Riders In the Chariot

by Patrick White

  Most of this Mrs Godbold knew, by hearsay, if not experience, and now visualized a mess of husband, songful and soulful, bitter and generous at once, as ready to lay his head on a bosom as bash it open on a stone. She would have endured all this, and more, if only she could have caught him by the shirt as he stumbled glassy from Fixer Jensen’s, but after Else’s recent report, Tom had gone frying further fish, of rather a different kind.

  Mrs Goldbold was almost tripped by her own thoughts at the corner of Alice Avenue, but kept her balance, and went on, turning her wedding-ring round and round, to achieve an assurance which hesitated to develop. She even whimpered a little to herself, something she would never have done by daylight, or in public. Only, in the streets of Sarsaparilla at night, she was less a wife and mother than a humour in a dark hat.

  In which state she arrived at Khalils’.

  And found, unexpectedly, discretion.

  If a piece of the gate did fall off as she opened it, that is always liable to happen, and if the house itself had dissolved, the windows remained an inextinguishable yellow, only partially eclipsed by a variety of materials: crimson plush, check horserug, brown holland, even, it seemed, a pair of old cotton drawers, that the owners had stretched, for privacy like. All was quiet, though, at Khalils’. So that when the visitor knocked, the sound of her knuckles rang out, and she sank a little lower in her shoes.

  Slippers approached, however, rather annoyed.

  “Waddaya want there?” called a voice through a tear in the screen door.

  “I am Mrs Godbold,” the darkness answered. “And I have come for my husband. Who must be here.”

  “Oh,” said the voice – it was a woman’s. “Mrs Godbold.”

  Then there was a long pause, in which breathing and mosquitoes were heard, and someone was waiting for someone else to act.

  “Mrs Godbold,” said the woman at last, through the tear. “Waddaya wanta come ’ere for!”

  “I came here for my husband,” the visitor persisted.

  It was so simple.

  But the door was whining and creating.

  “No one,” said the woman, “never came for their husband. Never.”

  She was distressed, it seemed, by some infringement of etiquette. She did not know what to do, so the door creaked, and her slippers shifted grittily.

  “You are Mrs Khalil?” Mrs Godbold asked.

  “Yes,” said the woman, after a pause.

  The sticky scent of jasmine hung low, touching strangers. Loving cats pressed against the skirt.

  “Aohh,” protested Mrs Khalil, “whydya wanna go an’ do this?”

  She could have been a decent sort. She was swinging the door, and her cats were at least fed.

  “You better come in,” she said, “Mrs Godbold. I dunno watta do with yer. But come in. It’s no faulta mine. Nobody never done this ter me before.”

  Mrs Godbold coughed, because she did not know what to answer, and followed the slippers of her new acquaintance, slit slat slit slat, down a passage, into a yellow light and some confusion.

  “There we are, anyways,” Mrs Khalil said, and smiled, showing a gold tooth.

  Mollie Khalil was not a bad sort at all. If she was Irish, whose fault was that? And such a long way back. There were those at Sarsaparilla who called her a loose woman, and those could have been right. But an honest woman, too. Doing her job like anyone else. Lived de facto with a Syrian until the bugger shoved off, when she simply turned to, and set up whoring in a quiet way, in a small home behind the fire-station. She was no longer for the men herself, preferring comfort and a glass of gin. Besides, her girls Lurleen and Janis were both of an age, and there was a lady would come from Auburn, to help out when necessary.

  “We might as well be comfortable,” Mrs Khalil now said. “Us women!” She laughed. “Take off your hat, dear, if you feel like it.”

  But Mrs Godbold did not.

  Mrs Khalil was wearing a loose, imaginative gown, in which her flesh swam free, as she moved about what was evidently her kitchen.

  She said:

  “This is my youngest kid, Janis, Mrs Godbold.”

  She touched her child’s rather frizzy hair as if it had been something else, growing on its own.

  Janis was having a read of what her mother would have called a Book. She did not look up, but stuck out her jaw, and frowned. She was sitting in her shift. Her bare toes were still wriggly, like a little girls’.

  “Siddown, dear,” said Mrs Khalil to her visitor, and moved something private from a chair.

  In a far corner there was a gentleman still to be explained.

  “This is Mr Hoggett,” she said. “He is waiting.”

  Mr Hoggett did not know what to say, but made a noise in the region of the singlet which contained his upper part.

  Mrs Godbold sat down upon an upright chair. Her errand of love remained somehow imperative, though by now she knew it could not be explained.

  Janis was turning the pages of her Book with a thumb which she licked scornfully. She was black, but not so black as not to know what she was worth.

  “Ackcherly,” said Mrs Khalil, staring dreamy at the vision which represented her younger child, “we was having a sorta discussion when you come around and knocked. I said death is like anythin’ else. It is wotcha care to make it, like. It is howya go orff. But Mr Hoggett and Janis still had to voice an opinion.”

  Mr Hoggett had not bargained for anything of this. He turned his head sideways. He scratched his navel through the singlet.

  “Mr Hoggett’s wife died,” Mrs Khalil said, and smiled a kind of dreamy smile.

