Riders In the Chariot

by Patrick White

  Mr Calderon and his widowed sister, Mrs Pask, took the boy to institute what they christened their Great Experiment. For Mr Calderon was a man of high ideals, even though, as his more perceptive parishioners noticed, he failed perpetually to live up to them. If it required the more perceptive to notice, it was because his failures up to date had been for the most part harmless ones. He was, indeed, a harmless man, with the result that he had been moved to Numburra from the larger town of Dumbullen. Such perception on the part of his bishop had caused the rector to shed very bitter tears, but of those, only his sister knew, and together they had prayed that he might receive the strength humbly to endure his martyrdom.

  It was the more distressing as the Reverend Timothy Calderon was a cultured man, of birth even, whose ideals had brought him from the Old Country shortly after ordination. Quite apart from the Latin verbs, he was able to unravel the Gospels from the Greek. He knew the dates of battles, and the names of plants, and had inherited a complete edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica as well as a signet-ring. If the souls of Numburra appreciated neither his gentle blood nor his education, that was something further he must bear. That he did bear it was due not only to fervid prayer, but also to the timely conception of his Great Experiment. On little Alf Dubbo, the parson decided, he would lavish all he could: fatherly love, and spiritual guidance, to say nothing of Latin verbs, and the dates of battles.

  Alf Dubbo appeared from the beginning to be an exceedingly bright boy. Those who were interested in him were soon convinced that he might grasp almost anything, provided he wanted to. Only, where did his bent lie? That at once became the problem. He was bright, but he was lazy, the most sceptical of the rector’s parishioners observed with tigerish satisfaction. Who but the rector would not have expected laziness from the bastard of an old black gin out at the Reserve? It did not occur to the critics, of course, that the boy might have inherited his vice from some Irish ancestor. Propriety alone made them reduce Alf’s Irish ancestors to the mythical status of the Great Snake.

  The rector himself began to suspect his ward of indolence, when on one occasion the boy asked:

  “Mr Calderon, what am I going to do with all these Latin verbs?”

  “Well,” said the rector, “in the first place, they are a discipline. They will help to build character.”

  “But I can’t see what use they will be,” complained the boy, in his gentle, imitation voice. “I don’t think I can be that kind of character.”

  Then he started, regrettably, to sulk. He would sulk, and scribble, and his teacher would have to admit that at such times little more could be done with him.

  “Sometimes I wonder whether we are not being terribly unwise,” the rector once confessed to his sister.

  “Oh, but in some directions, Timothy, he has made visible progress. In sketching, for instance,” Mrs Pask was vain enough to insist. “In sketching I cannot show him enough. He has an eye for colour. Alf is an artistic boy.”

  “Art, yes. But life.”

  The rector sighed, moody for his Latin verbs.

  Alf Dubbo did love to draw, and would scribble on the walls of the shed where he milked the rector’s horny cow.

  “What are you doing, Alf?” they called.

  “I was marking up the weeks since she had the bull,” the boy replied.

  That stopped them. He had noticed early on that Mrs Pask preferred to avert her eyes from nature. So that once more he was free to scribble on the walls of the shed, the finespun lines of a world he felt to exist but could not yet corroborate.

  In the circumstances, he was always undemonstratively happy when Mrs Pask happened to say:

  “Dear, oh, dear, I have a head! But we must not neglect your education, must we, Alf? Bring out my watercolour box, and we shall continue where we left off last time. I believe you are beginning to grasp the principles of drawing, and may even have a hidden talent.”

  As a young girl, Mrs Pask herself had been compelled to choose between several talents, none of them hidden, it was implied; indeed, they had been far too obvious. What with sketching, and piano, and a light soprano voice, she had led rather a distracted life, until it was revealed to her that she must abandon all personal pretentions for the sake of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the Reverend Arthur Pask. She did, however, retain a reduced interest in sketching and watercolour, and would, on days when the climate allowed, take her easel and dash something off. Her hobby – because, in spite of a technical facility, she would not let herself think of it as more – had proved a particular comfort in the hour of trial. For Mrs Pask was widowed early.

