Riders In the Chariot

by Patrick White

  But it had all happened before, of course. Everything has always happened before. Except to children. So the Godbold children continued to cry.

  When their mother had got to her feet, it was better. She said:

  “We mustn’t forget that corned breast. Come on, Kate. It’s your turn tonight.”

  Only then did they see that they might expect to resume life.

  And their mother dared sit a moment, though only close to the edge of the chair. She would have liked to talk to somebody about the past, even of those occasions which had racked her most, of emigration, and miscarriages, not to mention her own courtship; she longed to dawdle amongst what had by now become sculpture. For present and future are like a dreadful music, flowing and flowing without end, and even Mrs Godbold’s courage would sometimes falter as she trudged along the bank of the one turbulent river towards its junction with the second, always somewhere in the mists. Then she would look back over her shoulder at the garden of statuary, to walk amongst which, it seemed at that enviable distance, faith was no longer needed.

  In the flat, fen country from which she had come, she grew to expect what is called monotony by those who are deaf to the variations on it. A grey country. Even though a hollyhock in her father’s garden would sometimes flicker up in memory against a grey wall, or rose straggle over eaves, or bosomy elm heave in the heavy summer, it was winter that she remembered best, of many, many greys: boots clattering through grey streets; the mirror-grey of winter fens; naked elms tossing rooks into a mackerel sky; the cathedral – the greyest, the most permanent of all greys, rising into cloud, that sometimes would disperse, sometimes would unite with stone.

  The cathedral was both a landmark and a mystery, to which the gentry owed allegiance, and were, in fact, loyal in their languid way, observing somewhat frightening rites before Sunday dinner. All of that the little girl knew, but understood none of it, because her folk were chapel, all, as far as her grandmother could remember. Of course her father did not; he did not even attempt to. It was not a man’s job. The little girl quickly discovered that women remember; men act, and are.

  The father was a cobbler. Very devout, in that he observed all the Sabbath demanded, and went to meetings besides, and saw that good was done, within his means, where good must be. In the same way he provided for his children, always enough, without ever contemplating their true needs, or entering into their minds. After his wife died, he seemed no longer to consider there was sufficient reason for coming inside; he would remain in the shop half the night cobbling. And sometimes the girl would go as far as the doorway, to where she could see the back of her father’s neck underneath the naked light. He had hard hands, which felt of wax. He was perhaps a hard man, if just; anyway, he might have found it hard to love, although he was fond of his daughter, because she was his, and of all his children, because it was his duty before God.

  The girl inherited his devotion to duty, in addition to which she was granted a rapture her father had never known. The thumping hymns would lift her up above the smoking paraffin stoves; it was not only good health that inspired her lungs, but also something of ecstasy. She never forgot herself, however. She never failed to look along the line, to threaten misbehaviour, or find the place for brothers and sisters. She regarded it as her duty; that was clear. She was the eldest, and had become virtually the mother.

  There was some talk of the eldest girl studying to be a teacher when she reached a certain age, but that was silly. She would hang her head whenever the possibility was mentioned, as if it was a joke against her. She was not intended for any such dignity. Nor was she really bright enough, she herself was ready to admit, and felt relieved when the matter was dropped. Then she was to have gone into service with old Lady Aveling. It had been discussed at a garden fête to raise funds for the victims of an earthquake. The girl had stood watching the ferrule of a parasol, while her father continued to answer questions on her behalf. All the while the coolest imaginable young ladies in lacy blouses were shooting arrows at the targets which gardeners had set up for their pleasure, or calling back to beautiful young men whose politeness seemed a kind of insolence. How the arrows pierced the desperate, wooden girl. She was that perturbed for considering what might become of her children once she had entered the great lady’s demesne. But, in the end, the plan fizzled, like the first, and she remained at home, helping in the house, holding it up in truth with the strength of her young arms. There was the grandmother, certainly, but an ailing body who did little beyond shell peas, seated in a wicker chair, on a brick path, amongst the gooseberry bushes, whenever there was a bit of sun. It was the eldest girl, already in a starched white apron at an early age, who received people when they came. Her broad face would consider the answer, and always find it in the end.

  But work and duty did not overwhelm her youth. Far from it. There were many simple pleasures. There were the expeditions, alone with brothers and sisters, or in company with members of the congregation, in winter skating and nutting, in summer hay-making, or those long afternoons, dawdled away beside hedge or water, which are half-dreamed, half-lived.

