Riders In the Chariot

by Patrick White

  “We have moved out there,” he continued, “because nowadays it is more sympathetic, on the whole, to live amongst trees.”

  Herrenwaldau was an estate which Stauffers owned, about seven or eight miles from the town. Himmelfarb remembered hearing several years before how they had bought what some people considered the State should have acquired as a national monument. The original structure, built towards the end of the seventeenth century by a duchess for the purpose of receiving her lovers more conveniently, was something between a miniature palace and a large manor. It had become most dilapidated with the years, although it was understood the actual owners had renovated part of it to live in.

  Himmelfarb received everything, whether information on his own future, or glimpses of the rushing landscape, with a senuous acceptance which he might have questioned, if the motion of the car had not precluded shame. As he was rocked, soft and safe, he noticed the upholstery was the colour of Frau Stauffer’s skin. Outside, early light had transformed the normally austere landscape, where sky and earth, mist and water, rested together for the present in layers of innocent blue and grey. The soil would have appeared poor if the frost had not superimposed its glitter on the sand.

  The Stauffers, who were obviously performing a familiar rite, seemed to have forgotten their passenger – they would mumble together occasionally about cheese or paraffin – although Frau Stauffer did at last grunt loud and uglily:

  “Na!”

  For they were driving between stone gate-posts, under great naked elms, crowned with old, blacker nests, and hung with the last rags of mist.

  Nothing could disguise for Himmelfarb the coldness and grey-ness, the detached, dilapidated elegance of this foreign house, until, in a moment of complete loss, while his hosts were rootling in the car, he looked very close, and saw that the stone was infused with a life of lichen: all purples and greens and rusty orange-reds, merging and blurring together. Although it was something he had never noticed before, and it did not immediately mean to him all that it might in time, he was smiling when Frau Stauffer turned to him breathlessly, and said:

  “There is nobody here! Nobody, nobody!”

  Like a little girl who had achieved real freedom after the theory of it.

  “Ingeborg means,” her husband explained, “we have been without servants since the Regierung became obsessed by manpower.”

  He looked the more grimly amused for having bumped his head in retrieving an oil stove from the car.

  “But,” he added, “there is a farmer who rents some of the land, and who repays in kind, and with a certain amount of grudging labour. They feed the fowls, for instance, when we are away, and steal the eggs while we are here. We must devise a routine for you,” he concluded, “against the future. To avoid possibly dangerous encounters.”

  Such possibilities were ignored, however, for the time being. The three conspirators were loaded high with parcels, and clowned their way into the house, which smelled in particular of fungus, as well as the general smell of age.

  They showed Himmelfarb what was to be his room. They had only fairly recently discovered it, Konrad Stauffer told. Disguised from outside by a stone parapet, and from inside by panelling which masked its stairway, the small room could have been intended originally for the greatest convenience of the amorous duchess. The present hosts had furnished it in a hurry for their guest, with a truckle-bed, an old hip-bath in one corner, an austere chest, and the oil stove brought that day. Otherwise the small room was empty, which was how the visitor himself would have had it. As he arranged his insignificant possessions, he realized with sad conviction that the empty room was already his, and might remain so indefinitely.

  In the house proper, he understood, as he caught sight of himself that evening in one of the long, gilt mirrors, he would never belong.

  But a congenial meal was eaten off the blemished oak table, on which Ingeborg Stauffer laid her face, after the things had been cleared and the work finished.

  “At Herrenwaldau,” she said, or foresaw, “I shall never be completely happy. I am always anticipating some event which will destroy perfection. For instance, I am afraid of the house’s being requisitioned for I don’t know what squalid purpose. I can see some party leader, of the self-important, local variety, sitting with his feet up on the chairs. I can smell the face-powder, spilt on the dressing tables, by the mistresses.”

  “My wife is neurotic,” interrupted Konrad, whose back was turned to them, as he did accounts, or looked through letters which had arrived in their absence.

  “Certainly!” Ingeborg agreed, and laughed.

