‘There is Le Mesurier,’ he said. ‘We have also travelled together. Frank has great qualities, if he does not cut his throat.’
‘Promising!’ laughed Edmund Bonner.
‘And Palfreyman. You will approve of Palfreyman, Mr Bonner. He is an exceptional man. He is the ornithologist. Of great principles. Also a Christian.’
‘I do believe,’ said the draper, a little comforted, ‘I believe that Palfreyman is known to my friend Pringle. Yes, I have heard of him.’
‘And Turner.’
‘Who is Turner?’
‘Well,’ said Voss. ‘Turner is a labourer. Who asks to be taken.’
‘And you are confident that he is a suitable associate?’
‘I am of every assurance that I can lead an expedition across this continent,’ Voss replied.
Now he was a crag of a man. He beetled above the merchant, who wondered more than ever with what he had become involved, but was stimulated by it.
Still, it was in his nature to play with caution.
‘Sanderson has two men he will recommend to you,’ he said.
So that Voss became cautious in turn. Anonymous individuals were watching him from behind trees as well as from the corners of the rich room. He suspected their blank faces. All that was external to himself he mistrusted, and was happiest in silence which is immeasurable, like distance, and the potentialities of self. He did not altogether trust those he had chosen for his patron’s comfort, but at least they were weak men, he considered, all but one, who had surrendered his strength conveniently to selflessness.
‘I would like to avoid the conflict of opinion that a large party will certainly involve.’
‘You will be gone a year, two years, nobody knows; in any event, a long time. During that period you will profit by being able to draw upon a diversity of opinion. Great distances will tax physical strength. Some of your party may be forced to fall out; others, one must face the melancholy fact, may pass on. You appreciate my point of view? It is also Mr Sanderson’s. He is convinced that these men will be of value to the expedition.’
‘Who are they?’ asked the cloudy German.
The merchant at once mistook indifference for submission. The expression on his face had clarified as he sat forward to continue in full pride of superior strength.
‘There is young Angus. You will like Angus. He is the owner of a valuable property in the neighbourhood of Rhine Towers. A young fellow of spirit — I will not say hot-headed of anyone so amiable — who visited the Downs several years ago, and was at that time anxious to pursue fortune farther to the west, though just then conditions happened to be unfavourable.
‘Then,’ said Edmund Bonner, to his ivory paper-knife, that his wife had put on his desk one birthday, but which he had never used, ‘there is also Judd. I have not met Judd, but Mr Sanderson swears by him as a man of physical strength and moral integrity. An improviser, besides, which is of the greatest importance in a country where necessities are not always to hand. Judd, I understand, has shown himself to be most commendably adaptable. Because he came out here against his will. In other words, was a convict. Free now, naturally. The circumstances of his transportation were quite ridiculous, I am led to believe.’
‘They always are,’ interrupted Voss.
The merchant suspected that he might have been caught in some way. He was suspended.
‘Most of us have committed murders,’ the German said, ‘but would it not be ridiculous, Mr Bonner, if, for that murder which you have committed, you have been transported to New South Wales?’
Mr Bonner, who was left with no alternative, laughed at this joke, and decided to withdraw from deep water. With the elegant but strong paper-knife he began to tap a strip of canvas he had unfolded on the scented leather of his desk
‘I expect you will consider it imprudent, Mr Voss, if I ask whether you have studied the map?’
Here, indeed, was a map of a kind, presumptuous where it was not a blank.
‘The map?’ said Voss.
It was certainly a vast dream from which he had wakened. Even the draper suspected its immensity as he prodded at the coast with his ivory pointer.
‘The map?’ repeated the German. ‘I will first make it.’
At times his arrogance did resolve itself into simplicity and sincerity, though it was usually difficult, especially for strangers, to distinguish those occasions.
‘It is good to have a good opinion,’ laughed the merchant.
His honest flesh heaved, and himself rather drunken, began to read off his document, to chant almost, to invoke the first recorded names, the fly-spots of human settlement, the legend of rivers.
Mr Bonner read the words, but Voss saw the rivers. He followed them in their fretful course. He flowed in cold glass, or dried up in little yellow pot-holes, festering with green scum.
‘So you realize how much must be taken into account’ — the merchant had recovered himself. ‘And tempus fugit, tempus fugit! Why, I am blessed if it is not already time for dinner, which provides us with an excellent illustration of what I have been trying to convey.’
Thereupon, he slapped his strange, but really rather pleasing, because flattering, protégé on the knee. Flattering was the word. Edmund Bonner, once a hollow, hungry lad, was flattered by someone whose whole appearance suggested that he was hungry in his turn.
Now the whole stone house was booming with bronze, for Jack Slipper had come in from the yard and struck the great gong, his naked arms tensed and wiry, as Rose Portion went backwards and forwards, with dishes or without, ignoring all else but her own activity.
‘You must be feeling peckish,’ the expectant Mr Bonner remarked.
‘Please?’ asked Voss, perhaps to avoid making a decision.
‘I dare say’ — the merchant gave it extra weight — ‘you could put away your share of dinner.’
‘I am not prepared,’ replied the German, who was again unhappy.
‘Who ever had to prepare for a plate of prime beef and pudding!’ said the merchant, already surging forth. ‘Mrs Bonner,’ he called, ‘our friend will stay for dinner.’
‘So I anticipated,’ said Mrs Bonner, ‘and Rose has laid a place.’
The men had come out to her and, in fact, to all the company, who were now assembled in a cool hall, shifting their feet upon the yellow stone. Cool stone drank the laughter of the young people, and their conversation, which they made purely for the pleasure of speaking. Tom and Belle would sometimes play for hours at this kind of bat and ball. And there were the Palethorpes, who had arrived since. Mr P., as Mrs Bonner would refer to him, was her husband’s right hand, and indispensable as such, if also conveniently a Sunday joke. Mr P. was bald, with a moustache that somewhat resembled a pair of dead birds. And there was his wife — she had been a governess — a most discreet person, whether in her choice of shawls, or behaviour in the houses of the rich. The P.s were waiting there, self-effacing, yet both at home, superior in the long practice of discretion.
‘Thank you, I will not stay,’ Voss said, now in anger.
A rude man, saw Mrs Bonner.
A foreigner, saw the P.s.
Someone to whom, after all, I am completely indifferent, saw Laura Trevelyan, although he is not here, to be sure, for my benefit. What is? she was compelled to add.
Laughter and the society of others would sometimes drive this young woman to the verge of self-pity; yet she had never asked for rescue from her isolation, and now averted her eyes from Mr Voss in particular.
‘You will not stay?’ blustered the host, as if already potato-in-mouth.
‘If that is the intention of Mr Voss,’ said Mrs Bonner, ‘then we shall sustain a loss.’
‘You have made a bad poem!’ laughed Belle, kissing at her mother’s neck.