  Once Rob – he was the one who always dared most – had thought to suggest: “Why don’t we go up into the cathedral, and muck about? It is too cold outside, and there is nothing else to do. Eh? What about it, sis?” She was accustomed to hesitate because the responsibility would be hers, but on this occasion she did give in, not because the others were punching and pinching, but because she was already throbbing with expectation. She had never done more than look inside the cathedral in their own town, when, now the string of children was suddenly being sucked right in by the gasping door, into the smell of hot-water pipes, and a world which, as it formed, did not so much reprove them for their audacity, as ignore them entirely in the beginning. The great, ringed forest rose around them, its stone branches arching above their heads against a firmament of blue and crimson, from which light filtered dimly down, or music. At first the children acted respectful. Their limbs had ceased to be their own. They had stuck holy expressions on their faces, like little grotesque masks. Thinking that they ought to, they admired uninteresting objects, such as plaques for the dead, and only exclaimed too loud on discovering the Italian greyhound of some recumbent duchess. Such authenticity in stone thawed their natural spirits. They grew confident. They were laughing, and patting unnecessarily hard, ruddy-faced even in that gloom, becoming redder for the smell that somebody made, and just loud enough to carry. Then they were swept away in one gust, though by different paths, clattering and dispersing, bursting, for all the hissing and snatching of their mentor, the eldest sister. She might as well have hoped to restrain with hands or threats a batch of freshly-hatched trout, as catch the children once they had been poured back into their own hilarious element. Soon she had lost them. Soon, that could have been Rob, leaning out from one of the stone branches above, in company with the purple saints.

  She was glad, though, to feel exhausted by her powerlessness. She strolled a little, and let herself be influenced by the climate of mild solemnity. And was eventually composed enough to sit down on a rush-bottomed chair in an attitude for listening to sacred music. For the organ never stopped playing. She had been conscious of it, but only now began to hear. A music of a strength and solidity to strain the capacities of the harmonium at home. She had never heard anything like this, and was at first frightened to accept what she was experiencing. The organ lashed together the bars of music until there was a whole shining scaffolding of sound. And always the golden ladders rose, extended and extended, as if to reach the window of a fire. But there was no fire, only bliss, surging and rising, as she herself climbed upon the heavenly scaffolding and placed still other ladders, to reach higher. Her courage failed before the summit, at which she must either step right off into space, crash amongst the falling matchsticks, or be lifted out of sight for ever. For an instant she floated in the cloud of indecision, soothed by the infinitely kind fingers.

&n
bsp; So, in the end, when the organ stopped, she was dazed and sweating. She felt foolish, for her tears, and her recovered awkwardness. And for a strange gentleman who was looking at her.

  “Well?” laughed the man, with genuine pleasure and interest, but through a lot of phlegm.

  She blushed.

  He was a floury, funny-looking person. His wescoat was buttoned wrong. The scurf had fallen from his hair down on to his shoulders.

  “I shall not ask you what you thought of that, because,” he said, “it would only be a ridiculous question.”

  She blushed even worse. There was no ground to walk on. She was feeling awful.

  “Nobody else,” he said, “ever conveys the essence of music in any of the bilge they pour out regularly, trying to.”

  She began the business of extricating herself, but her chair shrieked like slate-pencils on the paving.

  “That was the Great Composer,” the strange gentleman continued, in an agony of enthusiasm and bronchial obstruction.

  But the reference made him look kinder.

  “I can see you will remember this day,” he said, “when you have forgotten a lot of other things. You have probably been taken closer than you are ever likely to come.”

  Then he walked away, warding off something with his scurfy shoulder.

  By this time the girl was again almost crying, but purely from mortification now. She escaped furiously to collect her lost children, and was only restored when everyone had been herded together. They went home soberly enough. They had bloaters for a treat, which the eldest sister ate more rapturously than any. As a young girl she had an appetite she would not have known how to disguise. It was only in later years that she learned to pick, in order to make things go round.

  In youth and strength, she would devour, and sleep it off. Even after the disasters which swallow those concerned, she would drop down and sleep like a pig. Her capacity for physical exertion was, it must be admitted, enormous. At hay-making, for example, she would never falter, or on pitching up the hay to load, like a man. At the end of the day, when women and boys were leaning exhausted and fiery, her normally pallid, nondescript skin would seem at last to have come alive, like a moist, transparent brier rose, as she continued to pitch regularly to the drays. It was Rob who liked to stand on the load, to receive. He always had to climb to where it was highest and most awkward, as on the toppling, dead-coloured hay, on Salters’ cart at Martensfield. When the girl had looked up, and for the first time, life, that ordinarily slack and harmless coil, became a fist, which was aiming at her personally. It hit her in the chest, it seemed. There was Rob, slipping, laughing, slithering, all wooden arms and legs, as the haymakers watched the slow scene. There was Rob lying in the field, his white eyelids. Herself watching. As the wheel of minutes ground. His mouth had hardly finished laughing, in time for the teeth to protest a little. They might have been grains of unripe corn. As the wheel of the cart trundled, lurched. Then the girl, whose strong back could formerly have held off the weight of the whole world, was tearing at iron, wood, stubble. She was holding in her hands the crushed melon that had been her brother’s head. In the dying field.

  Several people ran to help. And on the way. But it was she, of course, who had to carry her brother. It was not very far, her blurry mouth explained. From that field. To the outskirts of the town. She was strong, but her thoughts were tearing as she carried the body of her brother. It had been different when their mother died, in bed, at night, surrounded by relatives. Children were forgotten. Until, almost at once, the big girl had taken them on. She was lugging her brother around. So that he was hers to carry now. As her feet dragged along the first of the paving-stones, women clapped fingers to their mouths, and ran inside, trampling geranium and pinks, or burst from their cottages to gape at the girl who was carrying a dead boy, the sun setting in the grey streets, filling them for a moment with blood.

