Patrick White - Riders in the Chariot

THAT SUMMER the structure of Xanadu, which had already entered into a conspiracy with nature, opened still farther. Creatures were admitted that had never been inside before, and what had hitherto appeared to be a curtain, loosely woven of light and leaves, was, in fact, seen to be a wall. That which had been hung for privacy, might in the end, it now seemed, stand solider than the substance of stone and mortar which it had been its duty to conceal. One Tuesday afternoon, while Mrs Jolley was gone on an errand, of which the end was terribly suspicious, and while Miss Hare herself was walking through the great rooms, for no other purpose than to associate with the many objects and images with which they and her memory were stuffed full, the brindled woman thought she had begun to hear a sound. From where she listened it was faint but sure, although whether it was coming from a great depth, or horizontal distance, it was quite impossible to tell. It was all around and under her: the grey sound that is given out by tunnels, and the mouths of elephants, and sleepers turning in a dream, and earth falling in a veil from a considerable height. As soon as Miss Hare began to suspect, she held her fingers in her ears. As if that might stop it. Though she knew it would not. For she, too, was rocking and trembling. She had always imagined that, when it happened, it would come as a blast of trumpets, or the shudder of a bronze gong, with herself the core of the vibrating metal. But here it was, little more than a sighing of dust, and at the end, the sound of a large, but unmistakable bone which had given way under pressure. (She had always cried and protested when men were breaking the necks of rabbits, as she waited for the final sound of cracking.) Then it was over. And she had survived. Perhaps Xanadu had not yet fallen. At once Miss Hare began to run through her house to discover to what extent it had suffered. She was quite demented. Although shadow prevailed in the shuttered rooms, a yellow, rubbery light would belly suddenly out through the glass panels of some of the doors, and her figure flickered fearfully. She was more than ever striped, brown, or red, with patches of a clown's white, as she ran to catch the proud spirit, that had fallen, that could still, she hoped, be falling from the height of the trapeze. She ran helter-skelter, and her stumpy, rather grubby fingers were stretched out, tighter than nets. But small. In the drawing-room she found the first serious evidence of damage-in the drawing-room in which ladies in openwork dresses had accepted tea in Lowestoft cups, and told stories of the voyage out, and dancers had rested between waltzes, on the worn step that leads to matrimony, and her parents had failed to escape each other by hiding behind objects of virtu. It was on the drawing-room side that the foundations of Xanadu were now undeniably, visibly sunk. Where there had been a fissure before, where no more than a branch had been able to finger its way inside, a whole victorious segment of light had replaced the solid plaster and stone. Leaves were plapping and hesitating, advancing and retreating, in whispers and explosions of green. Walls were revealed mottled with chlorosis. The scurf of moss had fallen from an oaken shoulder onto the rags of Italian damask. And dust, dust. There was a newer kind, the colour of familiar biscuit, yet smelling of concealment and age. Now spilled freshly out. It lay on the boards together with the grey domestic dust, a thin bed for some future crumbling of stone. Miss Hare stood looking. Then she picked up a fragment of her house, just about the size of a fist, and threw it at a malachite urn which had been her parents' pride. The moment of impact, however, was somewhat disappointing. The sound it produced was even dull: almost that of a stone striking on composition, or wood. Yet, the urn had been genuinely mineral-so cold, and dense, and unresponsive-her skin had always assured her as a child, as well as on lonely occasions in after life. Her mouth, which was working to solve, suddenly subsided on the teeth. All problems had always given way to birds, and here were several, aimed practically at her. Released from the tapestry of light and leaves, the birds whirred and wheeled into life inside the burst drawing-room. What kind, Miss Hare could not have told; names were not of interest. But the plump, shiny, maculated birds, neither black nor grey, but of a common bird colour, were familiar as her own instinct for air and twigs. And one bird touched her deeply, clinging clumsily to a cornice. Confusion had robbed it of its grace, making it a blunt thing, of ruffled gills. From far below, the woman willed the frightened creature back into its element, where the reunited formation completed a figure to the approving motions of her head. She watched them quiver for an instant in flight, wired, it appeared, for inclusion in the museum of her mind. But they were gone, of course. She was left with the shimmer of brocaded light that hung upon the rent in the wall. So Miss Hare, too, went at last, nodding her papier-mâche head. She