Riders in the Chariot (41 page)

This suddenly shrivelled man gave the girl the courage to say, "You are a funny one. You was talking about missing the boat."

Nor could she resist dusting his back. It was her most natural gesture.

"Dirty old dust and needles!" she mumbled to herself.

He shook her off then, and jumped up, though her touch remained. He had always shivered at what was gentlest. Many of his own thoughts made him wince, and it was the simplest of them that fingered most unmercifully: touching a scab, dusting down, pointing, with the bread-dough still caked round arthritic joints.

But he became quite cheerful as they walked, and once or twice he took her by the arm, to show her something that attracted his attention, a yacht, or a bird, or the limbs of some tortured tree. Several times he looked into her face, or it could have been into his own more peaceful thoughts.

In any case, the lines of his face had eased out. And in her pleasure, she confessed, "I could come out again, Tom. If you will ask me. Will you?"

He was caught there. She was too simple.

So he had to say yes. Even though he left her in no doubt how she must interpret it.

Curiously, though, she did not feel unhappy. She was smiling at the sun, the strength of which had grown bearable by now. She could still smell the smell of oranges.

It was the relentless procession of mornings that killed hope, and made for moodiness. And the slam of the lid on the ice-chest. For sometimes the girl would not go out to receive the iceman.

"That iceman is a real beast," the cook had to comment once.

The parlourmaid did not answer.

"You are feeling off colour, Ruth," said the mistress.

She was lying on a sofa, reading, and the maid had brought her her coffee as usual on the little Georgian salver.

"I hope there is nothing really wrong?"

The girl made a face.

"I am no different, " she said.

But had developed an ugly spot on her chin.

"I can see you ought to take up Science," said the mistress. "It is wonderful; you don't know how consoling."

The opinions and enthusiasms of those around her would slide off the girl's downcast eyelids. She liked people to have their ideas, though. She would smile gently, as if to encourage those necessities of their complicated minds.

"I am not educated," she replied on this occasion.

"Understanding is all that is necessary," Mrs Chalmers-Robinson replied. "And it does not always come with education. Quite the contrary, in fact."

But Ruth continued listless.

Then the mistress had to say, "I am going to give you something. You must not be offended."

She took her into the bathroom, and gave her a little flask, in which, she explained, was a preparation of gin and camphor, excellent against pimples.

"One simply rubs it into the place. Rather hard," she advised. "I find it infallible."

Because, really, Ruth's ugly spot was getting on her nerves.

"Of course, I know you will think, in my case, at least: Science should do it." Here Mrs Chalmers-Robinson sighed. "But when you have reached my age, you will have discovered that every little helps."

Ruth took the bottle, but she did not think it helped. Although her mistress assured her it was having the desired result.

Certainly, one morning very soon after, the girl's skin was suddenly clear and alive. She began to sing in that rather trembly mezzo which Mrs Chalmers-Robinson so deplored. She sang a hymn about redemption.

"Do you feel happy when you sing those hymns?" her mistress was compelled to ask.

"Oh, yes, I am
happy
_!" Ruth replied, and was extra careful with the Brasso.

She said that that Sunday she was going to the beach at Bondi with her friend.

Mrs Chalmers-Robinson's bracelets rustled.

"I am glad you have a friend," she said. "Is she also in domestic service?"

The girl folded the rag with which she was polishing the door-knobs.

"No," she said. "That is, I got friendly, recently, with the man that brings the ice," she said.

"Oh," said Mrs Chalmers-Robinson.

She had composed her mouth into a line.

On Sunday when her maid was all arrayed, the mistress appeared somewhat feverish, her eyes more brilliant than ever before. She had done her mouth. There it was, blooming like a big crimson flower, with a little, careful, mauve line, apparently to keep it within bounds.

"Enjoy yourself, Ruth!" she called, brave and bright.

Before she settled down to Science.

"God is incorporeal," she read, "divine, supreme, infinite, Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love."

Mrs Chalmers-Robinson read and studied, to transform "hard, unloving thoughts," and become a "new creature."

