Riders In the Chariot Read online

  Miss Hare stood still in the middle of the road. So she had stood in the post office, only, then, she had worn the kind of expression people expected.

  “This is something of an occasion, Mrs Sugden,” she had said.

  There were those who could never understand Miss Hare’s manner of speech, but the postmistress had grown used to it.

  “Well, now,” Mrs Sugden said, arranging some papers nicely, and the little glue bottle which use had almost glued up.

  Then she waited.

  “Yes,” said Miss Hare.

  She could not find the horrid pen, She could not find the telegraph forms, sandy like her own skin.

  “I have been in touch with a person. A widow. In Melbourne. In an advertisement,” she said, and found the forms. “I am engaging a housekeeper for Xanadu.”

  “Well, now, I am real pleased!” said Mrs Sugden, and was truly.

  “You will not tell?” asked Miss Hare.

  How she hated the vicious pen.

  “Oh dear, no!” protested Mrs Sugden. “What is an official position if not a position of trust?”

  Miss Hare considered. The post office pen pricked the paper.

  “I will tell you all about it,” she decided. “But must write the telegram. To Melbourne.”

  Mrs Sugden knew how to wait.

  Miss Hare began to write.

  “She describes herself as a lady – capable and refined.”

  “Oh, dear, I should hope so!” exclaimed Mrs Sugden, blushing for other possibilities. “In these days, and under the same roof!”

  Miss Hare ploughed her way through the ugly desert of the telegraph form.

  “I am not afraid,” she said, “of anything. Or not of the things people are afraid of.”

  “There are other things, of course,” agreed Mrs Sugden, who, in her official position, must have experienced an awful lot.

  The postmistress waited. Miss Hare had on that old hat, wicker rather than straw – it was so very coarse – which she wore summer and winter regardless, and which gave her at times the look of a sunflower, at others, just an old basket coming to pieces. From where they were standing at the counter Mrs Sugden was able to look down at the kind of navel right at the centre of the crown. Miss Hare was that short. All was hat, and a hand extended from it, having trouble with a pen. The pen appeared to be resisting. Mrs Sugden stood and wondered where the hat could have come from. Nobody remembered seeing any other.

  “It is all due to my Cousin Eustace Cleugh,” began Miss Hare, who had just managed the signature. “He came here very many years ago. You will not remember. The way people sometimes used to send their sons on a visit to relatives in Australia. It seemed astonishing then. To Australia! Two wars have made a difference, of course, and the food parcels. But my Cousin Eustace came – he was somehow on my mother’s side, through Aunt Fanny of Banjo Downs. Oh, it was splendid! The bachelors’ quarters full. And they lit the chandelier almost every night. And balls, with music from Sydney. My mother said I should mingle with the guests – I was then a young girl; my hair had just been put up – but how could I mingle when I must watch all the people who had come to Xanadu? There was one girl – I must tell you – called Helen Antill, in a dress embroidered with tiny mirrors. I overheard my mother remark that perhaps she should not have invited that Miss Antill. ‘Nor any other girl,’ my father replied; ‘nor young men either.’ My father had to have his joke. ‘And let us enjoy our pudding in peace,’ he said, ‘and bread sauce.’ My father was fond of bread sauce with a roast fowl, and one of the cooks used to make him a special kind.”

  “Ah?”

  “With crushed onion!” cried Miss Hare.

  Mrs Sugden shifted foot. Much of her life had been spent in waiting.

  “But let me see – my Cousin Eustace, who came and went, was in some way disappointing to my parents, though in after years he made amends. Oh dear, yes, he made me a little allowance, because his circumstances permitted, from the island of Jersey where he lives. That began already during my mother’s lifetime. Fortunately. Because something – I never understood what – happened to my father’s business.”

  Miss Hare’s voice trailed off. She took up the second, and equally horrid post office pen. But her gesture remained an irrelevant one.

  “What do you know!” said Mrs Sugden.

  “Oh, yes,” sighed Miss Hare. “I thought you knew. I had been receiving the allowance so many years. Till suddenly the island of Jersey was overrun. Like that.”

