Riders In the Chariot

by Patrick White

  “And where do these ladies live?”

  “Oh, in some street. That is unimportant. I think you mentioned, Mr …” (She was no longer ashamed of her inability to manage a name.) “… that we were links in some chain. I am convinced myself that there are two chains. Matched against each other. If Mrs Jolley and Mrs Flack were the only two links in theirs, then, of course, we should have nothing to fear. But.”

  She was leading him slowly through the house, which the crimson and gold of evening had dyed with a Renaissance splendour. The marble of a torso and crystal of a chandelier shivered for their own beauty.

  “Is this the way?” he asked.

  “I am taking you out through the back,” she said. “It is shorter.”

  On the kitchen table a knife lay, it, too, a sliver of light.

  “I would kill for you, you know,” Miss Hare suddenly said. “If it would preserve for us what is right.”

  “Then it would no longer be right.”

  Himmelfarb smiled. He took the knife which she had picked up from the table, and dropped it back into its pool of light.

  “Its purpose is to cut bread,” he said. “An unemotional, though noble one.”

  So that she was quenched, and went munching silence on the last stage to the back door.

  On the step she stood giving him final directions.

  The rather dead, soapy face of the man who had come towards her up the hill, had been touched into life, by last light, or the mysteries of human intercourse.

  “You always have to leave me about this time,” she meditated, as she stood looking down on him from her step. “There is something secret that you do,” she complained, “in your own house. But I am not jealous.”

  “There is nothing secret,” he replied. “It is the time of evening when I go to say my prayers.”

  “Oh, prayers!” she mumbled.

  Then:

  “I have never said any. Except when I was not my own mistress. When I was very young.”

  “But you have expressed them in other ways.”

  She shook that off rather irritably, and might have been preparing something rude, if another thought had not risen to trouble the surface.

  “Oh, dear, what will save us?” she wondered.

  Before he could answer, she exclaimed:

  “Look!”

  And was shading her eyes from the dazzle of gold.

  “It was at this time of evening,” her mouth gasped, and worked at words, “that I would sometimes feel afraid of the consequences. I would fall down in a fit while the wheels were still approaching. It was too much for anyone so weak. And lie sometimes for hours. I think I could not bear to look at it.”

  “There is no reason why you should not look now,” Himmelfarb made an effort. “It is an unusually fine sunset.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  And laughed somewhat privately.

  “And the grey furrows,” she observed, “where the wheels have sunk in. And the little soft feathers of the wheels.”

  Himmelfarb took his leave of the mistress of Xanadu. He was not in a position to dismiss her as a madwoman, as other people did, because of his involvement in the same madness. For now that the tops of the trees had caught fire, the bells of the ambulances were again ringing for him, those of the fire-engines clanging, and he shuddered to realize there could never be an end to the rescue of men from the rubble of their own ideas. So the bodies would continue to be carried out, and hidden under a blanket, while those who were persuaded they were still alive would insist on returning to the wreckage, to search for teeth, watches and other recognized necessities. Most deceived, however, were the souls, who protested in grey voices that they had already been directed to enter the forms of plants, stones, animals, and in some cases, even human beings. So the souls were crying, and combing their smoked-out hair. They were already exhausted by the bells, prayers, orders and curses of the many fires at which, in the course of their tormented lives, it had been their misfortune to assist.

  Only the Chariot itself rode straight and silent, both now, and on the clouds of recollection.

  Himmelfarb plodded up the road which led from Xanadu to Sarsaparilla, comforted by physical weariness and the collaboration of his friend. He yawned once or twice. The white faces of nondescript flowers twitched and glimmered at the touch of darkness. Stones brooded. He, the most stubborn of all souls, might well be told off next to invest a stone. As he went up the hill, the sparks shot out from beneath his boots, from the surface of the road, so far distant that, with all the lovingkindness in the world, his back could not have bent for him to lift them up, so elusive that Hezekiah, David and Akiba had failed to redeem the lost sparks.

  The Jew wandered, and stumbled over stones, and came at last to his frail house, and touched the Sh’ma upon the doorpost as he went in.

  XI

  Every work morning Himmelfarb took the bus to Barranugli, where he seated himself at his drill in Rosetree’s factory, and made his contribution to Brighta Bicycle Lamps. Under the windows the smooth green river ran, but not so that you could see it, for the windows were placed rather high, and there were days when the Jew, who had been moved in the beginning by the flow of green water, scarcely noticed it even when he knocked off. As he walked alongside it towards the bus-stop, it had become a green squiggle, or symbol of a river.

  Once the foreman, Ernie Theobalds, who had just received a flattering bonus, was moved to address the Jew. He asked:

  “Howya doin’, Mick?”

  “Good,” replied the Jew, in the language he had learnt to use.

  The foreman, who had already begun to regret things, drove himself still further. He was not unkind.

  “Never got yerself a mate?” Ernie Theobalds remarked.

  The Jew laughed.

  “Anybody is my mate,” he said.

  He felt strangely, agreeably relaxed, as though it could have been true.

  But it made the foreman suspicious and resentful.

