Riders in the Chariot (9 page)

But the mere idea was preposterous.

One steamy morning in summer, at the time of year when the whole world was living palpably under grass, in a crushing scent of crushed grass, in a mercilessly gentle murmuring of doves, Mary Hare rose up, actually, visibly, out of her father's thoughts. At one of those moments when two people would give their souls to escape each other, neither could begin. There she was, rooted in his path, where it led beneath the camphor laurels, and meandered on into the yard.

"You, Mary!" exclaimed Norbert Hare, the sharp corners of his mouth outlined in dry, white salt.

There was no need for him to give further expression to his feelings.

Of course, she could not answer. She stood and twisted a stalk of grass.

A trick of light had endowed her with what could have been a shadow of beauty under the old goffered bonnet she was wearing: a country beauty, botched and brown, and quickly gone. But her father would not allow. He might have been denying the possibility for years, for now he said, from a long way off, but very distinctly, as some sounds will convey themselves in a stillness and from a distance, "Ugly as a foetus. Ripped out too soon."

Then their emotions were whirling, the spokes of whitest light smashing, the hooks grappling together, hatefully.

The sweat was running down her body, she could feel, in molten streams. She caught sight of his tightening mouth, and his throat strung with gristle.

"If you think we cannot put an end to it! But I am the one to choose!"

Whether she had heard this as she was walking away, she had never been quite certain; perhaps she would have liked to hear it.

But a stench was rising from the flesh of bruised grass. She was being surely suffocated under a pall of leaves.

Till his great voice began to call through a megaphone of stone.

She went back then, and realizing that it came from the cistern, looked in to see him treading water. The hair hung above his eyes in a straight, black, wet fringe. His eyes were awful--very pale, and far-seeing--as his voice, under the influence of cold and fear, continued to reproduce a desperate glug-glug of water. How cold the water was she could remember from once dipping her hand, in time of drought, into a bucketful a gardener had drawn up.

And now her father.

"Get something, Mar-y!" Her dream seemed to be giving tongue. "Someone!"

At the same time it sounded silly. He was like some spaniel thrown in against its will, and whose genuine dog-tragedy appeared to be drowning in comical acts.

She ran, though. She got a pole; it was an old, bleached clothesprop. She stood above him, away up, in the light, on the rim of the cistern.

Then he appeared more afraid than before, as if she were looking truly monstrous from that height and angle, as she held the pole towards him.

He was crying now, like a little boy, out of pale, wet mouth.

"Someone!" he was crying. "Mary! Don't! Have some pity! For God's sake! Run!"

Although rigid, her pole was merciful, but he warded it off with his hands, which were blue, she observed, and he would bob under, and return, each time his deathly fringe falling into place again on his forehead.

So she gathered up her dress at last, holding it bundled over her stomach, and ran, by whatever made her. She was two beings.

She ran through the deserted morning. It laid clammy hands upon her. She fell once, bumping along gravel. The house could have been a shell from which even the echo of distance had withdrawn. The little frail parasols, which protected the complexions of the roses, were on that morning untended by the second gardener.

By the time Mary Hare fetched William Hadkin and a boy, it was plain her father's folly had caught up with him; regret was of no assistance. He was gone by then. A frog plopped. A leaf fluttered, floated. When they finally dredged him up from under the black water, his pale eyes looked fearfully at those who had failed to rescue him, and for the first time the daughter realized how very similar his expression was to one of her own.

After that, Sarsaparilla learned how Norbert Hare had fallen into the tank at Xanadu. Although those who pulled him out said they would have taken a bet he had jumped, and others had even begun to consider whether--but that would have been uncharitable, not to say unthinkable. So there the matter rested, or was hushed up, rather, for the sake of a proper funeral.

At first the widow was not expected to recover from her grief. Or was it shock?

"How I feel for your poor mother!" said Mrs Jolley. "Even now. Even after she has passed on. Only one who has been a wife and mother can ever fully sympathize."

"There are those who believe that they, and only they, can understand a dog."

"I beg yours?" asked Mrs Jolley.

