Patrick White - Riders in the Chariot

Patrick White Riders in the Chariot

First published in 1961

ForKlari DanielandBen Huebsch

_The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spoke to them; and whether they did not think at the time that they would be misunderstood, and__ so _be the cause of imposition__. _Isaiah answer'd: "I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in everything, and as I was then perswaded, and remain confirm'd, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences, but wrote__...." _I then asked Ezekiel why he eat dung, and lay so long on his right and left side! he answer'd, "The desire of raising other men into a perception of the infinite: this the North American tribes practise, and is he honest who resists his genius or conscience only for the sake of present ease or gratification!"__

--WILLIAM BLAKE

PART ONE

"WHO WAS that woman?" asked Mrs Colquhoun, a rich lady who had come recently to live at Sarsaparilla. "Ah," Mrs Sugden said, and laughed, "that was Miss Hare." "She appears an unusual sort of person." Mrs Colquhoun ventured to hope. "Well," replied Mrs Sugden, "I cannot deny that Miss Hare is _different__." But the postmistress would not add to that. She started poking at a dry sponge. Even at her most communicative, talking with authority of the weather, which was her subject, she favoured the objective approach. Mrs Colquhoun was able to see for herself that Miss Hare was a small, freckled thing, whose stockings, at that moment, could have been coming down. To tell the truth, Mrs Colquhoun was somewhat put out by the postmistress's discretion, but could not remain so indefinitely, for the war was over, and the peace had not yet set hard. Miss Hare continued to walk away from the post office, through a smell of moist nettles, under the pale disc of the sun. An early pearliness of light, a lamb's-wool of morning promised the millennium, yet, between the road and the shed in which the Godbolds lived, the burnt-out blackberry bushes, lolling and waiting in rusty coils, suggested that the enemy might not have withdrawn. As Miss Hare passed, several barbs of several strands attached themselves to the folds of her skirt, pulling on it, tight, tight, tighter, until she was all spread out behind, part woman, part umbrella. "You could get torn," Mrs Godbold warned, who had come up to the edge of the road, in search of something, whether child, goat, or perhaps just the daily paper. "Oh, I could get torn," Miss Hare answered. "But what is a little tear?" It did not matter. Mrs Godbold was rather large. She smiled at the ground, incredulous, but glad. "I saw a wombat," Miss Hare called. "Not a wombat! In these parts? I do not believe you!" Mrs Godbold answered back. Miss Hare laughed. "What did it look like?" Mrs Godbold called, and laughed. Still looking in the grass. "I will tell you," Miss Hare declared, laughing, but always walking away. It did not matter to either that much would remain unexplained. It did not matter that neither had looked at the other's face, for each was aware that the moment could yield no more than they already knew. Somewhere in the past, that particular relationship had been fully ratified. Miss Hare went on, together with her emancipated skirt. With the back of her hand she hit a fence-post, to hear her father's bloodstone ring. She would knock thus on objects, to punctuate periods which, otherwise, might never have had an end. Now she heard the redeeming knock. She heard the wings of a bird suddenly break free from silence. She sang a little, or made sounds. All along the road--or track, the older people still called it--which rambled down from Sarsaparilla to Xanadu, the earth was black and oozy in the early morning of early spring. In all that dreamy landscape it seemed that each particle, not least Miss Hare herself, contributed towards some perfection. Nothing could be added to improve the whole. Yet, was she not about to attempt? Miss Hare stood still in the middle of the road. So she had stood in the post office, only, then, she had worn the kind of expression people expected. "This is something of an occasion, Mrs Sugden," she had said. There were those who could never understand Miss Hare's manner of speech, but the postmistress had grown used to it. "Well, now," Mrs Sugden said, arranging some papers nicely, and the little glue bottle which use had almost glued up. Then she waited. "Yes, "said Miss Hare. She could not find the horrid pen. She could not find the telegraph forms, sandy like her own skin. "I have been in touch with a person. A widow. In Melbourne. In an advertisement," she said, and found the forms. "I am engaging a housekeeper for Xanadu." "Well, now, I am real pleased!" said Mrs Sugden, and was truly. "You will not tell?" asked Miss Hare. How she hated the vicious pen. "Oh dear, no!" protested Mrs