became her most clumsily obscene whenever she ceased to control her own movements, as now, when she was moved, rather, through the wretched house, as much her doom as her property. So she loomed on the stairs, and in unaccountable passages. Pierced by the anxious brooches that barely held the skin together, the folds of her throat were choking her. Her ankles were elephantine in their plodding. She trailed a sad bladder, filled with the heaviest, coldest sand. Mrs Jolley, when she returned, found her employer occupied with the jigsaw pieces of a bathroom floor. "This is where you are!" the housekeeper exclaimed, as if it had not been obvious. She was angry, but intended to be cold and firm. Miss Hare also was trusting to appearance to hide her true state, of despondency and fear. At least she had the advantage of being seated on the floor, beneath her protective wicker hat. "Why shouldn't I be here?" she answered calmly. "Or there? Or anywhere?" "I have never seen this room before," complained Mrs Jolley, inspecting her surroundings. Miss Hare produced a key: black, of elegant design. "There was no reason why you should have. This was my parents' bathroom. I had almost forgotten about it myself. It was considered very lovely. Italian workmen came to make it." "Gingerbread!" Mrs Jolley snorted. "Give me modern plumbing!" "Oh, plumbing!" said Miss Hare. "That is a different matter." She had begun to feel tired. "Everyone will have plumbing soon. They will be flushed right out." "What is that thing?" Mrs Jolley asked, and pointed with her toe at the part of the floor with which her employer had been occupied. "I would prefer not to say," Miss Hare replied. Then Mrs Jolley laughed. Because she knew. "It is a goat," she said, perverting the word softly in her mouth. "What a decoration for a person's bathroom! A black goat! looking at you!" "No," said Miss Hare, with a firm movement of her jaw, "it would not appeal to you. Goats are perhaps the animals which see the truth most clearly." Mrs Jolley could not control her irritation. In fact, where her toe struck the mosaic, there was a rush of loose tesserae across the uneven surface of the floor. "Oh, I know!" she cried. "You have to throw up at me, don't you, on account of that old goat of yours. The one that got burnt. That you told me of. And nobody to blame." Miss Hare was soothing the scattered tesserae with her freckled hand. "Have you ever seen an armadillo?" she asked. "No." Mrs Jolley was very angry. "Perhaps you have, though, and don't know it!" Miss Hare laughed. "What," asked Mrs Jolley, "is an armerdiller?" "It is an animal which, I believe, is practically invulnerable. It _can__ be _killed__, of course. Anything can be _killed__. Because I once saw an armadillo that somebody had made into a basket." Then she looked up at her companion with such an expression that the latter attempted afterwards to describe it to Mrs Flack. "I know nothing about any such things," the housekeeper said rather primly. "And don't like saucy answers, particularly from those who I have obliged." Miss Hare was filling her pockets with the fragments of mosaic. "Have you engaged a strong boy to carry your box?" she asked. "Then there is no need to tell you!" said Mrs Jolley. But was taken aback. And, as a lady of principle, had to defend herself. "Yes," she said. "I have decided to terminate my service. You cannot expect me," she said, "to risk my neck in a house that is falling down." "You have seen it, then? The drawing-room?" "I'll say I have!" "Perhaps even foresaw-to have made your arrangements in advance, on the very afternoon!" Miss Hare laughed. Momentarily she seemed to have recovered her balance. The pocketfuls of tesserae rattled jollily when slapped. She had never cared for sweets, but would often suck a smooth pebble. "I don't propose to become involved in arguments," Mrs Jolley announced. "I am giving notice. That is all. Though have never done so in a bathroom. That is"-she stumbled-"I mean to say I have never been compelled to discuss matters of importance in any sort of a convenience." Miss Hare began to scramble up. "You will go, I suppose, to Mrs Flack." Mrs Jolley blushed. "For the time being," she admitted. "For life, I expect," Miss Hare murmured. Mrs Jolley hesitated. "It is very comfortable," she said. But did falter slightly. "What makes you say," she asked, "you speak as if"-she raised her voice-"as if I was not my own mistress." Miss Hare, who had arranged her crumpled skirt, was looking, not at Mrs Jolley. "There is a point," she said, "where we do not, cannot move any farther. There is a point at which there is no point. Who knows, perhaps you have reached it. And your friend is so kind. And her eiderdown, you say, is pale blue." "But it may suit me to move," Mrs Jolley insisted, stretching her neck. "You will see no more in other parts-I know because they took me as a girl-than you will from Mrs Flack's. And through Mrs Flack's eyes. The two of you will sit in Mrs Flack's _lounge__, watching us behave. Even directing us." "Have you met her?" "No. But I know her." "You have seen her at the post-office, perhaps?" "Not to my knowledge," Miss Hare