The young girl was inclined to ignore visitors when any of her family was present.
‘The more beef for Mr P.!’ cried Lieutenant Radclyffe, who was chafing even in his humour.
‘Why, pray, for Mr. P.?’ exclaimed the gentleman’s wife in discreet protest, but giggled to please her patrons. ‘Is he a lion, then?’
Everybody laughed. Even Mr P. showed his teeth beneath his dead birds. He was a man of all purposes.
Consequently Voss was almost forgotten.
‘I am already bidden,’ he said.
Although it was really unnecessary to assure those who were so little anxious for assurance.
Expectation was goaded by smells that drifted past the cedar doors, with the consequence that the yellow flags were becoming intolerable to most feet.
‘Then, if Mr Voss is already engaged,’ said Mrs Bonner, to release someone who was unacquainted with the convolutions of polite behaviour.
‘Too bad, old Voss!’ said the brisk Lieutenant, who would cheerfully have abandoned this unnecessary acquaintance, to rush in himself, slash with a sword at the sirloin, and watch the red juices run.
But the owner of the house continued to feel the weight of his responsibilities. He was compelled to offer parting advice, even if imperiously:
‘We must keep in touch, Voss. Daily communication, you know. There will be many things to decide. You will find me at my business premises any morning. Or afternoon, for that matter. But keep in touch.’
‘Naturally,’ replied the German.
Sooner or later he was leaving, through the laughter and conversation of ladies, who had entered the dining-room, and were recalling the sermon and bonnets, as they seated themselves upon the chairs to which gentlemen blindly assisted them. However high his vision had soared, the now leaden German trod in thick boots along the gravel. The indifference of voices in a room, even of the indistinct voices, becomes a criticism. So that he went faster, and grew clumsier, and leaner.
He was an uncouth, to some he was a nasty man.
All the way along the gritty road this nastiness was apparent to Voss himself. At such times he was the victim of his body, to which other people had returned him. So he walked furiously. He was not lame, but could have been. On that side of the Point there were several great houses similar to the Bonners’, from which human eye could have been taking aim through slits of shutters. Barricades of laurels blinded with insolent mirrors. Rooted in that sandy soil, in the straggling, struggling native scrub, the laurels had taken possession; strengthened by their own prevalence, the houses of the rich dared the intruder, whether dubious man, or tattered native tree.
So Voss turned the corner and went from that locality. Gritty winds tended to free him. A wind off the sea, even off becalmed baywater and sea-lettuce, was stirring his beard as he descended the hill. Through the window of a slab cottage on the left, that sold little bits of pickled pork, and withered apples, and liquorice, an old woman was staring. But Voss did not look. There were other random cottages, or shops, and a drinking-house, with horses tied outside to a ring. But Voss did not look. He followed the ruts, raging at those flies which the wind did not seem to deter. His beard flew. He was very sinewy, a man of obvious strength when observed in the open, yet who could have been trailing some humiliation, and as he walked, really at an inordinate pace, from time to time he would glance anxiously through the trees upon his right, at nothing substantial, it appeared. There the bay flickered through the scrub that still stood along the road before the town. Glittering feverishly as the whites of certain eyes, its waters did not soothe, at least, in those circumstances, and in that light.
So the foreigner came on into the town, past the Cathedral and the barracks, and went and sat in the Gardens beneath a dark tree, hoping soon to enter his own world, of desert and dreams. But he was restless. He began to graze his hands, upon twigs, and stubble of grass, and the stones of his humiliation. His face had dwindled to the bone.
An old, grey-headed fellow who happened to approach, in fustian and battered beaver, chewing slowly from a small, stale loaf, looked at the stranger, and held out a handful of bread.
‘Here,’ invited the oldish man, himself chewing and quite contented, ‘stick this inside of you; then you will feel better.’
‘But I have eaten,’ said the German, turning on the man his interrupted eyes. ‘Only recently I have eaten.’
So that the man in the beaver went away, trailing crumbs for the little birds.
At once the German, beneath his tree, was racked by the fresh mortification to which he had submitted himself. But it was a discipline for the great trials and achievements in store for him in this country of which he had become possessed by implicit right. Unseeing people walked the sandy earth, eating bread, or sat at meat in their houses of frail stone foundations, while the lean man, beneath his twisted tree, became familiar with each blade of withered grass at which he stared, even the joints in the body of the ant.
Knowing so much, I shall know everything, he assured himself, and lay down in time, and was asleep, slowly breathing the sultry air of the new country that was being revealed to him.
*
‘Well, what do you think of him?’ asked Mr Bonner, wiping the fat from his mouth with a fine napkin.
‘Today confirmed the impression I received at our meeting a few months ago,’ said Lieutenant Radclyffe. ‘A madman. But harmless mad.’
‘Oh, Tom, what an accusation to make,’ said Mrs Bonner, who was in a mood for kindness, ‘and with no grounds, at least that we can see — yet.’
But Tom was not concerned. Such an individual could not further his own career.
‘And do you really intend to send the creature on an expedition into this miserable country?’ asked Mrs Bonner of her husband. ‘He is so thin. And,’ she said, ‘he is already lost.’
‘How do you mean lost, Mamma?’ asked Belle, taking her mother’s hand, because she liked to feel the rings.
‘Well, he is,’ said Mrs Bonner. ‘He is simply lost. His eyes,’ she said, ‘cannot find their way.’
She herself was groping after what her instinct knew.
But Rose Portion had brought in a big apple-pie that was more important to some of those present.
‘Do not worry,’ said the merchant, as he watched his wife release the greeny, steamy apples from the pie. ‘There will be others with him,’ he said, ‘to hack a way.’
‘Of course,’ said Mrs Bonner, who loved all golden pastry-work, and especially when a scent of cloves was rising from it. ‘Nor did we really have time to understand Mr Voss.’
‘Laura did,’ said Belle. ‘Tell us about him, Lolly. What is he like?’
‘I do not know,’ said Laura Trevelyan.
I do not know Laura, Mrs Bonner realized.
The Palethorpes coughed, and rearranged the goblets out of which they had gratefully sipped their wine. Then a silence fell amongst the flakes of pastry, and lay. Till Laura Trevelyan said:
‘He does not intend to make a fortune out of this country, like other men. He is not all money talk.’
‘Other men are human,’ said her uncle, ‘and this is the country of the future. Who will not snap at an opportunity when he sees one? And get rich,’ he added, with sudden brutality of mouth. ‘This country,’ protested his full mouth.
‘Ah, this country!’ sighed his wife, who remembered others, and feared for her complexion.
‘He is obsessed by this country,’ said Laura Trevelyan. ‘That was at once obvious.’
‘He is a bit mad,’ pursued the Lieutenant monotonously.
‘But he is not afraid,’ said Laura.
‘Who is afraid?’ asked Tom Radclyffe.
‘Everyone is still afraid, or most of us, of this country, and will not say it. We are not yet possessed of understanding.’