Riders In the Chariot

by Patrick White

  With promotion approaching, he would not have been so injudicious to have called it anything else.

  “It was fate, you might say, that caused the mechanical defect in the fire-engine, which did not arrive – or, by crikey, there it is!”

  Indeed, it could be heard clanging, its tyres groaning roundly on the stones of Montebello Avenue.

  “Which did not arrive in time, you might say, to prevent the gutting of this Jewish gentleman’s residence.”

  Miss Hare was marooned in her own emotions and the constable’s sea of words.

  “It was fate, too, which removed this same gentleman from his home before the conflagration had broken out.”

  “Removed?” Miss Hare moaned.

  The constable reaped the harvest of his power and knowledge. He laughed, or showed his excellent teeth – real, as everybody knew.

  “That is what I said,” said the constable. “By Mrs Godbold, and Bob Tanner, the young feller who is going with her eldest girl.”

  “Then where is Mr Himmelfarb?” Miss Hare demanded.

  “In the temporary dwelling in which Mrs Godbold lives,” the constable informed.

  “Oh,” Miss Hare said. “Yes,” she said. “I might have known. Mrs Godbold would never allow anything to happen. I mean, anything that might be averted.”

  The constable had to laugh again.

  “Mrs Godbold is only a woman,” he said.

  Constable McFaggott would wrinkle up his face to laugh, because he knew how crisp the skin would appear at the corners of his eyes. Now he could not laugh too much.

  “One day, Miss Hare,” he said and laughed, never so silkily, “we’ll have to get your opinion of we men.”

  But the phone was again calling him from distant places.

  “Oh, the men,” she protested. “I do not know.” Sputtering and muttering. “Not the men. A cock is for treading hens.”

  When she got outside, the sparks were settling down again into stars. The moist, blackberry darkness nuzzled against her drawn skin. She could no longer run, only stump, and flounder, past what she knew to be there. The framework of her friend’s house was hissing by now beneath the play of water, but she did not really care whether the fire was extinguished or not.

  On arrival at Mrs Godbold’s shed, she forgot to knock, but went in, quite as though she were expected, which, indeed, she was.

  “Ah, there you are,” the owner said.

  Mrs Godbold stood smiling in the depths of her one room, her solid form fluctuating inside its glistening apron of light. Children were distributed on all sides, watching, or taking for granted. More than this Miss Hare did not attempt to notice. Without wasting any time, she surged forward on the last gust of her physical strength. But her instincts, it seemed, had only to open their reserves of power, as she knelt to lay her scorched face, against the cotton quilt, at the foot of the huge, iron bed.

  Himmelfarb had returned to his house round about noon. By then his physical distress was considerably increased, not so much from the bruises, cuts, and possibly one or two broken ribs inflicted on him at the factory, but a deeper, numbing pain, above which his mind would burn and flicker with the obsessive blue clarity of an acetylene flame.

  In the circumstances, the emptiness and silence of his wooden house offered him perfect consolation. How the carvings on the walnut surfaces would have oppressed, the plush fingers desolated, even at their most tenderly solicitous. Instead he lay down on the narrow bed in his bare room. His face was sculptured most economically in dead, but convincing, yellow wax, from which he issued, between spasms, to contend with the figure of Moshe his father, who flickered longingly within the acetylene nebula. Always separate during the illusory life of men, now they touched, it seemed, at the point of failure.

  How long Mordecai lay there, loved and tormented by his father, he could not have calculated, but when he opened his eyes, things were still preserved in their apparent shapes, and he was relieved to explore from a distance that of his single chair, down to the last crack and familiar abrasion.

  At the same time he realized he was not alone. That somebody was touching his forehead and his wrists. That a presence of unwavering strength had begun to envelop his momentarily distracted being.

  It was, he saw, his neighbour, Mrs Godbold.

  “I have no intention of disturbing you,” she said, speaking in tones both practical and absent, “but wonder what to do for the best.”

  In her state of doubt, she only half-addressed him, standing by the bed with her face averted, her attention concentrated on a distant, and still confused idea. Her statue had been set down, it appeared, on the edge of a great, open space, whether lake or plain he did not bother to investigate, only it was vast, he knew, from the expression of the face, and the unobstructed waves of afternoon.

