Riders In the Chariot

by Patrick White

  There was a knocking on the door then: some neighbour, some Eyetalian, to see whether they wanted the police. No, said Norman Fussell, it was only a slight difference being settled between friends.

  But Hannah cried.

  “All the good money!” she blubbed. “And what is old paintings? We only done it for your own good.”

  That, apparently, was something people were unable to resist.

  “Yes, Hannah,” Dubbo agreed. “You are honest. If anybody is.”

  He could not get breath for more.

  She was relieved to see that the blood she had noticed could not have been here own, blood was trickling out of the abo’s mouth.

  “You knocked a tooth, eh?”

  “Yes,” he could just bother.

  So now Hannah had to whimper because she was tender-hearted, and blood was sad, like hospitals, and wet nights, and old bags of greasy women, and fallen arches on hot feet, and the faces of people going along beneath the green neon.

  “Arr, dear!” she cried, but checked herself enough to call: “Don’t forget your money, Alf. Your money. Arr, well. You know it will be safe with me. You know I never bit anybody’s ear.”

  For Dubbo had gone along the passage into that room of which the cardboard walls had failed to protect. Perhaps, after all, only a skull was the box for secrets.

  But that, too, he knew, and swayed, would not hold for ever; it must burst open from all that would collect inside it. All pouring out, from tadpoles and clumsy lizards, to sheets of lightning and pillars of fire. For there was no containing thoughts, unless you persuaded somebody – only a friend would be willing – to take an axe, and smash up the fatal box for good and all. How it would have scared him, though, to step out from amongst the mess, and face those who would have come in, who would be standing round amongst the furniture, waiting to receive. Then the Reverend Jesus Calderon, for all he raised his pale hand, and exerted the authority of his sad eyes, would not save a piebald soul from the touch of fur and feather, or stem the slither of cold scales.

  The weight of night fell heavy at last on the house in Abercrombie Crescent. Norm Fussell, a nervous type, said he was going walk-about. Hannah did not go on the job – she was done up – but took an aspro, or three, and knew she would not drop off. Yet, it was proved, she must have floated on the surface of a sleep.

  About five, the whore got up. She was not accustomed to see the grey light sprawling on an empty bed; it gave her the jimmies. She would have liked a yarn, to put the marshmallow back into life by offering right sentiments. There is nothing comforts like worn opinions. But in the absence of opportunity, she looked along the passage, touching her bruises.

  There she saw the abo’s door was open.

  “Alf!” she called once or twice, but low.

  She began to go along then, running her hand along the wall.

  The room, it appeared, was empty. She had to switch on finally to see, although the electric light was cruel. But Dubbo had gone all right. Had taken his tin box, it seemed, and smoked off.

  All around, amongst the junk she had been in the habit of shoving away in that room, was matchwood. He had, she saw, brought the axe from the yard – it was still standing in the room – and split his old pictures up. Nothing else. All those bloody boards of pictures. There they were, laying.

  The thin light was screaming down from the bare electric globe.

  Well, she realized presently, she could let the stuff lay where it was, and use it up in time as kindling. She was glad then. She had known other men do their blocks, and bust up a whole houseful of valuable furniture.

  As she went back slow along the passage, in which the light was beginning to throb, from grey to white, gradually and naturally, it occurred to her the abo had not asked her for his money; it would still be in there under the handkerchiefs. He would come back, of course, and she would surrender up the envelope, because she was an honest woman. But sometimes a person did not come back. Sometimes a person died. Or sometimes what mattered of a person, the will or something, died in advance, and they did not seem to care. She remembered the abo the night before, after he got blown, propping himself in the middle of the carpet, on the bones of legs, all bones and breathlessness. If anyone had knocked on him at that stage, he might have sounded hollow, like a crab. But she did not think he had shown her his eyes, and in her anxiety to reconstruct a situation, she would have liked to remember.

  Still, Hannah was throbbing with hopes. In the cool of the morning, she was already on fire. She was back in her room by now. She would move the envelope from the drawer, for safety, since it had been seen. Not that Norm, of course. Norm was honest too.