  Miss Hare did, in fact, spill the remaining post office ink, but Mrs Sugden appeared not to care.

  “By Germans?”

  “Who else?” replied Miss Hare, not without contempt. “Like darkness. For years there was no communication from our relative, until on a Friday morning, exactly seven weeks ago, a few lines arrived to say my Cousin Eustace was safe. Although in only moderate health and reduced circumstances, he considered it his duty to continue rendering me some small assistance.”

  Mrs Sugden was suitably rejoiced at such a lifting of the clouds.

  “And so you were able to engage this lady.”

  “This woman has almost agreed.”

  Miss Hare could be at moments both realistic and stern.

  “Her name is Mrs Jolley,” she added, and, as the extent of the morning struck her through the window: “I do hope she is capable of being happy at Xanadu. Sydney is not Melbourne, and here on the outskirts, there is such a lot of grass.”

  “Anybody can be happy if they have a mind to be,” offered the postmistress, regardless of whether her maxim was cut to fit the situation.

  Some flies had died on the counter which separated the two women, who found themselves examining the bodies.

  “What,” asked Mrs Sugden, taking a deep breath, “what became of the girl called Helen Antill, who wore that lovely dress?”

  “Oh, she went away,” said Miss Hare. “Everybody goes away.”

  She began to swing her right leg. Her face, which narrative had turned moist and crumbly, was become dry and stale again. Ordinarily when she spoke, her mouth stayed stiff, almost as if she had had a stroke.

  “She went away, and married, but somebody we had never heard of, and lived in a house, and had children, and buried her husband. Once I saw her looking out of the window at something.”

  Mrs Sugden looked away, as if she, too, had seen.

  Just then there was a crunching, and a person approached – it was, in fact, the newcomer to Sarsaparilla, Mrs Colquhoun – with the result that Miss Hare let the present fall like a shutter.

  “Thank you,” she said to Mrs Sugden, whom she could have met only the moment before, and left.

  So there was Miss Hare, on the track which the Council had begun to call a road, sometimes even avenue, which led down from Sarsaparilla to Xanadu. At one point doubts had invested her, and turned her stony still, but uncertain prospects could not long resist the surge of her surroundings, and she soon went on. Where the road sloped down she ran, disturbing stones, her body quite agitated as it accompanied her, but her inner self by now joyfully serene. The anomaly of that relationship never failed to mystify, and she stopped again, to consider. For a variety of reasons, very little of her secret, actual nature had been disclosed to other human beings. She stood still. Thinking very intently. Or allowing her instincts to play around her. Although no other human being was actually present, she did resent what must eventually recur. She stroked leaves sulkily. She broke a shaggy stick. Other people would drive along a bush road looking out of the windows of a car, but their minds embraced almost nothing of what their flickering eyes saw. Whole towers of green remained unclimbed, rocks unopened. Or else the intruders might stop their cars, and go in search of water. She had seen them, letting themselves down into the cold, black, secret rock pools, while remaining enclosed in their own resentful goose-flesh. Whereas she, Miss Hare, whose eyes were always probing, fingers trying, would achieve the ecstasy of complete, annihilating liber
ation without any such immersion.

  Now, for a moment, she looked angry.

  But drifted on dreamily.

  All that land, stick and stone, belonged to her, over and above actual rights. Nobody else had ever known how to penetrate it quite to the same extent. She went on through her peculiar territory, lolloping, stopping. Often stopping. The sky had quickened, and was now a lively blue. The rather scrubby, indigenous trees, not so much of interest to the eye as an accompaniment to states of mind, were at the moment behaving with docility, a certain languid melancholy. Until she arrived at the bottom, where the road turned, and curled, and rose. The slope, gentle at first, climbed to abrupter terraces, with dispensations of fern and moss, and soft, rotting carpets, and there the trees, it seemed, grew straighter, taller and invariably she would turn dizzy if she stared too long upward at their scintillating crowns.

  The owner never approached her legal property by following the official road to the gates – those, with their attempt at heraldry, were chained and padlocked, anyway – but took a short cut that she and the Godbold children always used, or an even shorter one, as now, known only to herself, and along which she had to push and struggle, actually to tunnel. But the way developed over good, soft loam, and velvet patches of leaf mould, lovely if the knees were allowed to sink for a moment into a surface from which would rise the scent of fungus and future growth.