  “Yes,” she decided at last, though still hesitant. “I shall fetch you down to my place, sir, if you do not mind, as it is close, and where I can give you every attention.”

  Watching the heavy knot of hair in the nape of the thick, but appropriate neck, he did not protest.

  “I will go now,” she said quietly, still addressing someone else; “I will go, but come soon with the others.”

  He did not answer, but waited for that and anything more to be done.

  He could see now the rightness and inevitability of all that his wife Reha had been allowed in her simplicity to understand, and which she had attempted to convey, not so much by words, for which she had no gift, but by the light of her conviction. It seemed to him as though the mystery of failure might be pierced only by those of extreme simplicity of soul, or else by one who was about to doff the outgrown garment of the body. He was weak enough, certainly, by now, to make the attempt which demands the ultimate in strength.

  In the meantime, as he prepared, or rid himself of minor objections, he had agreed unreservedly that Reha should become his voice and hands. They had seldom enjoyed such intimacy of spirit as when, in the course of the afternoon, a wind got up from the sea, and hollowed the shell of the house until its walls were thinner still. Willows whipped deliriously, and the rushing of air could have engulfed, if it had not been for his spasms of pain, and the rows of beansticks dividing the immense colourlessness at regular intervals.

  At one such point she put her hand on his shoulder, and he opened his eyes, and saw that Mrs Godbold had returned.

  The woman who was bending over him straightened at once, for modesty’s sake, it seemed.

  She said:

  “We are here, sir, as I promised. Else, you know, and this is Bob Tanner, a friend.”

  Else was blushing, and looking into corners, not for what she might discover, but so that she might not be forced to see. She was reddening most prettily, with a blush of hedge-roses along her milky skin. Bob Tanner, in whom Himmelfarb recognized the lad sent on a former occasion to summon him to Xanadu, was all boots and muscles. He was ashamed of the noises that he made by moving on the bare floors, or, simply, in the act of breathing.

  “Now,” explained Mrs Godbold, “we are going to move you on to this contraption.”

  They had made a kind of stretcher out of two saplings and several chaff-bags, on to which they began, awkwardly, to ease the Jew. Bob Tanner, who could carry full sacks on his back, would have undertaken it alone after his fashion, but the women had to have their part.

  Mrs Godbold bit her lips till the blood almost ran.

  Else could have cried for her lover’s clumsy strength.

  “Silly thing! Stupid thing!” Else would hiss, and hook an elbow into Bob Tanner’s ribs.

  She could not be too critical. She could not be too close. She loved the veins that were bursting in his strong, but clumsy arms.

  So they moved the man out of the house in which he had never expected to live for more than a short interval.

  They brought Himmelfarb down on the stretcher to Mrs Godbold’s place. His head lolled. There was a rushing of willows, and a whispering of
grass. As he passed, the spearheads of the dead grass pricked his wrists, but without malice now. Whatever the length of the journey, it was consecrated for the sick man by the love and participation of his people. So, whole deserts were crossed. He opened his eyes, and already they had left the most grievous of them far behind. From the fringes of Kadesch, a blue haze promised Nebo over on the right. How they jolted and swayed. Endlessly. But the back of the young man, the bearer at his feet, was a pillar of solid flesh, and the woman who bent above his head, supported him less with the strength of her arms, than with a pervasive warmth of spirit.

  “There, sir,” she grunted sturdily. “Not much further now.”

  Sometimes she stumbled, but would not fall.

  Mrs Godbold was quite exalted by the burden it had been given her to bear. Her large breasts were proud inside the washed-out cotton dress, as the procession of faithful staggered at last to a standstill underneath her roof.

  Two little solemn girls, whom Himmelfarb connected with pushing and singing, had prepared a bed, as ordered, and were standing by. Mottled green by bruised grass, their arms were glowing golden against the white of sheets. Gold of light and green of vines were tangled together in the window, to make a curtain, of which a reflection hung, shimmering and insubstantial, on the wall above the great bed. Gently and rationally somebody was undressing him. After which, inside the tingling, sun-baked sheets, he might have surrendered completely to the pleasures of unconsciousness, if only the vice of pain had offered him release.