  Dubbo did not return to the house in Abercrombie Crescent. Hannah’s place was connected in his mind with some swamp that he remembered without having seen, and from which the white magic of love and charity had failed to exorcize the evil spirits. Certainly he had never expected much, but was sickened afresh each time his attitude was justified. Angels were demons in disguise. Even Mrs Pask had dropped her blue robe, and grown brass nipples and a beak. Such faith as he had, lay in his own hands. Through them he might still redeem what Mr Calderon would have referred to as the soul, and which remained in his imagining something between a material shape and an infinite desire. So, in those acts of praise which became his paintings, he would try to convey and resolve his condition of mind.

  As far as the practical side of his existence was concerned, it was easy enough to find work, and he went from job to job for a while after he had run from Hannah’s. He took a room on the outskirts of Barranugli, in the house of a Mrs Noonan, where no questions were asked, and where bare walls, and a stretcher with counterpane of washed-out roses, provided him with a tranquil background for his thoughts. He read a good deal now, both owing to a physical langour caused by his illness, and because of a rage to arrive at understanding. Mostly he read the Bible, or the few art books he had bought, but for preference the Books of the Prophets, and even by now the Gospels. The latter, however, with suspicion and surprise. And he would fail, as he had always failed before, to reconcile those truths with what he had experienced. Where he could accept God because of the spirit that would work in him at times, the duplicity of the white men prevented him considering Christ, except as an ambitious abstraction, or realistically, as a man.

  When the white man’s war ended, several of the whites bought Dubbo drinks to celebrate the peace, and together they spewed up in the streets, out of stomachs that were, for the occasion, of the same colour. At Rosetree’s factory, though, where he began to work shortly after, Dubbo was always the abo. Nor would he have wished it otherwise, for that way he could travel quicker, deeper, into the hunting grounds of his imagination.

  The white men had never appeared pursier, hairier, glassier, or so confidently superior as they became at the excuse of peace. As they sat at their benches at Rosetree’s, or went up and down between the machines, they threatened to burst right out of their singlets, and assault a far too passive future. Not to say the suspected envoys of another world.

  There was a bloke, it was learnt, at one of the drills down the lower end, some kind of bloody foreigner. Whom the abo would watch with interest. But the man seldom raised his eyes. And the abo did not expect.

  Until certain signs were exchanged, without gesture or direct glance.

  How they began to communicate, the blackfellow could not have explained. But a state of trust became established by subtler than any human means, so that he resented it when the Jew finally addressed him in the wash-room, as if their code of silence might have thus been compromised. Later, he realized, he was comforted to know that the Chariot did exist outside the prophet’s vision and his own mind.

  PART VI

  * * *

  XII

  Passover and Easter would fall early that year. The heavy days were still being piled up, and no sign of relief for those who were buried inside. Little wonder that the soul hesitated to prepa
re itself, whether for deliverance from its perennial Egypt, or redemption through the blood of its Saviour, when the body remained immured in its pyramid of days. Miss Hare burrowed deep, but uselessly, along the tunnels of escape which radiated from Xanadu, and parted the green, her skin palpitating for the moment that did not, would not come. Mrs Godbold, standing in the steam of sheets, awaited the shrill winds of Easter, which sometimes even now would sweep across her memory, out of the fens, rattling the white cherry boughs, and causing the lines of hymns to waver behind shaken panes. But this year, did not blow. For Mrs Flack and Mrs Jolley, mopping themselves amongst the dahlias at Karma, it was easier, of course, to invoke an Easter that was their due, as regular communicants, and members of the Ladies’ Guild. For Harry Rosetree, however, in his cardboard office at the factory, the season always brought confusion. Which he overcame by overwork, by blasphemy, and by tearing at his groin. There the pants would ruck up regularly, causing him endless discomfort during rush orders and humid weather.

  “For Chrissake,” Harry Rosetree bellowed, as he thumped and bumped, and eased that unhappy crotch, in his revolving, tiltable, chromium-plated chair, “what for is Easter this year so demmed early? A man cannot fulfil his orders.”