Ruth waited on the corner near the park. She waited, and her sensible heels no longer gave her adequate support. On Sundays the few people in the street always belonged to someone. They were marching towards teas in homes similar to their own, or to join hands upon the sand. Whenever people passed her, the waiting girl would look at her watch, to show that she, too, was wanted.

When Tom came at last--he had been held up by meeting a couple of blokes--it was quite late, but she was that glad; her face was immediately repaired by happiness.

Oh, no, she had not had to wait all that long.

By the time they reached the beach at Bondi, the light was already in its decline. They ate some sausages and chips in a refreshment room. Tom was a bit beery, she thought.

"I near as anything didn't come this evening," he confessed. "I nearly stayed and got full. Those coves I met wanted me to. They'd stocked up with grog enough for a month of Sundays."

"Then it was a pity you had asked me to come," she said, but flat, with no trace of bitterness or censure.

"I sort of felt there was no way out."

"It would have been better not to come."

"Oh, I wanted to," he said. And again, softer, after a pause: "I wanted to."

"I wish you would always tell me the truth," she said.

It made him start jabbing the tablecloth with a fork.

"Like somebody's bleedin' mother!" He dug holes in the tablecloth, till the young lady began to look their way. "Didn't your mother speak like that?"

"She died when I was young," said Ruth. "But there was my dad. He brought us up strict, I will admit. I loved him. That was why I came away."

"Because you loved him?"

"It is wrong to love a person too much. Sinful in a way."

"Sinful!"

Contempt made him blow down his nose, at which, at times, she could not bear to look, at the nostrils--they were beautiful--but she would again.

And his contempt was very quickly spent. He knew the cause of it was that which most attracted him to her: the unshakable--which at the same time he was tempted to assault.

After their exchange, he paid the bill at the desk, and they went out. They began to walk along the beach, avoiding in the dark certain darker shapes, making through the heavy, stupefying sand, towards the firmer path beside the sea.

"We're going to get our shoes wet," she warned, "if we are not careful."

Although the bubbly sea was casting its nets always farther afield, she did not intend to allow herself to be hypnotized by its action, however lovely. She could only see the imprudence of such behaviour. For a moment it was almost as though she were guiding those others, her brothers and sisters, or own unborn children.

He did not much care now, and even allowed her to take his arm. They walked sober for a time, in the indifferent grip of friendship, along the unrecognizable sand. Until, finally, exhaustion made them lag. Their legs could have been trembling wires. Such frailty was satisfying, but dangerous, so that when he said they should sit down, she remained standing.

Then, suddenly, Tom was down upon his knees. He had put his arms around her thighs. For the first time, against her body, she experienced the desperate bobbing of a human being who had abandoned himself to the current. If she herself had not been pitching in the darkness, his usually masterful head might have appeared less a cork. But in the circumstances, she would not have presumed to look for rescue to what her weight might have dragged under, just as she resisted the desire to touch that wiry hair, in case it should wind about her fingers, and assist in her destruction.

Instead, she began to cry out softly in protest. Her mouth had grown distorted and fleshy. She was bearing the weight of them both on her revived legs. But for how much longer, she did not like to think.

"Ah, no! Tom! Tom!" she breathed; her voice could have been coming from a shell.

As the mouths of darkness sucked her down, some other strangled throat in the distance laughed out from its game of lust. In the spirals of her ears, she heard the waves folding and unfolding on their bed.

Then the sand dealt her a blow in the back. It, too, was engaged apparently, beneath her, but with the passive indifference of thick sand. As the two people struggled and fought, the sand only just shifted its surface, grating coldly. The girl was holding the man's head away from her with all her strength, when she would have buried it, rather, in her breast. In the grip of her distress, she cried out with the vehemence of soft, flung sand.

"I would marry you, Tom!" she panted.

"That is news to me!" Tom Godbold grunted, rather angry.

He had known it, though; he had known many women.

But her announcement gave him an excuse to pause, without having to admit his lack of success.

"You don't know what you would be taking on," he said as soon as he was able.

