Riders In the Chariot

by Patrick White

  “Earthly love is not the faintest reflection of divine compassion,” the rector was explaining. “But I can tell you are not concentrating, Alf.”

  The boy looked down, and saw that his guardian’s knees, in their thinning and rather crumpled trousers, were touching his. He sensed that, according to precept, he should have felt compassion for this conscientious man, but all he felt was the pressure of knees. He was fascinated by the network of little creases in the worn serge, and by a smell of what he realized later on in cities was that of hot underclothing, as people struggled together, and clung to the little progress they had made.

  “I think we had better stop there,” the rector decided.

  But could not bring himself to alter his position.

  It was the boy who shifted, sighing, or grunting, as he looked out into the glare and saw Mrs Pask returning from good works with an empty pudding-basin.

  While the rector derived little consolation from his attempts to plant faith in the soul of this aboriginal boy, his sister grew quite skittish with what she liked to think the success of her instruction. Admittedly Mrs Pask had always liked the easy things, and admittedly Alf was learning how to please. Here was a whole sheaf of subjects, tastefully shaded, admirably foreshortened. It seemed that with a few ingratiating strokes the boy might reproduce the whole world as his teacher knew it.

  That would have been consummation, indeed. If, from time to time, she had not come across those other fruits of her pupil’s talent. Which made her frightened.

  And on one occasion the pupil himself rooted out an old, battered box which she had put so carefully away, even she had forgotten.

  “These are more paints,” said Alf.

  “Oh,” she began to explain, half-prim, half-casual. “Yes. Some old paints I gave up using very early. They did not suit the kind of work which interested me.”

  Alf squeezed a tube, and there shot out, from beneath the crust of ages, a blue so glistening, so blue, his eyes could not focus on it.

  All he could say was:

  “Gee, Mrs Pask!”

  Even then he had to control his mouth.

  Mrs Pask frowned in replying.

  “I have tried to explain why we should not, on any account, use such a very horrid expression. I thought you might have remembered.”

  “Yes,” he said. “But can I use the paints?”

  After a pause, she decided:

  “I think, perhaps, it would not be advisable for you to work in oils.”

  “Arrr, Mrs Pask!”

  For by now he had coaxed a rosy tongue out of a second tube. And was drowning in a burst of yellow from the bottom of a third.

  She said with an effort:

  “Oil paints lead to so much that is sensual, so much that is undesirable in art. But of course, you would not understand anything of that, and must take it on trust from those who do.”

  All he knew for the moment was his desire to expel the sensation in his stomach, the throbbing of his blood, in surge upon surge of thick, and ever-accumulating colour.

  “I could paint good with these,” he maintained.

  Mrs Pask looked whimsically sad.

  Then Alf Dubbo played an unexpected card. Put into his hand by divine interest, as it were, he had no cause for feeling guilty.

  “I could do things with these,” he began, “that I never ever would have known how to do before.”

  He touched the tube of supernatural blue.

  “I would paint Jesus Christ,” he ventured, in a voice which he had learnt to be acceptable.

  “Oh?”

  Mrs Pask sniggered wheezily. The boy had sounded so quaint.

  “I would not like to paint Jesus, only in oil paints,” he admitted.

  Mrs Pask averted her old and rather wobbly face. She remembered her young husband, and the strength and loveliness of his uncovered throat.

  “I will show you,” said Alf.

  “We shall see,” said Mrs Pask. “Put away the paints. Now. Please.”

  “You don’t know!”

  His voice jumped recklessly.

  “Oh, but I do!” she said.

  The words were so bleached, she was on the verge of repeating them.

  “Well, then?”

  “How provoking you can be!” she protested. “I did not say no exactly. Well, on your thirteenth birthday. But I insist you put away the paints now.”

  He did. And would wait. Longer if necessary. Nobody else would wait so carefully.

  In the meantime he followed around the one who held his life in her hands, and she often took advantage of the situation.

  For instance, she might ask:

  “If you forget to milk poor Possum when it rains, how can you expect me to remember I have promised to let you use the paints?”

  The rector hated his sister at times. Because, of course, she had told him what had taken place, making it sound both touching and ridiculous. It was dreadful to Timothy Calderon that he was so often aware of what he was unable to avert. Cruelty, for example. He was particularly sensitive to the duller, unspectacular kind.

  “But you will allow him?” he hoped.

  Mrs Pask folded in her lips.

  “I shall pray for guidance,” she replied.

  Frequently Mr Calderon did, too, without always receiving it.

  Once in the dark hall, in the smell of old books and yesterday’s mutton, the rector encountered Alf with almost no warning. The boy gave the impression of doing nothing with an air of some significance, and as always at such moments, the man was walled up more completely in his own ineffectuality and lovelessness.

  Yet, on this occasion, the suddenness of the encounter, or a rush of self-pity, started him off with:

  “I expect you are waiting pretty anxiously for your birthday, Alf?”

  The boy’s smile acknowledged the superfluousness and slight silliness of the remark.