  In the outer office Miss Whibley, the plumper of the two ladies who were dashing away at their typewriters, sucked her teeth just enough to censure.

  Miss Mudge, on the other hand, sniggered, because it was the boss.

  “Can you tell me, please, Miss Whibley?”

  Mr Rosetree would insist. He could become intolerable, but paid well for it.

  “Because it is a movable feast,” Miss Whibley replied.

  She thought perhaps her answer had sounded clever without being altogether rude. Miss Whibley was an adept at remaining the right side of insolence.

  “Well, move it, move it, or see that it is moved, Miss Whibley, please,” Mr Rosetree insisted, plodding through the wads of paper, “next year, well forward, Miss Whibley, please.”

  Miss Mudge sniggered, and wiped her arms on her personal towel. The boss would start to get funny, and keep it up during whole afternoons. Miss Mudge approved, guiltily, of jolly men. She lived with a widowed, invalid, pensioned sister, whose excessive misfortune had sapped them both.

  “Because I will not rupture myself for any Easter, Miss Whibley, movable or fixed.”

  Mr Rosetree had to kill somebody with his wit.

  Miss Whibley sucked her teeth harder.

  “Dear, dear, Mr Rosetree, it is a good thing neether of us is religious. Miss Mudge is even less than I.”

  Miss Mudge blushed, and mumbled something about liking a decent hymn provided nobody expected her to join in.

  “I am religious.” Mr Rosetree slapped the papers.

  “I am religious! I am religious!” Mr Rosetree sang.

  Indeed, he attended the church of St Aloysius at Paradise East, on Sundays, and at all important feasts, and would stuff notes into the hands of nuns, with a lack of discretion which made them lower their eyes, as if they had been a party to some indecent act.

  “You gotta be religious, Miss Whibley.” Mr Rosetree laughed. “Otherwise you will go to hell, and how will you like that?”

  Now it was Miss Whibley’s turn to blush. Her necklaces of flesh turned their deepest mauve, and she took out a little compact, and began to powder herself, from her forehead down to the yoke of her dress, with the thorough motions of a cat.

  “Well, I am not at all religious,” she said, wetting her lips ever so slightly. “I suppose it is because my friend is a dialectical materialist.”

  Mr Rosetree laughed more than ever. He could not resist:

  “And what is that?”

  He was quite unreasonably happy that afternoon.

  “I cannot be expected to explain every-thing!” Miss Whibley sulked.

  “Ah, you intellectuals!” Mr Rosetree sighed.

  Miss Mudge coughed, and shifted her lozenge. She loved to listen to other people, and to watch. In that way, she who had never thought what she might contribute to life, did seem to participate. Now she observed that her colleague was becoming annoyed. Miss Mudge could feel the heartburn rise in sympathy in her own somewhat stringy throat.

  “My friend is a Civil Servant,” Miss Whibley was saying. “In the Taxation Office. He is considered an expert on provisional tax.”

  Then she added, rather irrelevantly, only she had been saving it up for some time as a kind of experiment:

  “My friend is also a quarter Jewish.”

  Mr Rosetree was disengaging the wads of paper, which could only be prised apart, it seemed, at that season. Miss Whibley did not watch, but sensed.

  “A quarter Jew? So! A quarter Jew! I am a quarter shoe-fetichist, Miss Whibley, if that is what you wish to know. And five-eighths manic-depressive. That leaves still some small fraction to be accounted for. So we cannot yet work it out what I am.”

  Miss Whibley flung her typewriter carriage as far as it would go. Miss Mudge did not understand, but Miss Whibley knew that she should take offence. And she did, with professional efficiency.

  “A quarter Jew!” chanted Mr Rosetree.

  But Miss Whibley would not hear. She lowered her head to study her shorthand notes, though inwardly she had crossed the line which divides reality from resentment.