  “Never forget, Alf, that art is first and foremost a moral force,” she remarked once to her pupil, while demonstrating the possibilities of white as a livener of unrelieved surfaces. “Truth,” she added, “is so beautiful.”

  He was, at least, fascinated by her brush.

  “See,” she said, dabbing, “one tiny fleck, and each of these cherries comes to life. One has to admit there is something miraculous in the creative act.”

  He could not yet, but became convinced of some potentiality.

  “Let,” he said, “let me, Mrs Pask, now.”

  He was so quick. He could do a bowl of cherries – highlights included – or plaster hand which she had in a cupboard, before his teacher had caught on to the thread of narrative she proposed to follow. It exasperated, even humiliated her at first.

  “I hope you are not a vain boy,” she would remark.

  Which was too silly to answer.

  Once she put in front of him a vase of what she said were Crimson Ramblers – only a shadow of what they could be.

  For him, they were the substance. He made them stand up stiff and solid. He drew a blue line round each of the crimson roses, so that they were for ever contained.

  She laughed. She said:

  “You cannot resist colour. There was never anything so red. You must learn in time, though, it is delicacy that counts.”

  Mrs Pask loved best of all to talk while her pupil worked. She would lie back in her chair, with her feet on an embroidered stool. Years afterwards, coming across a print in a public library, Dubbo was forced to realize that Mrs Pask, for all her virtue, had been at heart one of the turbaned ladies of another more indolent age, leaning, figuratively in her case, on the shoulder of her little coloured boy.

  There in the weatherboard sitting-room at Numburra, under the cracking, corrugated roof, Mrs Pask’s voice would join with the drone of blowflies in unbroken antiphon.

  “I must tell you, Alf, I gave up all for Mr Pask, even down to face-powder, though of course my skin being of the finest, and my complexion so clear and fresh, that was no very great hardship. And who would not have done the same! He was a lovely man. Of the sweetest disposition. And so slim. But,” she coughed, “athletic. I can see him jump the net at tennis. Arthur would never think of going round.”

  The pupil worked. Or looked up at times, for politeness’ sake. Mrs Pask, of former fine complexion, had turned purple by that date. It was blood pressure, and the climate.

  Sometimes the boy would sit very still at the drawing-board. Then she would complain:

  “Surely you have not finished, Alf, when I have only just set you the subject?”

  “No,” he would reply, “not yet.”

  For peace.

  And would sit. And would wait.

  Then, after he had mixed some fresh colours, he would work. Sometimes she thought his eyes stared too hard. That his chest was too cramped. There was something unhealthy.

  She would say:

  “We must try to find some companions for you. Rough games once in a while are good for any boy. Not that I approve of brute strength. Only Christian manliness.”

  He grunted to appease her. He could not have formed words while under such other pressure. For, he was all the time painting.

  And on one occasion the tin box of Mrs Pask’s paints had gone clattering.

  “Oh!” she cried.
“If the little porcelain containers should get broken! Alf, I should be so upset. The box – I told you, didn’t I? – was a gift from Mr Pask.”

  Nothing was broken, however.

  “But what,” she asked, still breathing hard, “whatever in the world, Alf, is this?”

  Looking at his paper.

  It was almost as if she had caught him at something shameful. He sat with his knees together. His innermost being stood erect.

  “That is a tree,” he said when he was able.

  “A most unnatural tree!” She smiled kindly.

  He touched it with vermilion, and it bled afresh.

  “What are these peculiar objects, or fruit – are they? – hanging on your tree?”

  He did not say. The iron roof was cracking.

  “They must mean something,” Mrs Pask insisted.

  “Those,” he said, then, “are dreams.”

  He was ashamed, though.

  “Dreams! But there is nothing to indicate that they are any such thing. Just a shape. I should have said mis-shapen kidneys!”

  So that he was put to worse shame.

  “That is because they have not been dreamt yet,” he uttered slowly.

  And all the foetuses were palpitating on the porous paper.

  “I am afraid it is something unhealthy,” Mrs Pask confided in her brother. “An untrained mind could not possibly conceive of anything so peculiar unless.”

