Riders in the Chariot (50 page)

The pupil worked. Or looked up at times, for politeness's sake. Mrs Pask, of former fine complexion, had turned purple by that date. It was blood pressure, and the climate.

Sometimes the boy would sit very still at the drawing-board. Then she would complain, "Surely you have not finished, Alf, when I have only just set you the subject?"

"No," he would reply, "not yet."

For peace.

And would sit. And would wait.

Then, after he had mixed some fresh colours, he would work. Sometimes she thought his eyes stared too hard. That his chest was too cramped. There was something unhealthy.

She would say, "We must try to find some companions for you. Rough games once in a while are good for any boy. Not that I approve of brute strength. Only Christian manliness."

He grunted to appease her. He could not have formed words while under such other pressure. For he was all the time painting.

And on one occasion the tin box of Mrs Pask's paints had gone clattering.

"Oh!" she cried. "If the little porcelain containers should get broken, Alf, I should be so upset. The box--I told you, didn't I?--was a gift from Mr Pask."

Nothing was broken, however.

"But what," she asked, still breathing hard, "what ever in the world, Alf, is this?"

Looking at his paper.

It was almost as if she had caught him at something shameful. He sat with his knees together. His innermost being stood erect.

"That is a tree," he said when he was able.

"A most unnatural tree!" She smiled kindly.

He touched it with vermilion, and it bled afresh.

"What are these peculiar objects, or fruit--are they?--hanging on your tree?"

He did not say. The iron roof was cracking.

"They must mean something," Mrs Pask insisted.

"Those," he said, then, "are dreams."

He was ashamed, though.

"Dreams! But there is nothing to indicate that they are any such thing. Just a shape. I should have said mis-shapen kidneys!"

So that he was put to worse shame.

"That is because they have not been dreamt yet," he uttered slowly.

And all the foetuses were palpitating on the porous paper.

"I am afraid it is something unhealthy," Mrs Pask confided in her brother. "An untrained mind could not possibly conceive of anything so peculiar unless."

"But the boy's mind is not totally untrained. Since you have begun to train it," the parson could not resist.

He still smarted for his Latin verbs, and the obvious hold his sister had over Alf Dubbo, through the medium of paint.

"I have to admit I am a little frightened. I wonder whether I should go on with it," Mrs Pask meditated.

"You have uncovered his imagination. That is all." The rector sighed.

Imagination, just a little, was his own misfortune, for it had never been enough to ferment the rest of him, yet too much for failure to support. He was a soggy man, reminiscent of grey bread. If he had been less gentle, more bitter, he might have been admired. He had a handsome nose for a start, which should have cut an offender to the quick. But as it had never occurred to the Reverend Timothy Calderon to use any part of his physical person as a weapon, he was not repaid in fear and respect, not even by his own sister, who only loved him, because it would have been shocking not to, and because there was no other intimate relationship left to her.

As he conducted the ritual of his parish life: the tepid, but in every way reverential services, the visits to those of his parishioners who were too passive to intimidate him, the annual fête at which the same ladies guessed the weight of a different-coloured cake--the rector was sustained by secrets. Only two, certainly, for his temperament would not have run to more. But of those two secrets, the one was shocking enough, the other he would never have admitted to, so desperately did he depend upon it for his nourishment.

In that northern diocese of bells and lace, Mr Calderon officiated as befitted one born and reared an Anglican. While the temperature rose, so did the incense, though never enough to offend the nostrils. One was relieved to find that taste and the formalities had not been preserved from Rome to be destroyed by any evangelical fervour. Here original purity prevailed. Even when the lace got torn in scuffles, despite the vigilance of Mrs Pask. Even when the Eucharist lulled in summer, and the best intentions slipped beyond the bounds of concentration. Like Sunday, Mr Calderon came and went. His blameless hand would place the wafer, his unexceptionable voice intone, without disturbing the past, or ladies' minds. Blowflies seconded him, under the window of Saint George, which the butter factory had presented.

It was beneath the saint, his favourite, the manly, flannel-clad, athletic George, that the rector would most frequently indulge his secret life, while attending to those practical duties of devotional routine which boys regularly forgot. Perhaps the swing of his cassock, not entirely an ascetic garment, suggested to the silent man a somewhat freer choreography for the soul. In any case, as he placed a napkin, or a cruet, or retrieved a battered psalter from underneath a pew, the rector would find himself yearning after some more virile expression of faith which a damp nature and family opinion had never allowed him to profess. In other words, the Reverend Timothy Calderon longed secretly to flame in the demonstration of devotion. But would he really have known how? At least in his imagination, the strong voices of clear-skinned boys, in severest linen surplices, would mount in hymns of praise, carrying his diffident soul towards salvation. He would be saved, not by works, too exhausting in a hot climate, not by words, too banal in any event, but by youth, rather, and ever-straining lung-power.

