Riders in the Chariot (47 page)

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.