  She jumped up and ran and brought little glasses from which to drink cheap, fiery Korn. At times she could shine with happiness. And play Bach rather badly on an indifferent harpsichord.

  “Between Bach and Hitler,” Konrad said, “something went wrong with Germany. We must go back to Bach, side-stepping the twin bogs of Wagner and Nietzsche, with an eye for Weimar, and the Hansa towns, listening to the poets.”

  “You must allow me Tristan though,” his wife protested, and went and hung over his shoulder.

  Her head, with the dankish, nondescript, yet elegant hair, grew dark inside the candlelight.

  “All right. Tristan,” he agreed. “Anyway, Tristan is everybody’s property.”

  Very gently she bit the gristle in the nape of his neck.

  And he cried out, laughably.

  Which seemed to remind them it was time to go to bed.

  They played this game for several days, while Himmelfarb tentatively explored unopened rooms, and a wilderness of garden, in which unclipped box and yew would have disguised his movements, if a scent of thyme run wild had not risen from under his feet. Once or twice only a trembling of greenery separated him from some peasants, daughters of the tenant-farmer, it appeared, who had arrived on an errand, faces mottled and suspicious, knees dimpling milkily above worsted stockings. And once his back had only time to disappear as Frau Stauffer received someone of greater importance.

  That evening his hosts were more silent and thoughtful. When, of his own accord, he took to descending less often from his room, he knew that he was interpreting their wishes. In fact, Ingeborg Stauffer began, as if by agreement, to bring him his meals. And there were the cans of water. Now there was seldom music at night. Silence had thickened in the house below him.

  Ingeborg explained at last that Konrad had gone to Berlin. For there had been inquiries by local authorities about the uses to which their house was being put, the number of rooms, their visitors, etc. So Konrad had gone to arrange. There was almost nothing that could not be arranged, through the sister, who was a Minister’s wife, the friend, it was even said, of a personage. Ingeborg gave her information with an embarrassment which she had decided it was necessary to overcome, and left her guest to contemplate the knife-edge of life on which they were all balanced.

  Himmelfarb could just remember the thin, burning arms of Mausi Stauffer encircling his waist. Once she had almost destroyed him in the eyes of the world, and was now lifting him up, unconsciously, no doubt, a dea ex machina created for the occasion by her brother.

  The latter returned, satisfied enough, though ironic.

  “Sometimes I have to tell myself that success, even of the acceptable, the almost honest kind, was never unaccompanied. Inevitably, it trailed a certain shadow of shame. The favoured one became always just that little bit contaminated,” said Konrad, who had climbed to the room beneath the roof, carrying an extra lamp, and a bottle of Kognak. “I wonder whether the pure aren’t those who have tried, but not succeeded. Do you think, Himmelfarb, atonement is possible perhaps only where there has been failure?”

  “In that case many of us are saved who never suspected it!” the Jew replied.

  Konrad was already breathing too heavily, and not from his ascent to the hidden attic.

  “But you are the man of faith,” he mumbled.

  “I am the eternal beetle, who finds daily th
at he has slipped back several stages behind where he thought himself to be the night before. And continues to claw. I would only like to think I am the beetle of faith, not of habit.”

  “Better any kind of beetle than a nothing!”

  Konrad Stauffer was, in fact, the slightest of men, who made his respect the more touching to the object of it. Himmelfarb felt the humbler for his friend’s consideration, and would have liked in some way to convey his gratitude, but might never have occasion to.

  Because Stauffer remained at Herrenwaldau for increasingly brief periods.

  “Berlin again?” Himmelfarb once asked.

  “Berlin is only one of many directions,” the other replied.

  And continued to come and go.

  In the intervals, his wife served their guest with a regularity that was unexpected. Her elegance persisted, though by then shabbier in its expression. She had grown thinner, bonier, from withdrawal into a world where she seemed not to wish to be followed.

  Himmelfarb was even better able to respect such a wish since his own withdrawal into the empty room. There, in his obscure box, he was rarely unemployed, but had not yet arrived at that state of equanimity, of solitariness, of disinterest, from which, it had been suggested by the dyer, he might illuminate the vaster darkness.

