Riders In the Chariot

by Patrick White

  For, soon after his arrival, Mrs Spice had introduced him to the rest of his duties.

  She had uncorked the bottle one night, and said:

  “I am running short, Alf” – she always was – “but will give you a drop to pick you up, and show I am a good sport. You are a big boy now, you know. You are thin. But that don’t matter.”

  He did not know that he wanted the drink, but took it because it might lead him on to fresh discovery. He made her laugh. Himself, too, eventually. It was like the time, he remembered, when Mrs Pask had tinkered with the switch. It was as if he had drunk down a real electric shock; it just about shot him back against the wall.

  He stayed shaky for a little. He felt his skin had gone blue. But Mrs Spice did not seem to notice. She would have mentioned it if, all of a sudden, she had seen him turn blue, because she mentioned almost everything.

  “That will grow the hair on yers!” She laughed, that was all, rousing herself so that her tits jumped, and the hurricane lamp.

  Then she got serious, and, after pouring them another, reaching over with her leathery, but quite smooth and nice arm, would have liked to talk about things.

  “Sometimes I wonder what you think about, Alf,” she said. “What is inside of you? Everyone has somethink in them, I suppose.”

  Then she blinked, because she had made a serious contribution, like as if she was in the habit of reading books.

  Alf could not tell her. Because he could not have simply said: Everything is inside of me, waiting for me to understand it. Mrs Spice would not have understood. Any more than he did, altogether, except in flickers. So he had another drink out of the mug. One day he would paint the Fiery Furnace, with the figures walking in it. He could see them quite distinct now.

  All the time Mrs Spice was trying to impress. He saw at first faintly, then with cruel bursts of understanding. Her words and gestures were those of some other woman, who already existed in her imagination, and who would at last, with the co-operation of her audience and the bottle, perhaps even exist in fact.

  “You gotta realize I was not always like this,” she was saying, holding together her straight and loose hair, with both hands, at the nape of her neck.

  Although she succeeded surprisingly in her aim – there she was, a young woman in a cleaner cotton dress, smoother, smelling of laundry above the strong armpits – he knew the act to be dishonest. Had he not on one occasion promised Mrs Pask to paint the picture of Jesus Christ because he wanted something awful bad? And had known himself to be incapable.

  At least Mrs Spice was capable of fulfilling promises.

  “Nobody never accused me of sittin’ on it,” she said. “Mean is what I am not.”

  “You don’t wanta be afraid,” she added, when she had crawled over to his side of the shack.

  He was not afraid, only surprised at the powers which had been given him.

  “And remember,” she shouted, “I am not some bloody black gin! I am NOT. …”

  She shut up then, as they became possessed of the same daemon.

  During the night she was alternately limp and quarrelsome, until he at last shrank back into the body of a thin and sulky boy.

  “Go on!” he called out finally. “Get to hell!”

  He might have rolled himself into a ball, in self-protection, but he was pretty sure she would have picked it open.

  So he began to hit the old bag.

  “I’ll fetch the johns in the mornin’!” she shrieked. “Layin’ into a white woman!”

  When she fell asleep. He could hear the breath whistling out of her slack mouth.

  Towards dawn, Alf Dubbo crawled out of Mrs Spice’s hut. He was wearing his skin, which was all she had left him, but it felt good. It was the pearly hour. Damp blankets fell in folds upon his bare shoulders. He wandered a little way along the bank of the almost dry river. Dim trees disputed with him for possession of the silence, as twig or drop fell, and his hard feet scuffed up the dead leaves. The formlessness of the scene united with the aimless ness of his movements in achieving a kind of negative perfection.

  But he could not leave well alone. He had to start mucking around with the smooth bark of one tree and then another, with a nail he had picked up in leaving the camp. The faint line of his longing began to flow out of him and over the white bark of the trees. He drew langorously sometimes, sometimes almost inflicting wounds. And would move on to express some fresh idea. And never finished, and would never, so hopeless and interminable were the circumstances in which, continually, he found himself fixed.

  After a bit he began to go back in the direction of the camp. There was nothing else he could do for the moment. Colour was returning to the sky. Out in the open the light was sharpening its edge on tins.

  Mrs Spice appeared, giggly and abusive, after rising ladylike and late.

  “You’re a fair trimmer!” she repeated several times, and tittered. “But don’t think you’re goin’ to rule the roost,” she hastened to add, “just because I was good to yers once. Generosity has its limits.”

  After which she drew in her chin.

  But she could not keep it there for long.

  She had acquired a numerous clientele, through her dealings in bottles, as well as by bush telegraph. It was not uncommon for shearers in town on a spree to look up Hazel, or for a drover on the road to hitch his sulky to her tree. Gentlemen would drive out from town, or even walk late at night, arriving with a clink of bottles and a salvo of ribaldry. It must be said she seldom disappointed. Or if she did, it was usually some timid soul who had suddenly thought better of it. And for such there were always the alternatives of conversation and song. Mrs Spice herself was musical, and when squeezed in a certain way, would let out a thin soprano in imitation of an oriental bagpipe. There were nights when the moon reverberated with entertainments at the rubbish dump.

