Riders In the Chariot

by Patrick White

  If daylight had not licked quickly into shape, this kind of night-time persecution might have become unbearable. But morning arrived in Paradise East with a clatter of Venetian blinds. And there stood the classy homes in their entirety of brick. There were the rotary clothes-lines, and the galvanized garbage-bins.

  By daylight the Rosenbaums would sometimes even dare indulge a nostalgia for Beinfleisch, say, mit Krensoss. They would stuff it in, as though it might be taken from them. Their lips grew shiny from the fat meat, their cheeks tumid from an excess of Nockerl.

  Then Haïm Rosenbaum might ask:

  “Why you don’t eat your meat, Steve?”

  “Mum said it was gunna be chops.”

  “Shoot some of this tomato sauce on to the Beinfleisch. Then you can pretend it is chops,” advised the father.

  But Steve Rosetree hated deviation.

  “Who wants bloody foreign food!”

  “I will not have you swear, Steve!” said the mother, with pride.

  She loved to sit after Beinfleisch, and pick out the last splinters, with a perfect, crimson finger-nail. And dwell on past pleasures.

  Once Shirl Rosetree thought to inquire:

  “What about that old Jew, Harry, you told us about, down at the factory?”

  “What about this old Jew?”

  “What is he up to?”

  “For Chrisake! Who am I to know what is up to every no-hope Jew that comes to the country?”

  “But this one seemed, well, sort of educated, from what you said.”

  “He talks good. He talks so good nobody can understand.”

  Harry Rosetree had to belch.

  “You can smell the Orthodox,” he said, “on some Jews.”

  It made his wife laugh.

  “Times change, eh? When you have to smell the Orthodox!”

  But she would have loved still to watch the hands lighting the Chanukah candles. The Scrolls themselves were not more closely written than the faces of some old waxen Jews.

  “Times change all right,” her husband agreed. “But I do not understand why am I to keep a day-book of the doings of every Jew that comes!”

  “Let it pass!” his wife said. She manipulated her jaws to release a noise, half-yawn, half-laughter, punctuated by a gold tooth. But came out with a remark she immediately regretted: “You can’t get away from it, Harry, the blood draws you.”

  “The blood draws, the blood will run!” her husband said, through ugly mouth. “Have we seen, and not learnt?”

  “What blood?” asked the little girl.

  There were often things in her parents’ conversation that made her tingle with suspicion.

  “Nothing, dear,” said the mother. “Mum and Dad were having a discussion.”

  “At the convent,” Rosie Rosetree said, “there is a statue of Our Saviour, and the blood looks like it’s still wet.” She made her mouth into the little funnel through which she would allow commendable sentiments to escape. “It was that real, it made me cry at Easter, and the nuns had to comfort me. Gee, the nuns are lovely. I’m gunna be a nun, Mum. I’m gunna be a saint, and have visions of roses and things.”

  “There, you see, Shirl, Rosie has the right ideas.” The father smiled. “And as she is her old dad’s sensible girl, her visions will become more realistic. No one ever got far on the smell of roses.”

  Shirl Rosetree sighed. She frowned. It was true, of course. But the truth was always only half the truth. It was that that made her act sort of nervös. And all these family situations, as breakable as bakelite. Sometimes she was afraid she might be starting a heart, and would have liked to consult a good European doctor, only they all rooked you so. Or priest. Only you always came away knowing you had not quite told. And, in any case, what could a priest know to tell? Nothing. She never came away from the confessional without she had the heartburn. Some old smelly man in a box.

  Now she had got the heartburn real bad. It was after all that Beinfleisch, with the good Krensoss. She knew it must be turning her yellow.

  So Shirl Rosetree breathed rather hard, and fiddled with the little gold Cross in the shadow between her breasts, and said:

  “I think we had enough of this silly conversation. It’s the kind that don’t lead anywhere. I’m gunna lay down, and have a read of some nice magazine.”

  The voice of the Rosetrees proclaimed that a stranger was in their midst. If it hesitated to deride, it was for those peculiarly personal, not to say mystical reasons, and because derision was a luxury the Rosetrees were only so very recently qualified to enjoy. The voice of Sarsaparilla, developing the same theme, laboured under no such inhibitions, but took for granted its right to pass judgment on the human soul, and indulge in a fretfulness of condemnation.

