… 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. …
The black fellow rolled over on the bed, biting the back of his hand. The window was blinding him, with its four living creatures in the likeness of a man.
As he remembered the voice, so Dubbo was still able to see the drawing of The Chariot-thing. He would have known how to draw it, detail by detail, inch by inch, for he never forgot those places where he had been. There was simply the question of physical strength. Whether he could still paint, he doubted.
All that night he was haunted by the wings of the Four Living Creatures. The tips of their wings stroked his eyelids. He would reach up and touch the feathers, to become acquainted with their texture. But he woke horribly from one sleep, in which he had found himself lying stretched under the skin of a dead man. There it had been, sagging slightly above the bed, to shelter, it would have seemed, only for the cold drip, drip, drip.
He lay awake through the false dawn. Then, at sunrise, he got up, and stood at the window, and some of that rekindled fire was distributed through his dead veins. His fingers were liberated, and he began to trace on the glass the lines, not of his lost drawing, but the actual vision as it was revealed.
About seven o’clock Dubbo made himself a pannikin of tea. He ate some stale bread, with butter that could have been rancid. But the food comforted him. He felt quite brisk, though brittle. And began at once to restate his conception of the Chariot. The drawing was perhaps too quickly done, but came away so easily, almost as a print, from his memory. There it was in front of him. He knew then that, whatever his condition, he would paint his picture of the Chariot as he had originally intended.
The next two days his movements took control of his body, although his mind hovered above, as it were – rather stern, beaky, ready to refuse collaboration in dishonesty. So the firmament was again created. First the foundations were laid in solid blue, very deep, on which he began to build the gold. The road ran obliquely, and cruel enough to deter any but sure-footed horses. The latter could have been rough brumbies, of a speckled grey, rather too coarse, earthbound might have been a legitimate comment, if their manes and tails had not streamed beyond possibility, and the skeins of cloud shed by their flanks appeared at any point to catch on the rocks of heavenly gold.
One curious fact emerged. From certain angles the canvas presented a reversal of the relationship between permanence and motion, as though the banks of a river were to begin to flow alongside its stationary waters. The effect pleased the painter, who had achieved more or less by accident what he had discovered years before while lying in the gutter. So he encouraged an illusion which was also a truth, and from which the timid might retreat simply by changing their position.
The days grew kind in which Dubbo painted his picture. They were of a fixed, yellow stillness. The creaking of cicadas was not so much a noise, as a thick, unbroken, yellow curtain, hung to protect his exposed senses. All other sound seemed to have been wound into a ball at the centre of the town, as he stood and transferred the effulgence of his spirit on to canvas, or, when overcome by weakness, sat on the edge of a scraping chair, leaning forward so as not to miss anything taking place in the world of his creation.
Where he cheated a little was over the form of the Chariot itself. Just as he had not dared completely realize the body of the Christ, here the Chariot was shyly offered. But its tentative nature became, if anything, its glory, causing it to blaze across the sky, or into the soul of the beholder.
The Four Living Creatures were a different proposition, of course. He could not shirk those. So, set to work painfully to carve their semblance out of the solid paint. One figure might have been done in marble, massive, white, inviolable. A second was conceived in wire, with a star inside the cage, and a crown of barbed wire. The wind was ruffling the harsh, fox-coloured coat of the third, flattening the pig’s-snout, while the human eye reflected all that was ever likely to happen. The fourth was constructed of bleeding twigs and spattered leaves, but the head could have been a whirling spectrum. As they sat facing one another in the chariot-sociable, the souls of his four living creatures were illuminating their bodies, in various colours. Their hands, which he painted open, had surrendered their sufferings, but not yet received beatitude. So they were carried on, along the oblique trajectory, towards the top left corner. And the painter signed his name, in the bottom right, in neat red, as Mrs Pask had taught him:
A. DUBBO
With a line underneath.