  Sometimes, competing with his struggle to reach out towards, to reflect upon an unconscious world, he would hear the voice of the radio, announcing, admonishing, clearing its gravelly throat. Or Ingeborg would arrive to complete the sense of what he had suspected. Because, as the chain of events was forged, it became possible to foresee the links. So, Ingeborg only confirmed.

  One evening Stauffer returned, and Himmelfarb realized that his friend was also his contemporary, if anything older by a couple of years. For that youthful, sensual, forgivably superficial man had suddenly aged, just as his wife’s body could no longer conceal its physical shabbiness, which a superficial shabbiness of clothes had hitherto only hinted at.

  Stauffer announced that the British had declared war on Germany.

  “Then we are, at last, thank God, wholly committed,” he remarked, more to relieve his own feelings.

  After that, Himmelfarb did not see his friend again, and Ingeborg confirmed his impression that her husband was no longer at Herrenwaldau.

  “Yes,” she repeated with noticeable intensity, “it was best that he should go. And even if he is gone longer than usual, one grows accustomed to being alone; one can make it a habit like anything else.”

  Like the removal of her guest’s tray, for instance, an act she had learnt to perform with an obliviousness, a simplicity which moved him every time he watched it happen.

  “All this that you do for me!” He was forced to try to convey his feelings on one of the occasions when she had poured the steaming water from the waist-high can into the antiquated hip-bath.

  “Oh,” she exclaimed, quickly, still panting from her struggle up the flights of stairs, “don’t you understand? We do it also on account of ourselves. It is most, most necessary. For more than ourselves. For all of us.”

  And went away at once, biting her lip, and frowning at her shame.

  Several times Himmelfarb was tempted to touch on the subject of her husband’s employment, but she was gone before he was able to commit any such indelicacy, and afterwards he was glad.

  Only once she did remark:

  “You know Konrad will never do anything that you would condemn.”

  She became increasingly, no doubt wilfully, detached. On the night they heard, from their different parts of the house, the hysterical protests of the ground defences, and the cough and groan, the upheaval of prehistoric foundations when the British aeroplanes first dropped their bombs on a neighbouring target, Ingeborg did not appear. But, on the morning after, he noticed she had gathered back her hair so tight, her normally exposed face was even nakeder.

  Yet it did not reveal.

  As she held his empty cup at an angle, and contemplated the grey dregs of Ersatz coffee, she announced:

  “My lovely drake is dead. My big Muscovy. How he would hiss at times, and behave as unpleasantly as any man. But such a strong, splendid bird.”

  Himmelfarb felt he should ask how the drake had died.

  “Who will ever know?” she answered softly.

  It was not important, of course, beside the fact of death.

  There was the night the bombs were dropped so close, the rooms changed shape for a second at Herrenwaldau. The Jew rocked in his attic, but knew himself at that moment to be closer than ever to his God, as his thoughts clung to that with which he was most familiar. As the moonlight filled with the black shadows of wings, and all the evil in the world was aimed at the fragile lichened roof, he was miraculously transported.

  Afterwards when he had returned from this most ineffable experience, and the lower house no longer strained or tinkled, and only a recessive throbbing and whirring could be heard, the narrow stairway began to fill with the sound of footsteps, and he saw that Ingeborg Stauffer had come to his room, shielding a little lamp with her long trembling hand, against what had once been her assured and elegant breast.

  ‘I was so terribly afraid,” she confessed.

  ‘We were their target,” he realized, “for some reason only they can know.”

  “So very, very afraid,” Ingeborg Stauffer was repeating, and trembling.

  Fear, he could see, had made her once more human, and for the first time old.

  She was crying now.

  So he comforted her, by putting his arms round her almost naked body – she had been preparing herself for bed; he soothed and caressed and strengthened. So that she was soon made warm and young again. And some of his own youth and physical strength returned. In the short distance from the spirit to the flesh, he knew he would have been capable of the greatest dishonesty while disguising it as need.

