Riders In the Chariot

by Patrick White

  “I like that particularly,” said Mr Mortimer. “The big cartoon. It is most interesting. Let me look at it a moment.”

  “No,” said Dubbo. “I don’t want. It is too late. Another time.”

  Hurrying his paintings.

  “You promise, then?” persisted the other.

  “Yes, yes,” said Dubbo.

  But his nostrils contradicted.

  As the fire that had been kindled in the lounge-room died, Norm’s party began to break up. There was a kissing and a hugging. The queans were restoring their habitual atmosphere of crossed lines. While Dubbo carried off the last ember of true passion.

  Now he would be able to lock his door and trust the silence.

  But footsteps followed in the passage, half-tentative, half-confident.

  “Look here, Alf,” Humphrey Mortimer began.

  It could not have been anybody else.

  “I want to suggest something,” he said.

  He had followed the abo as far as his door.

  Although it was close in the passage, both men were shivering. Mr Mortimer, whose silhouette seldom fell short of perfect, was standing with his fists clenched in his trouser pockets, and his coat rucked up over a protruding bum. He looked ridiculous.

  “I will make you an offer for at least three of the paintings,” he said. “Which I am very anxious to own.”

  He named The Fiery Furnace and a couple of others.

  “And the drawing of the chariot-thing, when it has fulfilled its purpose. That is to say, when you have finished working from it.”

  The young man mentioned a sum, quite the most respectable that had ever been named in Hannah’s house of love.

  “No. No. Sorry,” said Alf Dubbo.

  His voice could not have hacked further words out of his feelings.

  “Think it over, at least. It is for your own good, you know.” Humphrey Mortimer pulled that one.

  He continued to smile, because life had taught him that his own way was easily bought.

  But Dubbo, who had laid himself open at certain moments during the evening, was no longer vulnerable. Since beginning to suspect he had been deceived, he had shrivelled right up, and nobody would coax him out again.

  “Paintings which nobody looks at might never have been painted,” the patron argued.

  “I will look at them,” Dubbo said, “Goodnight,” he said, “Mr Mortimer.”

  And shut the door.

  For a week or two the blackfellow experienced no inclination to paint, not even to look at the finished paintings, only to know that they were there. Something seemed to have frightened the daylights out of him. As if, in a moment of exuberant vanity, he had betrayed some mystery, of which he was the humblest and most recent initiate. Now he began to feel sick. He turned the paintings face to the wall, and would lie on his bed for hours, at weekends or at evening, his knees drawn up, protecting his head with his forearms. The palms of his hands had grown clammy.

  In that outer and parallel existence, which never altogether convinced him, the war was drawing to a close. The spray-painting of aeroplanes had fizzled out, except on paper. A two-up school was booming in one of the big packing-cases; the hangars were chock-full of stuff for anyone who felt inclined to shake it. Many did feel inclined. In fact, all the maggots on all the carcases began to wriggle, if anything, a bit harder, suspecting that the feast was almost finished. In a few instances, the conscience was felt to stir, as human features returned to the blunt maggot-faces, and it was realized that the true self, whatever metamorphoses it might have undergone, was still horridly present, and hinting at rehabilitation.

  Hannah would wake at noon as before, and pluck her eyebrows, and paint her nails, and paddle the big, desperate puff in the shadows of her armpits. But was looking real soggy. Of course, inside the dough of flesh she was still the straight, brown girl, but only she was to know that. And sometimes doubted. Whether she might not have sold herself for a bag of aniseed balls, to some randy kid, under the pepper trees, in break.

  Oh, the powder made her cough. She was what they called allergic; that was it. She was that soggy. All steamy, open pores. She was that sick. She was eating the aspros by the handful now. They sat sour. Or returned to burn. But she would also break out sometimes in a lovely sweat, no, a perspiration of relief. Until remembering what you could not exactly have called her sickness. It was like as if she had a sick thought. Her conscience would tick inside her like a cheap alarm clock. If a bell had gone off, she would have screamed out loud.

