Riders In the Chariot

by Patrick White

  “It is only reasonable,” she agreed, “that a child should learn to respect other people’s needs.”

  Anybody’s reasonableness, and particularly his wife’s, was what infuriated him most.

  So the child learned, as far as her natural clumsiness would allow, to move softly, like a leaf, and certain words she avoided, because they were breakable. The word LOVE, for instance, brittle as glass, and far more precious. Oh, she could go carefully enough in the end, in little, starched movements. And had learnt to love, even, but after her secret fashion, the labyrinths of corridors, the big, cool, greenish rooms, the golden walls of stone, the tunnels through the shrubberies.

  And now Miss Hare got up, as far as her tunnel would allow, to continue struggling, bundling, pushing with the shield of her great wicker hat, to burst forth, not without shaking, and panting, and ridiculousness, into the presence of her noble love.

  On extricating herself from the embrace of twigs, there remained perhaps another two hundred yards of less grudgingly gracious green: a pomegranate almost gone to wood, a crab or two, spidery with first blossom, several sad, but soothing pines. The ground continued to rise, increasing her breathlessness, tearing her calves open as she climbed. All, whether within or without, was leading upward now.

  So Miss Hare came home, as always, for the first time. She stepped out beyond the trees where lawn began. Certainly the grass appeared a bit neglected, but the eyes, and not necessarily the eyes of a lover, were invariably transfixed by their first glimpse of Xanadu. Miss Hare herself had almost crumbled as she stood to watch her vision form.

  II

  She liked to come downstairs early. She would even get up in the dark, bumping things before she found her balance. She liked to come down, and sit, and listen to the house, after her own footsteps had died away, and the sound of the primus on which she had brewed a pot of tea. Then, she would sit and wrinkle her nose at the smell of kerosene, while she thawed out, if it were winter, or relaxed in summer after the weight of the heavy nights. Later she would start to walk about, touching things. Sometimes she would move them: a goblet, or a footstool, and once a heavy buhl table, from which the brass had risen to set traps for clothes and flesh. But mostly she let things lie, out of respect. Or she would draw a curtain, cunningly, to look out at the spectacle of morning, when all that is most dense becomes most transparent, and the world is dependent on the eye of the beholder. Then Miss Hare’s mouth would grow slack and loving as she formed the solid trunks of gums out of the grey embryos of trees.

  She was at her best early in the morning. Except on this one. She jerked the curtain. And it tore uglily. A long tongue of gold brocade. But she did not stay to consider. It was several mornings since she had taken the postmistress into her confidence. It was the morning before the arrival of the housekeeper at Xanadu.

  “A housekeeper!” she said, feeling her knuckles to test their infirmity, and finding they were, indeed, infirm.

  A housekeeper though was less formidable than a person, and this was what Miss Hare dreaded most: an individual called Mrs Jolley, whose hips would assert themselves in navy blue, whose breathing would be heard, whose letters would lie upon the furniture addressed in the handwriting of daughters and nieces, telling of lives lived, unbelievably, in other places. It was frightening, frightening.

  Miss Hare often cried in private, not from grief, but because she found it soothing, and she did now. It was frightening though. Naturally she found it impossible to like human beings, if only on account of their faces, to say nothing of their habit of relating things that had never happened and then believing that they had. Children were perhaps the worst, because they had not yet grown insincere, and insincerity does blunt the weapons of attack. Possible exceptions were those children who grew up in one’s vicinity, almost without one’s noticing, just being around; that was delicious, like air. Best of all Miss Hare liked those who never expected what they would not receive. She liked animals, birds and plants. On these she would expend her great but pitiable love, and because that was not expected it ceased to be pitiable.