  “I would not of thought it would of come to this,” Mrs Flack repeated, “a stream of foreign migrants pouring into the country, and our boys many of them not yet returned, to say nothing of those with permanent headstones still to be erected overseas. So much for promises and Prime Ministers. Who will feed us, I would like to know, when we are so many mouths over, and foreign mouths, how many of them I did read, but forget the figure.”

  Then Mrs Flack’s friend, Mrs Jolley, would clear her throat and add her voice:

  “Yes, indeed, it makes you think, it makes you wonder. Who counts? It is not you. It is the one that greases the palm of a civil servant or a politician. It is never you, but the one that comes.”

  “Not that many a civil servant is not a highly respectable person,” Mrs Flack had to grant.

  “That is correct, and I should know, seeing as my own son-in-law is one. Mr Apps, who took Merle.”

  “I would not doubt that even a politician has high principles in the home.”

  “Ah, in the home! Oh, a politician is a family man besides. It is the kiddies that makes all the difference.”

  Abstraction would elevate the two ladies to a state so rarefied they dared not look at each other, but each would stare dreamily into her own bottomless mind, watching the cotton-wool unfurl.

  Once Mrs Flack’s eyes seemed to focus on some point. It was in actual fact a plaster pixie, of which she had a pair, out on the front lawn, beside the golden cypresses, amongst the lachenalia.

  “They say,” she said, “there is a foreign Jew, living,” she said, and appeared to swallow something down, “below the post office, in Montebello Avenue, in a weatherboard home” – here she drew back her strips of palest lips – “a home so riddled with the white ant, you can hear them operatin’ from where the kerb ought to be.”

  “In Montebello Avenue,” Mrs Jolley confirmed. “I did see. Yes, a funny-looking gentleman. Or man. They say, a foreign Jew. And for quite some time.”

  “Mind you the home is rotten,” Mrs Flack pursued, “but you cannot tell me, Mrs Jolley, that a home is not a home, with so many going roofless, and so many returned men.”

  “Preferential treatment is to be desired,” said Mrs Jolley, “for everyone entitled to it.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Mrs Flack.

  Which was terrible, because Mrs Jolley was not at all sure.

  “Well,” she said, “you know what I mean. Well, I mean to say,” she said, “a returned man is a returned man.”

  “That is so.”

  Mrs Flack was mollified.

  But Mrs Jolley had decided she must go. She was perspiring uncomfortably behind the knees.

  Then Mrs Flack flung a bomb.

  “What do you say, Mrs Jolley, if I walk a little of the way? There’s nothing like the fresh air.”

  This was revolutionary, considering that Mrs Flack never, never walked except when strictly necessary, on account of her heart, her blood pressure, her varicose veins, and generally delicate state of health. The fresh air, besides, was as foreign to her yellow skin as Jews to Sarsaparilla.

  “Why, dear, if you think you ought.” Mrs Jolley had to speak at last. “But I must hurry along,” she said. “My lady,” and here she had to la
ugh, “will be expecting me at Xanadu.”

  “Only a little of the way,” Mrs Flack insisted. “I was never a drag on anyone. But as far as Montebello Avenue.”

  “Ah!” Mrs Jolley giggled.

  It was certainly entrancing to walk together past homes which failed any longer to conceal, from Mrs Jolley in her mauve eye-veil, from Mrs Flack in her flat black hat with its cockade of dust.

  “Here,” said Mrs Flack, adjusting herself so that she became as much edge as possible, “are people who should not be allowed to live in any decent neighbourhood.”

  Mrs Jolley almost dislocated her neck.

  “I could not tell you in detail – it would make your flesh creep,” said the disappointing Mrs Flack, “only that a father and a young girl, well, I will put it bluntly – his daughter. There is a little motorcar in which you could not squeeze a third. She in slippery blouses that might be wet for all they hide.”

  “What do you know!” Mrs Jolley clucked.

  She could not help but feel she had suddenly got possession of all knowledge, thanks to the generosity of Mrs Flack. Mrs Jolley walked, red, but brave.

