Riders In the Chariot

by Patrick White

  Now he began to tremble. The frame of the stretcher creaked, creaked. He was ill, of course. Run down, Mrs Pask would have said, and prescribed a tonic. He coughed for a while, too long, and with such force that the joints of that ricketty room were heard to protest wheezily. Again he washed his hands, Mrs Pask breathing approval over his shoulder.

  Then he began to cry as he stood propped against the basin, a sick, hollow crying above the basinful of water. There were days when the blood would not stop.

  The blood ran down the hands, along the bones of the fingers. The pain was opening again in his side.

  In his agony, on his knees, Dubbo saw that he was remembering his Lord Jesus. His own guilt was breaking him. He began to crack his finger-joints, of the fingers that had failed to unknot the ropes, which had tied the body to the tree.

  He had not borne witness. But did not love the less. It came pouring out of him, like blood, or paint. In time, when he could muster the strength for such an undertaking, he would touch the tree to life with blue. Nobody knew the secret of the blue that he would use; no one would have suspected such a jewellery of wounds, who had not watched their own blood glitter and dry slowly under sunlight.

  Dubbo got up now. He began to move purposefully. He had to put an end to darkness. He switched the light on, and there at least his room was, quite neat, square, and wooden. He changed his singlet, put on best pants, smoothed his rather crinkly hair with water, and went out in the sandshoes which he always wore.

  In the steamy, bluish night, he caught the bus for Sarsaparilla. It was an hour when nobody else thought to travel, and the abo had to cling, like a beetle in a lurching tin. Everybody else was already there. All along the road women and girls were entering the brick churches for preliminary Easter services. Without altogether believing they had consented to a murder, the sand-coloured faces saw it would not harm them to be cleared in public. They had dressed themselves nicely for the hearing, all in blameless, pale colours, hats, and so forth. Some of them were wearing jewels of glass.

  Dubbo knew these parts by heart, both from looking, and from dreaming. He had drawn the houses of Sarsaparilla, with the mushrooms brooding inside. He had drawn the thick, serge-ridden thighs of numerous gentlemen, many from Government departments, some with the ink still wet on them. He had drawn Mrs Khalil’s two juicy girls, their mouths burst open like pomegranates, their teeth like the bitter pomegranate seeds. And as the serge gentlemen continued to pulp the luminous flesh, all was disappointment and coronary occlusion. So Dubbo had seen to draw.

  Sometimes in his wanderings through Sarsaparilla, the painter had pushed deep into his own true nature, which men had failed to contaminate, and there where the houses stopped, he had found his thoughts snapping again like sticks in silence. But subordinate to silence. For silence is everything. Then he had come back and drawn the arabesques of thinking leaves. He had drawn the fox-coloured woman looking out of a bush, her nose twitching as the wind altered.

  He would have liked to draw the touch of air. Once, though, he had attempted, and failed miserably to convey the skin of silence nailed to a tree.

  Now, remembering the real purpose of his visit to Sarsaparilla in the night, Dubbo’s hands grew slithery on the chromium rail of the empty bus. Ostensibly he was steadying himself. The bus was such a void, the conductor came along at last, and after clearing his throat, condescended to enter into conversation with a black.

  The conductor said, extra loud, there had been a fire at Sarsaparilla – some Jew’s place.

  “Yes?” Dubbo replied.

  And smiled.

  “Oh, yes!” he repeated, almost eagerly.

  “You know about it?” the conductor asked. “Know the bloke perhaps? Worked at Rosetree’s.”

  “No,” Dubbo said. “No. I don’t. I don’t know.”

  Because, he saw, with widening horror, it was his nature to betray.

  So he smiled.

  “Anyway,” said the conductor, “these bloody foreigners, the country’s lousy with them.”

  Dubbo smiled. But the cage of his chest was crushing him.

  “What happened to the bloke?” he asked.

  His voice was pitched rather too high.