  At one point he was almost crushed by it, and opened his eyes, wondering, with the result that several of the watchers recoiled, and two of Mrs Godbold’s younger girls, who had dared to peer into depths for which they were not prepared, began to cry.

  The mother shushed and shoved.

  Then she addressed the patient, saying:

  “I will send one of them to fetch Dr Herborn.”

  But the sick man’s face rejected her suggestion, so that she decided to humour him, for the moment at least.

  Doing as she knew how, she warmed a brick, and put it inside the bed, against his feet. At which he smiled. Or, again, when his lips, dried and cracked by suffering, opened on some request she was unable to interpret, she brought a watery soup made that same day out of a scrag-end of mutton, and tried to tempt him with a little of it. But his expression of nausea restrained her, and immediately she was ashamed for the poorness of her soup, indeed, for her whole house, unworthy even of lesser guests.

  Perhaps realizing, he opened his eyes at her, and spoke rather odd.

  “I am content, thank you,” he said.

  Then Mrs Godbold was overwhelmed by that compassion which all suffering roused in her. The sudden pangs forced her to go and put down the cup, which had begun to clatter in its saucer.

  During the afternoon, Himmelfarb drifted into a doze. He was swallowed up by the whiteness. He was received, as seldom. Of course there had been other occasions when he might have allowed himself: the hills of Zion, spreading their brown pillows in the evening light, had almost opened; the silence of his last and humblest house had promised frequent ladders of escape; as he knelt on the stones, in his blindness, the flames of Friedensdorf had offered certain release. But the rope-end of dedication had always driven him on. Even now it was torturing his side, although the goat-mask and hair shawl had slipped, leaving him hanging abandoned on a tree. Again, he was the Man Kadmon, descending from the Tree of Light to take the Bride. Trembling with white, holding the cup in her chapped hands, she advanced to stand beneath the Chuppah. So they were brought together in the smell of all primordial velvets. This, explained the cousins and aunts, is at last the Shecchinah, whom you have carried all these years under your left breast. As he received her, she bent and kissed the wound in his hand. Then they were truly one. They did not break the cup, as the wedding guests expected, but took and drank, again and again.

  Afterwards Else Godbold straightened his pillows. Else could only improvise little acts to cover up her inexperience. And the sick man was grateful for the touch of balsam, for the almost imperceptible dew brushing the craggy surfaces of pain.

  But Else withdrew quickly from what she sensed she, too, must eventually suffer. The iron shed which contained them all had begun to stifle, not to say menace. How she longed to slip outside, and hang about the lane, and feel the moonlight slide along her arms and throat, and return the touch of moonlight, until it became impossible to distinguish intention from intention.

  Then Bob Tanner, who had gone out earlier, returned, and told them of the fire which had started at the Jew’s – the continued heaping of orange light confirmed – and she saw that for her lover something was happening which would leave him changed. She saw that his rather clumsy, lad’s honesty, which she had loved and derided from the start, was setting in a shape that even she would not alter. He realized that his girl was the uglier for pity, and would alter many times yet. Each was choking with discovery. But the lovers were grateful to know they could still recognize each other, and did not doubt they must continue to, whatever the disguise.

  Then Else Godbold tore herself out of what was becoming an unbearable embrace of thoughts. She leaned towards the sick man, and said:

  “Mr Himmelfarb, I wish you would tell me of anything you want, of anything I could do, or bring.”

  She sounded as though she were threatening him, because, she realized bitterly, she was still too young.

  “If I brought cold water,” Else suggested desperately, “to sponge your face with? Eh?”

  But Himmelfarb had no requests.

  When he was not dozing, when he was not removed from the compartment of his body into a freedom of time and space, his expression would appear composed, observant, peering out through the vizor of his face, from out of what had by now become the protective armature of pain. Once or twice he glanced towards the window, at the scarcely extraordinary orange light, to follow an event that was taking place, at a distance, but of no concern. In the same way, from under his eyelids, he experienced the apparition of Miss Hare. He was not surprised. Nor did the weight of his faithful disciple weigh heavy on his dead feet.

