Riders in the Chariot (48 page)

"Concrete? You should know that real danger never begins by being concrete!"

Yes, indeed. He could not deny that.

When she had recovered from the spasm of exasperation which caused her to jerk, almost to twist the unbelievably passive hand, she began a long, dry, but important, because undoubtedly rehearsed, passage of recitative: "I was going to make a proposal. No. What am I saying? Offer a proposition? It has occurred to me on and off, only there were always too many obstacles. And even now it could sound silly. I mean, it might appear distasteful. But it is what Peg--the old servant--would have called practical. (If only Peg were here, it would be so much easier for all of us.) To cut matters short--because that is necessary since certain things have happened--I want to suggest that you should come here, well, to live."

Purposely, she did not look at him, because she would not have cared to witness surprise.

"I would hide you," she continued, with blunt tongue. "There are so many rooms, there would be no necessity to stay very long in any one. Which would add to the chances of your safety."

She could feel, through his stillness, that he did accept her motives, while remaining critical of her plan.

"It would be wrong of you to hide me," he answered, but gently. "Because I can honestly say I have nothing to hide."

"They will not ask themselves that," she said. "Men usually decide to destroy for very feeble reasons. Oh, I know from experience! It can be the weather, or boredom after lunch. They will torture almost to death someone who has seen into them. Even their own dogs."

"When the time comes for my destruction," he replied quite calmly and evenly, "it will not be decided by men."

"That makes it more frightening!" she cried.

And burst suddenly into tears.

She was at her ugliest, wet and matted, but any disgust which Himmelfarb might have felt was swallowed up in the conviction that, despite the differences of geography and race, they were, and always had been, engaged on a similar mission. Approaching from opposite directions, it was the same darkness and the same marsh which threatened to engulf their movements, but however lumbering and impeded those movements might be, the precious parcel of secrets carried by each must only be given at the end into certain hands.

Although the Jew blundered on towards the frontier through the mist of experience, he emerged at one point, and found himself on the hard
causeuse
_ in the little sitting-room at Xanadu. There he roused himself, and touched his fellow traveller, and said, "I am going now. I would like to persuade you that the simple acts we have learnt to perform daily are the best protection against evil."

"They are very consoling," she admitted.

But sighed.

The lovely, tarnished light of evening lay upon the floors. In that light, with each object most emphatically intact for the last moments of the day, Himmelfarb could have forgotten he had ever been forced to interrupt those simple daily acts which he now advocated as a shield.

Miss Hare followed him across the hall.

"At least I must warn you," she said, "when you go from here, that my former housekeeper, Mrs Jolley, suffers from certain delusions. I do not think she is an active agent. But is under the influence of a Mrs Flack, whom I have never met, only suspect. It could be that Mrs Flack also is innocent. But the most devilish ideas will enter the heads of some women as they sit together in a house at dusk and listen to their stomachs rumble. Well, Mrs Jolley is at present staying with Mrs Flack."

"And where do these ladies live?"

"Oh, in some street. That is unimportant. I think you mentioned, Mr..." (she was no longer ashamed of her inability to manage a name) "... that we were links in some chain. I am convinced myself that there are two chains. Matched against each other. If Mrs Jolley and Mrs Flack were the only two links in theirs, then, of course, we should have nothing to fear.
But
_."

She was leading him slowly through the house, which the crimson and gold of evening had dyed with a Renaissance splendour. The marble of a torso and crystal of a chandelier shivered for their own beauty.

"Is this the way?" he asked.

"I am taking you out through the back," she said. "It is shorter."

On the kitchen table a knife lay, it, too, a sliver of light.

"I would kill for you, you know," Miss Hare suddenly said. "If it would preserve for us what is right."

"Then it would no longer be right."

Himmelfarb smiled. He took the knife which she had picked up from the table, and dropped it back into its pool of light.

"Its purpose is to cut bread," he said. "An unemotional, though noble one."