It was again evening when he had finished. The light was pouring into his room, and might have blinded, if the will to see had continued in him. He sat down stiffly on the bed. The sharp pain poured in crimson tones into the limited space of room, and overflowed. It poured and overflowed his hands. These were gilded, he was forced to observe, with his own gold.
Mrs Noonan was a stranger in her own house, which had belonged, in fact, to her mother-in-law, which caused her to go softly in her rag hat, and coast along the walls in anticipation of strictures, smiling. She had no friends, but two acquaintances, a carrier and his wife, whom she could seldom bear to disturb. But drank a great deal of tea on her own. And loved her hens. And set store by the presence of a lodger, a decent sort of man, whom she did not see.
And was puzzled at last, on running a duster along the landing wainscot, to detect an unorthodox smell coming from under the door of the room that she let. It was so peculiar, not to say nasty, she did at last venture to call:
“Eh, Mis-ter?”
And to knock once or twice.
To rattle the knob of the locked door, though diffidently, because she could never bring herself to consider the rented room any longer part of Mother’s house, let alone her own.
“Mister! Mister!” She rattled, and smiled, cocking an ear. “Anything wrong? It is me – Mrs Noonan.”
“It is Mrs Noonan,” she repeated, but fainter.
Perhaps that was to reassure herself, but she was not really convinced by the sound of her own name, and went away wondering whether she dare disturb her acquaintances, the carrier and his wife. On deciding not, she put on a better hat, and some shoes, and went to a house several blocks away, where she had noticed from a brass plate that a doctor had set up.
The young doctor, who was reading a detective story, and scratching himself through his flies, was bored on being disturbed, but also relieved to be asked for advice, since an unpleasantness at the butcher’s over credit.
“What sort of smell?” the doctor asked.
Mrs Noonan flickered her eyelids.
“I dunno, Doctor,” she said, and smiled. “A sort of peculiar smell like.”
She breathed more freely when he fetched his bag, and felt important as they walked along the street, not quite abreast, but near enough to signify that they were temporarily connected. It was still hot, and they trod with difficulty through the pavement of heavy yellow sunlight, which had assisted Dubbo in the painting of his picture.
“Had he been depressed?” the doctor asked.
“Ah, no,” she answered. “Not that you could say. Quiet, though. He was always quiet.”
“Sick?”
“Well,” she hesitated. Then, when she had considered, she burst out in amazement: “Yes! Sick! I reckon that dark feller was real sick. And that is what it could be. He could of died!”
Her own voice abandoned her to a terrible loneliness in the middle of the street, because the doctor was above a human being. They went on, and she tried to think of her hens, now that that decent blackfellow was gone.
When they reached the room door, the doctor asked for a key, but as there was no duplicate, he did not suggest anything else; he burst the papery thing open.
They went in on the draught, rather too quickly, and at once were pushed back by the stench.
The doctor made a
noise, and opened the window.
“How long since you saw him?”
“Could be three days,” Mrs Noonan answered from behind her handkerchief, and smiled.
Dubbo was lying on the bed. He was twisted round, but natural-looking, more like some animal, some bird that had experienced the necessity of dying. There was a good deal of blood, though, on the pillow, on his hands, although it had dried by then, with the result that he could have been lying in the midst of a papier mâché joke.
The doctor was carrying out a distasteful examination.
“Is he dead?” Mrs Noonan was asking. “Eh, Doctor? Is he dead?”
“He is dead,” she replied, for herself.
“Probably a tubercular haemorrhage,” mumbled the doctor.
He breathed harder to indicate his disapproval.
“Ah,” said Mrs Noonan.
Then she caught sight of the oil paintings, and was flabbergasted.
“What do you make of these, Doctor?” she asked, and laughed, or choked behind her handkerchief.
The doctor glanced over his shoulder, but only to frown formally. He certainly had no intention of looking.
When he had finished, and given all necessary instructions to that inconsiderable object the landlady, and banged the street door shut, Mrs Noonan prepared to go in search of her acquaintances, the carrier and his wife.