  But the rector blundered on.

  “Well, who knows, your gift of painting may have been given to you as a means of expressing your innermost convictions.”

  Suddenly the two people involved in the situation began to sweat.

  “So that you should have something,” mumbled the rector, and repeated with suppressed emotion: “At least, something.”

  At this point an alarming, but not altogether unexpected incident, the boy realized, began to occur. Mr Calderon fumbled at Alf’s head, then pressed it against his stomach. They were standing in awkward conjunction in the semi-darkness and familiar smells.

  Although at first doubtful how he ought to behave, Alf decided to submit to the pressure. He could feel buttons and a watch-chain eating ravenously into his cheek, and then, deep down in the rector’s stomach, he heard a rather pitiful rumble. The sound that uncoiled itself was both apologetic and old. The boy visualized an old, soft, white worm slowly raising its head, swaying, and lolling, before falling back. He was so fascinated by the image that he had even begun to count the rings with which the ghostly worm was scored.

  But Mr Calderon had suddenly decided, it seemed, that he was not sad at all. A kind of jollity which had taken possession of his stomach almost bounced the boy off.

  “It is wrong to allow our affections to persuade us we are tragic figures,” the rector announced in an unknown voice.

  And, as the boy continued standing, pushed him away.

  Mr Calderon then went into his study, where the notes for a sermon were waiting to enmesh him, and in spite of his views on economy, and the early hour, switched on the electric light, with the result that he had never been so exposed before. It was disastrous. The boy crept away, but pursued by the picture of his guardian. For, although the rector’s incisive nose was as imposing as ever, right down to the glistening pores at the roots of it, the rest of the face was as white and crumbly as old scones. Or perhaps Mr Calderon had no more than left his teeth out.

  The image blazed across the boy’s mind and away, because, whatever cropped up en route, his thir
teenth birthday was only a short distance ahead.

  When at last he had arrived at it, he asked above the wrappings of the seemly presents:

  “And the paints, Mrs Pask? Can I use the oil paints that you promised?”

  There was a dreadful pause.

  Then Mrs Pask said:

  “You set too much store, Alf, by what is unimportant. But as I promised.”

  She seemed to have the wind that morning. It made a little pffff against the soft hair on her upper lip.

  So he got out the paints. He had found an old tea-chest on a rubbish dump, and had hammered it apart, and extracted the nails, and kept the sides in the feed shed. The ply boards were immaculate. He brought them to the back veranda. After sharing with him such technical points as she could remember, his teacher went away. She would not look. Anything might emerge now.

  So Alf Dubbo began to squeeze the tubes. Regardful of some vow, he dedicated the first board with a coat of flat white. He began moodily to dabble in the blue. He moulded the glistening gobs into arbitrary forms, to demolish them almost at once with voluptuous authority. He mixed the blue with white, until it had quite paled. And was moved to lay it at last upon the board in long, smooth tongues, which, he hoped, might convey his still rather nebulous intention. Sometimes he worked with the brushes he had prepared, more often with his trembling fingers. But he could not, in fact, he could not. A white mist continued to creep up and obscure what should have been a vision of blue. So he took the brush with the sharpest end, and with the point he described an unhappy O. From this cipher, the paint was dripping down in stalactites of bluish white. He took the blood-red, and thinned it, and threw it on in drops. It dripped miserably down. He recognized his failure, and turned the board away from him.

  He kept on returning, however, to the opaque masses of his paint. He was clogged with it. As he thought about his failure, and wondered how he might penetrate what remained a thick white mist in his mind, he scratched his own face in one of the lower corners of the board. The concave shape, something like that of a banana, was held as if waiting to receive. But he sensed he would never improve on an idea which had come to him in a moment of deceit.

  For some time he mooned around, until realizing he had, at least, observed a promise. To a certain extent, he had earned his freedom. He felt better then, and thought how he would put into his next picture all that he had ever known. The brown dust. His mother’s tits, black and gravelly, hanging down. The figure of the quarter-caste, Joe Mullens, striking again and again with his thighs as though he meant to kill. And the distance, which was sometimes a blue wire tautened round his own throat, and which at others dissolved into a terrible listlessness. There would be the white people, of course, perpetually naked inside their flash clothes. And the cup of wine held in the air by the Reverend Tim. That was, again, most important. Even through the dented sides you could see the blood tremble in it. And the white worm stirring and fainting in the reverend pants. And love, very sad. He would paint love as a skeleton from which they had picked the flesh – an old goanna – and could not find more, however much they wanted, and hard they looked. Himself with them. He would have liked to discover whether it really existed, how it tasted.

  Alf Dubbo was painting at his picture all the morning. Some of it even Mrs Pask and the rector might have understood, but some was so secret, so tender, he could not have borne their getting clumsy with it. parts of it walked on four legs, but others flowed from his hand in dreams that only he, or some inconceivable stranger, might recognize and interpret.

  A little while before it was time to set the pickled onions on the table, Mrs Pask came, and stood behind him.