replied. "I have seen her in the undergrowth. But you do not go there, of course. Amongst the black sods of rotting leaves. And in the ruins of the little shed in which my poor goat got burnt up. And in my father's eyes. All bad things have a family resemblance, Mrs Jolley, and are easily recognizable. I would recognize Mrs Flack however often she changed her hat. I can smell her when you do not mention her by name." Mrs Jolley had begun by now to leave the bathroom. Although she had arranged for her belongings to be fetched, she had till the following day to put in. If only she could think of some temporary occupation of a known and mechanical kind. In her distraction, she was reiterating, "Mad! Mad!" To preserve her own sanity. "A sad, bad word." Miss Hare sighed. They were walking down the passages in single file. "Because it leaves out half," she added. They were always walking, with Mrs Jolley at the head, with a careful nonchalance, in case the runners should slip from under them. "All right, then," Mrs Jolley gasped. "You can let me alone, though. We could trot out words till the Judgment, and not get anywhere at all. I am going to my room, thank you." But Miss Hare could not tear herself away. She was not so good that she was not fascinated by bad. If they had come across a dead baby lying on that window-sill, she would not have asked herself the reason why, before she had examined the little crimped fingers and limp-violet attitude. She would probably have touched it to see whether it felt of rubber. Only afterwards she would have realized that she, too, had escaped strangling by a miracle. But now they were walking and walking through the passages of Xanadu, and Mrs Jolley's behind was quaking visibly. It seemed as though her corset could do nothing more for her. "And so soft at times," Miss Hare meditated. And pursued. "Soft what?" Mrs Jolley's breath was sucked right in. She would not turn, though. "Eiderdowns," Miss Hare clattered. "Evil, evil eiderdowns!" Rounding a corner Mrs Jolley realized she had overshot the flight of stairs which led higher to her room. And here were the passages of Xanadu, endless before her. Almost at the same moment a pampas wand struck her on the mouth, from a console table, as they passed, and immediately she was turned to stone. But running, running. Her cold, stone legs must never stop. "If you must keep on about evil," she called back, her voice close to brass, or laughter, "I can remind you of some of the things that go on in this town, to say nothing of house. Or _orchard__!" She almost screeched, and her skirt too. While Miss Hare appeared to move on pads of kapok. Or else it was the dust from which the carpets were never free. "I am not surprised," Miss Hare gasped at last. "That you found out. One did expect." "And with a dirty Jew!" Miss Hare was red rage itself. She could not see for the sense of injustice which was rising green out of her. Towering in the perpendicular, it burst into a flower of sparks, like some obscene firework released from the dark of memory. "My _what__ Jew?" The words were choking. "Dirty? What is true, then? My kind man! My good! Then I am offal, offal! Green, putrefying, out of old, starved sheep. Worse, worse! Though not so bad as some. Offal is cleaner than dishonest women. What is lowest of all? You could tell me! Some women! Lower, even. Some women's shit!" So her memory spat, and the brown word plastered the accuser's back. Mrs Jolley, of course, could only stop her ears with the wax of unbelief. When she had opened them again, her white lips pissed back, "Who did the Jews crucify?" "The Jew!" Miss Hare panted. "I know that. Because Peg used to tell me. It was horrible. And blood running out of his hands, and down his poor side. I have never allowed myself to think about it." In the absence of what she might have kissed, she crammed her knuckles into her mouth. If all the windows had shattered, and the splinters entered her, she could have borne that. But just then, Mrs Jolley fell down. There was a little flight of two or three steps leading to a lower level, and from which a rod had worked loose. Mrs Jolley fell. _Crump__. Miss Hare was left standing on an edge. She looked down at her housekeeper, where the latter lay, a bundle of navy, on the carpet. The skirt had rucked up above the knees, the dimples of which looked white and very silly, for Mrs Jolley, apparently, wore her stockings neatly hoist at half-mast. Miss Hare could have gone on looking at the dimpled knees, but forced herself also to examine the face. The first dreadful, inky blue began slowly to drain away. It left a blank, though trembly blotting-paper. Mrs Jolley was gasping now. The tears ran out of her eyes, although she was not crying. "Oh, dear!" she gasped. "I could have broken something. And perhaps have." "No," said Miss Hare. "You are too well protected. And came down all of a piece." Mrs Jolley remembered, and her hate returned. "You will pay a pretty penny if I have!" she announced as hopefully as she was able. Miss Hare touched with the tip of her toe. "No," she said. "Nothing broken." But she was a little bit frightened. Mrs Jolley moved, and