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.