"I would be willing to take it on," she insisted.

Again he began to feel oppressed by that honesty which was one of her prevailing qualities, and now, as in later life, he tried to ensure that it would not threaten him.

He reached out very gently, and tried by every dishonest strategy of skin to reach that core which he resented. Until at last she took his hand, and laid it against her burning cheek.

She said, "But what is it, Tom? It is not as if I did not love you."

By now, he realized, he was really very tired. He lay heavy on her. He rested his head against her neck. He was too exhausted, it seemed, for further bitterness.

It was only then that she allowed him to make love, which was at best tentative, at worst ashamed, beside her riper one. Her lover allowed her to hold him on her breast. She buoyed him up on that dark sea. He floated in it, a human body, soothed by a mystery which was more than he could attempt to solve.

Afterwards as he lay, pushing the wet hair back from her temples, he said to her, "Perhaps you won, Ruth. I dunno how."

She did not move, as he continued to stroke her moist skin with the dry, rough skin of his hand.

"I hadn't thoughta gettin' married, but, for that matter, we could," he said. "It'll be tough, though, for both of us."

She began to kiss the back of his hand, so that he had to pull it away.

"Make you a honest woman!" He laughed. "Because, I suppose, by you, it is a sin, eh?"

"Both of us has sinned," she said, with a dreamy tenderness which at the same time filled her with horror.

She sat up, and the little pearls of sweat ran down between her skin and her chemise towards the pit of her conscience. She sat up straight, and the darkness could have been a board at her back, of the hard pew. Hard words came up out of her memory, of condemnation, in the voices of old men assured of their own salvation.

"Both of us! Both of us!" she repeated with shapeless mouth.

But he could not have troubled less.

"Not me!" He laughed.

Again he touched her thigh, and the terrible and lovely part was that she now allowed him. She rested her head against him, and even her tears were a sensation of voluptuous fulfilment.

"But I would bear all your sins, Tom, if it was necessary. Oh, I would bear them," she said, "and more."

That made him leave off. He was almost frightened by what he meant to her.

"I don't see," he complained, "why you gotta take on so, not when you got the conditions you wanted."

But he, of course, was not to know what she had forfeited.

"No," she said. "I won't take on. We must go now, though. Give me your hand up."

Very early she had sensed that her love was on two planes, one of which he might never reach.

They began to walk back. Once or twice she had to stifle something rising in her full throat, once or twice she dared to look up, half expecting sentence to be passed in letters of stars.

Soon after, the parlourmaid mentioned to the cook--it could not be avoided forever--that she was going to get married.

"To Tom Godbold, the iceman," she had to admit.

"Well," said Ethel, "you
will
_ be finding out!"

Contrary to the cook's expectations, the iceman himself referred frequently to the promise he was supposed to have made.

"And will he be keeping both of you out of the ice-delivery wages?" she asked of the prospective bride, hoping that she might receive an answer to colour her visions of a pitiful existence.

"Oh, no," Ruth replied. "He is giving that up. We are going to live at a place called Sarsaparilla. It is on the outskirts. Tom is going in with a mate of his who is a carrier."

"These mates!" Ethel said.

But it all seemed to be settled, and it became necessary to tell the mistress. Who knew already, of course.

Recently Mrs Chalmers-Robinson had been enjoying every opportunity to exercise her intuition on what might be happening to her friends. Since her husband had got into financial difficulties, there were few who did not respect her feelings by avoiding her. It was as if it had been agreed amongst her acquaintance that she was far too ill to receive visits. Certainly some gift, if not sincerity, is required to transpose the witty tunes of light friendship into a key appropriate to crisis, and lacking that gift, or virtue, the ladies would glance into shop windows, or cross the street, on observing the object of their embarrassment approach. Jinny Chalmers painted on a redder mouth, and studied Science. Once or twice she was also seen dining with her husband at expensive restaurants, but everybody of experience knew how to interpret that. The Chalmers-Robinsons were convening a meeting, as it were, in a public place, where each would be protected to some extent from the accusations of the other, while considering what next.