more, she began to heave. She was whimpering windily, but cautiously. "This is what happens to a mother forced by circumstances to live separated from her family. Oh, dear!" But although she had fallen smack, she got almost as quickly up. It was her knees that drove her, her blue-and-white, milky knees. She got up, and was wrapping her skirt closer round them, as if there had been a draught blowing. When she raised her face, it was rather a delicate pink, wasted on Miss Hare. The two women stood facing each other with nothing but their dead passions lying between, nothing to protect them but the sound of their breathing. They could not endure it for very long, but turned, and walked in opposite directions, touching a curtain, a pampas duster, or leaf that had blown in. It was pretty obvious they had decided to pretend nothing had happened-at least for the time being. But, in this matter at least, Miss Hare did not succeed in keeping up the deception. Her blood would float the evidence back in sudden, sickening waves. She heard words like stones battering on her memory. She did not see her housekeeper again, except from a distance. The wages she left on a corner of the kitchen table, under a two-ounce weight, and presumably the amount was correct, for nobody ever complained. On the following afternoon the boy came for Mrs Jolley's belongings. There was such a chatter of relief, such a clatter of self-importance, as the owner ran to arrange, lock, direct. The boy had bony wrists, and swollen veins in his muscular arms. He paused for a moment in the hall, to get his breath and recover from the pressure of embarrassment. The lady had run back up the stairs, to fetch an umberella, she said. He had never set eyes on marble before, only in banks and old washstands. Nor did he dream much, or he might have realized, as he looked about him in the hall, that images and incidents do not depend on probability for life. He was trembling slightly, under the pearls of sweat, particularly after he had touched a square of satin which disintegrated in his hand. That made him breathe harder, out of his arched chest. And when, from another direction, there appeared, sudden like, the madwoman of Xanadu, and asked him to do her the favour, in strictest confidence, of delivering an urgent message to a friend. Miss Hare stood on her toes to make the mission more confidential still. Her throat was bursting with its urgency. Her lips fanned the words upward. The lad gathered she must see that Jew cove from Montebello Avenue, soon, soon, at soonest. He was not, on no account, to tell another soul. For the present, he would have been frightened to. Then Miss Hare handed her messenger a shilling, as she had seen her parents doing. And disappeared. For Mrs Jolley's voice was clearly announcing, in light-coloured accents, the return of Mrs Jolley. It was many a day since Miss Hare had run so fast. She ran and climbed to get there in time, almost breaking her knees open, climbing by handfuls of carpet when her toes missed a stair, climbing, and straining, and arriving at last in the little glass dome which had been her father's especial eyrie. Then, venturing out upon a parapet, she peered through a stone balustrade. Here she was, exalted above her late misery and terror. And there, there was Mrs Jolley, distorted by distance and the angle, into a squat navy figure. How her gay eye-veil gesticulated to the boy who laboured underneath her box, and a case hung from his right arm besides. The mauve veil clapped at a distance, like Mrs Jolley's own tongue extolling the morality of motherhood. Miss Hare's mouth opened, her throat distended. She spat once, and laughed to see it fall, wide, of course, curving in the wind, glittering in the sun. She could have sung for the deliriousness of height, the clarity of light. All hers. Until the stanched terrors came seeping back, dressed in the iridescence of slime. Frightful things were threatened, which the Jew, with his experience, might possibly avert. She, in her state of almost complete ignorance, could only undertake to suffer, enough, if necessary, for both of them. So her joy was turned to foreboding. The stone house rocked, and the trees which hid the brick homes of Sarsaparilla. She hung on to the balustrade, sweating at the knees as she tried to reconstruct in physical detail the expression of lovingkindness, to recall its even subtler abstract terms. That alone might save, if it were not obliterated first by conspiracy of evil minds. So she waited. Wherever she spent the rest of the afternoon, walking through her house, or in the garden-at least there was earth on her shoes, and on her scabby hands, and on her skirt a fringe of burrs-Miss Hare could not have mapped her course with any degree of accuracy. But the Jew did come. Late in the afternoon she realized he was walking towards her, through the long, treacly grass, out of the chocked garden. As he climbed the slope, it was not his face that he presented, but the top of his head, with its wings of difficult hair, grizzled, but still thick. Some might have described that hair as matted, and they would have been correct. He