"Nothing," replied Miss Hare, and laughed into her cup. "We were talking about my mother. She felt for herself, I think. More than enough."

"You are a hard one!"

"I was hardened.

"But not all hard," added the blotchy woman, after a second's thought, and softer. "Or I would be dead of it."

"Well, I never!"

"Oh, there is a great deal that I truly, truly love."

"Are you a Christian?"

"Ah," sighed Miss Hare. "It would not be for me to say, even if I understood exactly what that means."

"I am," said Mrs Jolley. "I attended the C. of E. ever since I was a kiddy."

And would batter somebody to prove it.

"I mean," persisted the housekeeper, "didn't anybody bother with your religious education?"

Miss Hare was too embarrassed to answer.

"So as you can believe. You do believe in
something
_, don't you?"

Miss Hare hesitated. Then she said, very slowly, "I believe. I cannot tell you what I believe in, any more than what I am. It is too much. I have no proper gift. Of words, I mean. Oh, yes, I believe! I believe in what I see, and what I cannot see. I believe in a thunderstorm, and wet grass, and patches of light, and stillness. There is such a variety of good. On earth. And everywhere."

"But what is over it?" Mrs Jolley had to burst out.

"That!" Miss Hare cried. "That! I would rather you did not ask me about such things."

She had got up, and was swaying and trembling, so that Mrs Jolley became afraid. How she hated that blotchy face. Just supposing it had a fit!

"I am sorry I started all this if it is too much for you," the housekeeper said, very firmly, not looking any more, and controlling her voice.

"Oh, no," breathed Miss Hare.

And went away.

Mrs Jolley listened, hoping she might hear a body fall. She hoped Miss Hare might die, even. Then all that was bright and solid, all that was known and vouched-for must prevail.

So Mrs Jolley rushed at the oven, to bake a cake, although it was not a day of celebration, but she liked to bake, a pink cake for choice, with nonpareils and something written on it. With the Mothers' Union and the Ladies' Guild, with the Fellowships Senior and Junior, pink was always popular, and what is popular is safe.

Mrs Jolley sang and baked. She loved to sing the pinker hymns. She would even sing those of which she did not know the words. She sang and baked. And saw pink. She loved the Jesus Christ of long pink face and languid curls, in words and windows. All was right then. All the homes and kiddies saved. All was sanctified by cake.

At Xanadu the great kitchen almost cracked black open.

Mrs Jolley sang and baked. Brick by brick her edifice rose, but a nice sandwich, of course. Round. Whereas it was the square brick homes which she celebrated. And populated. With her mind she placed the ladies and the kiddies--not so many gentlemen--as if they had been sandwich flags: the little girls, with their fresh frocks and tiny rings and vanity bags; the lovely little boys, with freckles and quiffs, and teeth that too much cake had destroyed. Mrs Jolley sang and praised. To destroy or to save was the same when you had paid the premium.

As the time approached to ice her cake, the smell of delicious baking and support of family morality had made this woman strong. So she must remain; it was only nerves that had caused her to falter a moment, and the company of that poor dill.

Ah, dear, you had to laugh, though!

When Miss Hare returned, Mrs Jolley had burst open. Her white teeth were gashing the kitchen.

"Will you share the joke?" asked the mistress.

"Would I share!" Mrs Jolley rocked.

Until Miss Hare had to smile in self-defence.

"Ah, dear, I am bad!" Mrs Jolley cried, and laughed. "That is what I am!"

She looked at Miss Hare. If she had not been breathless, she would have blown down the whole dusty house of cards on the owner's head, and walked away into the perspective of certainty.

4

AT WHAT stage she had begun to fear Mrs Jolley, Miss Hare was not sure, though she thought it probably dated from the morning when the housekeeper had presented her with a pink cake, and on it written, really most beautifully, in fancy script: FOR A BAD GIRL "What a beautiful cake!" Miss Hare had exclaimed, with something like horror.

"I would not claim to be artistic if my son-in-law, the stoker--he is the husband of Elma, the youngest--had not told me that I was," Mrs Jolley replied.

But she coughed for decency's sake.

"You must not mind the joke," she added. "Two ladies living together should cultivate a sense of humour."

