Riders In the Chariot

by Patrick White

  Then it was over. And she had survived. Perhaps Xanadu had not yet fallen.

  At once Miss Hare began to run through her house to discover to what extent it had suffered. She was quite demented. Although shadow prevailed in the shuttered rooms, a yellow, rubbery light would belly suddenly out through the glass panels of some of the doors, and her figure flickered fearfully. She was more than ever striped, brown, or red, with patches of a clown’s white, as she ran to catch the proud spirit, that had fallen, that could still, she hoped, be falling from the height of the trapeze. She ran helter skelter, and her stumpy, rather grubby fingers were stretched out, tighter than nets. But small.

  In the drawing-room she found the first serious evidence of damage – in the drawing-room in which ladies in openwork dresses had accepted tea in Lowestoft cups, and told stories of the voyage out, and dancers had rested between waltzes, on the worn step that leads to matrimony, and her parents had failed to escape each other by hiding behind objects of virtu. It was on the drawing-room side that the foundations of Xanadu were now undeniably, visibly sunk. Where there had been a fissure before, where no more than a branch had been able to finger its way inside, a whole victorious segment of light had replaced the solid plaster and stone. Leaves were plapping and hesitating, advancing and retreating, in whispers and explosions of green. Walls were revealed mottled with chlorosis. The scurf of moss had fallen from an oaken shoulder on to the rags of Italian damask. And dust, dust. There was a newer kind, the colour of familiar biscuit, yet smelling of concealment and age. Now spilled freshly out. It lay on the boards together with the grey domestic dust, a thin bed for some future crumbling of stone.

  Miss Hare stood looking. Then she picked up a fragment of her house, just about the size of a fist, and threw it at a malachite urn which had been her parents’ pride. The moment of impact, however, was somewhat disappointing. The sound it produced was even dull: almost that of a stone striking on composition, or wood. Yet, the urn had been genuinely mineral – so cold, and dense, and unresponsive – her skin had always assured her as a child, as well as on lonely occasions in after life.

  Her mouth, which was working to solve, suddenly subsided on the teeth. All problems had always given way to birds, and here were several, aimed practically at her. Released from the tapestry of light and leaves, the birds whirred and wheeled into life inside the burst drawing-room. What kind, Miss Hare could not have told; names were not of interest. But the plump, shiny, maculated birds, neither black nor grey, but of a common, bird colour, were familiar as her own instinct for air and twigs. And one bird touched her deeply, clinging clumsily to a cornice. Confusion had robbed it of its grace, making it a blunt thing, of ruffled gills. From far below, the woman willed the frightened creature back into its element, where the reunited formation completed a figure to the approving motions of her head. She watched them quiver for an instant in flight, wired, it appeared, for inclusion in the museum of her mind. But they were gone, of course. She was left with the shimmer of brocaded light that hung upon the rent in the wall.

  So Miss Hare, too, went at last, nodding her papier-mâché head. She became her most clumsily obscene whenever she ceased to control her own movements, as now, when she was moved, rather, through the wretched house, as much her doom as her property. So she loomed on the stairs, and in unaccountable passages. Pierced by the anxious brooches that barely held the skin together, the folds of her throat were choking her. Her ankles were elephantine in their plodding. She trailed a sad bladder, filled with the heaviest, coldest sand.

  Mrs Jolley, when she returned, found her employer occupied with the jigsaw pieces of a bathroom floor.

  “This is where you are!” the housekeeper exclaimed, as if it had not been obvious.

  She was angry, but intended to be cold and firm. Miss Hare also was trusting to appearance to hide her true state, of despondency and fear. At least she had the advantage of being seated on the floor, beneath her protective wicker hat.

  “Why shouldn’t I be here?” she answered calmly. “Or there? Or anywhere?”

  “I have never seen this room before,” complained Mrs Jolley, inspecting her surroundings.

  Miss Hare produced a key: black, of elegant design.

  “There was no reason why you should have. This was my parents’ bathroom. I had almost forgotten about it myself. It was considered very lovely. Italian workmen came to make it.”

  “Gingerbread!” Mrs Jolley snorted. “Give me modern plumbing!”

  “Oh, plumbing!” said Miss Hare. “That is a different matter.” She had begun to feel tired. “Everyone will have plumbing soon. They will be flushed right out.”

  “What is that thing?” Mrs Jolley asked, and pointed with her toe at the part of the floor with which her employer had been occupied.

  “I would prefer not to say,” Miss Hare replied.

  Then Mrs Jolley laughed. Because she knew.

  “It is a goat,” she said, perverting the word softly in her mouth. “What a decoration for a person’s bathroom! A black goat! Looking at you!”

  “No,” said Miss Hare, with a firm movement of her jaw, “it would not appeal to you. Goats are perhaps the animals which see the truth most clearly.”

  Mrs Jolley could not control her irritation. In fact, where her toe struck the mosaic, there was a rush of loose tesserae across the uneven surface of the floor.

  “Oh, I know!” she cried. “You have to throw up at me, don’t you, on account of that old goat of yours. The one that got burnt. That you told me of. And nobody to blame.”

  Miss Hare was soothing the scattered tessarae with her freckled hand.