  “Arr,” said the conductor. “I dunno.” And yawned. “I didn’t hear.”

  He was tired, and began to clean his ears with a key.

  Dubbo continued to smile away his love and faith. Early on they had told him it was his nature to betray, and often since, they had proved it to him. He had even betrayed his secret gift, but only once, and with that, he knew almost for certain, he would make amends eventually. That would bear witness to his faith, in the man they had crucified, as well as in the risen Lord.

  When the bus reached Sarsaparilla, the abo got down at the post-office corner, and descended the hill to where he knew the Jew had lived. There, sure enough, was the skeleton of what had been a house. The little, mild blue beads of fire ran and dropped from what remained. Contorted sheets of iron glowed fainter now, and hissed. The sparks, however, were still very beautiful if in any way encouraged.

  A few women were standing around, hoping something of a personal sort might explode in the ashes to revive their interest, and a couple of volunteers were examining a limp-looking length of hose. To these men the abo called.

  “Where,” he began to ask from a distance.

  Everybody turned and stared. The voice the strange blackfellow used was slewing round in the slight wind.

  The firemen were too tired to bother, but their flat faces waited for a little.

  “Where would,” the abo began again; and: “Can you tell us.” His question fell, broken.

  For he had begun to cough, and went stumbling humiliated away. He could only cough, and stagger over ground that might have been designed for his downfall. And after a brief passage through some blackberry bushes, came up abruptly against a shed.

  There was a light in it. He steadied himself. His hands were holding a window-sill.

  Then Dubbo looked inside, and saw as well as remembered that this was the shed in which lived Mrs Godbold, whom he had first encountered at Mrs Khalil’s, and who had bent down and wiped his mouth as nobody had ever done. Consequently, as she had already testified her love, it did not surprise him now to find the same woman caring for the Jew. There in the bosom of her light the latter lay, amongst the heaps of sleeping children, and the drowsy ones, who still clung to whatever was upright, watching what had never happened before. And the fox-coloured woman from Xanadu lay across the Jew’s feet, warming them by methods which her instincts taught her.

  As Dubbo watched, his picture nagged at him, increasing in miraculous detail, as he had always hoped, and known it must. In fact, the Jew was protesting at something – it could have been the weight of the bedclothes – and the women were preparing to raise him up. The solid, white woman had supported him against her breasts, and the young girl her daughter, of such a delicate, greenish white, had bent to take part, with the result that some of her hair was paddling in the Jew’s cheek, and the young fellow, his back moulded by the strain, was raising the body of the sick man, almost by his own strength, from out of the sheets, higher on the stacked pillows.

  The act itself was insignificant, but became, as the watcher saw it, the supreme act of love.

  So, in his mind, he loaded with panegyric blue the tree from which the women, and the young man His disciple, were lowering their Lord. And the flowers of the tree lay at its roots in pools of deepening blue. And the blue was reflected in the skins of the women and the young girl. As they lowered their Lord with that almost breathless love, the first Mary received him with her whitest linen, and the second Mary, who had appointed herself the guardian of his feet, kissed the bones which were showing through the cold, yellow skin.

  Dubbo, taking part at the window, did not think he could survive this Deposition, which, finally, he had conceived. There he stood, sweating, and at last threatened with coughing. So he went
away as he had come. He would have been discovered if he had stayed, and could not have explained his vision, any more than declared his secret love.

  As soon as the women had settled their charge, his head lay marvellously still.

  Mrs Godbold, who had arranged the sheet neatly underneath the yellow chin, touched him with the tips of her fingers. She could not feel life, but knew from having carried the body of her brother, and closed the eyes of several babies, that life was there yet.

  Indeed, nothing would now divert Mordecai ben Moshe from his intention of following to its source that narrower, but still reliable stream. So he would ignore the many hands which tweaked at his cap, or became involved in the flowing folds of his white gown, to distract, to supplicate. As he strode, the particles of petitions fluttered in his face in tinkling scraps, to melt against his hot skin. Pressure of time would not allow him to stop, to piece together, to communicate, although he was expected, he was expected to know.

