Riders in the Chariot (2 page)

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 forever 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, immediately 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 forever.

"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."

"It is only reasonable," she agreed, "that a child should learn to respect other people's needs."

Anybody's reasonableness, and particularly his wife's, was what infuriated him most.

So the child learned, as far as her natural clumsiness would allow, to move softly, like a leaf, and certain words she avoided, because they were breakable. The word LOVE, for instance, brittle as glass, and far more precious. Oh, she could go carefully enough in the end, in little, starched movements. And had learnt to love, even, but after her secret fashion, the labyrinths of corridors, the big, cool, greenish rooms, the golden walls of stone, the tunnels through the shrubberies.

And now Miss Hare got up, as far as her tunnel would allow, to continue struggling, bundling, pushing with the shield of her great wicker hat, to burst forth, not without shaking, and panting, and ridiculousness, into the presence of her noble love.

On extricating herself from the embrace of twigs, there remained perhaps another two hundred yards of less grudgingly gracious green: a pomegranate almost gone to wood, a crab or two, spidery with first blossom, several sad, but soothing pines. The ground continued to rise, increasing her breathlessness, tearing her calves open as she climbed. All, whether within or without, was leading upward now.

So Miss Hare came home, as always, for the first time. She stepped out beyond the trees where lawn began. Certainly the grass appeared a bit neglected, but the eyes, and not necessarily the eyes of a lover, were invariably transfixed by their first glimpse of Xanadu. Miss Hare herself had almost crumbled as she stood to watch her vision form.

2

SHE LIKED to come downstairs early. She would even get up in the dark, bumping things before she found her balance. She liked to come down, and sit, and listen to the house, after her own footsteps had died away, and the sound of the primus on which she had brewed a pot of tea. Then, she would sit and wrinkle her nose at the smell of kerosene, while she thawed out, if it were winter, or relaxed in summer after the weight of the heavy nights. Later she would start to walk about, touching things. Sometimes she would move them: a goblet, or a footstool, and once a heavy buhl table, from which the brass had risen to set traps for clothes and flesh. But mostly she let things lie, out of respect. Or she would draw a curtain, cunningly, to look out at the spectacle of morning, when all that is most dense becomes most transparent, and the world is dependent on the eye of the beholder. Then Miss Hare's mouth would grow slack and loving as she formed the solid trunks of gums out of the grey embryos of trees.

She was at her best early in the morning. Except on this one. She jerked the curtain. And it tore, uglily. A long tongue of gold brocade. But she did not stay to consider. It was several mornings since she had taken the postmistress into her confidence. It was the morning before the arrival of the housekeeper at Xanadu.

"A housekeeper!" she said, feeling her knuckles to test their infirmity, and finding they were, indeed, infirm.

A housekeeper, though, was less formidable than a person, and this was what Miss Hare dreaded most: an individual called Mrs Jolley, whose hips would assert themselves in navy blue, whose breathing would be heard, whose letters would lie upon the furniture addressed in the handwriting of daughters and nieces, telling of lives lived, unbelievably, in other places. It was frightening, frightening.

Miss Hare often cried in private, not from grief, but because she found it soothing, and she did now. It was frightening, though. Naturally she found it impossible to like human beings, if only on account of their faces, to say nothing of their habit of relating things that had never happened and then believing that they had. Children were perhaps the worst, because they had not yet grown insincere, and insincerity does blunt the weapons of attack. Possible exceptions were those children who grew up in one's vicinity, almost without one's noticing, just being around; that was delicious, like air. Best of all Miss Hare liked those who never expected what they would not receive. She liked animals, birds, and plants. On these she would expend her great, but pitiable love, and because that was not expected, it ceased to be pitiable.

Once, it was related, a naked nestling had fallen into her lap, and she had reared it by some mysterious method of her own, warming it down her front, it was suspected, and ejecting juices into its beak from her mouth. The nestling had grown into a dove. Some of the Godbold children had been shown it. Then it flew away, of course, but would return sometimes, Miss Hare told. She would talk to it. Everybody except the Godbold kids thought it a lot of rot, Miss Hare talking to birds. But you could learn, she insisted. Miss Hare said you could learn to do anything, provided you wanted to, but there were an awful lot of things you did not want enough.

Like learning to love a human being. Like the housekeeper, whom the telegram and her own increasing infirmity were bringing to Xanadu.