  “Yeah, that’s all right,” he strained, and sweated. “I don’t say we ain’t got a pretty dinkum set-up. But a man stands a better chance of a fair go if he’s got a mate. That’s all I’m sayin’. See?”

  Himmelfarb laughed again – the morning had made him rash – and replied:

  “I shall take Providence as my mate.”

  Mr Theobalds was horrified. He hated any sort of educated talk. The little beads of moisture were tingling on the tufts of his armpits.

  “Okay,” he said. “Skip it!”

  And went away as if he had been treading on eggs.

  Immediately Himmelfarb would have run after the foreman, and at least touched him on the shoulder, and looked into his face, for he could not have explained how he had been overcome by a fit of happy foolishness. But already the important figure, bending at the knees as well as at the elbows, was too far distant.

  It was true, too, as Ernie Theobalds was conscious, the Jew had not found himself any friend of his own sex, although since his arrival in the country he had made overtures to many men, and for that purpose would take the train, and often walk the streets of the city at night. There were those who had asked him for advice, or money, and according to his ability he had given both. Some had accepted it undemonstratively, as their due, others seemed to regard him as God-sent, with the result that he was forced to retreat, to save them from their presumption, and himself from shame. Others still, suspected him of being some kind of nark or perv, and cursed him as he lifted them out of their own vomit. Once or twice, outside the synagogues, on the Sabbath, he had spoken to those of his own kind. They were the most suspicious of all. They became so terribly affable. And collected their wives, who were standing stroking their mink as they waited, and got into their cars, and drove towards the brick warrens where they hoped to burrow into safety.

  So Himmelfarb remained without a friend.

  Or mate, he repeated gingerly.

  And at once remembered the blackfellow with
whom he had not yet spoken.

  For that abo was still around at Rosetree’s. A lazy enough bugger, everybody agreed. But somehow or other, it seemed to suit the abo to stick. Sometimes gone on a drunk, he would return, sometimes with a purple eye, or green bruise on yellow. A brute that no decent man would touch, only with a broom.

  Yet, with this fellow flotsam, the Jew had formed, he now realized, an extraordinary non-relationship. If that could describe anything so solid, while unratified, so silent, while so eloquent. How he would sense the abo’s approach. How he went to mèet his silence. How they would lay balm on wounds every time they passed each other.

  It was ridiculous. They were both ashamed. And turned their backs. And resumed their waiting. Sometimes the abo would whistle derisively some pop tune he had learnt from the radio. He would blow out his lips to extend an already considerable vulgarity of theme. To destroy, it was suggested. But knew that his friend, old Big Nose, would never be deceived.

  They might have left it at that. After all, each in his time had experienced the knife.

  Then one day during smoke-o Himmelfarb had gone into the washroom, of which the scribbled woodwork, sweating concrete and stained porcelain had grown quite acceptable. There he sat. There he leaned his head. And the introspective accents of a mumbling cistern and a drizzling tap ministered to his throbbing head.

  He often sat out smoke-o in the wash-room which would remain deserted until work began. He would sit perfectly still, but, on this particular occasion his hand had touched the book someone had left open on the bench. It was only natural for Himmelfarb to read whatever print he set his eyes on. Now he began at once, with surprise flooding over him:

  “And I looked and behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire.

  “Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance: they had the likeness of a man.

  “And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings …”

  But it was no longer his own voice which the Jew heard above the soft babble of the cistern and the sharper drizzle of the tap. It was the voice of voices – thick, and too throaty, and desolating in its sense of continuity. It could have been the voice of the Cantor Katzmann. Yet the voice no longer attempted to clothe the creatures themselves in allegorical splendour, of Babylonian gold. They were dressed in the flesh of men: the pug of human gargoyles, the rather soapy skin, the pores of which had been enlarged by sweat, the mouth thinned by trial and error, the dead hair of the living human creatures blowing in the wind of circumstance.

  The Jew read, or heard:

  “… two wings of every one were joined one to another, and two covered their bodies …”

  In spite of which he knew from observing. He could read by heart the veins of the hidden bodies.

  Now the lips of the past blew the words a little faster, as if the mouth had adapted itself to the acceleration of time. Time, in fact, was almost up. Belts were tightening. Down in the workshop there was a thwack of leather, metal easing greasily.

  But the reader could not interrupt his reading:

  “… and when the living creatures went, the wheels went by them: and when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up …”

  When the machinery in the workshop started up, the whole wash-room revolted, but soon drowned, and floated gently enough. Against the noise from the machines, the voices of the tap and cistern were no longer audible.

  But the voice of the Jew continued reading, now utterly his own, and loud, above the natter of the rejuvenated machines:

  “… And the likeness of the firmament upon the heads of the living creatures was as the colour of the terrible crystal, stretched forth over their heads above. …”

  When the abo came in. Looking for something he had left.

  Immediately on seeing how he was caught, he remained poised, rocking on the balls of his normally flat and squelchy feet. He could not decide what to do.

  The Jew was shining.

  “It is Ezekiel!” he said, forgetful of that convention by which he and the black fellow refrained from exchanging words. “Somebody is reading Ezekiel I found here. Open on the bench.”

