Patrick White - Riders in the Chariot

As soon as the women had settled their charge, his head lay marvellously still. Mrs Godbold, who had arranged the sheet neatly underneath the yellow chin, touched him with the tips of her fingers. She could not feel life, but knew from having carried the body of her brother, and closed the eyes of several babies, that life was there yet. Indeed, nothing would now divert Mordecai ben Moshe from his intention of following to its source that narrower, but still reliable stream. So he would ignore the many hands which tweaked at his cap, or became involved in the flowing folds of his white gown, to distract, to supplicate. As he strode, the particles of petitions fluttered in his face in tinkling scraps, to melt against his hot skin. Pressure of time would not allow him to stop, to piece together, to communicate, although he was expected, he was expected to know. And did, of course, now. He knew all the possible permutations and combinations. Whereas, at Bienenstadt, his green and supple soul had been forced to struggle for release, the scarred and leathery object which it had become would now stand forth with very little effort. So, too, he had only to touch tongues, including his own, and they would speak. As the purple stream-for it was evening now-wound through the rather stony hills, there came to him thousands asking him to tell them of the immediate past, so that they might be prepared against the future, since many of them feared they might soon be expected to return. The strange part was: he knew, he knew. The cliffs of rock were his scroll. He had only to open the flesh of their leaves to identify himself with the souls of plants. So the thousands waited for him along the banks of the interminable river. Sometimes the faces were those of Jews, sometimes they were gentile faces, but no matter; the change could be effected from one to the other simply by twitching a little shutter. Only, he who had drilled holes, could not stop now for souls, whatever the will, whatever the love. His own soul was carrying him forward. The mountains of darkness must be crossed. Such was his anxiety and haste, Himmelfarb shifted his feet beneath the bedclothes: little more than a fluttering of bones, but not so faint that Miss Hare did not feel it against her cheek. For a moment Mrs Godbold was afraid the old creature might be going off into one of her attacks; there was such a convulsion of the body, such a plunging of the blackened hat. But Miss Hare only settled deeper into a state where her friend was too discreet to follow. As she turned to occupy herself with other things, Mrs Godbold saw on the blistered mouth evidence of gentlest joy. Miss Hare had, in fact, entered that state of complete union which her nature had never yet achieved. The softest matter her memory could muster-the fallen breast-feathers, tufts of fur torn in courtship, the downy, brown crooks of bracken-was what she now willed upon the spirit of her love. Their most private union she hid in sheets of silence, such as she had learnt from the approach of early light, or from holding her ear to stone, or walking on thicknesses of rotted leaves. So she wrapped and cherished the heavenly spirit which had entered her, quite simply and painlessly, as Peg had suggested that it might. And all the dancing demons fled out, in peacock feathers, with a tinkling of the fitful little mirrors set in the stuff of their cunning thighs. And the stones of Xanadu could crumble, and she would touch its kinder dust. She herself would embrace the dust, the spirit of which she was able to understand at last. Himmelfarb's face had sunk very deep into the pillow, it seemed to Else Godbold as she watched. He was stretched straight, terrible straight. But warmer now. For it was at this point that he glanced back at the last blaze of earthly fire. It rose up, through the cracks in the now colourless earth, not to consume, but to illuminate the departing spirit. His ankles were wreathed with little anklets of joyous fire. He had passed, he noticed, the two date-palms of smoking plumes. By that light, even the most pitiable or monstrous incidents experienced by human understanding were justified, it seemed, as their statuary stood grouped together on the plain he was about to leave. So he turned, and went on, arranging the white _kittel__, in which he realized he was dressed, and which he had thought abandoned many years ago in the house on the Holzgraben, at Holunderthal. Then Miss Hare uttered a great cry, which reverberated through the iron shed like the last earthly torment, and began to beat the quilt with the flat of her hands. "Himmelfarb," she cried, "Himmelfarb," the name was choking her, "Himmelfarb is dead! Oh! _Ohhhhhh__!" It died away, but she continued to blubber, and feel the quilt for something she hoped might be left. All the little girls had woken, but not one could find the courage to cry. And now Mrs Godbold herself had come, and when