  And the abo would walk along the passage. Quiet. He was quiet all right, except if he got poisoned and fell about the place, and that was the girls in the bars, who had altogether no discretion. Otherwise nobody could complain. It was painting, painting, all the while. That could have been what wore Hannah down: to think there was a man shut up by himself dead quiet in a room at the back, dabbling nonsense on an old board. What some, some of the clever ones, did claim to understand.

  Once he came along the passage, quiet as usual, but rather quick. It scared her suddenly to hear him, close by. She broke a nail on the knot of a parcel she had brought back, and was just beginning to untie. If that in itself was not enough to raise the pimples on you. Not that he was any more than only passing. Through the yellower light which poured in, under the blind she had had to adjust, to see what she was doing.

  “Gee! You aren’t training to bust a safe open?” she was compelled to ask. “It’s those old sandshoes.”

  “They’re easy on the feet,” he replied.

  “Anyways,” she said, “what’s wrong with your job, Alf? You haven’t given it away?”

  “No,” he said. “I been feeling crook. I didn’t go. Not for two days.”

  “What’s up?”

  “I dunno,” he said. “Nothing.”

  “Ah dear, nothing bad, I hope.” She sighed, but did not care. “Everybody’s sick. It wouldn’t be this flamin’ war?”

  She began again frigging with the parcel, which no longer seemed of much importance. Her mouth was slacker than usual. It shone, because she had had to wet it after she had taken fright.

  For a moment there flickered up in him the possibility that he might use, or store, passages of yellow light, or Hannah’s broken forms against yellow wood and mirrors.

  She only saw that he was looking at her too long.

  He went out then, because, he said, he would like to get some air. Although it was doubtful whether he would. That which passed for air would not have squeezed into the lungs, but blocked the tubes like wads of moist blotting paper. A thick, lemony light had been poured into the brick streets and round the roots of the pollarded planes. Somewhere in the distance fire could have been threatening.

  When all the frightful accidie and imminence of the last few days bubbled up into Dubbo’s mouth, and he spat it out in a brown stream, so that an old woman withdrew into the doorway of her own squalor, away from the hollow blackfellow, who walked casually enough, his hands in his pockets, spitting blood. He did not see, though. He was, to a great extent, released. Now he could have used the impasto of deepening summer, of the thickening, yellow afternoon. He could have wallowed in it. In his own peculiar handwriting, he would have scratched the legend of grey, seamy brick. And against it he would have elongated the already drawn-out face, hollowed still deeper the hollow temples, and conveyed sight through opaque eyelids. For this, he saw, was Humphrey Mortimer’s afternoon. Wherever it flowed, it smelled of rotting fruit, of an ether which did not anaesthetize, sweet, but bad.

  Again the abo was forced to spit, and this time it was clearer. This time, besides, he had to notice. Halted by the note of crimson, he stood staring at the grey pavement, remembering his lapse in devotion to a trust. The inexorable crimson stained his wrong deeper still. Then he spat again, and saw that the colour, like all such thoughts, was mercifully fading, though the original cause and weakness must remain. For, had he not revealed to Humphrey Mortimer secret truths which had
been given him to keep?

  Dubbo sat for a while on a bench, not in a park, but in the street, just where he happened to be passing. From time to time, he spat, to examine the colour, until finding at last that the haemorrhage must have stopped.

  Presently a man came and sat beside him, and told him that soon the war would be over, because, said the man, it was written in the Scriptures.

  Dubbo made no reply, suspecting it was as the man had said.

  And the evil ones, continued the prophet, would be trodden under foot, as would the lesser evil, who betrayed the Lord through pure ignorance and vanity whenever the opportunity occurred. That included the concubines, and sodomites, the black marketeers, and reckless taxi-drivers – all those who in any way betrayed a trust.

  The dusk was splitting into little particles. There was nothing, almost nothing left except the movement of disintegration.

  Now Dubbo was aching in the chest, now that all goodness was to break. All the solid forms that he could answer for. All the brilliant colours that could lick across the field of vision.