  “Well, I never!” she said. “That is a funny sort of picture. After all I have taught you! What is it called?”

  “That is called My Life” the boy answered.

  “And this?” she asked, pointing with her toe.

  “That,” he said – he almost could not, “that is the picture of Jesus. It is no good, though, Mrs Pask. You must not look. I don’t understand yet.”

  She, too, did not know exactly what to say. She had turned her deepest purple. She was munching on her lips.

  She said:

  “It all comes of my being so foolish. Things are not like this,” she said. “It is downright madness. You must not think this way. My brother must speak to you,” she said. “Oh, dear! It is dirty! When there is so much that is beautiful and holy!”

  She went away nearly crying.

  And he called after her:

  “Mrs Pask! It is beautiful! It is all, really, beautiful. It is only me. I am learning to show it. How it is. In me. I’ll show you something that you didn’t know. You’ll see. And get a surprise.”

  But she went away towards the kitchen.

  And his lips were spilling over with the bubbles of anguish.

  That dinner, which Alf did not share, the rector and his sister had a slap-up row.

  “But you have not seen!” she kept on harping, and drumming on the tablecloth.

  “I do not wish to see,” he repeated. “I have confidence in the boy. It is his way of expressing himself.”

  “You are weak, Timothy. If you were not, you would take the matter in hand. But you are weak.”

  He could not answer that one straight, but said:

  “Our Lord recognized that all human beings are weak. And what did He prescribe? Love! That is what you forget, Emily. Or is it that you choose to ignore?”

  The window-panes were dancing.

  “Oh, love!” she said, real loud.

  She began to cry then. For a while the windows rattled, but they did at last subside, and become again flat glass.

  After that Alf Dubbo went away, because he was sick from listening. He put his paintings in the shed, behind the bran bin, which had just fallen empty, and which usually stayed that way for some time after it happened.

  There was no painting or drawing in the following weeks. Mrs Pask said that he must learn to darn, and sew on buttons, in case he should become a soldier. She gave him many other little jobs, like weeding, and errands, and addressing envelopes for the parish news – it was so good for his hand – while she sat and rested her ankles. Nor did she live aloud any more the incidents of her past life. But thought them instead. Or remembered sick people who needed visiting. She went about much more than before, as if, by staying at home, she might have discovered something she did not want to, just by going into a room.

  Mrs Pask went her own way, and the Reverend Timothy Calderon and Alf Dubbo went theirs, all separately. It had always been that way more or less, only now it was as though they had been made to see it. In the case of the rector and his sister, at least they had their purposes, but for Alf Dubbo it was terrible, who walked amongst the furniture, and broken flower-pots, and cow-pats. Once he squelched his hand in a new turd that old Possy had let drop, and his eyes immediately began to water, as the comforting smell shot up, and because at the same time the fresh cow-dung was so lifeless in texture compared with that of the oil paints.

  Only twice he looked at the paintings he had hidden in the shed. On the first occasion he could not bear it. On the second it might have been the same, if the rector had not suddenly appeared, looking for something, and said:

  “I am the only one, Alf, who has not seen the works of art.”

  So Alf Dubbo showed.

  Mr Calderon stood holding the boards, one in either hand, looking from one to the other of the pictures. His lips were moving. Then the boy realized his guardian was not looking at the paintings, but somewhere into his own thoughts, at the pictures in his mind. Alf did not blame, because, after all, that was mostly the way people did behave.

  “So these are they,” the rector was saying; the veins were old in the backs of his hands. “Well, well.” Looking, and not, from one to the other. “I can remember, when I was a boy, before I became aware of my vocation, I had every intention of being an actor. I would learn parts – Shakes
peare, you know – just for the fun of it, and even make up characters, the most extraordinary individuals, out of my own rather luxuriant imagination. People told me I had a fine declamatory voice, which, admittedly, I had. I took the part of a Venetian in, I believe it was The Merchant. And once,” he giggled, “I played a lady! I wore a pair of rose stockings. Silk. And on my chest a cameo, which had been lent me by some acquaintance of my aunts.”

  The Reverend Timothy Calderon had grown cheerful by now. He stood the painted plywood against the empty bin, and went outside.

  “One day, Alf, you must explain your paintings to me,” he said. “Because I believe, however clearly any artist, or man, for that matter, conveys, there must always remain a hidden half which will need to be explained. And perhaps that is not possible unless implicit trust exists. Between. Between the artist and his audience.”

  It was a limpid morning, in which smoke ascended, and Mrs Pask had discovered a reason for paying a call. As he followed the rector between the rows of bolting lettuces, Alf Dubbo was puzzled to feel that perhaps he was the one who led, for Mr Calderon had turned so very spongy and dependent. The boy walked noticeably well. Upright. He appeared to have grown, too. He was suddenly a young man in whom the scars had healed, of the wounds they had made in his flesh. His nostrils awaited experience.

  At one point, at a bend in the path, the rector turned, and seemed in particular need of the youth’s attention and understanding.