  Then, by the light of the subdued lamp, he saw their faces in the glass. He saw the expression of Ingeborg Stauffer. Who had woken first. Whose disgust was not less obvious for being expertly concealed. As for his own face, it was that of an old, inept man. Or Jew.

  “We must try to sleep now,” she said.

  She had never sounded kinder, gentler, than in leaving him.

  Quite early, it seemed, the following morning, Himmelfarb recognized sounds of approach in the outside world. By climbing on the table, and opening a little bull’s-eye, he had found that, after craning out, and peering through a balustrade, he could distinguish below the empty sky a fragment of garden, trees and gravel drive. Now, on the morning after the misguided raid, a truck drew up in his precious, because so limited, field of vision, and several men – or one of them, perhaps, a sergeant – began to get down.

  Much later than usual, Frau Stauffer appeared briefly with his coffee, and announced that the Army was in residence. To examine damage and dispose of bombs. Naturally, she would come to him now only when absolutely necessary. That morning the coffee had been almost cold he realized after drinking it.

  At the same time his room became particularly fragile, even, he felt, superfluous. Was he preparing to break his shell? Indeed, the stillness could have been an egg, inside which he had been allowed to grow in strength, until now reminded, by instinct, by men’s voices, by the contact of steel with steel, of some unspecified duty to be performed in an outside world.

  Now, it seemed, the stillness could give him nothing more. So he was walking up and down, restlessly, although from habit very softly. And hardly noticed when, after days, his guardian’s footsteps again sounded normal on the stairs.

  “They have gone,” she said, but with an imitation of relief.

  For, in fact, they had not. They would never go now, so her face told, although she had watched, and he had heard them disappearing down the drive.

  Himmelfarb sensed that the inmates of Herrenwaldau had merely entered on a fresh phase of spiritual occupation.

  And soon after, Ingeborg Stauffer came to
him to say:

  “I know now that Konrad will never return.”

  It appeared so obvious when spoken, only it was a conviction that until then they had not dared share.

  “But have you received news?” Himmelfarb was foolish enough to ask.

  “Not news.” She shrugged. “I shall never, never receive news. I shall only ever know that I shall not see Konrad alive.”

  Himmelfarb suspected she would not allow herself to say: my husband – it had come so glibly, so extravagantly from her in the past – but now she was not strong enough. In his pity he longed to touch her.

  Her face had opened a little. She said:

  “It is less dreadful when one had always known. He himself expected. Oh, I know that Konrad, in spite of his success, was an insubstantial man. We both accepted it. He had very few illusions. ‘My books will survive,’ he used to say, ‘just about as long as I.’”

  There was an organization of a secret, an illegal nature, of which she could not tell, of which in fact she knew very little. To this, Himmelfarb gathered, Stauffer had belonged. But his actual missions would remain undisclosed.

  “You understand, in any case,” she said, repeating a remark she had made once before, “he will have done nothing that you would ever condemn.”

  Up to this she had been giving information, but now she gathered her elbows. She said:

  “I loved him! I loved him!”

  Her ordinarily marble face was mumbling and grunting, like that of some bereaved woman.

  “My dearest husband!” she confided.

  And went away.

  Less than ever now Himmelfarb belonged to Herrenwaldau. The boards ticked during darkness. In the hours of darkness the dark-red heart swelled enormously beneath the rafters. His iron bed was straiter, crueller to his sides. Then his own wife came and took his hand, and together they stood looking down into the pit of darkness, at the bottom of which was the very faintest phosphorescence of faces. He longed – oh, most intolerably – to look once more at the face of Reha Himmelfarb, but it was as though she were directing his vision towards the other, unknown faces, and might even have become unrecognizable herself. The tears were flowing faster, from the unseen eyes. Of blood, he saw, on the back of his hand. The voices of darkness ever swelling. So that the quick-lime of compassion, mounting from the great pit, consumed him where he stood. Quite alone now. For Reha Himmelfarb had withdrawn; she already knew the meaning of what they had just experienced together.