  “Have you ever seen an armadillo?” she asked.

  “No.” Mrs Jolley was very angry.

  “Perhaps you have, though, and don’t know it!” Miss Hare laughed.

  “What,” asked Mrs Jolley, “is an armerdiller?”

  “It is an animal which, I believe, is practically invulnerable. It can be killed, of course. Anything can be killed. Because I once saw an armadillo that somebody had made into a basket.”

  Then she looked up at her companion with such an expression that the latter attempted afterwards to describe it to Mrs Flack.

  “I know nothing about any such things,” the housekeeper said rather primly. “And don’t like saucy answers, particularly from those who I have obliged.”

  Miss Hare was filling her pockets with the fragments of mosaic.

  “Have you engaged a strong boy to carry your box?” she asked.

  “Then there is no need to tell you!” said Mrs Jolley.

  But was taken aback. And, as a lady of principle, had to defend herself.

  “Yes,” she said. “I have decided to terminate my service. You cannot expect me,” she said, “to risk my neck in a house that is falling down.”

  “You have seen it, then? The drawing-room?”

  “I’ll say I have!”

  “Perhaps even foresaw – to have made your arrangements in advance, on the very afternoon!”

  Miss Hare laughed. Momentarily she seemed to have recovered her balance. The pocketfuls of tesserae rattled jollily when slapped. She had never cared for sweets, but would often suck a smooth pebble.

  “I don’t propose to become involved in arguments,” Mrs Jolley announced. “I am giving notice. That is all. Though have never done so in a bathroom. That is,” she stumbled, “I mean to say, I have never been compelled to discuss matters of importance in any sort of a convenience.”

  Miss Hare began to scramble up.

  “You will go, I suppose, to Mrs Flack?”

  Mrs Jolley blushed.

  “For the time being,” she admitted.

  “For life, I expect,” Miss Hare murmured.

  Mrs Jolley hesitated.

  “It is very comfortable,” she said.

  But did falter slightly.

  “What makes you say,” she asked, “you speak as if,” she raised her voice, “as if I was not my own mis
tress?”

  Miss Hare, who had arranged her crumpled skirt, was looking, not at Mrs Jolley.

  “There is a point,” she said, “where we do not, cannot move any farther. There is a point at which there is no point. Who knows, perhaps you have reached it. And your friend is so kind. And her eiderdown, you say, is pale blue.”

  “But it may suit me to move,” Mrs Jolley insisted, stretching her neck.

  “You will see no more in others parts – I know because they took me as a girl – than you will from Mrs Flack’s. And through Mrs Flack’s eyes. The two of you will sit in Mrs Flack’s lounge, watching us behave. Even directing us.”

  “Have you met her?”

  “No. But I know her.”

  “You have seen her at the post office, perhaps?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” Miss Hare replied. “I have seen her in the undergrowth. But you do not go there, of course. Amongst the black sods of rotting leaves. And in the ruins of the little shed in which my poor goat got burnt up. And in my father’s eyes. All bad things have a family resemblance, Mrs Jolley, and are easily recognizable. I would recognize Mrs Flack however often she changed her hat. I can smell her when you do not mention her by name.”

  Mrs Jolley had begun by now to leave the bathroom. Although she had arranged for her belongings to be fetched, she had till the following day to put in. If only she could think of some temporary occupation of a known and mechanical kind. In her distraction, she was reiterating:

  “Mad! Mad!”

  To preserve her own sanity.

  “A sad, bad word.” Miss Hare sighed.

  They were walking down the passages in single file.

  “Because it leaves out half,” she added.

  They were always walking, with Mrs Jolley at the head, with a careful nonchalance, in case the runners should slip from under them.

  “All right, then,” Mrs Jolley gasped. “You can let me alone, though. We could trot out words till the Judgment, and not get anywhere at all. I am going to my room, thank you.”

  But Miss Hare could not tear herself away. She was not so good that she was not fascinated by bad. If they had come across a dead baby lying on that window-sill, she would not have asked herself the reason why, before she had examined the little crimped fingers and limp-violet attitude. She would probably have touched it to see whether it felt of rubber. Only afterwards she would have realized that she, too, had escaped strangling by a miracle.

  But now they were walking and walking through the passages of Xanadu, and Mrs Jolley’s behind was quaking visibly. It seemed as though her corset could do nothing more for her.

  “And so soft at times,” Miss Hare meditated.

  And pursued.

  “Soft what?” Mrs Jolley’s breath was sucked right in.

  She would not turn, though.

  “Eiderdowns,” Miss Hare clattered. “Evil, evil eiderdowns!”

  Rounding a corner Mrs Jolley realized she had overshot the flight of stairs which led higher to her room. And here were the passages of Xanadu, endless before her.

  Almost at the same moment a pampas wand struck her on the mouth, from a console table, as they passed, and immediately she was turned to stone.

  But running, running. Her cold, stone legs must never stop.

  “If you must keep on about evil,” she called back, her voice close to brass, or laughter, “I can remind you of some of the things that go on in this town, to say nothing of house. Or orchard!”

  She almost screeched, and her skirt too.