  Presently it was time for the ladies to leave. They went out most conspicuously on that afternoon. In the workshop the men were knocking off. Some had begun to move towards the bus-stop, others towards the paddockful of ramshackle cars. Whether they marched, carrying prim-looking ports, or gangled leisurely, with sugar-bags slung by cords across the shoulders, no other act performed by the men during the day so clearly proclaimed their independence. Only a boss, it was implied, would presume that their going out was inevitably linked to their coming in.

  Although the boss should have left, now that the walls no longer shook, and silence was flowing back into the shed which ostensibly he owned, Harry Rosetree continued to sit. Because he had decided to work on. But did not, in fact. The silence was so impressive he became convinced he was its creator, along with the Brighta Lamps, the Boronia Geometry Sets, the Flannel-Flower Bobby-Pins, and My Own Butterfly Clips. Of course, if he had not been possessed by his irrational joy long before the factory had begun to empty, the illusion might not have endured; he would most probably have been caught out by that same silence which now increased his sense of power and freedom. But his joy, which had made him so distasteful during the afternoon to the ladies he employed, was too rubbery and aggressive to allow itself to be bounced aside. Nor could he have restrained it any more than he could have halted time, which went ticking on through the last week before the Easter closure, and the most formidable silence of all, when the soul is re-born.

  Not that Rosetrees were all that observant. But Harry Rosetree was an honest man. If you signed a contract, you had to abide by the clauses. And religion was like any other business. Rosetrees were Christians now; they would do the necessary. Shirl complained, but of course she was a woman. Shirl said she had been brought up to stay at home, to stuff the fish and knead the dumplings, not to pray along with the men. She did not go much on early mass, but Harry would sometimes persuade, with a bottle of French perfume or pair of stockings. Then Shirl would get herself up in the gold chains which were such a handy investment, and derive quite a lot from the subdued and reverential atmosphere – it was lovely, the elevation of the Host – and the wives of upper-bracket executives in their expensive clothes.

  But that Easter they had made their reservations at My Blue Mountain Home. It was all very well to be Christians, Shirl said, but surely to God they were Australians too. So they were going to sing The Little Brown Jug, and Walking Matilda, and Pack Up Your Troubles, after tea. Along with a lot of bloody reffos, Harry said. What he understood best, usually he suspected most.

  So that it was not altogether the sweet scent of Easter which had flooded Harry Rosetree’s soul, as h
e worked on, or sat in his office, in the brassy light of late afternoon. As he drifted, he was uplifted, but by something faintly anomalous. Until finally he was stunned. It could only be the cinnamon. It was Miss Mudge: my chest, sir, if I do not take precautions in humid weather, hope you do not object to such a penetrating odour. It smelled, all right. Even now that she was gone, it shrieked down the passages of memory, right to the innermost chamber.

  They were again seated in the long, but very narrow, dark parlour, raising the mess of brown apple to their lips. The mother had arranged special cushions, on which the father was reclining, or lolling, rather. Such an excess of blood-red plush, with the nap beginning to wear off, filled the chair and made for discomfort. It was the occasion that mattered, and the father throve on occasions. Whatever the state of their fortunes, whatever the temper of the goyim, the father would deliver much the same homily: our history is all we have, Haïm, and the peaceful joys of the Sabbath and feast days, the flavour of cinnamon and the scent of spices, the wisdom of Torah and the teaching of the Talmud.

  What had been the living words of the father would crackle like parchment whenever Haïm ben Ya’akov allowed himself to remember. Or worse, he would see them, written in columns, on scrolls of human skin.

  But now it was the scent of words that pervaded. Whatever the occasion – and how many there had been – the father wore the Yarmulka. And the wart with the four little black bristles to the side of the right nostril. At Pessach the father would explain: this, Haïm is the apple of remembrance, of the brown clay of Egypt, so you must eat up, eat, the taste of cinnamon is good. Haïm Rosenbaum, the boy, had never cared for the stuff, but long after he had become a man, even after he was supposed, officially, to have stripped the Ark of its Passover trappings, and dressed his hopes in the white robe of Easter, the scent of cinnamon remained connected with the deep joy of Pessach.