  Alf Dubbo preferred to keep out of all that, suspecting how he would be treated – like an idiot, or a black – but sometimes could not avoid being caught, early and innocently asleep, in Mrs Spice’s shack.

  On one such occasion a shearer from Cowra, particularly leery, and beery, and proud of his easy conquest of a lady, noticed something in the corner, and remarked:

  “What-o, Hazel! Takin’ a swig at the blackjack on the side?”

  But Mrs Spice, when stood up, could demonstrate that coarseness was never the master of delicacy.

  “That,” she replied, “I would have you know, Mr Er, is a young boy apprenticed to the bottle trade.”

  In between casual custom and the normal business round, she forgot she had warned the abo not to expect anything further of a lady’s generosity, and would become fretfully solicitous. Sometimes he laughed in her face, sometimes he beat her with a little switch, but at others they rode together on the tiger, until that slashed and fiery beast turned into an empty skin.

  At last, apathy and some foreboding descended on Alf Dubbo. He would look at himself, puzzled and frightened. He was feeling off, the distance through the doorway glittering with tins and emptiness.

  “’Ere,” she asked, “what’s got inter youse?”

  “I feel crook,” he said, and turned.

  Then she would swear, and shake the bags on which she slept.

  She grew more cantankerous.

  “You are not worth your damper,” she said once. “Layin’ around!”

  And spat.

  A couple of days later she came up to him in the sun. He could see that her thoughts were already spilling out of her. She said:

  “You are crook! And waddaya done ter me? Eh? A fine present ter give!”

  He realized how they hated each other.

  “You old rubbish dump!” he cried. “Who’s to know who dropped it on yer? What with drovers, and shearers, and everybody!”

  She was cursing, and shaking.

  “Those are the last words you say in my place!” she shouted.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay, Mrs Spice.”

  He
took his shoes, and went, although it was already four o’clock in the afternoon. He slept under a tree that night, and woke early, to re-examine the mark of his sickness the first moment possible. Then he sat, during the brief space when the sun deceives with gold. And continued sitting as the world stretched before him in its actual colours, of grey-brown.

  Alf Dubbo now went bush, figuratively at least, and as far as other human beings were concerned. Never communicative, he retired into the scrub of half-thoughts, amongst the cruel rocks of obsession. Later he learned to prefer the city, that most savage and impenetrable terrain, for the opportunities it gave him of confusing anyone who might attempt to track him down in his personal hinterland. But for the time being, he hung around country towns, and stations, working for a wage, or earning his keep, sometimes even living on a charitable person for a week or two. He never cared to stay anywhere long. There was always the possibility that he might be collected for some crime he began to suspect he had committed or confined to a reserve, or shut up at a mission, to satisfy the social conscience, or to ensure the salvation of souls that were in the running for it.

  He avoided his own people, whatever the degree of colour, because of a certain delicacy with cutlery, acquired from the parson’s sister, together with a general niceness or squeamishness of behaviour, which he could sink recklessly enough when forced, as he had throughout the reign of Mrs Spice, but which haunted him in its absence like some indefinable misery.

  There was also, of course, his secret gift. Like his disease, he would no more have confessed that to a black than he would have to a white. They were the two poles, the negative and positive of his being: the furtive, destroying sickness, and the almost as furtive, but regenerating, creative act.

  As soon as he had saved a few pounds, Dubbo had gone about buying paints through the medium of a store catalogue. They were crude, primary things to amuse children. But they made him tremble. And were quickly used. Then he took to breaking into the tins of paint he discovered in station store-rooms, and would slap at any obscure wall until he had exhausted his desire. He would spend Sundays in the shade of an iron water-tank, drawing and tearing off, and drawing, until he had a whole heap of hieroglyphs which perhaps only he could interpret. Not that it would have occurred to him to attempt communication with another. But his forms were crystallizing. While his organism was subjected to the logic of disease, an increased recklessness of mind helped him take short cuts to solving some of the problems. Many others remained, though as he wandered deeper into himself, or watched the extraordinary behaviour of human beings on the periphery of his own existence, he was often hopeful of arriving eventually at understanding.

  Everything he did, any fruit of his own meaningful relationship with life, he would lock up in a tin box, which grew dented and scratched as it travelled with him from job to job, or lay black and secret underneath his bed, while he played the part of factory hand or station rouseabout.

  Nobody would have thought of opening that box. Most people respected the moroseness of its owner, and a few were even scared of Dubbo.

  He grew up tall, thin and rather knobbly. He had already matured by the time he developed the courage and curiosity to make for Sydney. Arriving there, he left the tin box in a railways parcels office, and slept in parks at first, until he discovered a house sufficiently dilapidated, a landlady sufficiently low, and hopeful, and predatory, to accept an abo. He settled at last, although two of his fellow lodgers, a couple of prostitutes, objected eloquently to such an arrangement. But only in the beginning. It soon became obvious that the abo was going to disappoint, by his decency, his silence, by his almost non-existence. The landlady, who had been deserted the year previous by a lover, gave up knocking at his door, and shuffled off into the wastes of linoleum, to nurse her grievance and a climacteric.