must, indeed, have set out immediately on arriving home. He was wearing a kind of boiler-suit which he could only have bought at an army disposal store, and which no doubt he wore to his work at the factory. The suit was too big, the stuff too dun, too coarse. It was chafing him, she began to see, around the neck. It was a skinny, scraggy neck. But she remembered this was an elderly man, who had suffered great privations, and who had been worn down still further by the accumulation of knowledge. So Miss Hare reassured herself, not without a tremor, holding up his frail elderliness against what she knew of the brutality of men. He continued to advance. Once or twice he stumbled, when the grass made loops for him to slip his ankles into, and as he lurched-it was inevitable in such circumstances-his great head tumbled and jerked on his shoulders like that of a human being. The mistress of Xanadu moistened her lips as she waited. She was so brittle herself, it was doubtful whether such another should be added to the collection. Perhaps that gave her just the extra courage needed to receive him as her mother might have, upon the steps. But her mother had enjoyed full possession of that social and economic faith on which the stone mansions are built, whereas in the daughter's worst dreams those foundations were already sunk; only her faith in light and leaves remained to hold the structure up. Whether the Jew would accept the house as reality or myth, depended not a little on whether a divine intuition, which she hoped, insisted, _knew__ him to possess, would inform mere human vision. Actually the Jew had raised his head. He was looking at her. She saw his face then, and he had not shaved, as some men did not, of course, preferring to tidy themselves at night. He was old and ravaged under the stubble. He was old, and green, of a pale, a livid soap-colour. He was hideous and old, the Jew. So that her own face crumpled, which she had been careful to spread over a framework of expectation. A gust of wind could have blown her, rattling, across the terrace. But unmercifully refrained. Then she realized that his eyes were expecting something of her. And she immediately remembered. She hurried down the steps, too quickly for anyone who had been restored suddenly to life-she might have taken a tumble-yet not quick enough for one who recognized that same lovingkindness which might redeem, not only those in whom its lamp stood, but all those who were threatened with darkness. What was oddest, though, the Jew appeared to rediscover something he had known and respected. His expression was so convinced, she was almost compelled to look behind her, in search of some more tangible reason. If she did not, it could have been because she had finally descended. She was standing beside him on the level ground, and the situation seemed to demand that exchange of flatnesses, biscuits rather than oxygen, by which people mostly exist. "Oh," she gasped, and began to crumble words, "I am so sorry. Such an inconvenience. Bringing you, I mean. Like this." "It is no inconvenience," he replied, in the strain that had been established. "It was only fortunate that Bob Tanner caught me so soon after I got off the bus." "Bob Tanner?" "The boy who gave the message." "Oh," she said, thoughtfully, "I did not know there was anyone called Tanner." She sank her chin in. If it had been evening, she might have done something with a fan-if she had had one. But there was only that old flamingo horror of her mother's, so hateful since Mrs Jolley had touched it, and provoked an incident. He was looking at her. He was waiting. But she remembered hearing it was vulgar and inept to bring people straight to the point. So she offered graciously, "I can see the journey has tired you. I insist that you come in. I shall make you rest for a little. You may like to tell me about your work." "It is the same," he said. "Oh, no," she replied, after careful consideration. "Nothing is ever the same." "You have not been engaged in boring a hole in a sheet of steel." "Why must you do just that?" It was time, she suspected, to lead him in. Their heels crunched as they turned on what had once been the gravel drive. Her occupation was making her feel kind and adult. "It is a discipline," he explained, "without which my mind might take its own authority for granted. As it did, in fact, in the days when it was allowed freedom. And grew arrogant. And in that arrogance was guilty of omissions." Miss Hare shivered, as if he had robbed her of her years. "I never could bear discipline. Governesses!" she complained. "It is fortunate I have not got what is called a mind." "You have an instinct." She smiled. She was quite proud. "Is that what it is?" she considered. "I do know a lot. About some things." They had mounted the terrace. "That light, for instance. Those two shiny leaves lying together on the twig. That sort of thing I know and understand. But will it do anybody any good? And your sitting and boring the silly old hole?" "Yes," he answered. "Eventually." They were standing together on the terrace. "It is not yet obvious," he said, "but will be made clear, how we are to use our