  The spit jumped out of his mouth with joy.

  The blackfellow stood there, playing with a ball of cotton waste, backwards and forwards, from hand to hand. He was sulking now, though.

  “It is your book?” asked the Jew.

  Then the blackfellow did something extraordinary. He spoke.

  “Yes,” he admitted. “It’s my book.”

  “Then you read the Bible. What about the other prophets? Daniel, Ezra, Hosea?” the same unmanageable enthusiasm drove the Jew to ask.

  But it did no appear as though the blackfellow would allow himself to be trapped again. His lips were very thick and surly.

  He said:

  “We better go down now.”

  And jerked his head in the direction of the workshop.

  “Yes,” agreed the Jew.

  The abo quickly took the book, and hid it amongst what was apparently a bundle of his private belongings.

  Himmelfarb remained spellbound. He was smiling that slow, inward smile, which could exasperate those whom it excluded.

  “Interesting,” he had to remark. “But I shall not ask any questions, as I see you do not wish me to.”

  “Where’ll it lead?” The abo shrugged. “I was reared by a parson bloke. That’s all. Sometimes I have a read of the Bible, but not for any of his reasons. I read it because you can see it all. And it passes the time.”

  All of which the abo spoke in a curiously unexpected voice, conjured up from a considerable depth.

  After that the two men returned to their work, for the machines were deriding them as they belted hell out of Rosetree’s shed.

  Now the Jew began to wonder, as he sat at his drill, and stamped the sheet, and stamped the sheet, whether their relationship would be in any way altered by what had happened. But it did not appear to be. It was as though it had set too long in the form it had originally taken. A certain enduring warmth, established in the beginning, had been perhaps intensified. The Jew was conscious of it if ever the blackfellow passed. Something almost tactile took place between them, but scarcely ever again was there any exchange of words. Sometimes the younger man would almost grunt, sometimes the older one would almost nod. Or they would look for each other, even catch each other at it. And once the blackfellow smiled, not for his acquaintance of elaborate standing, but for anyone who cared to receive it. If the Jew did, that was incidental. It was, the latter saw, a demonstration of perfect detachment.

  Yet Himmelfarb was heartened by his study of this other living creature, to whom he had become joined, extraordinarily, by silence, and perhaps also, by dedication. On one other occasion, finding they had arrived simultaneously at the outer gate, and there was no avoiding it, they must go out together, he could not resist addressing the black.

  “The day we spoke,” the Jew ventured, “either I did not think, or have the time, to ask your name.”

  The abo could have been preparing to sulk. But changed his mind quickly, it appeared, on sensing there was no trap.

  “Dubbo,” he answered briskly. “Alf Dubbo.”

  And as briskly went off. He was gay on that day. He picked up a stone, and made it skip, along the surface of the green river. He stood for a moment squinting at the sun, the light from which splintered on his broad teeth. He could have been smiling, but that was more probably the light, concentrated on the planes of his excellent teeth.

  Alf Dubbo was reared in a small town on the banks of a river which never wholly dried up, and which, in wet seasons, would overflow its steep banks and flood the houses in the lower town. The river played an important part in the boy’s early life, and even after he left his bir
thplace, his thoughts would frequently return to the dark banks of the brown river, with its curtain of shiny foliage, and the polished stones which he would pick over, always looking for pleasing shapes. Just about dusk the river would become most fascinating for the small boy, and he would hang about at a certain bend where the townspeople had planted a park. The orange knuckles of the big bamboos became accentuated at dusk, and the shiny foliage of the native trees seemed to sweat a deeper green. The boy’s dark river would cut right across the evening. Black gins would begin to congregate along the bank, some in clothes which the white women had cast off, others in flash dresses from the stores, which splashed their flowers upon the dark earth, as the gins lay giggling and anticipating. Who would pick them? There were usually white youths hanging around, and older drunks, all with money on them, and a bottle or two. Once he had seen a gin leave her dress in the arms of her lover, and plunge down towards the river, till the black streak that she made was swallowed up in the deepening night. But that was unusual. And in spite of the fact that it was also exciting, he had gone away.

  Mrs Pask had been standing at the kitchen door.

  “Alf, where ever were you?” she asked.

  And her cocky echoed from beneath the shawl:

  “Alfwheraryou? AlfwheraryouAlf? Alf.”

  Not yet sleeping.

  “By the river,” the boy answered.

  “That is no place,” she said, “to loiter about at this time of night. Mr Calderon has been looking for you. He is going to let you conjugate a Latin verb. But first there are several little jobs. Remember, it is the useful boys who are sought after in later life.”

  So Alf took the tea-towel. He hung around dozing while she splashed and talked, and hoped the Latin verb would be forgotten.

  Actually, Alf Dubbo was not born in that town. He was born not so many miles away, at another bend in the ever-recurring river, on a reserve, to an old gin named Maggie, by which of the whites she had never been able to decide. There he would have remained probably, until work or cunning rescued him. That he was removed earlier, while he was still, in fact, a leggy, awkward little boy, was thanks to the Reverend Timothy Calderon, at that time Anglican rector of Numburra.