  Once, it was related, a naked nestling had fallen into her lap, and she had reared it by some mysterious method of her own, warming it down her front, it was suspected, and ejecting juices into its beak from her mouth. The nestling had grown into a dove. Some of the Godbold children had been shown it. Then it flew away, of course, but would return sometimes, Miss Hare told. She would talk to it. Everybody except the Godbold kids thought it a lot of rot, Miss Hare talking to birds. But you could learn she insisted. Miss Hare said you could learn to do anything provided you wanted to, but there were an awful lot of things you did not want enough.

  Like learning to love a human being. Like the housekeeper, whom the telegram and her own increasing infirmity were bringing to Xanadu.

  “Ah, no, no, no!” she protested and whimpered in the cold early morning air.

  And the house repeated it after her.

  Most of those landowners who wished to show how rich they were had already gone on to build in brick at the time when Norbert Hare decided to cut his dash in stone. To Mr Hare, brick was plain ugly; it did not please him a little bit, and what was Xanadu to suggest, if not the materialization of beauty, and climax of his pleasure? Pleasure is a shocking word in societies where the most luxurious aspirations are disguised as humble, moral ones. It is doubtful whether any rich, landowning gentleman of the period would have admitted to his house’s being more than necessary or practical. Material objects were valued for their usefulness; if they were also intended to please, not to say glorify, it was commonly kept a secret. Only Norbert Hare, notoriously rash, had been heard to confess that the word useful sounded to him less modest than humiliating. It was so intolerably grey and Australian. Brilliant and elegant were the epithets applicable to Norbert’s aspirations, certainly to his most ambitious, his Pleasure Dome at Xanadu. Although by no means a sincere man, there was one point in his life at which sincerity conferred with taste and individualism. Xanadu was Norbert’s contribution to the sum of truth, brilliant and elegant though the house was, created in the first place for its owner’s pleasure. More would have admired it openly, if they could have felt the principles of their admiration to be sound. As it was, other monied gentlemen voiced more loudly than ever their enthusiasm for the practical qualities of brick, and were persuaded that if the turrets of their purple mansions conformed to the pattern then condoned, nobody was going to accuse simple, down-to-earth sheep-keepers of acting in any way flash.

  Norbert, of course, did not keep sheep; his family might have laughed a little longer if he had. What he possessed was the fortune of his wine-merchant father, who died conveniently soon after his son’s marriage, followed by several commercial brothers, trustful to the point of overlooking brilliance in a nephew. Norbert Hare inherited all, and thus comfortably endowed set about leading the life of a country gentleman, such as he understood it from his reading and his travels, with none of the colonial encumbrances of sheep and acres which made the undertaking virtually impossible. What he required, and did in fact acquire, was an exquisite setting for his humours: the park of exotic, deciduous trees, the rose garden which his senses craved, pasture for the pedigree Jersey cows which would fill his silver jugs with cream, and stables for the horses which he drove himself with virtuosity – always greys, always four-in-hand. Thus surrounded and provided for, he was soon engrossed in living up to it all: advising on the drenching of a cow, or blistering of a horse (Mr Hare always knew), marshalling the cinerarias in extra brilliant ranks, interfering in his daughter’s education, tearing down a wall, throwing out a wing, or running upstairs to jot down some thought which had occurred invariably to someone else before him.

  Despite the inevitable frustrations and migraines, life at Xanadu was never squalid. Out of its bower of rather unhappy exotic trees, out of its necklaces of rosebeds (the complexions of the blooms themselves protected by little parasols, which occupied practic
ally the whole of the second gardener’s time) aspired the lovely languid house. Round it they had trained wistaria, which at the height of the Hares’ glory had not attained to vulgar opulence, and which never failed to please the eye in the same way as a feather boa on the right neck. In the spring its heavy, clovy scent invaded the great, greenish rooms; the marble staircase and the malachite urns dissolved beneath the onslaught, and the gilded mirrors led by subtle, receding stages far beyond the bounds of vision.

  The beauty of it antagonized some of those whom the Hares were in the habit of regarding as friends, to say nothing of the practical relatives, Ted Urquhart Smith, for instance, one of the cousins from Banjo Downs.