But she did look once more at the body of the dead man, and the house was less than ever hers.
The body of Alf Dubbo was quickly and easily disposed of. He had left money enough – it was found in a condensed-milk tin – so that the funeral expenses were settled, the landlady was paid, and everybody satisfied. The dead man’s spirit was more of a problem: the oil paintings became a source of embarrassment to Mrs Noonan. Finally, the helpful carrier advised her to put them in an auction, and for a remuneration carried them there, where they fetched a few shillings, and caused a certain ribaldry. Mrs Noonan was relieved when it was done, but sometimes wondered what became of the paintings.
Not even the auctioneers could have told her that, for their books were lost soon after in a fire. Anyway, the paintings disappeared, and, if not destroyed when they ceased to give the buyers a laugh, have still to be discovered.
PART VII
* * *
XVII
They had started to demolish Xanadu. A very short time after the wreckers went in, it seemed as though most of the secret life of the house had been exposed, and the stage set for a play of divine retribution; only the doors into the jagged rooms continued closed, the actors failed to make their entrance. Of course, the reason might have been that vengeance was fully inflicted, and the play finished, where wallpaper now twittered, and starlings plastered the cornices. Even so, people came down hopefully from Sarsaparilla to watch, to brace themselves against the impending scream of tragedy, to stroll amongst the grass while keeping a lookout for souvenirs, a jade bead perhaps, or coral claw, or the photographs that are washed up out of the yellow past.
It was no more than a gleaning, because the furniture had been removed immediately it was decided to demolish and subdivide. Solicitors had presided. A young man turned up, in black, and a rustier, elderly individual. They had supervised the inventories, and were present at the arrival of the vans, on the authority of the legatee and relative, a Mr Cleugh, of the island of Jersey, UK. All was arranged by correspondence, as the fortunate gentleman was too old to undertake the voyage – besides, he had done it once – and could have been interested only in the theory of wealth by now. So the malachite urns were removed at last from Xanadu, and the limping cedar, and the buhl table of brass hackles. Some of the inhabitants of Sarsaparilla claimed to have been informed that it all fetched a pretty penny, though there were others who heard that it went for a song.
The strange part was that the old woman had thought to consult solicitors. She had, it appeared, called them in soon after the death of her mother, when some transparency of memory prompted her to dictate a will in favour of her cousin, Eustace. Not even those who invariably failed to understand motives, could have interpreted the inheritance as a simple reversion, for Mary Hare was closer by blood to several Urquhart-Smiths.
So, it seemed, Miss Hare had chosen. She who had lurked in the scrub, and frequently scuttled from the eyes of strangers, who had stood at a window holding the rag of a curtain over half her face, or drifted directionless through the corridors and rooms of her nominal home at Xanadu, she who was at most an animal, at least a leaf, had always chosen, people came to think, and had chosen for the last time, the night the Jew’s house got burnt, to go away from Sarsaparilla, where she was never seen again.
There had been a hue and cry, and speculation in the press, and two bodies offered, one from a river in the south of New South Wales, the second from the sea, off the Queensland coast. Neither corpse was recognizable. But it was decided by reasoning too devious to disentangle that Miss Hare was she who had stepped into the cold waters of the southern river, where trout had nibbled at her till the state of anonymity was reached. So it was published officially. But there were those who knew that that was not Miss Hare. Mrs Godbold knew. Several of the latter’s daughters knew. Though the matter was never, never discussed amongst them, they knew that Miss Hare was somewhere closer, and would not leave those parts, perhaps in poor, crumpled, disintegrated flesh, but never more than temporarily in spirit. So the Godbolds would push the hair out of their eyes, and squint at the sun, and keep quiet, if ever the subject of Miss Hare’s end crept into the conversation of the inhabitants of Sarsaparilla.