  During those years it was easy to stay in work. However distasteful, Dubbo managed to adapt himself to that monotonous practice for longer stretches by sealing his mind off, and by regarding those dead hours as a period of mental fallow for the cropping of his art. But he longed to close the door of his room, which he had made neat enough to please a parson’s sister, and to take from his double-locked box the superior oils he could now afford to buy.

  There were also the grey days, and the streaming, patent-leather evenings, which turned his skin a dubious yellow, his mind to a shambles of self-examination and longing. Often he would take refuge by slipping into the Public Library, to look at books. But reading did not come easily; an abstraction of ideas expressed less than the abstraction of forms and the synthesis of colours. There were the art books, of course. Through which he looked with a mixture of disbelief and criticism. On the whole he had little desire to learn from the achievement of other artists, just as he had no wish to profit by, or collaborate in the experience of other men. As if his still incomplete vision would complete itself in time, through revelation. But once he came across the painting by a Frenchman of the Apollonian chariot on its trajectory across the sky. And he sat forward, easing his brown raincoat, his yellow fingers steadying themselves on the slippery page. He realized how differently he saw this painting since his first acquaintance with it, and how he would now transcribe the Frenchman’s limited composition into his own terms of motion, and forms partly transcendental, partly evolved from his struggle with daily becoming, and experience of suffering.

  In the great library, the radiators would be pouring out the consoling soup of warmth. All the readers had found what they had been looking for, the black man noticed with envy. But he was not altogether surprised; words had always been the natural weapons of whites. Only he was defenceless. Only he would be looking around. After reading, and yawning, and skipping, and running his thumb down a handful of pages to hear them rise like a flock of birds, he would arrange the books in an all too solid pile, and stare. On days when he was master of himself, his sense of wonder rewarded him. But in a winter light, if he had not been nourished by his secrets, if he had not enjoyed the actual, physical pleasures of paint, he might have lain down and died, there amongst the varnish and the gratings, instead of resting his head sideways on the table, and falling asleep on the pillow of his hands. Then the sweat would glitter on the one exposed cheekbone, and amongst the stubble at the nape of his neck.

  On one such occasion he sat up rather suddenly, yawned, tested a sore throat by swallowing carefully once or twice, and picked up a volume which someone else had abandoned along the table. He was reading again, he found, the sad story of Our Lord Jesus Christ. He could remember many of the incidents, and how he had hoped to love and reverence the individuals involved, at least enough to please his guardians. He read, but the expression of the eyes still eluded him. All was pale, pale, washed in love and charity, but pale. He opened the Gospel of the Beloved Disciple. Then his throat did hurt fearfully. It burned. The bubbles of saliva were choking him.

  He got up, and went away, his badly-fitting raincoat, of an ugly and conflicting brown, floating and trailing. He walked a considerable distance that night, with long, sliding steps, and lay down under a sandstone ledge, under some wet lantana bushes, with a woman who told him how she had been done out of a quarter-share in a winning lottery ticket.

  The couple proceeded to make love, or rather, they vented on each other their misery and rage. The woman had with her a bag of prawns, of which she was smelling, as well as of something slow and sweet, probably gin. She attempted repeatedly to fasten on him her ambitious sea-anemone of a mouth, and he was as determined to avoid being swallowed down. Consequently, he could have killed that poor, drunken whore. She was a little bit surprised at some of it. As he held her by the thighs, he could have been furiously ramming a wheelbarrow against the darkness. But her misfortunes were alleviated, for the time being, and until she discovered they had been increased. Even after her lover had left her, in the same rage which she had chosen to interpret as passion, she continued to call to him, in between doing up her dress and searchin
g for her prawns.

  As for Dubbo, he slithered down the slope through the smell of cat which lantana will give out when disturbed after rain. Since his guardians had taught him to entertain a conscience, he would often suffer from guilt with some part of him, particularly on those occasions when his diseased body took control, in spite of the reproaches of his pastor-mind. Now he might have felt better if he had been able to roll his clothes into a ball, and shove them under a bush. But it was no longer possible, of course, to abandon things so easily. And he had to walk on, tormented by the intolerable clothes, and the lingering sensation of the whore’s trustful thighs.

  In the white hours, he came to the house where he lived, and let himself shivering and groping into the room which was his only certain refuge. When he had switched the light on, the validity of certain forms which he had begun to work out on a sheet of plywood, made his return a more overwhelming relief, even though his deviation had to appear more terrible. Shambling and fluctuating in the glass, he lay down at last on the bed, and, where other men might have prayed for grace, he proceeded to stare at what could be his only proof of an Absolute, at the same time, in its soaring blues and commentary of blacks, his act of faith.

  Dubbo was sufficiently sustained both physically and mentally by his vocation, to ignore for the most part what people called life. Only the unhappiness of almost complete isolation from other human beings would flicker up in him at times, and he would hurry away from his job – at that period he was working in a Sydney suburb, in a factory which manufactured cardboard boxes and cartons in oiled paper – he would hurry, hurry, for what, but to roam the streets, and settle down eventually on a straight-backed bench in one of the parks.

  There he would indulge in what was commonly called putting in time, though it was, in fact, nothing else but hoping.