  “But the boy’s mind is not totally untrained. Since you have begun to train it,” the parson could not resist.

  He still smarted for his Latin verbs, and the obvious hold his sister had over Alf Dubbo, through the medium of paint.

  “I have to admit I am a little frightened. I wonder whether I should go on with it,” Mrs Pask meditated.

  “You have uncovered his imagination. That is all.” The rector sighed.

  Imagination, just a little, was his own misfortune, for it had never been enough to ferment the rest of him, yet too much for failure to support. He was a soggy man, reminiscent of grey bread. If he had been less gentle, more bitter, he might have been admired. He had a handsome nose for a start, which should have cut an offender to the quick. But as it had never occurred to the Reverend Timothy Calderon to use any part of his physical person as a weapon, he was not repaid in fear and respect, not even by his own sister, who only loved him because it would have been shocking not to and because there was no other intimate relationship left to her.

  As he conducted the ritual of his parish life: the tepid, but in every way reverential services, the visits to those of his parishioners who were too passive to intimidate him, the annual fête at which the same ladies guessed the weight of a different-coloured cake – the rector was sustained by secrets. Only two, certainly, for his temperament would not have run to more. But of those two secrets, the one was shocking enough, the other he would never have admitted to, so desperately did he depend upon it for his nourishment.

  In that northern diocese of bells and lace, Mr Calderon officiated as befitted one born and reared an Anglican. While the temperature rose, so did the incense, though never enough to offend the nostrils. One was relieved to find that taste and the formalities had not been preserved from Rome to be destroyed by any evangelical fervour. Here original purity prevailed. Even when the lace got torn in scuffles, despite the vigilance of Mrs Pask. Even when the Eucharist lulled in summer, and the best intentions slipped beyond the bounds of concentration. Like Sunday, Mr Calderon came and went. His blameless hand would place the wafer, his unexceptionable voice intone, without disturbing the past, or ladies’ minds. Blowflies seconded him, under the window of St George, which the Butter Factory had presented.

  It was beneath the Saint, his favourite, the manly, flannel-clad, athletic George, that the rector would most frequently indulge his secret life, while attending to those practical duties of devotional routine which boys regularly forgot. Perhaps the swing of his cassock, not entirely an ascetic garment, suggested to the silent man a somewhat freer choreography for the soul. In any case, as he placed a napkin, or a cruet, or retrieved a battered psalter from underneath a pew, the rector would find himself yearning after some more virile expression of faith which a damp nature and family opinion had never allowed him to profess. In other words, the Reverend Timothy Calderon longed secretly to flame in the demonstration of devotion. But would he really have known how? At least in his imagination, the strong voices of clear-skinned boys, in severest linen surplices, would mount in hymns of praise, carrying his diffident soul towards salvation. He would be saved, not by works, too exhausting in a hot climate, not by words, too banal in any event, but by youth, rather, and ever-straining lung-power.

  All that he had never been, all that he had not experienced, was fatally attractive to the humble rector. Under the window of the blond Saint, bursting the Dragon with his lance, his brother-in-law Arthur Pask would appear to Timothy Calderon, and, after jumping the tennis-net, throw his arm around the weaker shoulder. During his brief life, all had been made possible to Arthur: a thrilled, and thrilling faith, the rewards and pains of a missionary fervour, marriage with a lovely girl – nobody had blamed Emily on seeing that her reason for defection was not altogether evangelical – then martyrdom, more or less, for in spite of his aggressive health, Arthur Pask was carried off, at the early age of twenty-six, by rheumatic fever, on the Birdsville Track. Of those who mourned, perhaps it was not his widow who was cut most deeply. A widow is placated by the drama of it; a woman can sweeten herself on what is bitterest in memory. It was the brother-in-law who suffered. Though nobody knew it.

  Not long after Alf Dubbo came to them, the rector had remarked:

  “I noticed, Emily, you did not communicate this morning.”

  “No,” she said.

  Their feet were flogging the dust on the short distance to the rectory.

