Patrick White - Happy Valley

She felt the bark against her forehead, scored and rough. She held the letter in her hand, tore it, following no design. The letter fluttered away in little jagged scraps. It lay white on the ground. It was the fourth letter she had destroyed. She did not even feel a sense of power now that she had destroyed the fourth. It had become a habit. Why it had ever been anything else. She laughed. In tearing a letter up. Or burning a letter and feeling that you were responsible, as if the fire. That time in the gully up near Ferndale was what you felt, what you could not express, when the fire ran down the gully from tree to tree and they felled a belt of timber to break the fire, and dug a ditch all night in a fever, all those men working like a lot of marionettes, up and down their arms, their faces black, and beating with branches to turn the course of the fire. There was something magnificent in the progress of fire. Then Roger Kemble wrote on white notepaper with a crest and asked you to marry him. She touched with her toe a fragment of white paper lying on the ground. He could not understand the leaping of fire against those trees, or why she had clenched her hands, or the way her heart, because it had a positive power that made men move their arms in abject unison like so many marionettes, it was pitiful to see, and exciting. She kicked her toe fiercely against the root of the tree.

Mother cried because she thought the fire would pass Ferndale and reach Glen Marsh, and you almost prayed for it with your throat dry to reach Glen Marsh. Mother making a family tree and hanging it on the wall. The crackle of green wood, the spitting of sap, they beat the fire with boughs. The Furlows of Glen Marsh perched on a tree, so many twigs to a branch. What a lovely fire, she said, what a lovely fire. Like saying, thank you for the lovely dance, only you did not mean it then, and this, this leaping of fire, your whole body worshipped the rhythm was the dance serpentine with flames. It did not reach Glen Marsh. It burnt itself out. It was not the men, nothing they had done, it just burnt itself out, a sort of hara-kiri of the fire. And Mother said, thank God, because she felt it would not be blasphemy to say it on such an occasion as this, so much saved, lives perhaps, and the way the men had worked, as if it had been the men, and not the fire that had died of its own will.

Sidney Furlow walked beneath the plum-trees. She walked over the scraps of paper that lay scattered on the ground. She went on towards the stables. She felt impotent. A wilderness of hours lay between lunch and tea. The yard was a wilderness of silence. In the stable was the colt that Hagan had been breaking. He stood there dejected now with the saddle on his back, would stand there all day, smarting and galled, the flies jetting the corners of his eyes. He snorted when he looked across the gate of the stall. His flanks quivered. Eyeing her to see. That big brute riding the colt in the yard, she had seen, seen the horse ball in the air, shatter the ground, with Hagan unshaken on his back, then accepting dejection, and now standing all day learning the shape and purport of the saddle on his back. This was a triumph of man. The power of man, subjecting the brute to acquiescence, though not subjecting fire. A conflict for superiority between two brutes. He swayed a little as the colt struck the ground, then he was upright in the saddle again. The colt now eyed her to see.

Why not? she said. She opened the stall gate. The colt sidled, snorted, stared at her out of his white face, out of his bloodshot eyes. He was a big, muscular bay animal. He stood there, afraid, in the pools of stagnant urine and the piled dung on the stall floor. All that week Hagan had been riding him. He was still bewildered. He quivered when she touched the bridle rein. She did not give a damn what happened, what was said, what Mother said, as she led the colt, cautious in its step, across the yard. But she had to ride the colt. It was her funeral. She led the horse down the hill to a small hollow out of sight of the house.

There, she said, as she flung the reins back over his neck. She felt excited, the horse excited, blowing out his nostrils and spraying her with fear.

He was still when she mounted, quite still, only for a trembling between her legs, but he made no move, and she sat there tautly, waiting for something to happen, waiting for a thunderbolt. Touched him with her spurs then. She anticipated the shudder and the grunt, bent to the movement of the horse, as he hunched his back and curved in the air, her breath left her as he touched the ground. Oh but it was good, good, and she laughed, holding him with her spurs, turned him up the paddock, let the wind slip past and the blurred grass. She clung to the horse as he rooted back, she laughed, she spurred him on and they passed over the hill. Tried to shake her off and she clung to him, or hit him across the shoulder with her crop, striking the sweat bands and the white foam. There was foam on the leather crop. She could feel the straining of his mouth, straining at her hands. This was power. You could feel it in your hands. You could feel the hot air of the flames on your face. Something you could not explain. Something fierce and irrational, in the striving of the horse, in the progress of the flame. You became part of it, or overcame it and were swallowed up in a spasm of violence.

She drew him in on the flat. He reared up, beating the air. Then he stood still, hunched again, with his tail between his legs.

Taking him out for some air? asked Hagan.

Coming up behind her like that. Hagan approached her on his horse, riding in an easy jog with one hand planted confidently on his thigh.

He’s broken by now all right, he said, looking ironically not so much at the horse.

You’ve done your job very well, she said. That goes without saying, of course.

I kind of irritate you, he said.

No!

She started the colt into a walk. He went pretty stupidly, in a daze. She was breathless, could not sort her emotions, coming up behind her like that, and blowing his trumpet, not that you expected anything else, not from Hagan, damn his eyes, skulking along, anyway she had ridden the horse.

You know how to sit him, he said.

I ought to. I’m not a child.

That doesn’t follow.

She knew, and she bit her lip.

He looked at her, the way she hated him. She had guts though, riding that horse, he had said she had guts the day she ran down the hill, only he would not tell, he would not put ideas in her head, the sulky little bitch that wanted a good smack on her arse, running down the hill, there wasn’t too much of it, but room enough for what it deserved. That was what most of them wanted, call me Vic and all that and then dropping you like a scone, to tune them up, this one too, only you wanted nothing like that, didn’t want to get bitten, want…She could sit a horse though, you could see that, easy in the saddle. Didn’t want that. Didn’t want…

Going far? he said.

That depends.

I’m going up here to look at a fence.

She did not answer. But she rode along. She could turn off soon, but she would go a little. She was seated higher than Hagan on his rather stocky little mare. She felt a sense of easy achievement as she rode along. Her body swayed with the horse, soothed, or purged of the emotion that led her to take the horse from the stall.

He rode along beside her. He smiled to himself. Doing him an honour, Miss Sidney Furlow. She had a small waist inside that coat. She was neat enough in her own line, but a line that wasn’t his.

I shall keep this horse, she said.

If you’ve made up your mind it’s as good as yours.

His irony started to prick her again.

Don’t you believe in getting what you want?

Yes, he said, I’m with you there.