Riders In the Chariot

by Patrick White

  Mrs Rosetree would have liked very much to know whether the house in Persimmon Street conveyed an impression of abnormality from the outside. Needless to say, it did not. Since normality alone was recognized in Paradise East, tragedy, vice, retribution would remain incredible until the Angel of the Lord stepped down and split the homes open with his sword, or the Bomb crumbled their ant-hill texture, violating the period suites. For the present, it seemed, from the outside, reality was as square as it was built. The mornings droned on. There was Stevie Rosetree, kicking his heels amongst the standard roses, picking his nose behind the variegated pittosporum, as on any other holiday. There was Rosie Rosetree trotting off to mass, again – was it? – or again? – holding the book from which the markers had a habit of scattering, and paper rose-petals of grace.

  Rosie Rosetree attended all the masses; it was no trouble at all to one trembling on that delicious verge where the self becomes beatified. Even the return to superfluous questions could not destroy bliss at Easter.

  “Did Father Pelletier wonder why we was not there?” Mrs Rosetree asked.

  “He asked whether Mumma was sick.”

  “And what did you say, Rosie?”

  “I said that Dadda was undergoing a mental crisis,” Rosie Rosetree answered.

  And withdrew into that part of her where, she had recently discovered, her parents were unable to follow.

  Mrs Rosetree was practical enough to respect a certain coldness in her children, because she had, so to speak, paid for it. But she had to resent some thing. So now she returned to the usually deserted lounge-room which her husband had hoped might be his refuge. She leaned her forearms on the rosewood table, so that her bottom stuck out behind her. She was both formal and dramatic, in azure satin. She said, with some force:

  “You gotta tell me, Harry, or I’m gunna go plain loopy. Did something happen to that old Jew?”

  Harry Rosetree was fanning the smoke away from his eyes, although nobody was smoking. She realized, with some horror, she might always have hated his small, cushiony hand.

  “Eh?” Mrs Rosetree persisted, and the table on which she was leaning tottered.

  But her husband said:

  “You let me alone, Shirl.”

  She was frightened then. All that she had ever experienced in darkness and wailing seemed to surge through her bowels. And she went out, out of the house, and was walking up and down in her housecoat, moaning just enough to be heard – fearfully, deafeningly, it sounded to the children on whom she had conferred immunity – as she trod the unconscious, foreign, Torrens-titled soil, beside the barbecue.

  That way Rosetrees spent their Easter, while for other, less disordered families, Jesus Christ was taken down, and put away, and resurrected, with customary efficiency and varying taste. Outside the churches everyone was smiling to find they had finished with it; they had done their duty, and might continue on their unimpeded way.

  While Harry Rosetree sat.

  On the Wednesday Mrs Rosetree, who had begun once more to dress, came and said, neither too casual, nor too loud:

  “Mr Theobalds is on the phone.”

  Harry had to take the call; there was no way out.

  His wife was unable to follow, though. The conversation was all on Mr Theobalds’ end, and Harry, if he answered, that froggy.

  Afterwards Harry rang a Mr Schildkraut. There was to be Minyan for Mordecai Himmelfarb.

  And however much she was afraid to be, Shirl Rosetree knew that she was glad. She had survived the dangers of the flesh, but did not think she could have endured an interrogation of the spirit. Sometimes she thought she was happiest with her own furniture. So now she began to run the shammy leather over the rosewood and maple veneer, until wood was exalted to a state of almost pure reflection. She got the hiccups in the end.

  Shortly after he had shaved himself, Harry Rosetree went out without telling his wife, who knew about it, nevertheless. Through the sealed window in the hall, she watched him get inside the car. He was fumbling a good deal, she could tell; he made the lights wink, over and over, in the car’s glass buttocks, as if it had been night. Before he drove away with a jerk.

