“No,” he said. “There is no reason to go away. In this glass house. One is fully exposed everywhere.”
“Is it different, then, in other houses?”
He laughed. He sounded almost natural.
“No,” he replied. “I suppose not.”
“How you hated it,” she said. “The dance with Miss Antill. I am sorry.”
He began to tremble. If she had not pitied, she might have been shocked. But there had been moments when she had absolved even her father from being a man.
Cousin Eustace did not speak. He stood and trembled.
She touched some ivy. Painfully.
“And you will not forget it,” she said.
“There comes a point where one can’t remember everything,” Eustace replied, with reason as well as feeling.
Then she touched the back of his hand, and he did not withdraw. Of course her skin told her immediately that she could have been a dog, but she was grateful to be accepted if only in that form. In fact, she would not have thought of expecting more, and mercifully it had never yet occurred to her to think of herself as a woman.
After a bit, he began to cough and move about without direction or elegance, like an ordinary person when nobody is there. Rather clumsily. But he did not repudiate his companion.
“Oh, dear!” He sighed, and laughed, but again roughly, and unlike him. “Do you ever crumble? Suddenly? Without warning?”
“Yes,” she cried. “Oh, yes! Often. Truly.”
It was most important that he should know.
But he was yawning. It could have been that he had not heard her reply, or that he had heard, and did not believe in the existence of anything outside the closed circle of himself.
She saw, however, that he was tamed, and that in future she might walk calmly, though quietly, in his vicinity, and watch him, and he would not mind. Only soon after the ball at Xanadu, Cousin Eustace resumed his tour of the world, as had always been intended, and took refuge finally on the island of Jersey, with a housekeeper, and what eventually became a famous collection of porcelain.
Even if her husband had allowed it, Mrs Hare would never have been able to forget how her cousin had insulted her guest. What she did forget, conveniently, was that she had expected of him something impossible, not to say indelicate. It was only in after life, in the regurgitation of memories, that she sometimes came across her true motive for giving the ball at Xanadu. It would drift up to the surface of her mind, almost complete, almost explicit, but always it had a horrid, quickly-to-be-rejected taste.
If Mary was less upset by Eustace Cleugh’s behaviour, it was because she already expected less of the human animal, and in consequence was not surprised when he diverged from the course which other people intended he should take. The ugliness and weakness which his nature revealed at such moments were, she sensed, far closer to the truth. So she could understand and pity her cousin, even understand and pity her father, even when the latter looked at her with hate for what she saw and understood. In her time she had seen dogs receive a beating for having glimpsed their masters’ souls. She was no dog, certainly, and her father had not beaten her, but there had been one occasion when he did start shooting at the chandelier.
It was a summer evening, on which the weather had not broken. The expected storm still hung heavy on the leaden mountains to the west, and the air was full of flying-ants, dashing themselves against glass and flesh, and fretting off their wings in the last stages of a life over which they seemed to have no control.
As the servants, with the exception of an old coachman who was somewhere in the region of the stables, had not yet returned from a picnic, the family had just finished helping themselves to a supper of cold fowl. This fowl had been coated, all with the best intentions, with an egg sauce, to which in the heat and the dusk the flying-ants were fatally attracted, their reddish bodies squirming, with wings, without, as they died upon the baroque carcase of the anointed fowl.
“Loathsome creatures!” protested Mrs Hare, to whom any insect was a pest.
Mary did not contribute an opinion, as the remarks of parents seldom seemed to ask for confirmation, but continued to eat, or munch, rather loudly, a crisp stick of celery, and to scratch herself, because the heat had made her prickly. In intolerable circumstances, she alone was tolerably comfortable.
To the others, it was insufferable. The light in the dining-room had turned a dark brown.
Then Norbert Hare took the fowl by its surviving drumstick, and flung it through the open window, where it fell into a display of perennial phlox. It was one of his misfortunes to be led repeatedly to ruin his effects.
He was still eating. His mouth was, in fact, too full. His cheeks were swollen, and his eyes appeared almost white.
“Norbert!” cried his wife. “Whatever are the maids going to say?”
Knowing that she herself, with a lantern, would rummage amongst the phlox.
Then Norbert Hare took a loaf of bread, and flung it after the boiled fowl. He took a carving knife, and decanter of port wine, and threw.
He felt freer.
His wife began to cry.
“There,” he said, for himself. “But it is never possible to free oneself. Not entirely.”
His wife cried and cried.
“I am to blame,” offered the daughter, in case that was what they wanted.
“If we are to decide on the objects of blame,” her father shouted, “it could well be the boiled fowl.”
And seemed to madden entirely.
He was running and pouncing on some intention not yet matured.
Then he seemed to remember, and went to a desk, and got out the pistols.
In the drawing-room at Xanadu, separated from the dining-room by folding doors, there was a chandelier of exceptional loveliness, which money had brought from some dismembered European house, and of which the crystal fruit now hung above antipodean soil. The great thing loomed and brooded, at times fiery, at times dreamily opalescent, but always enticing away from the endless expanse of flat thought. Mary Hare loved it, though she had always believed her passion to be secret.