It remained something of a mystery, while Xanadu itself was the broken comb from which the honey of mystery had soon all run. People listened for the next crump, from a distance, or approached close enough to enjoy the spectacle of the complicated copper bath-heater, although from that level they could not have caught sight of the tesselated Italian floor, from which time and Mrs Jolley had already half-scattered the medallion depicting a black goat.
Sometimes, in the absence of actors, the workmen would appear on one of the several planes of the deserted stage, and perform against the dead colours for the pleasure of the thin but enthusiastic audience. The spectators would enter right into the play, because all those workmen were regular blokes with whom they could have exchanged sentiments as well as words. Which made the act of desecration more violent and personal, adding to it, as it were, the destructive animus of banality.
So the few ladies from Sarsaparilla, and handful of kiddies, and three or four stubbly pensioners, roared their heads off the morning the young chap – the wag of the bunch – stood on the landing at Xanadu with a bit of an old fan he had found, and there amongst the lazy sunlight which the trees allowed to filter on to the brown wallpaper and dustmarks, improvised a dance which celebrated the history of that place. How the young labourer became inspired enough to describe those great sweeping arcs with his moulted fan, nobody understood, nor did the artist himself realize that, for all its elasticity of grimace and swivelling impudence of bum, his creation was a creaking death dance. But the young man danced. For the audience, his lithe thighs introduced an obscenity of life into the dead house. The candid morning did not close down on his most outrageous pantomime. The people hooted, but in approval. Until at the end, suddenly, the tattered fan seemed to fly apart in the dancer’s hand, the tufts of feathers blew upward in puffs of greyish-pink smoke, and the young man was left looking at a few sticks of tortoiseshell.
At once he began to feel embarrassed, and went off stage, careful to close the door upon his exit. The audience dispersed shyly.
Xanadu continued to crumble, when it did not crash. In the evenings when the wreckers had gone, and the long gold of evening had succumbed to cold blue, other figures would appear. They were the couples of lovers, avoiding one another, which was easy eventually, since there was enough silence for everyone, and the grass meeting in arches above the extended bodies made a world that might have been China or
Peru.
Else Godbold walked there with her! over Bob Tanner. They, who had experienced life, frowned on recognizing ignorance, skirted obstructions in the rather difficult terrain, stalking stiffly. Locked together precariously by the little finger, they swung hands, but gravely, and made plans for the future. As if they had actually tamed it.
But once Else bent down, and picked up a scrap of paper, some old page, from some old book, only of handwriting, of a funny, educated kind, which they took the trouble to decipher, some of it at least, under a rampant elder bush.
“July 20. …” Else Godbold began to mumble syllables, and Bob Tanner chose that moment to approach his head.
“… heat oppressive as we left Florence for Fiesole, and the villa of Signora Grandi, the acquaintance of Lucy Urquhart-Smith’s. I hope life may become more tolerable, though Signora G. has made it clear that it will remain exorbitant! Bathed face, and put on my reseda Liberty. Feeling much improved!
“Norbert indefatigable. Italy his spiritual home. Only a few nights ago he embarked on a long poem on the theme of Fra Angelico. Doubtful, however, whether his physical condition will allow him to bring it to an altogether satisfactory conclusion. Poor fellow, the oil is a constant upset to his stomach! Now that we are in a villa of our own, hope to discover some respectable woman who will know how to prepare him his mutton chop.
“My little girl is unhappy. She is a puzzle. Says she wishes she were a stick! Often wonder how M. will adapt herself. She is so plain! And will not learn to converse. Her statements stop a person short. Will not deny that M.’s remarks usually contain the truth. But the world, I fear, will not tolerate the truth, at least in concentrated form. A man who drinks his whisky neat quickly becomes unsociable. As we know from personal experience.
“July 21. Norbert insisted on returning to Florence for the day. Did San Marco, Santa Maria del Carmine, Santa Maria Novella, Santo Spirito, etc., etc. Exhausted. Bilious.
Riders In the Chariot Page 58