  She brought the body to their father, who did not look at her straight, she saw, then, or ever again. He would sometimes look at her boots, that strong pair, which he himself had made, and on which blood had fallen.

  The girl went upstairs, and slept. Some of the younger ones had cried, not for a dead brother, but for fear they might never shake their eldest sister out of her terrifying sleep.

  Time, however, tidies very quickly.

  The girl found a new way, the woman remembered, of doing her hair, making it look neat and sleek, with a brown velvet ribbon. She refused to cut off her hair, as others were doing. She would have felt foolish. Or perhaps she was just dowdy.

  She had been walking, she remembered, in the back garden, in her brown ribbon, and a scent of stocks. It was evening, and the tea was on the stove.

  Her father had come out to her. He said, looking away, as always, somewhere over her shoulder, but smilingly, for him:

  “I want you to come inside and meet Miss Jessie Newsom.”

  He even touched her, so that she quailed.

  “Miss Jessie Who?” she asked, although she had heard plainly.

  He appeared to take it for granted that she had, for he went on with what he had prepared.

  “She is a teacher. Over at Broughton.”

  She noticed the adam’s-apple, which had always seemed to make speech more difficult for their father.

  She tore off a bud. Inside, it was a pale, peculiar green.

  Then he told her, gently, but awfully.

  “She is going to be your mother.”

  But the girl saw to it, in her own case at least, Miss Jessie Newsom never became that.

  She was a kind, cool teacher, with apparently confident hands. She was wearing a cameo brooch on the important night, and a cardigan which sagged rather, from the weighty decisions the teacher had been forced to make. In her belief that advantages were open to all those who cared to take the trouble, Miss Newsom had learnt to speak properly, but her origins continually reminded her of the secret cupboards, and sometimes she would blush for their contents.

  She said:

  “So this is Ruth. They tell me you have been the most wonderful girl. I hope you will not feel, Ruth, that I am in any way an intruder. I hope we shall be able to – shall we say – share the duties of family life?”

  Jessie Newsom was so prudent.

  But now she hesitated, because she found she was looking at the girl’s forehead, which was all that had been offered of the face, and it was altogether expressionless.

  Miss Jessie Newsom made an excellent wife and stepmother, the girl heard, both from those who had been shocked by Ruth Joyner’s behaviour, and from her own brothers and sisters, whose letters dwindled as continued distance loosened the relationship.

  Shortly after Miss Newsom’s advent, the eldest girl had approached her father, and announced:

  “I have decided to look for work now.”

  To which the father replied:

  “If that is how you feel, Ruth. We will try to find you something close by.”

  “I have decided to emigrate,” she said. “Chrissie Watkins’s auntie hears Chris is doing well in Sydney. I have got all the information from Mrs Sinnett, and will write about the passage, if you will help me. And with money, too, in the beginning. I will pay the money back, of course, because of all these other children.”

  The father made noises in his throat. What could he say, he wondered, to console? Instead, he brought out something typical of himself.

  “You should learn to forgive, Ruth. That is what we have been taught.”

  But she did not answer. In her misery, she was afraid she might have fetched up a stone. Nor did she dare touch, for she could have buried herself in her father’s chapped lips, and been racked upon the white, unyielding teeth.

  So she went. Her father bought her a tin box in which to pack her few things. Her brothers and sisters presented her with a mauve satin handkerchief sachet, on which was embroidered across a corner: A clean nose is not a luxury. She was wretchedly seasick, or unhappy. Other girls, wh
o lit cigarettes, and crossed their legs with professional ease, and knew how to ask for something called a gimlet, did not care for her company. Her skirts were too long, nor did her conversation add anything to their experience of life. So she sat alone, and watched the ocean, the like of which she had never seen, so huge and glassy. And off the Cape an elderly gentleman, who had a business at some place – Gosford, was it? – proposed to her, but it would have been silly, not to say wrong, to let herself accept.

  At night, while the other young women were fumbling with temptation on the steerage deck, she said her prayers, and was mysteriously, personally comforted. Released finally from the solid body. her soul was free to accept its mission, but hesitated to trust to its own strength. And hovered, and hovered in the vastness, until recognizing that the rollers were folded into one another, and the stars were fragments of the one light. So she would stir in her sleep, and smile for her conviction, and often one of her cabin mates, as she combed the knots out of her own salty hair in the merciless little flaky mirror, would question the expression of the sleeping girl’s face.

  On arriving in Sydney, Ruth Joyner discovered that her friend Chrissie Watkins had married, and gone to live in another state. So there was no one. But she found work easy enough, first in some refreshment room, where for a while she carried trays with the thick white cups and the fingers of fruit-cake or madeira. She would set the orders carefully down, and return to the urns, which smelled perpetually of dregs.

  All was going well, it seemed – customers often smiled, sometimes even read her passages from letters, and once she was asked to examine a varicose vein – when the lady supervisor called Ruth, and said:

  “Look, love, I will tell you something. You will never make good as a waitress. You are too slow. I am only telling you, mind.”

  Because, really, the lady supervisor was kind. She had only been standing a long time, and the heat had eaten the seams of her black satin.