  “’Ere! Cut it out!” Mr Hoggett had to protect his rights. “I didn’t come ’ere for this. A man can stay at ’ome and listen to the wireless.”

  He looked around, accusing, and what was most unfair, at Mrs Godbold, who was innocent.

  Then the bawd began to turn nasty. She struck several matches, but they broke.

  “I toldya, didn’t I? I couldn’ta made it plainer. Janis is bespoke. Some men make me wanta reach!”

  But she got the cigarette alight at last. She began to breathe up smoke, and to move about inside her clothes. Mr Hoggett, who was pretty big, simply sat, in his singlet, expressing himself with his belly. He might have expanded further if Mrs Khalil’s kitchen had not filled up already, with dishes, and baskets, and piles of women’s underclothes, and cats, and an old gas stove with a glass face and mutton fat inside.

  “Excuse us, dear, if business will raise its head,” Mrs Khalil apologized to Mrs Godbold.

  The latter smiled, because she felt she ought. But the expression did not fit her face. It drifted there, out of someone else’s situation. The chair on which she sat was so upright, the flesh itself could not upholster it. Or, at least, she must see to that.

  At the same time, there was a great deal she did not understand. It left her looking rather sad.

  “I could wait outside,” presently she said.

  For her intentions, if they had ever formed, had finally grown paralysed.

  “Oh dear, no!” protested Mrs Khalil. “The night air does no one any good.”

  So Mrs Godbold’s statue was not moved from off its chair, and just as she was puzzled by her own position, the sculptor’s purpose remained obscure to the beholder.

  In the kitchen’s fearful fug, forms had swelled. For one thing, Mr Hoggett had expended a good deal of emotion. Now, when he suddenly laughed, right the way up his gums, it was perhaps entitlement. He slapped his opulent thigh, and looked across at Janis, and asked:

  “Havin’ a nice read, love?”

  “Nao,” said Janis.

  She had done her nails some time ago, and the stuff was flaking off. What she read, following it with a finger, was obviously of grave substance.

  “There!” she cried. “Mumma, I toldya! Thursday is no good. We are under the influence of Saturn. See?”

  She slammed the Book together then.

  “Oh, gee!”
she said.

  She went and threw the window up, so that she let in the moon and a scent of jasmine. A white, sticky stream of night came pouring in, together with a grey cat of great persistence.

  “Gee,” said Janis, “I wish I could make somethink happen!”

  “That is somethink I would never dare wish for,” asserted her mother.

  And blew a trumpet of smoke from her nostrils.

  In the house behind, voices were laid together in the wooden boxes. They would rasp like sandpaper at times, or lie against one another like kid gloves.

  Mrs Godbold listened to the minutes. She held up her chin. In spite of the aggressively electric light, the side of her face closest to the window had been very faintly moonwashed. It was only just visible, one paler splash.

  Suddenly she bent down, for something to do, it could have been, and got possession of the smoky cat. She laid it along her cheek, and asked:

  “What are you after, eh?”

  So softly. But it was heard.

  Mrs Khalil nearly bust herself. She answered:

  “Love, I expect. Like anybody else.”

  And Mrs Godbold had to see that this was true. That was perhaps the dreadful part. Now she really did understand, she thought, almost everything, and only prayed she would not be corrupted by her own knowledge.

  The chair creaked on which Mr Hoggett sat. He was very heavy. And hair bursting out of his body.

  “I would like to go away, somewhere on a train,” Janis said, and turned quick. “Mumma,” she said, “let me have me dress. Go on!” she coaxed. “I gotta go out. Anywheres.”

  “You know what was agreed.” the mother replied.

  The girl began to protest and twist. She was very pretty underneath her shift.

  In the dream in which she sat, and from which her marble must never be allowed to stir, Mrs Godbold could feel the drops of jasmine trickling down. She began, for protection, to think of her own home, or shed, and the white surface of the ironing-table, cleaner than moonlight, not to say more honest, with the bowl from which she sprinkled the clothes. She must pin her mind on all such flat surfaces and safe objects, not on her husband; he was the weakest side of her.

  So she fixed her eyes on the floor of Mrs Khalil’s kitchen, on a harlequin lino, where much had been trodden in.

  The moon has touched her up, Mrs Khalil saw, and for a moment the bawd fell quite genuinely in love with that strong but innocent throat, although, mind you, she was sick of men and women, their hot breath, their double-talk, their slack bodies, and worst of all, their urgent ones. She liked best to lay around with the Sunday papers, a cat against her kidneys.

  Mrs Godbold paddled her hand in the grey cat’s very nearly contented fur. She no longer blamed her husband, altogether. She blamed herself for understanding. She might have left, indeed, if she had been able to withdraw her feet. But the moonlight lay in sticky pools, even where invisible, smelling of jasmine, and a man’s stale body.

  Then there was such a to-do, the wooden house was all but knocked sideways.

  “Don’t tell me!” cried Mrs Khalil. “It is that bloody abo again!”

  “Arrr, Mumma!” Janis had to draw the line at that.