knowledge, what link we provide in the chain of events." The hour sounded inside the house. The winding of that particular clock had been Mrs Jolley's last attempt to preserve continuity, such as she understood it, at Xanadu. The chiming reminded Miss Hare of her real purpose in sending for the Jew, so she began to wrap her hands in each other. She said, "I am here alone now. Which makes it easier to receive, and discuss. My housekeeper left me, you know, this afternoon. Before that, one never could be certain at what point she might burst into one's thoughts. She had no respect for the privacy of other people's minds. But was always opening, or looking out from behind curtains. Not that she _saw__! I do not think Mrs Jolley sees beyond texture-brick and plastic." Miss Hare had continued to lead her visitor, so that by now they had crossed the threshold, and were actually standing in the house. Out of the corner of her eye, the throbbing beauty of the hall, with its curved staircase and the fragments of a bird's nest, told her of her great courage in attempting to reveal the truth to a second person, even this Jew, after her experience with someone else. Of course the Jew had to look; he was also human. His head was turning on his scraggy neck. His nostrils, she saw, were remarkably fine, in spite of the very pronounced nose. "Extraordinary!" he said. She heard at least that, but did not feel she would attempt to interpret the accompanying smile. "Oh, there is a lot," she said. "I shall show you in time." "But are you not overwhelmed," he asked, "by living here?" "I have always lived here. What is there to overwhelm me?" Fascinated by what he saw, his answer slipped out from behind his usually careful lips. "Its desolation." The heavy word tolled through marble. "You, too!" she cried. "Do you only see what is in front of you?" He threw back his head, it might have been defensively. His laughter sounded quite metallic. "God forbid!" he said. "I could have died of that!" Then he looked at her very closely, following, as it were, in the lines of her face, the thread of his own argument. "It is only that I have grown used to living in a small wooden house, Miss Hare. I chose it purposely. Very fragile and ephemeral. I am a Jew, you see." She did not see why that condition, whatever it was, might not be shared. She felt the spurt of jealousy. She snorted, and began to suck the hot, rubbery lumps of her exasperated lips. "Almost a booth," he continued. "Which the wind may blow down, when one has closed the door for the last time, and moved on to another part of the desert." She hated to contemplate it. "That," she protested, "is morbid." He was looking at her intently, and with the greatest amusement. "It is only realistic to accept what history has proved. And we do not die of it. Even though his limbs may be lopped off from time to time, the Jew cannot die." He persisted in looking at her, as if determined to discover something in hiding behind her face. Could it have been he was sorry for her? When they were sharpening their knives for _him__? When he was the one deserving of pity? Some people, it was true, and more especially those endowed with brilliance, were dazzled by their minds into a state of false security. Unlike animals, for instance. Animals, she well knew, peered out perpetually into what was still to be experienced. So that again she grew agitated. "I must tell you," she almost gasped. In quite a flurry, she had led him into the little sitting-room to which she had retired with her mother the night of the false suicide. Such was her haste on the present occasion, the door would have banged behind them, if it had not decided many years before that it was never again intended to close. It was too stiff. Like the kind of hard _causeuse__ on which she seated herself with her guest, and of which the hospitality had remained strictly theoretical even in the palmy days. There they were, though. After she had looked round, Miss Hare managed, painfully, "I am afraid for you." And did the most extraordinary thing. She took the Jew's hand in her freckled, trembling ones. What she intended to do with it was not apparent to either of them, for they were imprisoned in an attitude. She sat holding the hand as if it had been some thing of value found in the bush: a polished stone, of curious veins, or one of the hooded ground-orchids, or knot of wood, which time, weather, and disease, it was suggested, had related to human disasters. Only the most exquisite sensation destroyed the detached devotion which Miss Hare would normally have experienced on being confronted with such rare matter. "Anybody's life is threatened with a certain amount of hazard," the few answered seriously, after he had recovered with an effort from hilarious surprise, and a thought so obscene he was humiliated for the capacity of his own mind. Miss Hare sat making those little noises of protest reminiscent of frogs and leather. "Clever people," she was saying, "are the victims of words." She herself could have dwindled into a marvellous silence, her body slipping from her, or elongated into such shapes of love and music as she had only noticed