  While Miss Hare appeared to move on pads of kapok. Or else it was the dust from which the carpets were never free.

  “I am not surprised,” Miss Hare gasped at last. “That you found out. One did expect.”

  “And with a dirty Jew!”

  Miss Hare was red rage itself. She could not see for the sense of injustice which was rising green out of her. Towering in the perpendicular, it burst into a flower of sparks, like some obscene firework released from the dark of memory.

  “My what Jew?” The words were choking. “Dirty? What is true, then? My kind man! My good! Then I am offal, offal! Green, putrefying, out of old, starved sheep. Worse, worse! Though not so bad as some. Offal is cleaner than dishonest women. What is lowest of all? You could tell me! Some women! Lower, even. Some women’s shit!”

  So her memory spat, and the brown word plastered the accuser’s back.

  Mrs Jolley, of course, could only stop her ears with the wax of unbelief. When she had opened them again, her white lips pissed back:

  “Who did the Jews crucify?”

  “The Jew!” Miss Hare panted. “I know that. Because Peg used to tell me. It was horrible. And blood running out of his hands, and down his poor side. I have never allowed myself to think about it.”

  In the absence of what she might have kissed, she crammed her knuckles into her mouth. If all the windows had shattered, and the splinters entered her, she could have borne that.

  But just then, Mrs Jolley fell down. There was a little flight of two or three steps leading to a lower level, and from which a rod had worked loose. Mrs Jolley fell.

  Crump.

  Miss Hare was left standing on an edge. She looked down at her housekeeper, where the latter lay, a bundle of navy, on the carpet. The skirt had rucked up above the knees, the dimples of which looked white and very silly, for Mrs Jolley, apparently, wore her stockings neatly hoist at half-mast.

  Miss Hare could have gone on looking at the dimpled knees, but forced herself also to examine the face. The first, dreadful, inky blue began slowly to drain away. It left a blank, though trembly blotting-paper.

  Mrs Jolley was gasping now. The tears ran out of her eyes, although she was not crying.

  “Oh, dear!” she gasped. “I could have broken something. And perhaps have.”

  “No,” said Miss Hare. “You are too well protected. And came down all of a piece.”

  Mrs Jolley remembered, and her hate returned.

  “You will pay a pretty penny if I have!” she announced as hopefully as she was able.

  Miss Hare touched with the tip of her toe.

  “No,” she said. “Nothing broken.”

  But she was a little bit frightened.

  Mrs Jolley moved, and more, she began to heave. She was whimpering windily, but cautiously.

  “This is what happens to a mother forced by circumstances to live separated from her family. Oh, dear!”

  But although she had fallen smack, she got almost as quickly up. It was her knees that drove her, her blue-and-white, milky knees. She got up, and was wrapping her skirt closer round them, as if there had been a draught blowing.

  When she raised her face, it was rather a delicate pink, wasted on Miss Hare.

  The two women stood facing each other with nothing but their dead passions lying between, nothing to protect them but the sound of their breathing. They could not endure it for very long, but turned, and walked in opposite directions, touching a curtain, a pampas duster or leaf that had blown in. It was pretty obvious they had decided to pretend nothing had happened – at least, for the time being.

  But, in this matter at least, Miss Hare did not succeed in keeping up the deception. Her blood would float the evidence back in sudden, sickening waves. She heard words like stones battering on her memory.

  She did not see her housekeeper again, except from a distance. The wages she left on a corner of the kitchen table, under a 2 oz. weight, and presumably the amount was correct, for nobody ever complained.

  On the following afternoon the boy came for Mrs Jolley’s belongings. There was such a chatter of relief, such a clatter of self-importance, as the owner ran to arrange, lock, direct. The boy had bony wrists, and swollen veins in his muscular arms. He paused for a moment in the hall, to get his breath, and recover from the pressure of embarrassment. The lady had run back up the stairs, to fetch an umberella, she said. He had never set eyes on marble before, only in banks and old washstands. Nor
did he dream much, or he might have realized as he looked about him in the hall, that images and incidents do not depend on probability for life. He was trembling slightly, under the pearls of sweat, particularly after he had touched a square of satin which disintegrated in his hand.

  That made him breathe harder, out of his arched chest. And when, from another direction, there appeared, sudden like, the madwoman of Xanadu, and asked him to do her the favour, in strictest confidence, of delivering an urgent message to a friend.

  Miss Hare stood on her toes to make the mission more confidential still. Her throat was bursting with its urgency. Her lips fanned the words upward.

  The lad gathered she must see that Jew cove from Montebello Avenue, soon, soon, at soonest. He was not, on no account, to tell another soul. For the present, he would have been frightened to.

  Then Miss Hare handed her messenger a shilling, as she had seen her parents doing. And disappeared. For Mrs Jolley’s voice was clearly announcing, in light-coloured accents, the return of Mrs Jolley.

  It was many a day since Miss Hare had run so fast. She ran and climbed to get there in time, almost breaking her knees open, climbing by handfuls of carpet when her toes missed a stair, climbing, and straining, and arriving at last in the little glass dome which had been her father’s especial eerie. Then, venturing out upon a parapet, she peered through a stone balustrade.