she had touched, and listened, and her intuition had confirmed, she saw fit to pronounce, "He will not suffer any more, the poor soul. We should give thanks, Miss Hare, that he went so peaceful, after all." Just then the alarm clock, with which one of the children must have been tinkering during the day, went off before its usual hour, with a jubilance of whirring tin to stir the deepest sleeper, and Mrs Godbold turned toward the mantel. When she was satisfied, she said, "Mr Himmelfarb, too, has died on the Friday." Although her remark was so thoughtfully spoken, its inference was not conveyed to anybody else. Nor had she intended exactly to share what was too precious a conviction. Then the woman and her eldest daughter quietly went about doing the several simple things which had to be done for the man that had died, while Maudie Godbold pulled on her stiff shoes, and trailed up the hill to fetch the previously rejected Dr Herborn. It was very still now, almost cold for the time of year. The lilies of moonlight dropped their cold, slow pearls. The blackberry bushes were glittering. At that hour, before the first cock, if such a bird survived at Sarsaparilla, the only movement was one of dew and moonlight, the only sound that of a goat scattering her pellets. At that hour, Miss Hare came out of the Godbolds' shed, since there was no longer cause for her remaining. She had witnessed everything but the doctor's signature. In the friable white light, she too was crumbling, it seemed, shambling as always, but no longer held in check by the many purposes which direct animal, or human life. She might have reasoned that she had fulfilled her purpose, if she had not always mistrusted reason. Her instinct suggested, rather, that she was being dispersed, but that in so experiencing, she was entering the final ecstasy. Walking and walking through the unresis-tant thorns and twigs. Ploughing through the soft, opalescent remnants of night. Never actually arriving, but that was to be expected, since she had become all-pervasive: scent, sound, the steely dew, the blue glare of white light off rocks. She was all but identified. So Miss Hare stumbled through the night. If she did not choose the obvious direction, it was because direction had at last chosen her.

ROSETREES did not go away at Easter. Harry Rosetree said he could not face it. "But we got the reservations," his wife protested frequently. "We shall lose the deposit, Harry," Mrs Rosetree pointed out. "You know what those Hungarians are." Harry Rosetree said that he was feeling sick. Deposit or no deposit, he just could not go away. But went into the lounge-room, and pulled the blinds down. "You are sick?" Mrs Rosetree cried at last. "You are neurotic! I am the one that will get sick, living with a neurotic man." Soon afterwards, she began to cry. She did not dress for several days, but went around in the azure housecoat she had been wearing the evening of that old Jew's visit. It blazed less, perhaps, on Mrs Rosetree now, and the seams were going at the armpits. Nor did Harry Rosetree dress, but sat in pyjamas, over his underwear, and smoked. Or he would just sit, a hand on either thigh. He was tired, really; that was it. He would have preferred to be a turnip. Mrs Rosetree would come in and sit around. "Neurotic," she repeated rather often, which was the worst she could say of anybody after: "What can you expect of Jews?" Then she would peer out through the slats of the Venetians. From a certain angle, Shirl Rosetree still appeared to wear the varnish, but there was another side, where her husband's sudden denial of life had crushed and matted the perm, giving her the look of a crippled bird, or, for Haïrn ben Ya'akov at least, his wife's grandmother, that black old woman whose innocent and almost only joy had been to welcome in the Bride with cup and candle. So that in the room at Paradise East, which normally was just right-oyster satin, rosewood, and the net _Vorhänge__-Harry Rosetree would be shading his eyes, from some distressing effect of light, or flapping of a great, rusty bird. There were moments when the intensity of his experience was such that his wife, who never stopped moving around, or feeling her side, or suspecting her breath, or rearranging the furniture, or again, crying on account of everything, would sit down, and lay her head, the side of crumpled hair, on a little rosewood table, and watch through the slats of her fingers the husband whom she despised, but needed still. Of course Shulamith could not see by the light of reason and the shadowy room what was devouring Haïm, although the surge of her blood would suddenly almost suggest. But she would not accept. She would jump up, and return to the Venetian blinds. 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 pit-tosporum, 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 something. 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's 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.