Now her father went, after loading, and shot into the chandelier.
He looked very small and ridiculous standing beneath the transparent branches.
“Munching! Munch-ing!” he shouted.
And shot.
“O God, save us all!” he shouted.
And shot.
There fell at intervals an excruciating crystal rain. How much actual damage was done it was not yet possible to estimate, although Mrs Hare did attempt spasmodically.
“There!” shouted Norbert Hare. And: “There!”
“Come! I cannot endure your father any longer!” announced the mother, and drew her daughter into a little room which was only used when the doctor came, or someone asking for money.
Then, when the door was locked, she cried:
“I do not know what I have done to deserve so much!”
The daughter remained silent, for she knew she was the greater part of what her mother had to endure. Besides, it was of more interest to listen to what her father might be doing.
The sound of shots was less frequent, but boards cracked, rooms shook, the whole house seemed under the influence of his passion. He must have been running about a good deal. Until, suddenly, silence took over, its passive structure rising in tiers of indifference and layers of suffocating feathers.
“What do you think can have happened?” asked his wife, perhaps as she was expected to.
“It is probably less fun when nobody is looking,” suggested the daughter, but without bearing a grudge.
“That is true,” agreed the mother, startled to realize the truth had been spoken by her daughter.
For Mary was stupid, and the truth something that one generally avoided, out of respect for good taste, and to preserve peace of mind.
“I shall go out now,” said Mary at last, “and look.”
“How brave you
are!” the mother cried, with genuine admiration.
“I am not brave,” said her daughter.
But she was unable to explain that, burning as she was, there could be no question of her dying; life itself would have been extinguished.
She found the house big and empty. The weather had changed at last, with the result that a cold wind was blowing through the rooms, scattering dead ants from the sills. The curtains tugged, swollen, at their rings.
Then her father came downstairs, very quietly, as if he had been reading in his room, and come to get a glass of water. The situation might have continued innocent enough, if it had not been for the appearance of the outraged house, and the eyes of the man who had just arrived at the bottom of the stairs.
He was looking at her, trying to engulf her in a tragedy he was preparing. Looking, and looking. It might have been horrible if less protracted.
As it was, and perhaps realizing his error in judgment, he took the pistol she had failed to notice he was still carrying, and shot it off at his own head. And missed. A piece of plaster thumped down from a moulding on the ceiling.
The sound could have completed his exhaustion, for he tumbled immediately into a big, strait, wing chair, which stood at hand. All of it he did rather clumsily and ridiculously, because it had not been thought out, or else he had lost interest in the sequence of events.
But it seemed for a moment as though she would not allow him to break the thread. She could not prevent herself from continuing to look, right into him, as he sat in the uncomfortable chair, and although he had forgiven her for the crime of being, it was doubtful whether he would ever forgive her for that of seeing.
She did not expect it, of course.
She went and picked up a pistol lying on the floor, and put it back where it had been in the first place, whether innocently, or through an inherited instinct for malice, he was too exhausted to inquire of his own mind.
He continued to sit, looking at his own waistcoat.
“All human beings are decadent,” he said. “The moment we are born, we start to degenerate. Only the unborn soul is whole, pure.”
As she had turned away from him, and stood picking at some flaw in the lid of the little desk, he had to torment her. He said:
“Tell me, Mary, do you consider yourself one of the unborn?”
“I don’t understand such things,” she replied. “Not yet.”
And looked round at him.
“Liar!”
He would never forgive her her eyes, and for refusing to be hurt enough.
“Oh yes, you can twist my arm if you like!” she blundered, through thickening lips, for his accusation was causing her actual physical pain. “But the truth is what I understand. Not in words. I have not the gift for words. But know.”
The abstractions made her shiver. If she could have touched something – moss, for instance – or smelled the smell of burning wood.
He continued sitting in the chair, and might even have started to relent.
So, she saved him that further humiliation by going outside, and there were the stars, swimming and drowsing towards her as she put out her hands. She was walking and crying, and gulping down the effusions of light, and crying, and smearing her cheeks with the sticky backs of her rough hands.
Long after her father was dead, and disposed of under the paspalum at Sarsaparilla, and the stone split by sun and fire, with lizards running in and out of the cracks, Miss Hare acquired something of the wisdom she had denied possessing the night of the false suicide. Sometimes she would stump off into the bush in one of the terrible jumpers she wore of brown ravelled wool, and an old stiff skirt, and would walk, and finally sit, always listening and expecting until receiving. Then her monstrous limbs would turn to stone, although her thoughts would sprout in tender growth of young shoots, or long loops of insinuating vines, and she would glance down at her feet, and frequently discover fur lying there from the throes of some sacrifice. If tears ever fell then from her saurian eyes, and ran down over the armature of her skin, she was no longer ludicrous. She was quite mad, quite contemptible, of course, by standards of human reason, but what have those proved to be? Reason finally holds a gun at its head – and does not always miss.