  Miss Hare came in, and even the older children were afraid, who had known this mad woman ever since they could remember, and looked for her at windows, or in and out the bush, always to be found, like owls in certain trees, or some old possum-inmate of particular shed or chimney. Now this amiable and familiar beast lay whimpering and grunting across the foot of their mother’s bed. She smelled still of burning, but fire could have been the least cause of her distress.

  The mother, of course, handled this like any other situation. Coming forward, she said:

  “I am glad you have come, Miss. I thought you would. There is perhaps something that only you can do for him.”

  And touched the scorched shoulder.

  But Miss Hare would not answer at first, or would only moan, which could yet have been a manner of communication with some other soul present.

  The sick man, however, gave no sign of acknowledgment, but lay with his eyes closed.

  “Will you take off your jacket, perhaps?” Mrs Godbold asked of her most recent guest.

  But Miss Hare would only moan, not from pain, it seemed, but because she had again succeeded in closing the circle of her happiness. Yet she must have been suffering, for those of the children who had advanced closest saw that the red down was singed close along her chops, and the skin shiny from the basting it had got.

  Horrid though her appearance was, all those around her remained rooted in respect. Although the great wicker hat had gone askew, its spokes burnt black, not even Mrs Godbold dared suggest the wearer should remove it. Miss Hare had never been seen without, unless by Mrs Godbold herself, who had nursed her years before in sickness. Nobody else cared to speculate on what might be hidden underneath.

  Then Miss Hare sat up, as straight as her fubsy body would allow.

  “His feet,” she said, “ar
e cold.”

  For she had stuck her hand under the blanket.

  “So very, very cold.” Miss Hare’s slow words followed her fingers, ending in a shiver.

  “Yes.” Mrs Godbold could not evade it. “But you shall warm them.”

  Miss Hare cheered up then, as everybody saw. She sat and chafed her spirits back. Or gradually lolled lower, until her face rested on the forms of feet printing them on her cheek.

  All this time the man’s face was breathing gently on the pillow, but the air could have been rarefied.

  “Gracie will go for Dr Herborn,” Mrs Godbold had at last decided.

  But Himmelfarb opened his eyes. He said:

  “No. No. Not now. Thank you. For the moment I have not the strength to submit to any doctor.”

  And smiled with the least possible irony, to absolve whoever it had been for conceiving a superfluous idea.

  He was as content by now as he would ever have allowed himself to be in life. Children and chairs conversed with him intimately. Thanks to the texture of their skin, the language of animals was no longer a mystery, as, of course, the Baal Shem had always insisted.

  So he breathed more gently, and resumed his journey.

  So Miss Hare was translated. Her animal body became the least part of her, as breathing thoughts turned to being.

  The night rose and fell, to which the dying fire gave its last touch of purple through the frame of vines and window.

  Maudie Godbold did think for a moment that she saw a face, but by that hour all the watchers were sleepy, some of them even sleeping.

  After leaving the factory on the eve of the holidays for which they had all been longing and waiting, Dubbo went straight to the house where he lodged, on the outskirts of Barranugli. In other years he might have stopped at shops to lay in food against Easter, but now, because something had happened, his sandshoes hurried. Something had happened of extreme importance, but which he would attempt to dismiss. He washed his hands first. He sat for a little on the edge of the bed. He ate some bread, with cold sausage, which tasted of sawdust. He spat it out. But gathered it up at once from the floor. Something he had done contradicted what he had been taught. He sat. In the dusk he washed his hands again. It was so important. He was clean at least by education. He sat in the dusk, and would have liked to look at his few recent paintings, all turned to the wall, but knew he would find them receded into their frames. The disappearing room abandoned him to hopelessness. Shadows would flutter at that hour like insubstantial bats. He remembered his mother had once told him how the spirit of his grandfather was a guardian on whom he might rely, but during one of the many phases of flight, he and his protector had, he suspected, parted company. In any case, for quite some time he had sensed himself to be alone.