long ago in dancers, swaying and looking, no more governed by precept or reason, but by some other lesson which the flesh might at any moment remember, at the touch of peacock feathers. Miss Hare had to glance at her companion to see whether he could be aware that her limbs were, in fact, so long and lovely, and her conical white breasts not so cold as they had been taught to behave unless offered the excuse of music. But the Jew had set himself to observe the strange situation in which his hand had become involved. And at the same time he was saying, "I agree that intellect can be a serious handicap. There are moments when I like to imagine I have overcome it." Then, as the wrinkles gathered at the corners of his mouth: "It is most salutary that you and the drill at which I spend my working life should disillusion me from time to time." He accused with a kindliness, even sweetness, which made her almost throw away the hand. Her evanescent beauty was lit with the little mirrors of fury, before it was destroyed. Which it was, of course. Her condition could not have been less obvious than the sad rags of old cobwebs hanging from a cornice. "Oh," she cried, her mouth full of tears and pebbles, "I am not interested in you! Not what you are, think, feel. I am only concerned for your safety. I am responsible for you!" she gasped. In her anxiety, her tormented skin began to chafe the hand. Whether she had suspected a moment before, probably for the first and only time, what it was to be a woman, her passion was more serious, touching, urgent now that she had been reduced to the status of a troubled human being. Although they continued to sit apart on the terribly formal furniture, it was this latest metamorphosis which brought the two closest together. Himmelfarb stirred inside the aggressive, and in no way personal boiler-suit. After clearing his throat, he asked, "Is there any concrete evidence of danger?" If he played for time, and ignored the last dictates of repulsion which might advise him to withdraw his hand, he could perhaps persuade her into telling him the most secret hiding places. "Concrete? You should know that real danger never begins by being concrete!" Yes, indeed. He could not deny that. When she had recovered from the spasm of exasperation which caused her to jerk, almost to twist the unbelievably passive hand, she began a long, dry, but important, because undoubtedly rehearsed, passage of recitative: "I was going to make a proposal. No. What am I saying? Offer a proposition? It has occurred to me on and off, only there were always too many obstacles. And even now it could sound silly. I mean, it might appear distasteful. But it is what Peg-the old servant-would have called practical. (If only Peg were here, it would be so much easier for all of us.) To cut matters short-because that is necessary since certain things have happened-I want to suggest that you should come here, well, to live." Purposely, she did not look at him, because she would not have cared to witness surprise. "I would hide you," she continued, with blunt tongue. "There are so many rooms, there would be no necessity to stay very long in any one. Which would add to the chances of your safety." She could feel, through his stillness, that he did accept her motives, while remaining critical of her plan. "It would be wrong of you to hide me," he answered, but gently. "Because I can honestly say I have nothing to hide." "They will not ask themselves that," she said. "Men usually decide to destroy for very feeble reasons. Oh, I know from experience! It can be the weather, or boredom after lunch. They will torture almost to death someone who has seen into them. Even their own dogs." "When the time comes for my destruction," he replied quite calmly and evenly, "it will not be decided by men." "That makes it more frightening!" she cried. And burst suddenly into tears. She was at her ugliest, wet and matted, but any disgust which Himmelfarb might have felt was swallowed up in the conviction that, despite the differences of geography and race, they were, and always had been, engaged on a similar mission. Approaching from opposite directions, it was the same darkness and the same marsh which threatened to engulf their movements, but however lumbering and impeded those movements might be, the precious parcel of secrets carried by each must only be given at the end into certain hands. Although the Jew blundered on towards the frontier through the mist of experience, he emerged at one point, and found himself on the hard _causeuse__ in the little sitting-room at Xanadu. There he roused himself, and touched his fellow traveller, and said, "I am going now. I would like to persuade you that the simple acts we have learnt to perform daily are the best protection against evil." "They are very consoling," she admitted. But sighed. The lovely, tarnished light of evening lay upon the floors. In that light, with each object most emphatically intact for the last moments of the day, Himmelfarb could have forgotten he had ever been forced to interrupt those simple daily acts which he now advocated as a shield. Miss Hare followed him across the hall. "At