  Mr Rosetree drove out towards Sarsaparilla along the main highway, where morning had conspired with the Tudor-style, luxury homes to wrap them in cellophane, thus increasing their market value. But soon he was taking lesser roads, which led him by degrees through the remnants of a countryside: grey sheds, and barbed wire, a repetition of shabby hills – at which he did not care to look. Rural scenes made him nervous, unless some sunlit forest, remembered or illusory he had never decided, through which he loitered, gathering wild strawberries at the foot of a convent’s mottled wall. Unequivocal forms, whether topographical or human, depressed this small, soft man, who saw that he might come to grief. So he would turn aside, on principle, from axe-faced women and muscular men. He liked to eat Gänsebraten and Torte. His lips were rather red, and full, with a division in the lower one. But, confronted with the bones of a situation, as in the last few days, the juices had run out of him. He was appalled.

  Harry Rosetree continued to drive – the long, glass car was almost too biddable – towards a duty which he had accepted, less from compulsion than from sentiment, he was trying to believe. But as he drove in his incredible car, Haïm ben Ya’akov found himself abandoning the controls of reason, not to say the whole impressive, steel-and-plastic structure of the present, for the stuffy rooms of memory. His father, who was never far distant, entered almost at once, in Yarmulka and rather frowzy curls. He took the boy by the hand, and they stood before the Ark, which the beadle had uncovered as a favour, so that they might read the inscription on the wrapper. See, Haïm, the father was explaining, your own wrapper covering the Scroll. Read, he insisted, since I have paid for you to learn the letters. Read, he said, and let me hear. So the boy read, fearfully: The Commandment of the Lord is clear. Then the beadle pulled the cord, and the wonders and terrors were again veiled by the little curtain. Wonders and terrors alternated. Why, you are trembling, Haïm. Once more it was the father, as they stood outside the privy in the unmistakable smell of urine-saturated wood. But there is no reason, the father attempted to persuade, and went so far as to squeeze an elbow as they continued standing in the yard. His eyeballs shone greenish in the last of the pale light which trickled in between the cramped houses. I will let you into a secret, he apparently decided there and then, to give you courage, though perhaps it is too soon to understand more than a little of what is promised. Such light as there was, converged on those glittering eyeballs. I have just come, the father confided, from a conversation with two Rabbanim, in which we discussed the One who is Expected. Here the eyeballs threatened, and the urine smelled most terribly. The One who, in our time, we are convinced, must come, to lead and save, as it was not, it seems, David, or Hezekiah, and not, most certainly, Sabbatai Zvi, though all that is something you will not have heard about. Listen, Haïm, because this is what concerns you. You will be amongst the first to receive our Saviour. I have prayed for it, and prayed, and know. That you. YOU. It was written on the whitest scrap of sky. Then they called to the father from the shop, to attend to business. Soon there was the sound of hardware, and the shattered boy was left saddled with the greatest wonder, the greatest terror of all.

  Now Harry Rosetree, whose swirling car had brought him to the outskirts of Sarsaparilla, realized that his tongue was sticking to the roof of his mouth, his throat might have swallowed a handful of dust, his nails were brittle unto breaking. They told him at the post office that the woman Mrs Godbold lived just down there. In the shed. Other side of the blackberry bushes. He left the car, and began to walk, tottering over the uneven ground, the archway of his legs only groggily dependent on their unhappy groin.

  In a kind of lean-to adjoining the shed there was a woman he took to be Mrs Godbold, bending down to stoke a copper, from which she rose redder over pale. For a moment he hoped such a very simple person might not understan
d his manner of speech, as regularly there were some who did not. Then he could apologize, and go away. But the situation continued to develop. And now the woman had turned to face him, while remaining withdrawn, hair harassed, arms wet, for it so happened she was occupied with laundry matters.

  “My name is Mr Rosetree,” her visitor began, but did not add, as was his habit: “Of Brighta Bicycle Lamps at Barranugli.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Mrs Godbold, in a voice that was clear, and light, and could have been unlike her own, a voice, moreover, which might not reveal, and certainly would not ask.

  “I own a business down here,” Mr Rosetree mumbled, and waved his arm in any direction. “And have come in connection with a disagreeable incident, involving an Individuum of my employment.”

  Mrs Godbold was re-arranging her sodden wash. In the blue water, in the zinc tubs, she pushed the heavy forms around. Once or twice she plunged her arms, and on drawing them out, the skeins of suds fell back. She was so intent, Mr Rosetree doubted he would ever reach her.