  “There is the post office,” Mrs Flack continued. “There is that Mrs Sugden.”

  “Oo-hoo! Mrs Sugden!” she had to call. “How are we today?”

  Mrs Sugden was good, thanks.

  Mrs Flack hated Mrs Sugden, because the postmistress would never be persuaded to tell.

  Then the two ladies began to tread more cautiously, for they had entered Montebello Avenue. Their ankles had begun to twist on stones. Where the pavement should have been, the grass, unpleasant in itself, oozing black juices when it did not cut the stockings, threatened to reveal the rarer forms of nastiness at some future step.

  “If you are not loopy to go on living at Xanadu!” Mrs Flack called from her wading.

  Mrs Jolley usually replied: A person must retain her principles; but today, it had to be admitted, Mrs Flack’s grip on life was so much stronger, her friend had been reduced. So, instead, she answered:

  “Beggars cannot be choosers.”

  “Beggar me!” shrieked Mrs Flack, somewhat surprisingly.

  Foreign parts and paspalum had made her reckless. Her waxen skin had begun to appear deliquescent.

  “There!” she suddenly hissed, and restrained her friend’s skirt.

  It was as though an experienced huntsman had at last delivered a disbelieving novice into the presence of promised game. Not that the game itself was in evidence yet, only its habitat.

  The two ladies stood in the shelter of a blackberry bush to observe the house in which the foreign Jew was living. The small brown house was suitably, obscenely poor. The other side of the fence, from which previous owners had pulled pickets at random to stoke winter fires, mops of weed were threatening to shake their cotton heads. Of course there were the willows. Nobody could have denied the existence of those, only their value was doubtful because they had cost nothing. The willows poured round the shabby little house, serene cascades of green, or lapped peacefully at its wooden edges. Many a passer-by might have chosen to plunge in, and drown, in those consoling depths, but the two observers were longing for something that would rend their souls – a foetus, say, or a mutilated corpse. Instead, they had to make do with the sight of guttering that promised to fall off soon, and windows which, if glitteringly clean, ignored the common decencies of lace or net.

  “Not even a geranium,” said Mrs Flack, with bitter satisfaction.

  Then, if you please, the door opened, and out came, not the Jew, that would have been electric enough, but a woman, a woman. It was a thickish, middle-aged woman, in shapeless sort of faded dress. Some no-account woman.

  It was Mrs Jolley who realized first. She was often quite quick, although it was Mrs Flack who excelled in psychic powers.

  “Why,” Mrs Jolley said now, “what do you know! It is that Mrs Godbold!”

  Mrs Flack was stunned, but managed:

  “I always thought how Mrs Godbold was deep, but how deep, I did not calculate.”

  “It is wonderful,” said Mrs Jolley, “to what lengths a woman will go.”

  For the owner himself had just emerged. The Jew. The two ladies clutched each other by the gloves. They had never seen anything so yellow or so strange. Strange? Why, dreadful, dreadful! Now the whirlwinds were rising in honest breasts, that honest corsets were striving to contain. The phlegm had come in Mrs Flack’s mouth, causing her to swallow quickly down.

  Mrs Jolley, as she had already confessed, had noticed the man on one or two previous occasions as she came and went between Xanadu and Sarsaparilla, but had failed to observe such disgraceful dilapidation of appearance, such irregularities of stubble, such a top-heavy, bulbous head, such a truly fearful nose. In the circumstances, she felt she should apologize to her somewhat delicate companion.

  But the latter was craning now.

  “He is big,” she remarked, between her moist teeth.

  “He is not small,” Mrs Jolley agreed, as they stood supporting each other on wish-bone legs.

  “Who would ever of thought,” Mrs Flack just articulated, “that Mrs Godbold.”

  Mrs Godbold and the man were standing together on the steps of the veranda, she on the lower, he above, so that she was forced to look up, exposing her face to his and to the evening light.