  “You’ll see,” said the man, in the voice in which it was his habit to prophesy. “And the price of eggs will fall. And the price of sardines.”

  But Alf Dubbo was going. He could scarcely control a longing to look once more at those few paintings in which his innocence remained unimpaired, in which the Lord still permitted a solidity of shapes, a continuity of life, even error.

  So he butted the darkness with his head, and the breath rattled behind his ribs, and the streets made way before him.

  When he arrived at the house in Abercrombie Crescent he found that Norman Fussell had come. Norm was trying on a white fur in Hannah’s glass. His real self had taken over, and the perv sniggered, and snuggled, and considered himself from all angles.

  “Hi, Alf!” he called. “Can you resist my piece of Arctic fox?”

  But Hannah had slammed shut with the opening of the front door.

  “Lay off it, you silly clown!”

  She was in no mood for circuses.

  Norm could have been a little drunk. In his desire to continue fooling, he would not allow his stooge to withdraw from their act, as she would, in fact, have preferred. Both were dressed for it, since it was their custom to take off half their clothes in the house, and let their flesh have its slapstick way. Both bulged, if they did not actually sag, and the white fur for which they were now contending, seemed to make them softer, nakeder. Norm was certainly the rounder, as his needs had been fulfilled by the touch of fur. His cheeks oozed cheerfulness. Hannah’s face, on the contrary, was dry, and curiously flat. It might have been rendered by a couple of strokes of a whitewash brush.

  Norm was still arsing about. Obviously he was fairly drunk. He swung, and clung to the tail of the white fox, of which Hannah had recovered the head.

  “Shall I tell you, Alf,” he called, “how us girls got to be financial?”

  And jerked the fox.

  “I will dong you one,” shouted Hannah, “before you tear this bloody fur!”

  Dubbo laughed, but out of friendship. He could not wait now.

  “And financial fanny, anyways!” Hannah had continued to shout.

  She told how she had got the fur through the trade, from a Jew who was obliged to her for a favour or two in his reffo days. She spoke that loud and clear, she could have suspected somebody might doubt.

  But Dubbo had already passed. And Norm, who had relinquished the fur, was threatening to pee himself. The giggles were glugging. His flesh was flapping. And the handles on the furniture jumped and rattled.

  Dubbo had got inside his room at last, in which the blind pictures were standing, and the greeny-black dressmaker’s dummy, and all those other irrelevant objects which his life there had made relevant. The room was cracking, it seemed, under the necessity of abandoning its severely finite form. The dummy was inclining forward on its dry-rotten pedestal. Electric wiring whirred. As he began to turn the pictures. And turned. And turned.

  And his own life was restored by little twinges and great waves. His hands were no longer bones in gloves of papery skin, as he twitched the pictures over, and gave them the support they needed – against the bed, the rusted kero stove, an angle of the room. Once more the paintings were praising and affirming in accents of which his mouth had never been capable.

  Returned into the bosom of conviction, he might not have resisted the impulse to bring out paints there and then, and reproduce the deepening yellow through which he had watched the evening streets, if that yellow had not begun to sicken in him. If he had not not dis-covered.

  Then the teeth were terrible in his face. He began to fumble and bungle through his own possessions as well as the wretched trash of Hannah’s lodger’s room. His search toppled the dressmaker’s dummy, which went down thumping out its dust. Perhaps he had just failed to see what he was looking for. Often, in moments of passion or withdrawal, he would overlook objects which were there all the time before him. But in the present case, only the hard truth emerged: The Fiery Furnace was gone, together with that big drawing. The Chariot-thing. What else, he did not stop to consider. Nobody bothers to count the blows when he knows that one of them will prove fatal.

  “Hannah!”

  A voice had never gone down the passage like that before. He was running on those quiet, spongy feet. And breathing high.