  “An Individuum who died,” he added rather hopelessly.

  At this point Mrs Godbold was at last persuaded to assist.

  “On Good Friday. Early. Mr Himmelfarb,” she said.

  It was so conclusive, there seemed no reason for looking at her visitor.

  Then, although he did not wish to, Mr Rosetree had to enquire:

  “Where, please, is the corpse of this Himmelfarb?”

  Nothing had ever appeared so brutal as the surfaces of the zinc washtubs.

  “That is to say,” he said, “I wish to know with which funeral establishment you have placed the body. There are friends who will take charge of it.”

  Mrs Godbold was examining a beam of light, in which invisible things were perhaps disclosed.

  “But he is buried,” she said, at last. “Like any Christian.”

  Mr Rosetree opened the mouth which he hoped most desperately to use.

  “But this Himmelfarb was,” he said, “a Jew.”

  Mrs Godbold’s throat had contracted inside its thick, porous skin. The intruder was prickling all over. The woman, too, he saw, had broken out in an ugly gooseflesh.

  “It is the same,” she said, and when she had cleared her voice of hoarseness, continued as though she were compelled by much previous consideration: “Men are the same before they are born. They are the same at birth, perhaps you will agree. It is only the coat they are told to put on that makes them all that different. There are some, of course, who feel they are not suited. They think they will change their coat. But remain the same, in themselves. Only at the end, when everything is taken from them, it seems there was never any need. There are the poor souls, at rest, and all naked again, as they were in the beginning. That is how it strikes me, sir. Perhaps you will remember, on thinking it over, that is how Our Lord Himself wished us to see it.”

  Mr Rosetree was confused.

  “But Himmelfarb was a Jew,” something forced him to repeat.

  Mrs Godbold touched the edge of zinc.

  “So, they say, was Our Lord and Saviour who we have buried too.”

  Mr Rosetree was no longer able to connect the facts he wanted to communicate. In between, his mouth would form disconcerting bursts of bubbles.

  “Schildkraut who is waiting. And other nine men. To hold Minyan”

  “I did not know as Mr Himmelfarb had any particular friends. He was too well disposed to all,” Mrs Godbold thought aloud, then added in unequivocal words: “Tell his friends it was a lovely morning, the morning that we buried him. It was yesterday, it seems. Early, so as Mr Pargeter – that is the minister – and the undertakers, could fit it in. Of course I would have been capable of doing everything myself, and did do many little things that professional undertakers will not recognize. But he was buried official by Thomas & Thomas, a credited firm, of Boundary Street, Barranugli.”

  Her visitor sensed while looking at the floor that Mrs Godbold had become inspired.

  “I walked to the ground – it is not far – with a couple of my more sensible girls. And was there to receive him. It was that clear. It was that still. You could hear the magpies from all around. The rabbits would not bother themselves to move. There was a heavy dew lying from the night, on grass and bushes. No one would have cried, sir, not at such a peaceful burial, as on yesterday morning when we stood, and afterwards, we was glad to dawdle, and feel the sun lovely on our backs.”

  So they buried Himmelfarb again.

  Mrs Godbold stirred those same sheets which lay soaking in the blue water.

  “He was, you might say, overlooked,” she ventured to judge. “But some of us will remember and love him.”

  Then her visitor began to move. He felt himself to be superfluous. While all the time Mrs Godbold’s stream flowed, warmer, stronger, all-healing. Only, Haïm ben Ya’akov regretted, certain wounds will not close.

  “Ah!” she cried suddenly.

  Life was too insistent.

  “I was forgetting!” she panted.

  And pushed inside the main shed, with such force that she shook it.

  “It is the bread,” she said.

  When she had flung the oven open, there, indeed, was the bread. The loaves had risen golden. The scent was rushing out of them.

  “Will I make you a quick cup?” she asked. “With a slice of fresh bread to it? There is quince jam,” she coaxed.

  “No,” Mr Rosetree replied. “I have business. Other business.”

  She came out again, almost too close to him; he could smell the agonizing smell of bread.