  And did, of course, now.

  He knew all the possible permutations and combinations. Whereas, at Bienenstadt, his green and supple soul had been forced to struggle for release, the scarred and leathery object which it had become would now stand forth with very little effort. So, too, he had only to touch tongues, including his own, and they would speak.

  As the purple stream – for it was evening now – wound through the rather stony hills, there came to him thousands asking him to tell them of the immediate past, so that they might be prepared against the future, since many of them feared they might soon be expected to return. The strange part was: he knew, he knew. The cliffs of rock were his scroll. He had only to open the flesh of their leaves to identify himself with the souls of plants. So the thousands waited for him along the banks of the interminable river. Sometimes the faces were those of Jews, sometimes they were gentile faces, but no matter; the change could be effected from one to the other simply by twitching a little shutter. Only, he who had drilled holes, could not stop now for souls, whatever the will, whatever the love. His own soul was carrying him forward. The mountains of darkness must be crossed.

  Such was his anxiety and haste, Himmelfarb shifted his feet beneath the bedclothes: little more than a fluttering of bones, but not so faint that Miss Hare did not feel it against her cheek. For a moment Mrs Godbold was afraid the old creature might be going off into one of her attacks; there was such a convulsion of the body, such a plunging of the blackened hat. But Miss Hare only settled deeper into a state where her friend was too discreet to follow. As she turned to occupy herself with other things, Mrs Godbold saw on the blistered mouth evidence of gentlest joy.

  Miss Hare had, in fact, entered that state of complete union which her nature had never yet achieved. The softest matter her memory could muster – the fallen breast-feathers, tufts of fur torn in courtship, the downy, brown crooks of bracken – was what she now willed upon the spirit of her love. Their most private union she hid in sheets of silence, such as she had learnt from the approach of early light, or from holding her ear to stone, or walking on thicknesses of rotted leaves. So she wrapped and cherished the heavenly spirit which had entered her, quite simply and painlessly, as Peg had suggested that it might. And all the dancing demons fled out, in peacock feathers, with a tinkling of the fitful little mirrors set in the stuff of their cunning thighs. And the stones of Xanadu could crumble, and she would touch its kinder dust. She herself would embrace the dust, the spirit of which she was able to understand at last.

  Himmelfarb’s face had sunk very deep into the pillow, it seemed to Else Godbold as she watched. He was stretched straight, terrible straight.

  But warmer now. For it was at this point that he glanced back at the last blaze of earthly fire. It rose up, through the cracks in the now colourless earth, not to consume, but to illuminate the departing spirit. His ankles were wreathed with little anklets of joyous fire. He had passed, he noticed, the two date-palms of smoking plumes. By that light, even the most pitiable or monstrous incidents experienced by human understanding were justified, it seemed, as their statuary stood grouped together on the plain he was about to leave.

  So he turned, and went on, arranging the white Kittel, in which, he realized, he was dressed, and which he had thought abandoned many years ago in the house on the Holzgraben, at Holunderthal.

  Then Miss Hare uttered a great cry, which reverberated through the iron shed like the last earthly torment, and began to beat the quilt with the flat of her hands.

  “Himmelfarb,” she cried, “Himmelfarb,” the name was choking her, “Himmelfarb is dead! Oh! Ohhhhhh!”

  It died away, but she continued to blubber, and feel the quilt for something she hoped might be left.

  All the little girls had woken, but not one could find the courage to cry.

  And now Mrs Godbold herself had come, and when she had touched, and listened, and her intuition had confirmed, she saw fit to pronounce:

  “He will not suffer any more, the poor soul. We should give thanks, Miss Hare, that he went so peaceful, after all.”