  Although he arrived almost at once, she was already advancing to meet him through the doorway of her room. She appeared to have decided she would not do any good by talking. That dry, white look, which her face had only recently acquired, had never been more in evidence than against the controversial fur. She had stretched the fox, straight and teachery, along her otherwise naked shoulders. No swagger any more. There was a sort of chain, with a couple of acorns, holding the fur together above the shabby, yellow parting of her breasts.

  “Hannah!” he breathed. “You done that?”

  He couldn’t, or not very well, get it past a turn in his throat.

  “I will tell you,” Hannah answered, flat, now that the scene was taking place. “Only don’t – there is no need – to do your block before you know,”

  And Norm looking over her shoulder. Norman Fussell was very curious to observe how, in the light of what he already knew, the rest of it would turn out.

  For the present Dubbo was almost bent up. Breathing and grinning. His ribs would have frightened, if they had been visible.

  But Hannah was slow as suet. With a nerve inside of it.

  “I will tell you. I will tell you,” she seemed to be saying.

  She did not care very much whether she died. She could have exhausted her life by now. It was only the unimaginable act of dying that made her sick nerve tick.

  Then Dubbo began to get his hands around her. She went down, quite easy, because she felt that guilty at first, she was offering no resistance. She intended to suffer, if it could not be avoided. She almost wanted to feel his fingers sinking into that soft sickness she had become.

  So he got her down against the doorway of her room. The chain which had been fastening the fox burst apart, and she was bundled in her pink slip. Or tearing. Her cheek was grating on the bald carpet when not ploughing the smell of new fur.

  The abo was tearing mad, and white beneath his yellow skin.

  All his desperate hate breath hopelessness future all of him and more was streaming into his pair of hands.

  Then Hannah got her throat free. Perhaps she had expiated enough. She let out:

  “Aaaahhhhhhh! Normmm! For Chrissake!”

  Norm Fussell just failed to exorcize the ghost of a giggle.

  Not that things were getting funny. It had begun to be intolerable for him too, as he was officially a man, and had just been called upon to work a miracle. So now, he who had been hopping around in his normal flesh, after throwing off responsibility with his clothes, began with one arm to apply to the abo a hold which a sailor had once taught him. And which he had never kn
own to work.

  But at least they were all three involved. Their breath was knotted together in ropes as solid as their arms.

  At one point, Hannah began again:

  “Alf, I will tell you. I will tell you,”

  Her tongue was rather swollen, though. It would pop out like a parrot’s.

  In between, she was crying sorry for herself.

  “I will tell” – she would manage to get it out. “That Mort bug Alf Chrise MORTIMER honest honest only took a few quid commish on Alf.”

  That made him fight worse. All the bad that he had to kill might escape him by cunning.

  Because all three of the wrestlers understood at last they were really and truly intended to die at some moment, possibly that one.

  Seeing the muck of blood on her arms, on her slip – it could only have been her blood – Hannah was whimpering afresh for what she had been made to suffer, ever, and so drawn out, when in the history book they chopped the heads cleanly off.

  But at that moment, Norm Fussell, by dint of pressure, or weight, or the sailor’s genuinely skilful hold, got the abo off of Hannah.

  And Hannah got up. Self-pity did not delay her a second. Her flesh flew. But, of course, she had got thinner. She could not drag out the drawer too quick. Of the dressing-table. Scrabble under handkerchiefs. Fetch out what was flapping more than her own hand.

  When the abo came at her afresh, she had the envelope to push against him.

  “Honest,” Hannah cried, shaking like paper. “I wouldn’t never bite your ear! Look, Alf! Look, only!”

  Dubbo was unable to look, but nature slowed him up.

  “See, Alf? There is your name. I wrote. Only took a spot of commission. Bought a fur. What other intention. It was that puf Mortimer would not let me alone. Here, look, Alf, is the rest. I was gunna hand it over, dinkum, when things had settled down.”

  Dubbo was all in for the moment.

  Seeing the blood on her arms, and her slip reduced to bandages, Hannah began again to cry, for what she had escaped, for all that life had imposed on her. The tufts of her hair, Norman Fussell observed, had turned her into the imitation of a famous clown.