Sugden. "What is an official position if not a position of trust?" Miss Hare considered. The post-office pen pricked the paper. "I will tell you all about it," she decided. "But must write the telegram. To Melbourne." Mrs Sugden knew how to wait. Miss Hare began to write. "She describes herself as a lady--capable and refined." "Oh dear, I should hope so!" exclaimed Mrs Sugden, blushing for other possibilities. "In these days, and under the same roof!" Miss Hare ploughed her way through the ugly desert of the telegraph form. "I am not afraid," she said. "Of anything. Or not of the things people are afraid of." "There are other things, of course," agreed Mrs Sugden, who, in her official position, must have experienced an awful lot. The postmistress waited. Miss Hare had on that old hat, wicker rather than straw--it was so very coarse--which she wore summer and winter regardless, and which gave her at times the look of a sunflower, at others, just an old basket coming to pieces. From where they were standing at the counter Mrs Sugden was able to look down at the kind of navel right at the centre of the crown. Miss Hare was that short. All was hat, and a hand extended from it, having trouble with a pen. The pen appeared to be resisting. Mrs Sugden stood and wondered where the hat could have come from. Nobody remembered seeing any other. "It is all due to my Cousin Eustace Cleugh," began Miss Hare, who had just managed the signature. "He came here very many years ago. You will not remember. The way people sometimes used to send their sons on a visit to relatives in Australia. It seemed astonishing then. To _Australia__! Two wars have made a difference, of course, and the food parcels. But my Cousin Eustace came--he was somehow on my mother's side, through Aunt Fanny of Banjo Downs. Oh, it was splendid! The bachelors' quarters full. And they lit the chandelier almost every night. And balls, with music from Sydney. My mother said I should mingle with the guests--I was then a young girl; my hair had just been put up--but how could I mingle when I must watch all the people who had come to Xanadu? There was one girl--I must tell you--called Helen Antill, in a dress embroidered with tiny mirrors. I overheard my mother remark that perhaps she should not have invited that Miss Antill. 'Nor any other girl,' my father replied; 'nor young men either.' My father had to have his joke. 'And let us enjoy our pudding in peace,' he said, 'and bread sauce.' My father was fond of bread sauce with a roast fowl, and one of the cooks used to make him a special kind." "Ah?" "With _crushed onion__!" cried Miss Hare. Mrs Sugden shifted foot. Much of her life had been spent in waiting. "But let me see--my Cousin Eustace, who came and went, was in some way disappointing to my parents, though in after years he made amends. Oh dear, yes, he made me a little allowance, because his circumstances permitted, from the island of Jersey where he lives. That began already during my mother's lifetime. Fortunately. Because something--I never understood what--happened to my father's business." Miss Hare's voice trailed off. She took up the second, and equally horrid post-office pen. But her gesture remained an irrelevant one. "What do you know!" said Mrs Sugden. "Oh, yes," sighed Miss Hare. "I thought _you__ knew. I had been receiving the allowance so many years. Till suddenly the island of Jersey was overrun. Like that." Miss Hare did, in fact, spill the remaining post-office ink, but Mrs Sugden appeared not to care. "By Germans?" "Who else?" replied Miss Hare, not without contempt. "Like darkness. For years there was no communication from our relative, until on a Friday morning, exactly seven weeks ago, a few lines arrived to say my Cousin Eustace was safe. Although in only moderate health and reduced circumstances, he considered it his duty to continue rendering me some small assistance." Mrs Sugden was suitably rejoiced at such a lifting of the clouds. "And so you were able to engage this lady." "This woman has almost agreed." Miss Hare could be at moments both realistic and stern. "Her name is Mrs Jolley," she added, and, as the extent of the morning struck her through the window: "I do hope she is capable of being happy at Xanadu. Sydney is not Melbourne, and here on the outskirts, there is such a lot of grass." "Anybody can be happy if they have a mind to be," offered the postmistress, regardless of whether her maxim was cut to fit the situation. Some flies had died on the counter which separated the two women, who found themselves examining the bodies. "What," asked Mrs Sugden, taking a deep breath, "what became of the girl called Helen Antill, who wore that lovely dress?" "Oh, she went away," said Miss Hare. "Everybody goes away. " She began to swing her right leg. Her face, which narrative had turned moist and crumbly, was become dry and stale