As she watched her employer, the milky dimple was in its place.

"Oh, how I agree!"

Miss Hare laughed, and her right leg stiffened as she kicked the kitchen flags with her heel.

Then Mrs Jolley lowered her eyelids.

Yes, it was from the moment Mrs Jolley lowered her eyelids that Miss Hare had begun to feel afraid. Of course, she did not fear for her person. She could come to no physical harm; she was too old, too ugly, too poor, too unimportant in anybody's life. But she did sense some danger to the incorporeal, the more significant part of her. Time and isolation had rendered this, she had felt until now, practically indestructible. Even history, wars had not coerced her inner being. Except for her relationship with her father, the brief unpleasantness with William Hadkin, and the death of her poor goat, she had had little experience of evil. Newspapers she never read; living, not reading about it, had been her life. So the world had revolved on the axis with which she had provided it, until Mrs Jolley brought the virtues to Xanadu.

Days after the lettering had been consumed, Miss Hare was haunted by the pink cake. She must, she
would
_ understand it, though there were pockets of thought which her mind refused to enter, like those evil thickets in which might be found little, agonizing tufts of fur, broken swallows' eggs, or a goat's rational skull.

How much Mrs Jolley knew, it was difficult to tell. She would lower her eyelids and go disguised. There was always the veil of conversation--Miss Hare dreaded it most of all: the piles of brick that Mrs Jolley built to house her family in, the red brick boxes increasing and encroaching, the sons-in-law, all substantial men, it appeared, straining at their clothing, mopping up their gravy before they retired to the pleasures of chenille and silky oak. And the children: too good, too clean, too nice--too bad, in fact.

Nothing but faith could have resisted such very material opposition, and Miss Hare did have hers, to revive which she would run off into the bush, and after picking up the crystal thread, follow it over pebbles. Each pool would reveal its relevant mystery, of which she herself was never the least. Finally she would be renewed. Returning by a different way, she would recognize the Hand in every veined leaf, and would bundle with the bee into the divine Mouth. If she no longer raised her eyes to the evening sky, it was because she had not yet recovered all her strength. Morning is for the weaker souls; in that she walked gratefully, and not without considerable deep knowledge.

On such a morning, of confusion and solution, she found herself closer to the dark man than she had ever been before. Already she had come across this person once or twice on the roads round Sarsaparilla, although she gathered from the Godbold children that he lived somewhere at Barranugli.

He was an abo, or something, Else, the eldest Godbold,
thought
_.

He could be a Syrian, or Indian, or a sort of gypsy, Gracie shouted.

Maudie yelled that Gracie did not know a thing.

Anyway, Saturday, the black got drunk, and was laying in the nettles, Kate knew for certain.

Else shushed her sister.

It was Maudie who added the only sober, factual information. He worked at the place that made the bicycle lamps, where their dad had gone for a bit, until he got fed up--Rosetree's factory, just outside of Barranugli. Maudie had seen the black knocking off along with the other men. He was carrying his tucker bag, and a big, square piece of board, she had wondered for what.

There were six Godbolds, all girls, some of whom could usually be seen in the scrub round Xanadu, lugging a puppy, or nursing a bird, and intent on business of their own. In one way and another the Godbold girls knew a lot. Their bodies and the soles of their feet were hard, and their minds, on the whole, sensible.

That they were not better informed on the subject of Miss Hare's black was rather surprising, though Miss Hare herself was not surprised, nor would she have wished it otherwise, for she respected privacy. Seldom did she meet human beings, and those she did, she would not know how to address. She preferred to peer at them through leaves, when she herself was practically reduced to light and shadow. Then, at last, she was truly in her element.

So she would peer out at her dark man on those occasions when he walked through the lanes which ran past Xanadu. Once she had entered through his eyes, and at first glance recognized familiar furniture, and once again she had entered in, and their souls had stroked each other with reassuring feathers, but very briefly, for each had suddenly taken fright. From then on, they had been inclined to avoid each other, until on that specific morning, not long after Miss Hare's trial by Mrs Jolley had begun, the dark person actually spoke.