  “You have not taken offence?” she asked. “At what I did? To bury the gentleman on Christian ground?”

  “What for should I go crook?” Rosetree protested, stiff now. “It is this Schildkraut. I am no Jew.”

  “No,” said Mrs Godbold.

  As he could feel she had begun to pity, he went away very quickly, stumbling over the rough ground.

  Even so, he heard her voice:

  “Dr Herborn certified it was the heart.”

  Harry Rosetree drove home so smoothly nobody would have guessed. So much chromium. Such a vision of pink paint. He had turned the radio on as a matter of course, and the car was flying streamers, of pretty music, in addition to those it stripped from the wind. It was only inside, amongst the beige upholstery, and faced with the controls, that the music broke up into little tinkly bits of foil, and nervous glass splinters, and ugly, torn sheets of zinc.

  He drove faster in order to arrive, and did, although it was only at his own house.

  Shirl said:

  “Well, Harry, you look as though you seen an accident, or something. You wanta take a good stiff Scotch and a couple of aspro. Though I know it is wrong to offer advice.”

  She would have been interested to examine him closely, but he was walking through their house. He was grunting sort of funny. He sat on the edge of an already overflowing chair, grunting, or belching – grey.

  “Gee,” she said, who had followed him, “you are not going to put the wind up me, are you?”

  When he began to cry, she was at first too shocked to continue. Mrs Rosetree had a secret longing for hard, blond men, in sweatshirts that revealed their torsoes. Not this soft sister, whom she had loved, however, by contract, and even, she could swear, by impulse.

  Harry was blubbering, and rubbing his knee-caps.

  “It is the same!” he was saying, she thought.

  She stared.

  “It is the same!” he kept on blubbering.

  Then she did get angry.

  “It is the same? It is the same?” she shouted back. “I am the same dill that always stuck around!”

  She began to punch the cushions.

  “But have had enough for now! At least,” she said, “I am gunna ring Marge Pendlebury, and go to some nice picture. To forget. Oh,” she called, “I have my sense of duty, too. I will not forget that.”

  Harry Rosetree continued sitting on the over-upholstered,
grey chair until his wife had left the house. She had looked in once, but they were still far too naked to address each other. When she had gone, he went into the bathroom, where she had been powdering her body, and gargling. There was steam on the mirror, in which he began to write, or print, in big letters.

  MORD …, he put.

  But rubbed it out.

  But began again to cry.

  And stopped.

  Quite suddenly he bared his teeth at the glass, and the least vein in his terrible eyeballs was fully revealed to him.

  When Mrs Rosetree got home, the strings of the parcels were eating into her plump gloves. She was trailing the fox cape as if the bull had been too much for her.

  “Hoo-oo!” she called. “Hiya?”

  That was for Colonel Livermore, who made careful noises back. His wife would avert her eyes from the Rosetrees’ side, but the colonel, a mild man, and just, had in the beginning offered cuttings of Pussy Willow, and imparted several Latin names.

  “Home again!” replied the colonel with his usual exactitude.

  But Mrs Rosetree seldom listened to the words her neighbour spoke. She was content to bathe in the desirable, if rather colourless distinction the colonel’s dried-up person still managed to exude.

  Now Mrs Rosetree chose to remark, with a special kind of tenderness, from her side of the photinias:

  “That I always think, is such a pretty little thing.”

  Although she was in no mood for any bally plant.

  “That,” replied the colonel, “is oxalis.”

  And pulled it smartly up.

  Mrs Rosetree could not care.

  “Well,” she said, “I am quite fagged out.”

  She had learnt it from Colonel Livermore himself.

  “I am going to lay – lie down, I don’t mind telling you, Colonel,” she said, “and rest my poor, exhausted feet before the kids come in.”

  At that hour the shapes of the garden, in which she had never really felt at home, were beginning to dissolve, the bricks of the house were crumbling. If the interior resisted, it was because her instincts kept the rooms stretched tight, at least the essential part of them, or comforting primeval form, and she could have wandered endlessly at dusk through her version of the stuffy, felted tents, touching, when her spirit craved for reassurance, the material advantages with which she had filled a too heroic prototype.