again. Ordinarily when she spoke, her mouth stayed stiff, almost as if she had had a stroke. "She went away, and married, but somebody we had never heard of, and lived in a house, and had children, and buried her husband. Once I saw her looking out of the window at something." Mrs Sugden looked away, as if she, too, had seen. Just then there was a crunching, and a person approached--it was, in fact, the newcomer to Sarsaparilla, Mrs Colquhoun--with the result that Miss Hare let the present fall like a shutter. "Thank you," she said to Mrs Sugden, whom she could have met only the moment before, and left. So there was Miss Hare, on the track which the Council had begun to call a road, sometimes even avenue, which led down from Sarsaparilla to Xanadu. At one point doubts had invested her, and turned her stony still, but uncertain prospects could not long resist the surge of her surroundings, and she soon went on. Where the road sloped down she ran, disturbing stones, her body quite agitated as it accompanied her, but her inner self by now joyfully serene. The anomaly of that relationship never failed to mystify, and she stopped again, to consider. For a variety of reasons, very little of her secret, actual nature had been disclosed to other human beings. She stood still. Thinking very intently. Or allowing her instincts to play around her. Although no other human being was actually present, she did resent what must eventually recur. She stroked leaves sulkily. She broke a shaggy stick. Other people would drive along a bush road looking out of the windows of a car, but their minds embraced almost nothing of what their flickering eyes saw. Whole towers of green remained unclimbed, rocks unopened. Or else the intruders might stop their cars, and go in search of water. She had seen them, letting themselves down into the cold, black, secret rock pools, while remaining enclosed in their own resentful goose-flesh. Whereas she, Miss Hare, whose eyes were always probing, fingers trying, would achieve the ecstasy of complete, annihilating liberation without any such immersion. Now, for a moment, she looked angry. But drifted on dreamily. All that land, stick and stone, belonged to her, over and above actual rights. Nobody else had ever known how to penetrate it quite to the same extent. She went on through her peculiar territory, lolloping, stopping. Often stopping. The sky had quickened, and was now a lively blue. The rather scrubby, indigenous trees, not so much of interest to the eye as an accompaniment to states of mind, were at the moment behaving with docility, a certain, languid melancholy. Until she arrived at the bottom, where the road turned, and curled, and rose. The slope, gentle at first, climbed to abrupter terraces, with dispensations of fern and moss, and soft, rotting carpets, and there the trees, it seemed, grew straighter, taller, and invariably she would turn dizzy if she stared too long upward at their scintillating crowns. The owner never approached her legal property by following the official road to the gates--those, with their attempt at heraldry, were chained and padlocked, anyway--but took a short cut that she and the Godbold children always used, or an even shorter one, as now, known only to herself, and along which she had to push and struggle, actually to tunnel. But the way developed over good, soft loam, and velvet patches of leaf mould, lovely if the knees were allowed to sink for a moment into a surface from which would rise the scent of fungus and future growth. So Miss Hare was pushing and struggling now, because it was what she liked, and chose. Scratched a little, but that was to be expected once the feet were set upon the paths of existence. Slapped by a staggy elder-bush, of which the buds had almost reached the edible stage. Whipped by the little sarsaparilla vine, of which she could have drunk the purple up. Stroked by ferns, and ferns. At one stage she fell upon the knees of her earth-coloured, practical stockings, not because she was discouraged, or ill--she had reached the time of life where acquaintances and neighbours were always on the lookout for strokes--but because it was natural to adopt a kneeling position in the act of worship, and because intense conviction will sometimes best express itself through the ungainliness of spontaneity. So she rested a little upon her knees, under the great targe of her protective hat, and dug her blunt, freckled fingers into the receptive earth. She knelt for a while in the tunnel that led to Xanadu, and anybody would have found her more grotesquely ugly, less acceptable than they had thought. If family had remained to her, other than her Cousin Eustace, who was at a distance, and a handful of Urquhart Smiths, who had decided to forget, they would have turned away on recognizing such a travesty of their otherwise irreproachable strain.