least I must warn you," she said, "when you go from here, that my former housekeeper, Mrs Jolley, suffers from certain delusions. I do not think she is an active agent. But is under the influence of a Mrs Flack, whom I have never met, only suspect. It could be that Mrs Flack also is innocent. But the most devilish ideas will enter the heads of some women as they sit together in a house at dusk and listen to their stomachs rumble. Well, Mrs Jolley is at present staying with Mrs Flack." "And where do these ladies live?" "Oh, in some street. That is unimportant. I think you mentioned, Mr…" (she was no longer ashamed of her inability to manage a name) "… that we were links in some chain. I am convinced myself that there are two chains. Matched against each other. If Mrs Jolley and Mrs Flack were the only two links in theirs, then, of course, we should have nothing to fear. _But__." She was leading him slowly through the house, which the crimson and gold of evening had dyed with a Renaissance splendour. The marble of a torso and crystal of a chandelier shivered for their own beauty. "Is this the way?" he asked. "I am taking you out through the back," she said. "It is shorter." On the kitchen table a knife lay, it, too, a sliver of light. "I would kill for you, you know," Miss Hare suddenly said. "If it would preserve for us what is right." "Then it would no longer be right." Himmelfarb smiled. He took the knife which she had picked up from the table, and dropped it back into its pool of light. "Its purpose is to cut bread," he said. "An unemotional, though noble one." So that she was quenched, and went munching silence on the last stage to the back door. On the step she stood giving him final directions. The rather dead, soapy face of the man who had come towards her up the hill had been touched into life, by last light, or the mysteries of human intercourse. "You always have to leave me about this time," she meditated, as she stood looking down on him from her step. "There is something secret that you do," she complained, "in your own house. But I am not jealous." "There is nothing secret," he replied. "It is the time of evening when I go to say my prayers." "Oh, _prayers__!" she mumbled. Then: "I have never said any. Except when I was not my own mistress. When I was very young." "But you have expressed them in other ways." She shook that off rather irritably, and might have been preparing something rude, if another thought had not risen to trouble the surface. "Oh, dear, what will save us?" she wondered. Before he could answer, she exclaimed, "Look!" And was shading her eyes from the dazzle of gold. "It was at this time of evening," her mouth gasped, and worked at words, "that I would sometimes feel afraid of the consequences. I would fall down in a fit while the wheels were still approaching. It was too much for anyone so weak. And lie sometimes for hours. I think I could not bear to look at it." "There is no reason why you should not look now." Him-melfarb made an effort. "It is an unusually fine sunset." "Yes," she said. And laughed somewhat privately. "And the grey furrows," she observed, "where the wheels have sunk in. And the little soft feathers of the wheels." Himmelfarb took his leave of the mistress of Xanadu. He was not in a position to dismiss her as a madwoman, as other people did, because of his involvement in the same madness. For now that the tops of the trees had caught fire, the bells of the ambulances were again ringing for him, those of the fire-engines clanging, and he shuddered to realize there could never be an end to the rescue of men from the rubble of their own ideas. So the bodies would continue to be carried out, and hidden under a blanket, while those who were persuaded they were still alive would insist on returning to the wreckage, to search for teeth, watches, and other recognized necessities. Most deceived, however, were the souls, who protested in grey voices that they had already been directed to enter the forms of plants, stones, animals, and in some cases, even human beings. So the souls were crying, and combing their smoked-out hair. They were already exhausted by the bells, prayers, orders, and curses of the many fires at which, in the course of their tormented lives, it had been their misfortune to assist. Only the Chariot itself rode straight and silent, both now and on the clouds of recollection. Himmelfarb plodded up the road which led from Xanadu to Sarsaparilla, comforted by physical weariness and the collaboration of his friend. He yawned once or twice. The white faces of nondescript flowers twitched and glimmered at the touch of darkness. Stones brooded. He, the most stubborn of all souls, might well be told off next to invest a stone. As he went up the hill, the sparks shot out from beneath his boots, from the surface of the road, so far distant that, with all the lovingkindness in the world, his back could not have bent for him to lift them up, so elusive that Hezekiah, David, and Akiba had failed to redeem the lost sparks. The Jew wandered, and stumbled over stones, and came at last to his frail house, and touched the Shema upon the doorpost, as he went in.