So that she was quenched, and went munching silence on the last stage to the back door.

On the step she stood giving him final directions.

The rather dead, soapy face of the man who had come towards her up the hill had been touched into life, by last light, or the mysteries of human intercourse.

"You always have to leave me about this time," she meditated, as she stood looking down on him from her step. "There is something secret that you do," she complained, "in your own house. But I am not jealous."

"There is nothing secret," he replied. "It is the time of evening when I go to say my prayers."

"Oh,
prayers
_!" she mumbled.

Then: "I have never said any. Except when I was not my own mistress. When I was very young."

"But you have expressed them in other ways."

She shook that off rather irritably, and might have been preparing something rude, if another thought had not risen to trouble the surface.

"Oh, dear, what will save us?" she wondered.

Before he could answer, she exclaimed, "Look!"

And was shading her eyes from the dazzle of gold.

"It was at this time of evening," her mouth gasped, and worked at words, "that I would sometimes feel afraid of the consequences. I would fall down in a fit while the wheels were still approaching. It was too much for anyone so weak. And lie sometimes for hours. I think I could not bear to look at it."

"There is no reason why you should not look now." Himmelfarb made an effort. "It is an unusually fine sunset."

"Yes," she said.

And laughed somewhat privately.

"And the grey furrows," she observed, "where the wheels have sunk in. And the little soft feathers of the wheels."

Himmelfarb took his leave of the mistress of Xanadu. He was not in a position to dismiss her as a madwoman, as other people did, because of his involvement in the same madness. For now that the tops of the trees had caught fire, the bells of the ambulances were again ringing for him, those of the fire-engines clanging, and he shuddered to realize there could never be an end to the rescue of men from the rubble of their own ideas. So the bodies would continue to be carried out, and hidden under a blanket, while those who were persuaded they were still alive would insist on returning to the wreckage, to search for teeth, watches, and other recognized necessities. Most deceived, however, were the souls, who protested in grey voices that they had already been directed to enter the forms of plants, stones, animals, and in some cases, even human beings. So the souls were crying, and combing their smoked-out hair. They were already exhausted by the bells, prayers, orders, and curses of the many fires at which, in the course of their tormented lives, it had been their misfortune to assist.

Only the Chariot itself rode straight and silent, both now and on the clouds of recollection.

Himmelfarb plodded up the road which led from Xanadu to Sarsaparilla, comforted by physical weariness and the collaboration of his friend. He yawned once or twice. The white faces of nondescript flowers twitched and glimmered at the touch of darkness. Stones brooded. He, the most stubborn of all souls, might well be told off next to invest a stone. As he went up the hill, the sparks shot out from beneath his boots, from the surface of the road, so far distant that, with all the lovingkindness in the world, his back could not have bent for him to lift them up, so elusive that Hezekiah, David, and Akiba had failed to redeem the lost sparks.

The Jew wandered, and stumbled over stones, and came at last to his frail house, and touched the Shema upon the doorpost, as he went in.

11

EVERY WORK morning Himmelfarb took the bus to Barranugli, where he seated himself at his drill in Rosetree's factory, and made his contribution to Brighta Bicycle Lamps. Under the windows the smooth green river ran, but not so that you could see it, for the windows were placed rather high, and there were days when the Jew, who had been moved in the beginning by the flow of green water, scarcely noticed it even when he knocked off. As he walked alongside it towards the bus-stop, it had become a green squiggle, or symbol of a river.

Once the foreman, Ernie Theobalds, who had just received a flattering bonus, was moved to address the Jew. He asked, "Howyadoin', Mick?"

"Good," replied the Jew, in the language he had learnt to use.

The foreman, who had already begun to regret things, drove himself still further. He was not unkind.

"Never got yerself a mate," Ernie Theobalds remarked.

The Jew laughed.

"Anybody is my mate," he said.

He felt strangely, agreeably relaxed, as though it could have been true.