  “Wot abo?” Mr Hoggett was quick to ask.

  As if they had not stalled on him enough.

  “The only one. Our pet one,” moaned Mrs Khalil. “Send it orff, and it will turn up again like washin’ day.”

  “Arr, Mumma, no!”

  Janis could have had the belly-ache.

  “Is it ’im?” Mr Hoggett was fairly running sweat.

  But nobody listened to that gentleman now.

  For the screen door was screaming painfully. The boards of the violated house were groaning and recoiling.

  He came in. He had a purple bruise where he had fallen on his yellow forehead, somewhere or other. He could not use his body by now, but was directed by a superior will.

  “You dirty, drunken bastard!” shouted Mrs Khalil. “Didn’t I tellya we was not accepting any further visits?”

  He stood, and a smile possessed him.

  The bawd would have liked to deliver a piece on blacks, but remembered dimly she had been married to one in all but writing.

  “This is no visit. This is a mission,” announced the abo.

  So surprisingly that Mrs Godbold looked up. She had been half determined to keep her eyes fixed firmly on the lino, in case she might have to witness an indignity which she would not be strong enough to prevent.

  “A mission?” shouted Mrs Khalil. “Wot sorta mission, I would liketa know?”

  “A mission of love,” replied the abo.

  And began to laugh happily.

  “Love!” cried Mrs Khalil. “You got ideas in yer head. I’m tellin’ you! This is a decent place. No love for blacks!”

  Janis had grown giggly. She was biting the red stuff off of her nails, and scratching herself.

  The black continued to laugh for a little, because he had not yet run down, and because laughter disposed him to resist the roomful of fluctuating furniture.

  Then he became grave. He said:

  “Okay, Mrs Khalil. I will sing and dance for you instead.”

  “If you will allow me,” he added, very reasonable. “And even if you cut up rough. Because I am compelled to.”

  Many of the words were borrowed, but those could have been the cheaper ones. A certain gravely cultivated tone and assembly of educated phrases were what, it seemed, came natural to him. Even as he rocked, even as his thick tongue tripped over a word here and there, as his fiery breath threatened to burn him up, or he righted himself on the furniture, his eyes were fixed obsessively on some distant standard of honesty and precision. He would never quite lose sight of that – he made it clear – and it was what infuriated some of his audience most. Mr Hoggett, for instance, while affecting the greatest disgust, both for a moral situation, and for the obvious signs of vomit on the abo’s pants, was most enraged by a tone of voice, and words that he himself would never have dared use.

  “Where did ’e learn it, eh?” he asked. “This one beats the band. So much play-actin’, and dawg!”

  The black man, who was conscientiously preparing the attitude and frame of mind necessary for his act, paused enough to answer, in a voice that was as long, and straight, and sober as a stick:

  “I owe everything to the Reverend Timothy Calderon, and his sister, Mrs Pask.”

  “Waddaya know!” exploded Mrs Khalil.

  She could not help but laugh, although she had decided on no account to do so.

  The blackfellow, who had at last succeeded in reconciling attitude with balance, now began to sine:

  “Hi digger, hi digger,

  My uncle is bigger

  Than my father,

  But not as big as

  Friday night.

  Friday is the big shivoo,

  When the swells begin to swell,

  And poor Mother has her doubts.

  Hi digger, hi digger,

  The moon has a trigger,

  Which shoots the buggers down,

  Whether they want to be hit,

  Or to pro-cras-tin-ate ….”

  “Go easy!” interrupted Mrs Khalil. “I don’t allow language in my place. Not from clients. If I’m forced ter use a word meself, it’s because I got nowhere else ter go.”

  “Why don’t they lock ’im up?” Mr Hoggett complained.

  “Why?” asked Mrs Khalil, and answered it easy. “Cos the constable ’imself is in the front room, as always, with my Lurleen.”

  By this time the black, who had started in a lazy, loving way, only lolling and lurching, as he sowed seed gently with his hands, or took out his heart to present to the different members of the audience, had begun to grow congested. He was darkening over, purpling even. His sandshoes began to beat a faster time. Short, stabbing gestures were aimed, not at another, but inward, rather, at his own breast.

  He stamped, and sang faster:

/>   “Hi digger, hi digger,

  Nail it! Nail it!

  Nail the difference till it bleeds!

  It’s the difference, It’s the difference

  That will bleed the best.

  Poppies are red, and Crimson Ramb-lers,

  But men are redd-est

  When they bleed.

  Let ’em! Let ’em!

  Le-ehtt … .”

  So he sang, and stamped, and stamped on a cat or two, which yowled in their turn. Baskets fell, of lingerie, which the sun had hardened into slabs of salt fish. As the abo jumped and raised hell, Mollie Khalil appeared to have started jumping too, or at least her breasts were boiling inside the flora! gown.

  “Catch ’old of ’im, willya, please! Someone! Mr Hoggett, be a gentleman!”

  She had revived herself somewhat, with something, to cope with a situation, and now was holding her side hair, so that the sleeves had fallen back, from rather moister, black-and-whitest armpits.