  So Miss Hare was pushing and struggling now, because it was what she liked, and chose. Scratched a little, but that was to be expected once the feet were set upon the paths of existence. Slapped by a staggy elder-bush, of which the buds had almost reached the edible stage. Whipped by the little sarsaparilla vine, of which she could have drunk the purple up. Stroked by ferns, and ferns.

  At one stage she fell upon the knees of her earth-coloured, practical stockings, not because she was discouraged, or ill – she had reached the time of life where acquaintances and neighbours were always on the lookout for strokes – but because it was natural to adopt a kneeling position in the act of worship, and because intense conviction will sometimes best express itself through the ungainliness of spontaneity.

  So she rested a little upon her knees, under the great targe of her protective hat, and dug her blunt, freckled fingers into the receptive earth. She knelt for a while in the tunnel that led to Xanadu, and anybody would have found her more grotesquely ugly, less acceptable than they had thought. If family had remained to her, other than her Cousin Eustace, who was at a distance, and a handful of Urquhart Smiths, who had decided to forget, they would have turned away on recognizing such a travesty of their otherwise irreproachable strain.

  In the past the Hares had always blamed the Urquhart Smiths, and the Urquhart Smiths, with equal determination, had blamed the Hares. But now there were not many of either to argue and discuss. If it had not been for Norbert Hare himself one might have expected normality from such an untainted, bourgeois stock, for Norbert was the son of old Mr Hare, the wine merchant at Wynyard, as everybody knew. The Urquhart Smiths, understandably, knew it better than anybody else, and, forgetting the Smiths in favour of the Urquharts, were always ready to remind their Eleanor who had married Norbert.

  Eleanor was of that branch of the family at Mumblejug, of whom Sir Dudley, it will be remembered, arrived in New South Wales during the last century to represent the Queen. Renowned for his silk hats and horsemanship, Sir Dudley was an exemplary man, as his descendants had continued to tell long after everybody else had forgotten. If his daughter Eleanor was less remindful than some of the collaterals, it was perhaps because of her discreet temper, her indifferent health, and, certainly, her unorthodox marriage. Of four sisters, she was the only one to survive. All lovely, gracious girls, three were buried before they had been matched, under the gum trees, outside the little Gothic church which Sir Dudley had built at Mumblejug, not so much to exalt the spirit, as to perpetuate a materialist tradition.

  So solid, so lovely-old, so English, Sir Dudley’s church seemed to proclaim the situation at Mumblejug as indestructible. And then Eleanor went and did that terrible thing, of marrying Norbert, the son of old Hare the wine merchant at Wynyard. People of account, quite unacquainted with the Urquhart Smiths, were shocked into sympathy with them. Eleanor, however, departed with her portion, and many lesser individuals laughed.

  It was not that anybody failed to respect old Mr Hare. Nobody suspected his fortune of being anything less than considerable; nor were the matrimonial expectations of nice people particularly sanguine in such a recent society, unless the arrival of some Honourable roused intemperate hopes. All considered, a girl might have done worse than catch a Hare, and if practical minds did not quickly and quietly accept Eleanor Urquhart Smith’s choice, the fault lay with her husband, who was original.