  It was obvious that the woman’s flat, and ordinarily uncommunicative face had been opened by some experience of a private nature, or perhaps it was just the light, gilding surfaces, dissolving the film of discouragement and doubt which life leaves behind, loosening the formal braids of hair, furnishing an aureole, which, if not supernatural – reason would not submit to that – provided an agreeable background to motes and gnats. Indeed, the Jew himself began to acquire a certain mineral splendour as he stood talking, even laughing with his friend, in that envelope, or womb of light. Whether the two had been strengthened by some event of importance, or were weakened by their present total disregard for defences, their audience was made to know, but could not, could not tell. Mrs Jolley and Mrs Flack could only crane and swallow, beside the blackberry bush, beneath their hats, and hope that something disgraceful might occur.

  “What is that, Mrs Jolley?” Mrs Flack asked at last.

  But Mrs Jolley did not hear. Her breath was roaring through her mouth.

  For the Jew had begun to show Mrs Godbold something. Whatever it was – it could have been a parcel, or a bird, only that was improbable, a white bird – their attention was all upon it.

  “I believe he has cut his hand,” Mrs Jolley decided. “She has bandaged up his hand. Well, that is one way!”

  Mrs Flack sucked incredulous teeth. She was quite exhausted by now.

  Then, as people will toss up the ball of friendship, into the last light, at the moment of departure, and it will hang there briefly, lovely and luminous to see, so did the Jew and Mrs Godbold. There hung the golden sphere. The laughter climbed up quickly, out of their exposed throats, and clashed together by consent; the light splintered against their teeth. How private, and mysterious, and beautiful it was, even the intruders suspected, and were deterred momentarily from hating.

  When they were again fully clothed in their right minds, Mrs Jolley said to her companion:

  “Do you suppose she comes to him often?”

  “I would not know,” replied Mrs Flack, though it was obvious she did.

  “Tsst!” she added, quick as snakes.

  Mrs Godbold had begun to turn.

  “See you at church!” hissed Mrs Jolley.

  “See you at church!” repeated Mrs Flack.

  Their eyes flickered for a moment over the Christ who would rise to the surface of Sunday morning.

  Then they drew apart.

  Mrs Jolley walked on her way, briskly but discreetly, down the hill, towards Xanadu. She would have liked to kill some animal, fierce enough to fan her pride, weak enough to make it possible, but as it was doubtful any such beast would offer
itself, scrubby though the neighbourhood was, she drifted dreamily through the series of possible ways in which she might continue to harry the human soul.

  The morning Himmelfarb’s hand was gashed by the drill which bored those endless holes in the endless succession of metal plates, was itself an endless plain, of dirty yellow, metallic wherever sweating fanlight or louvre allowed the sword to strike. The light struck, and was fairly parried by defensive daggers, of steel, as well as indifference. Equally, wounds were received. Their past lives rose up in a rush in the throats of many of the singletted men, and gushed out in tongues of sour air, while a few went so far as to fart their resentment, not altogether in undertone. Some of the ladies, who had bared themselves as much as was decent, and who were in consequence looking terribly white, swore they must win the lottery, or leave their husbands. Over every surface, whether skin or metal, humidity had laid its film. Flesh united to mingle with it. Only metal appeared to have entered into an alliance with irony, as the machinery continued to belt, to stamp and to stammer with an even more hilarious blatancy, to hiss and piss with an increased virulence.

  Just after smoke-o, Himmelfarb’s hand came in contact with the head of the little drill. Very briefly and casually. The whole incident was so unemotional, probably nobody noticed it. At the time, it caused Himmelfarb very little pain. As he had succeeded by now in withdrawing completely from his factory surroundings, he was usually unperturbed by such wounds as they might deal, even the mental ones. But here was his hand, running blood. There was a fairly deep gash along the side of the left palm.

  After a little, he went quietly to the wash-room to clean the wound. There was nobody there – except, he then realized, the blackfellow, who could have been staring at himself in the glass, or else using the mirror as an opening through which to escape.

  Himmelfarb rinsed his hand beneath the tap. The blood ran out of the wound in long, vanishing veils. At moments the effect was strangely, fascinatingly beautiful.

  So it seemed to appear also to the blackfellow, who was now staring at the bleeding wound, whether in curiosity, recollection, sympathy, what, it was impossible to tell. Only that his active self seemed to have become completely submerged in what he was witnessing.