  “What becomes of all this flummery when Bert has blown the cash?” asked Ted on one occasion, indicating with calloused hand the drawing-room at Xanadu, in which it was almost impossible to tell where glass ended and light began.

  Addie, his sister, permitted herself a titter.

  His Cousin Eleanor hesitated. Grave even as a girl, life with her husband had made her graver still.

  “But I think Norbert’s fortune is very prudently invested,” she replied at last. “And then, a house is said to be an investment in itself.”

  The wife of Norbert Hare seldom committed herself to positive opinions. Two positives in that relationship would have been intolerable.

  Once, in a fit of rage, the husband accused his wife of having become the mouthpiece of social cliché.

  “But it is what people prefer, Norbert,” the poor woman protested, with vehemence for her. “Too much of what is unexpected is too upsetting.”

  Before there was any call for it she began to wear, together with her apologetic amethysts, colours which suggested mourning. She would cough thinly, from behind an expression that invited inquiry into the state of her health, and visitors would take the hint, not that they really cared to discover how Mrs Hare’s health was poor, but it provided a useful topic with which to hack a way into the tangles of conversation.

  She was not a snob, though there were many who accused her of it. She suffered, rather, from seeing the weak exposed to those whom she considered strong, and so she would attempt to keep her friends separate, in compartments that she hoped might protect them from one another. She was completely unreal, and would impart temporarily to those of her equals with whom she came in contact something of her unreality. Yet she was not ineffective against the peacock colours of the stage at Xanadu, and provided the perfect flat foil to her husband’s fustian. The one cataclysmic reality to challenge her playing of the part was the presence of her daughter, but that was a fact she had failed from the beginning to embrace, an event the significance of which she had recoiled from relating to the play of life.

  After several years of tedious and frustrated childbirth, Mrs Hare had succeeded in having this little girl. They named her Mary, because the mother, fortunately, was too exhausted to think, and the father, who would have plunged with voluptuous excitement into the classics, or the works of Tennyson, to dredge up some shining name for a son, turned his back on the prospect of a daughter. So Mary the latter became, but an innocent Protestant one.

  Mrs Hare had soon taken refuge from Mary in a rational kindness, with which she continued to deal her a series of savage blows during what passed for childhood.

  “My darling must decide how best she can repay her parents for all she owes them,” was amongst the mother’s favourite tactics. “See all these beautiful things they have put here to be enjoyed, not smashed in thoughtless games.”

  And, in answer to a frequent question:

  “Only our Father in Heaven will be able to tell my pet why He made her as He did.”

  Paddling in her own delicious shallows, it never occurred to Mrs Hare to raise her eyes to God, except to call Him as a formal witness. She accepted Him – who would have been so audacious not to? – but as the creator of a moral and a social system. At that level, she could always be relied on to put her hand in her purse, to help repair vestments, or support fallen girls, and her name was published for everyone to read, on a visiting card, inserted in a brass frame, on the end of her regular pew.

  The little girl appeared gravely to accept the attitudes adopted by her mother, but was not genuinely influenced. Unattached, she drifted through the pale waters of her mother’s kindness like a little, wondering, transparent fish, in search of those depths which her instinct told her could exist.

  Her father’s attitudes were less acceptable than her mother’s.

  Once in her presence – or she had been standing, rather, in the drawing-room alcove, apart, touching the waves of an emerald silk with which the day-bed would fascinate the fingers – her father had thrown down his cap with more than his usual violence and shouted:

  “Who would ever have thought I should get a red girl! By George, Eleanor, she is ugly, ugly!”

  Which – it sounded – was the worst that might be said.

  With more than her usual kindness, Eleanor Hare motioned to their child, and when the latter had come forward – because, what else could anyone do? – the mother smoothed a sash, and sighed and suggested:

  “Plain is the word, Norbert. And who knows – Mary’s plainness may have been given to her for a special purpose.”