But it made the foreman suspicious and resentful.

"Yeah, that's all right," he strained, and sweated. "I don't say we ain't got a pretty dinkum set-up. But a man stands a better chance of a fair go if he's got a mate. That's all I'm sayin'. See?"

Himmelfarb laughed again--the morning had made him rash--and replied, "I shall take Providence as my mate."

Mr Theobalds was horrified. He hated any sort of educated talk. The little beads of moisture were tingling on the tufts of his armpits.

"Okay," he said. "Skip it!"

And went away as if he had been treading on eggs.

Immediately Himmelfarb would have run after the foreman, and at least touched him on the shoulder, and looked into his face, for he could not have explained how he had been overcome by a fit of happy foolishness. But already the important figure, bending at the knees as well as at the elbows, was too far distant.

It was true, too, as Ernie Theobalds was conscious, the Jew had not found himself any friend of his own sex, although since his arrival in the country he had made overtures to many men, and for that purpose would take the train, and often walk the streets of the city at night. There were those who had asked him for advice, or money, and according to his ability he had given both. Some had accepted it undemonstratively, as their due, others seemed to regard him as Godsent, with the result that he was forced to retreat, to save them from their presumption, and himself from shame. Others still suspected him of being some kind of nark or perv, and cursed him as he lifted them out of their own vomit. Once or twice, outside the synagogues, on the Sabbath, he had spoken to those of his own kind. They were the most suspicious of all. They became so terribly affable. And collected their wives, who were standing stroking their mink as they waited, and got into their cars, and drove towards the brick warrens where they hoped to burrow into safety.

So Himmelfarb remained without a friend.

Or mate, he repeated gingerly.

And at once remembered the blackfellow with whom he had not yet spoken.

For that abo was still around at Rosetree's. A lazy enough bugger, everybody agreed. But somehow or other, it seemed to suit the abo to stick. Sometimes gone on a drunk, he would return, sometimes with a purple eye, or green bruise on yellow. A brute that no decent man would touch, only with a broom.

Yet, with this fellow flotsam, the Jew had formed, he now realized, an extraordinary non-relationship. If that could describe anything so solid, while unratified, so silent, while so eloquent. How he would sense the abo's approach. How he went to meet his silence. How they would lay balm on wounds every time they passed each other.

It was ridiculous. They were both ashamed. And turned their backs. And resumed their waiting. Sometimes the abo would whistle, derisively, some pop tune he had learnt from the radio. He would blow out his lips, to extend an already considerable vulgarity of theme. To destroy, it was suggested. But knew that his friend, old Big Nose, would never be deceived.

They might have left it at that. After all, each in his time had experienced the knife.

Then one day during smoke-o Himmelfarb had gone into the washroom, of which the scribbled woodwork, sweating concrete and stained porcelain had grown quite acceptable. There he sat. There he leaned his head. And the introspective accents of a mumbling cistern and a drizzling tap ministered to his throbbing head.

He often sat out smoke-o in the washroom, which would remain deserted until work began. He would sit perfectly still, but, on this particular occasion his hand had touched the book someone had left open on the bench. It was only natural for Himmelfarb to read whatever print he set his eyes on. Now he began at once, with surprise flooding over him.

"And I looked and behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber out of the midst of the fire.

Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance: they had the likeness of a man.

And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings...."

But it was no longer his own voice which the Jew heard above the soft babble of the cistern and the sharper drizzle of the tap. It was the voice of voices--thick, and too throaty, and desolating in its sense of continuity. It could have been the voice of the Cantor Katzmann. Yet the voice no longer attempted to clothe the creatures themselves in allegorical splendour, of Babylonian gold. They were dressed in the flesh of men: the pug of human gargoyles, the rather soapy skin, the pores of which had been enlarged by sweat, the mouth thinned by trial and error, the dead hair of the living human creatures blowing in the wind of circumstance.