  Norbert Hare had never been given to half measures. He did, or contemplated doing things which nobody else would have thought of. He once rode a grey horse up the marble stairs at Xanadu, as far as the landing, it was said, where his mount took fright, and deposited a mound of glaring yellow on the runner. Although they were not always executed, Norbert was for ever conceiving plans: for building a study at the top of a Chinese pagoda, or stable in the shape of a mosque, for breeding escargots de Bourgogne, or planting medlars, or printing poems – his own – on sheets of coloured silk, woven for that purpose on the property. The wine merchant’s son had received an education, which his own peculiar temperament ensured was of a spasmodic and eclectic kind. At one period he had considered writing a treatise on Catullus, until discovering he was out of patience with that poet. Norbert, had in fact, written quantities himself: epigrams and metaphysical fragments, which he would read aloud to anybody he succeeded in cornering. The fragment, it appeared, possessed for him a greater distinction than the whole. There were all those pieces of marble he brought from Italy. He brought the mosaics for a bath, all nymphs, and vines, and a big, black, baleful goat. Two Italian artisans were imported purposely to fit the pieces together, after it had been promised they would receive a regular supply of vino. The Italians came and practised their art, and drank their wine, and one of them, it was never decided which, got an Irish girl with child. Norbert and Eleanor were absent a good deal, of course, in foreign parts, because it was the period when Australians of That Class – and Norbert was soon of That Class – were returning home to show they were as good as anyone else. So the Hares had to go, nor could the discreet Eleanor prevent rumours trickling back: that Norbert had been involved in a duel while passing through Perugia, and that in London he had fallen down in public while under the influence of strong drink. It was all in character. But Norbert’s grandest gesture, the one that caused people to suck their teeth, to gnash them, or to set them in a kind, sad smile, was the building of his folly at Sarsaparilla outside Sydney. His Pleasure Dome, he called it, his Xanadu, and recited the appropriate verses to lady guests as they strolled in their veils and the afternoon, inspecting the freshly-laid foundations of porous yellow stone.

  Nothing exquisite can be created in a hurry, and Xanadu was no exception. It cost time and patience; everybody grew exhausted. But there it stood finally: golden, golden, in a frill or two of iron lace, beneath the dove-grey thatching of imported slates, its stables and bachelor quarters trailing out behind. So Norbert, son of old Mr Hare, the wine merchant at Wynyard, was vindicated at last, if only in his own sight. He liked to climb up through his house, and on reaching the top, with its little, actual dome of faintly amethyst glass, spend a private hour devouring the flesh of a cold fowl, skimming opening lines from obscure poets, or just staring out over his own property. Or beyond, it could have been-beyond the still manageable park which he had ordered to be planted, beyond even the grey, raggedy, native scrub, for his eyes appeared momentarily appeased, and that end might not have been achieved, if anchorage in time and space had forced him to recognize the native cynicism of that same, grey, raggedy scrub.

  The scrub, which had been pushed back, immediat
ely began to tangle with Norbert Hare’s wilfully created park, until, years later, there was his daughter, kneeling in a tunnel of twigs which led to Xanadu. Speckled and dappled, like any wild thing native to the place, she was examining her surroundings for details of interest. Almost all were, because alive, changing, growing, personal, like her own thoughts, which intermingled, flapping and flashing, with the leaves, or lay straight and stiff as sticks, or emerged with the painful stench of any crushed ant. Her hands, almost always dirty and scratched, from the constant need to plunge into operations of importance: encouraging a choked plant to shoot, freeing a fledgling from its shell, breaking an afterbirth – were now hung with dying ants, she observed with some distress. One slithered from her father’s bloodstone ring, which she wore not as a memento of her father, but because its device officially confirmed her ownership of Xanadu.

  Once or twice in the far past she had attempted to play with the ring on her father’s hand.

  “It is not a toy,” he had warned. “You must learn to respect property.”

  So she had begun to.

  The mother, also, had worn rings, amethysts for preference. She favoured the twilight colours. Her clothes were in no way memorable, except perhaps her collection of woolly wraps, of such lightness they could not possibly have weighed upon her. The little girl was allowed to touch the clothes and rings her mother wore, even to grow rough with them. Too delicate to protest much, unless an issue exceeded the bounds of taste, Eleanor Hare wished most earnestly to do what was right, as wife and mother.

  “I am so afraid, Norbert, we shall not love our child enough. With my health and your interests.”

  “Oh, love!” the father replied, and laughed fit to shatter it for ever.

  “I had no intention of causing you pain,” his wife complained, before withdrawing into herself, under a big woolly shawl, a sage green, and a hot water bottle which she would hold to her neuralgia.

  “If only you would prevent her knocking over coffee cups,” he requested, “especially into the laps of guests, and snapping off dahlias, and stamping up and down the landing while I am reading. I need a certain amount of silence while I am thinking something out.”