  Because she was inexperienced, or because she was born hopeful Mary did not immediately begin to hate her father. She decided on a watery smile, which only made her uglier, and her parent more enraged.

  She remained altogether without companions, because it never occurred to anybody that she was in need of them, and she did fairly well without: with sticks, pebbles, skeleton leaves, birds, insects, the hollows of trees, and the cellars and attics of Xanadu. She did have a pony, but preferred to be with it rather than to ride upon it – which would have entailed the company of her father – and soon learned to oblige most of its wishes by studying the quiver of a nostril, the flicker of a muscle, and the varying assertions of silence.

  Once when, unavoidably, in the company of her father, and they had gone down to inspect a rested paddock, she had thrown herself on the ground and begun to hollow out a nest in the grass with little feverish jerks of her body and foolish grunts, curling round in the shape of a bean or position of a foetus. So it appeared to him. But, in answer to his quick-drawn demand for an explanation, the child had replied simply:

  “Now I know what it feels like to be a dog.”

  He had been so shocked and disgusted by the expression on her freckled face, that he told her to get up at once, and decided not to think about the incident again.

  On very few occasions Mary Hare and her father, approaching from their opposite sides, arrived simultaneously at a common frontier of understanding, and then only when alcohol, despair or approaching death loosened the slight restraints of reason – when, indeed, he came closest to resembling in her eyes a distressed or desperate animal.

  Throughout her life the daughter would remember an incident which occurred about that time, and on which she would employ her intuition in attempting to interpret what her mind failed to understand. She had been standing on the terrace. It was the hour of sunset. Earlier in the afternoon they had gone driving along the roads and lanes round Sarsaparilla, even as far as Barranugli, so that her father might show himself. How relieved she felt to be alone at last, able to look at and touch and smell whatever she saw, without danger of being asked by her parents for explanations. The urns on the terrace were running over, she remembered, with cascades of a little milky flower, which would shimmer through darkness like falls of moonlight. But at that hour the light was gold. Or red. So splendid that even she, a red girl, had no need to feel ashamed of the correspondence.

  Then her father came outside. He had been tasting a new brandy which they had sent out for his personal opinion, and his mouth was still wet and shining from his recent occupation. His eyes, in the dazzle from the sun, appeared almost vulnerable. There they stood, the father and daughter, facing each other, alar
mingly exposed. He came forward, and seemed at once both puzzled and assured. Fondling her. Which was not his habit. And it was not altogether pleasant: his hands playing amongst her hair. She was reminded of a pair of black-and-white spaniels she had seen lolloping and playing together, too silly to help themselves. But just because her father’s temporary silliness and loss of control had reduced him to the level of herself and dogs, she did submit to his fondling her.

  She did not remember what he said, not all of it, for that, too, was silly and confused, only that at one point he had shaken his head, as if to dash the sunlight out of his eyes, both drowning and smiling, and spoke in a harsh voice, which, although addressing her, did not seem designed for her attention.

  Her father said:

  “Who are the riders in the Chariot, eh, Mary? Who is ever going to know?”

  Who, indeed? Certainly she would not be expected to understand. Nor did she think she wanted to just then. But they continued there, the sunset backed up against the sky, as they stood beneath the great swingeing trace-chains of its light. Perhaps she should have been made afraid by some awfulness of the situation, but she was not. She had been translated: she was herself a fearful beam of the ruddy, champing light, reflected back at her own silly, uncertain father.

  Then he had started frowning, and it became obvious they were again driving along the road from Barranugli to Sarsaparilla, returning through the comparatively humdrum light of the afternoon already past.

  “I do not like the offside front mare,” he complained. “Must replace the offside front. She moves lame, without her being lame at all.”

  For he required perfection in horses, as in everything, and usually got it, except in human beings.

  He looked at her, and was again irritated, she saw, because she was such an ugly little girl, and she, for her part, could do nothing for him but smile back in the way of those from whom nothing much is expected.