  Just then the alarm-clock, with which one of the children must have been tinkering during the day, went off before its usual hour, with a jubilance of whirring tin to stir the deepest sleeper, and Mrs Godbold turned towards the mantel.

  When she was satisfied, she said:

  “Mr Himmelfarb, too, has died on the Friday.”

  Although her remark was so thoughtfully spoken, its inference was not conveyed to anybody else. Nor had she intended exactly to share what was too precious a conviction.

  Then the woman and her eldest daughter quietly went about doing the several simple things which had to be done for the man that had died, while Maudie Godbold pulled on her stiff shoes, and trailed up the hill to fetch the previously rejected Dr Herborn.

  It was very still now, almost cold for the time of year. The lilies of moonlight dropped their cold, slow pearls. The blackberry bushes were glittering. At that hour, before the first cock, if such a bird survived at Sarsaparilla, the only movement was one of dew and moonlight, the only sound that of a goat scattering her pellets.

  At that hour, Miss Hare came out of the Godbolds’ shed, since there was no longer cause for her remaining. She had witnessed everything but the doctor’s signature. In the friable white light, she too was crumbling, it seemed, shambling as always, but no longer held in check by the many purposes which direct animal, or human life. She might have reasoned that she had fulfilled her purpose, if she had not always mistrusted reason. Her instinct suggested, rather, that she was being dispersed, but that in so experiencing, she was entering the final ecstasy. Walking and walking through the unresistant thorns and twigs. Ploughing through the soft, opalescent remnants of night. Never actually arriving, but that was to be expected, since she had become all-pervasive: scent, sound, the steely dew, the blue glare of white light off rocks. She was all but identified.

  So Miss Hare stumbled through the night. If she did not choose the obvious direction, it was because direction had at last chosen her.

  XV

  Rosetrees did not go away at Easter. Harry Rosetree said he could not face it.

  “But we got the reservations,” his wife protested frequently.

  “We shall lose the deposit, Harry,” Mrs Rosetree pointed out. “You know what those Hungarians are.”

  Harry Rosetree said that he was feeling sick. Deposit or no deposit, he just could not go away. But went into the lounge-room, and pulled the blinds down.

  “You are sick?” Mrs Rosetree cried at last. “You are neurotic! I am the one that will get sick, living with a neurotic man.”

  Soon afterwards, she began to cry. She did not dress for several days, but went around in the azure housecoat she had been wearing the evening of that old Jew’s visit. It blazed less, perhaps, on Mrs Rosetree now, and the seams were going at the armpits.

  Nor did Harry Rosetree dress, but sat in pyjamas, over his underwear, and smoked. Or he would just sit, a hand on either th
igh. He was tired, really; that was it. He would have preferred to be a turnip.

  Mrs Rosetree would come in and sit around.

  “Neurotic,” she repeated rather often, which was the worst she could say of anybody after: “What can you expect of Jews?”

  Then she would peer out through the slats of the Venetians. From a certain angle, Shirl Rosetree still appeared to wear the varnish, but there was another side, where her husband’s sudden denial of life had crushed and matted the perm, giving her the look of a crippled bird, or, for Haïm ben Ya’akov at least, his wife’s grandmother, that black old woman whose innocent and almost only joy had been to welcome in the Bride with cup and candle. So that in the room at Paradise East, which normally was just right – oyster satin, rosewood, and the net Vorhänge – Harry Rosetree would be shading his eyes, from some distressing effect of light, or flapping of a great, rusty bird.

  There were moments when the intensity of his experience was such that his wife, who never stopped moving around, or feeling her side, or suspecting her breath, or re-arranging the furniture, or again, crying on account of everything, would sit down, and lay her head, the side of crumpled hair, on a little rosewood table, and watch through the slats of her fingers the husband whom she despised, but needed still. Of course Shulamith could not see by the light of reason and the shadowy room what was devouring Haïm, although the surge of her blood would suddenly almost suggest. But she would not accept. She would jump up, and return to the Venetian blinds.