Often in the evening as she watched from the terrace of her deserted house for the chariot of fire, the woman wondered how her father would have received her metamorphoses: probably with increased disgust, although a suspect visionary himself, and on one occasion at least, standing together at the same spot, she had actually seen him twitch the veil. Now, if she had outstripped him in experience, time and silence, and the hints of nature had given her the advantages.
So she would wait, with the breath fluctuating in her lungs, and the blood thrilling through her distended veins. She waited on the last evening before the person called Mrs Jolley was expected to arrive. And sure enough, the wheels began to plough the tranquil fields of white sky. She could feel the breath of horses on her battered cheeks. She was lifted up, the wind blowing between the open sticks of fingers that she held extended on stumps of arms, the gold of her father’s bloodstone ring echoing the gold of trumpets. If on the evening before the arrival of a certain person, an aura of terror had contracted round her, she could not have said, at that precise moment, whether it was for the first time. She could not remember. She was aware only of her present anguish. Of her mind leaving her. The filthy waves that floated off the fragments of disintegrating flesh.
Later, when she got up from the ground, she did not attempt to inquire into what might have bludgeoned her numb mind and aching body, for night had come, cold and black. She bruised knuckle on knuckle, to try to stop her shivering, and began to feel her way through the house, by stages of brocade, and vicious gilt, by slippery tortoiseshell, and coldest, unresponsive marble.
III
The following day, which was that of Mrs Jolley’s arrival, Miss Hare did not dare look out of the house before the morning was advanced, for fear she might suffer a repetition of her experience the night before. She did not feel strong enough for that. Still, she rose as usual, in the dark, bumping and charging as she pulled her jumper on. This morning she lit the kitchen range with twigs she had gathered, and small logs sawn slowly in advance. She also swept a little in the room which she had decided the housekeeper should use. But she did not draw curtains until she saw a well-established sunlight lying on the floor. Then she waited for nothing further, but went outside, and became at once involved in many little rites, both humdrum and worshipful.
The morning glittered still with pendants of swinging light and stomachers of dew. The formidable blades of taller grasses were not yet wiped free of wet. In some cases she performed for them what later the sun would do better. But she soon gave up. It was too much for her at her age. She scattered crumbs instead, and birds came down, hobbling and bobbing at her feet, clawing at her shoulders, and in one case, holding on to the ribs of her hat. With a big pair of rusty scissors, she cut crusts of bread into the sizes she knew to be acceptable. Bending so that her skirt stuck out straight behind, she became magnificently formal, like certain big pigeons, of which one or two had descended, blue, out of the gums. All throats were moving, wobbling, and hers most of all. In agreement. In the rite of birds.
Other dedicated acts were performed in order. She drew water, and set bowls. Several days earlier a snake had issued out from between the stones of the house, very black and persuasive, with tan bands along the sides. Her eyes had glistened for the splendid snake. But, although she had stood still, at once, it had failed to sense the degree of sacerdotal authority vested in the unknown woman, and returned by way of the crack in the stone, into the foundations of the house. Every morning since, she had put a saucer of milk, but the snake remained to be converted. She would wait, and eventually, of course, perfect understanding would be reached.
Morning wore away. A wind had risen, and was slashing at things, and funnelling down her front. Then she did give a slight
gulp of panic, not as the result of direct physical discomfort, but because of the remoter mental pain she must suffer in the afternoon.
To say to the woman.
Miss Hare went inside.
At least she had her house. She could show her house. Its splendours would speak for her, in voices of marble and gold, to say nothing of the lesser insinuations of watered silk. So she wandered here and there, letting in always more light, and the blades of light slashed the carpets, smoking, and pillars of gold rose up in the shadows of some rooms, where they had never been before.
In a little room which had never been much used – it was, in fact, that in which she and her mother had locked themselves the night of the false suicide – she picked up a fan, of some elegance and beauty, of tortoiseshell, tufted with flamingo, which an Armenian merchant had given to her mother one winter at Assouan.
Miss Hare held the fan, but she did not dare open it on seeing her own face in the glass.
The gust of cold panic recurred.
It was time. The light told her, not her stomach, for she was seldom hungry all day long, living, it would have seemed, almost on experience; nor did clocks signal the hour at Xanadu, for clocks had stopped, and she no longer bothered to wind them up. But light told all that was ever necessary. And now the windows were gaping long and cold, with a cold, whitish light, of later afternoon.
Miss Hare began running about, doing things, and not. She did the things to her clothes that she had seen other people do. Only, she was inclined to hit, where others might have given a pat. There was nothing she could do about hair, and besides, she would be wearing the inevitable hat.
Mrs Jolley got off the bus at the post office corner at Sarsaparilla. It could only have been Mrs Jolley, her black coat composed of innumerable panels – it appeared to be almost all seams – over what would reveal itself as the navy costume anticipated by Miss Hare. The hat was brighter, even daring, a blue blue, in spite of the mourning of which her future employer had been forewarned. From the brim was suspended, more daring, if not actually reckless, a brief, mauve eye-veil. She remained, however, the very picture of a lady, waiting for identification at the bus stop, but discreetly, but brightly, and grasping her brown port.
Riders In the Chariot Page 5