  “I remembered,” she explained, “it is the anniversary of Arthur’s death.”

  “You remembered!” He laughed.

  It sounded odd, but Emily Pask was of those people who, besides forgetting, failed to divine sensibility in others. If less obtuse, of course, she would have seen that her brother whipped his sorrows to prevent them lagging.

  Their life together was full of undercurrents, which sometimes threatened to drag them down. So that the presence of the aboriginal boy did at first relieve, and even promise rescue. If the sister was only partially aware, the brother became fully conscious that his hopes were fastening on Alf Dubbo, and that through him he hoped he might achieve, if not personal salvation, at least a mental cosiness. Until finding he had only added another nail to those he wore.

  For the rector had never succeeded in communicating with anyone by words. Nor would the boy, it appeared, attempt to express himself, except by those riddles in paint which his teacher so deplored.

  Soon after the morning on which Mrs Pask had found herself faced with her pupil’s daemon, Timothy Calderon discovered Alf looking through a book, as though he were not at all sure he should be doing what he was unable to resist.

  “Well, Alf,” the kindly man slowly opened, “have you found something instructive? Or only to your taste?”

  He had not meant it that way, but there it was. While the boy continued turning the pages with feverish necessity.

  “It is a book I found,” Alf replied, with some obviousness. “It is interesting,” he added.

  He spoke dully, when he was, in fact, consumed.

  “Ah,” said the rector, “I believe that was a present from a school acquaintance of my sister’s. Who knew of her interest in the arts.”

  The man and boy continued looking together at the book.

  Here the world broke into little particles of light. The limbs of the bathers might have remained stone, if light had not informed the observer that this was indeed flesh of flesh; even the water became a vision of original nakedness. Dancers were caught for an instant in the turmoil of their tulle. Laundresses ironed a diago
nally divided world of powdered butterflies. Solid lanterns vibrated with thick, joyous bursts of light.

  “The French,” remarked Mr Calderon, after he had referred to the title, “have a different conception of things.”

  The boy was throbbing over his discovery.

  “They are a different race,” the rector judged, smiling a forgiving smile.

  Then the boy stopped at a picture he would always remember, and criticize, and wish to improve on. It was the work, he read, of some French painter, a name to him, then as always. In the picture the chariot rose, behind the wooden horses, along the pathway of the sun. The god’s arm – for the text implied it was a god – lit the faces of the four figures, so stiff, in the body of the tinny chariot. The rather ineffectual torch trailed its streamers of material light.

  “‘Apollo’,” read the rector.

  He was not prepared to continue, or to comment.

  But Alf Dubbo said:

  “The arm is not painted good. I could do the arm better. And horses. My horses,” the boy claimed, “would have the fire flowing from their tails. And dropping sparks. Or stars. Moving. Everything would move in my picture. Because that is the way it ought to be.”

  “You are the regular little artist!” the rector accused, and laughed against his painful teeth.

  “Fire and light are movement,” the boy persisted.

  Then the man could bear his own extinction no longer. He touched the boy’s head, but very briefly. He said:

  “Come on, Alf, close up the book now. There is something else I want you to think about.”

  He brought the Bible, and began to read from the Gospel of St John.

  “John,” he explained, “was the Beloved Disciple.”

  The parson told of spiritual love and beauty, how each incident in Our Lord’s life had been illuminated by those qualities. Of course the boy had heard it all before, but wondered again how he failed continually to appreciate. It did seem as though he could grasp only what he was able to see. And he had not yet seen Jesus Christ, in spite of his guardian’s repeated efforts, and a succession of blurry colour-prints. Now he began to remember a night at the Reserve when his mother had received a quarter-caste called Joe Mullens, who loved her awful bad, and had brought her a bottle of metho to prove it. Soon the boy’s memory was lit by the livid jags of the metho love the two had danced together on the squeaky bed. Afterwards his mother had begun to curse, and complain that she was deceived again by love. But for the boy witness, at least, her failure had destroyed the walls. He was alive to the fur of darkness, and a stench of leaves, as he watched the lightning-flicker of receding passion.