained twisted up. Her breath was rasping, or retching out of her throat.

Mercifully, she fell upon her bed soon after, recovering in sleep that beauty which was hers in private, and which, consequently, many people had never seen.

*

After a very short interval, it seemed, Belle Bonner was married to Tom Radclyffe, at St James’s, on a windy day. If Mrs Bonner had swelled with the material importance of a wedding, the disbelieving father appeared much shrunken as he supported his daughter up the aisle. How Belle felt, almost nobody paused to consider, for was not the bride the symbol of all their desires? Indeed, it could have been that Belle herself did not feel, so much as vibrate, inside the shuddering white cocoon from which she would emerge a woman. A remote, a passive rapture veiled her normally human face. To Laura Trevelyan, a bridesmaid who did not match the others, there was no longer any means of communicating with her cousin. She would have resented it more, and dreaded the possibility that their intimacy might never be restored, if she, too, was not become temporarily a torpid insect along with everyone else.

So satin sighed, lozenges were discreetly sucked, and the scented organ meandered through the melodious groves of flowers.

Then, suddenly, the bells were beginning to tumble.

Everyone agreed that the Bonner wedding was the loveliest and most tasteful the Colony had witnessed. Afterwards, upon the steps, emotion and colour certainly flared high, as the wind took veil, hair, and shawl, rice stung, carriages were locked together in the crush, and the over-stuffed and excited horses relieved themselves copiously in the middle of the street. There was also an episode with a disgraceful pink satin shoe, which a high-spirited young subaltern, a second cousin of Chattie Wilson, had carried off, it was whispered, from the dressing-room of an Italian singer. Many of the women blushed for what they knew, others were crying, as if for some tragedy at which they had but lately assisted in a theatre, and a few criticized the bride for carrying a sheaf of pear-blossom, which was original, to say the least.

Standing upon the steps of the church, in the high wind, Laura Trevelyan watched her cousin, in whose oblivious arms lay the sheaf of black sticks, of which the flowerets threatened to blow away, bearing with them tenderly, whitely, imperceptibly, the myth of all happiness.

12

ALTHOUGH the past winter had proved unusually wet in almost every district, it was naturally wettest in that country in which the expedition of Johann Ulrich Voss was forcibly encamped, for men are convinced early in their lives that the excesses of nature are incited for their personal discomfiture. Some who survive the trial persuade themselves they had been aware all along, either through their instinct, or their reason, of the existence of the great design, yet it is probable that only the wisest, and most innocent, were not deceived at first.

Now, as winter became spring, the members of the expedition were beginning to crawl out of their cave and watch drowsily the grey water dwindle into yellow slime. They no longer blamed their sins for their predicament. Although physically weak, and disgusting to smell, their importance was returning by human leaps and bounds. Their weak eyes were contending with the stronger sun. Already the higher ground showed green promise of a good season. So the men were stretching their muscles, and flattering themselves, on the strength of their survival, that all the goodness which emanated from the earth was for their especial benefit, that it was even the fruit of their suffering, when one day a small, grey bird, whacking his beak against the bough of a tree which hung beside the entrance to the cave, seemed to cast some doubt upon their recovered confidence.

It was obvious that the fearless bird could not conceive that respect was due to men, not even as Turner shot him dead.

When Palfreyman remonstrated with the successful sportsman, the latter cheerfully replied:

‘What’s the odds! If I had not of knocked ’im off, something else would of got ’im.’

The sun was blaring with golden trumpets. Tinged with gold after weeks in the musty cave, the fellow forgot the grey louse he had always been.

So he cleared his throat and added:

‘And you scientific gentlemen should know that a bird is only a bird.’

His almost foetal eyes were twinkling. Never before had he felt himself the equal of all men.

Palfreyman was distressed.

‘Poor thing,’ he said, touching the dead bird with the tip of his toe.

‘Do not tell me you never killed a bird!’ cried Turner.

Compassion in the other had caused him to scent a weakness. Now he was perhaps even a gentleman’s superior.

‘I have killed many, to my knowledge,’ Palfreyman replied, ‘and could be responsible for much that I do not realize.’

As he spoke, it seemed that he was resigning his part in the expedition.

Turner was angry. He kicked the dead bird, so that it went shooting away across the mud and water. He himself slithered off, over rocks, in search of something else to kill, but constrained still by the great expanse of wet.

Palfreyman wished that he could have employed himself in some such easy, physical way and, in so doing, have re-discovered a purpose. There comes a moment when an individual who is too honest to take refuge in the old illusion of self-importance is suspended agonizingly between the flat sky and the flat earth, and prayer is no more than a slight gumminess on the roof of the mouth.

At this period, between flood and dry, owing to some illusion of sky and water, the earth appeared very flat indeed, particularly at early morning, when the leader of the expedition, Mr Voss, would walk out to test the ground. His trousers rolled to the middle of his calves, and wearing a stout reefer jacket, for the cold was still considerable in the early hours, he would proceed awkwardly across the mud, but soon become bogged. Then he would throw his feet to the winds, to rid them of that tragic sock. In different circumstances, he could have appeared a ridiculous figure to those watching from the shingly platform in front of the cave. Now they would not have dared laugh, for fear of the sounds that might have issued out of their mouths. Nor did they speak as much as formerly. Words that did not belong to them — illuminating, true, naked words — had a habit of coming out.