All that he had never been, all that he had not experienced, was fatally attractive to the humble rector. Under the window of the blond saint, bursting the dragon with his lance, his brother-in-law Arthur Pask would appear to Timothy Calderon, and, after jumping the tennis-net, throw his arm around the weaker shoulder. During his brief life, all had been made possible to Arthur: a thrilled, and thrilling faith, the rewards and pains of a missionary fervour, marriage with a lovely girl--nobody had blamed Emily on
seeing
_ that her reason for defection was not altogether evangelical--then martyrdom, more or less, for in spite of his aggressive health, Arthur Pask was carried off, at the early age of twenty-six, by rheumatic fever, on the Birdsville Track. Of those who mourned, perhaps it was not his widow who was cut most deeply. A widow is placated by the drama of it; a woman can sweeten herself on what is bitterest in memory. It was the brother-in-law who suffered. Though nobody knew it.

Not long after Alf Dubbo came to them, the rector had remarked, "I noticed, Emily, you did not communicate this morning."

"No," she said.

Their feet were flogging the dust on the short distance to the rectory.

"I remembered," she explained, "it is the anniversary of Arthur's death."

"You remembered!" He laughed.

It sounded odd, but Emily Pask was of those people who, besides forgetting, failed to divine sensibility in others. If less obtuse, of course she would have seen that her brother whipped his sorrows to prevent them lagging.

Their life together was full of undercurrents, which sometimes threatened to drag them down. So that the presence of the aboriginal boy did at first relieve, and even promise rescue. If the sister was only partially aware, the brother became fully conscious that his hopes were fastening on Alf Dubbo, and that through him he hoped he might achieve, if not personal salvation, at least a mental cosiness. Until finding he had only added another nail to those he wore.

For the rector had never succeeded in communicating with anyone by words. Nor would the boy, it appeared, attempt to express himself, except by those riddles in paint which his teacher so deplored.

Soon after the morning on which Mrs Pask had found herself faced with her pupil's daemon, Timothy Calderon discovered Alf looking through a book, as though he were not at all sure he should be doing what he was unable to resist.

"Well, Alf," the kindly man slowly opened, "have you found something instructive? Or only to your taste?"

He had not meant it that way, but there it was. While the boy continued turning the pages with feverish necessity.

"It is a book I found," Alf replied, with some obviousness. "It is interesting," he added.

He spoke dully, when he was, in fact, consumed.

"Ah," said the rector, "I believe that was a present from a school acquaintance of my sister's. Who knew of her interest in the arts."

The man and boy continued looking together at the book.

Here the world broke into little particles of light. The limbs of the bathers might have remained stone, if light had not informed the observer that this was indeed flesh of flesh; even the water became a vision of original nakedness. Dancers were caught for an instant in the turmoil of their tulle. Laundresses ironed a diagonally divided world of powdered butterflies. Solid lanterns vibrated with thick, joyous bursts of light.

"The French," remarked Mr Calderon, after he had referred to the title, "have a different conception of things."

The boy was throbbing over his discovery.

"They are a different race," the rector judged, smiling a forgiving smile.

Then the boy stopped at a picture he would always remember, and criticize, and wish to improve on. It was the work, he read, of some French painter, a name to him, then as always. In the picture the chariot rose, behind the wooden horses, along the pathway of the sun. The god's arm--for the text implied it was a god--lit the faces of the four figures, so stiff, in the body of the tinny chariot. The rather ineffectual torch trailed its streamers of material light.

" 'Apollo,' " read the rector.

He was not prepared to continue, or to comment.

But Alf Dubbo said, "The arm is not painted good. I could do the arm better. And horses. My horses," the boy claimed, "would have the fire flowing from their tails. And dropping sparks. Or stars. Moving. Everything would move in my picture. Because that is the way it ought to be."

"You are the regular little artist!" the rector accused, and laughed against his painful teeth.

"Fire and light are movement," the boy persisted.

Then the man could bear his own extinction no longer. He touched the boy's head, but very briefly. He said, "Come on, Alf, close up the book now. There is something else I want you to think about."

He brought the Bible, and began to read from the Gospel of Saint John.

"John," he explained, "was the Beloved Disciple."

The parson told of spiritual love and beauty, how each incident in Our Lord's life had been illuminated by those qualities. Of course the boy had heard it all before, but wondered again how he failed continually to appreciate. It did seem as though he could grasp only what he was able to see. And he had not yet seen Jesus Christ, in spite of his guardian's repeated efforts, and a succession of blurry colour-prints. Now he began to remember a night at the reserve when his mother had received a quarter-caste called Joe Mullens, who loved her awful bad, and had brought her a bottle of metho to prove it. Soon the boy's memory was lit by the livid jags of the metho love the two had danced together on the squeaky bed. Afterwards his mother had begun to curse, and complain that she was deceived again by love. But for the boy witness, at least, her failure had destroyed the walls. He was alive to the fur of darkness, and a stench of leaves, as he watched the lightning-flicker of receding passion.

"Earthly love is not the faintest reflection of divine compassion," the rector was explaining. "But I can tell you are not concentrating, Alf."

The boy looked down, and saw that his guardian's knees, in their thinning and rather crumpled trousers, were touching his. He sensed that, according to precept, he should have felt compassion for this conscientious man, but all he felt was the pressure of knees. He was fascinated by the network of little creases in the worn serge, and by a smell of what he realized later on in cities was that of hot underclothing, as people struggled together, and clung to the little progress they had made.

"I think we had better stop there," the rector decided.

But could not bring himself to alter his position.

It was the boy who shifted, sighing, or grunting, as he looked out into the glare and saw Mrs Pask returning from good works with an empty pudding-basin.

While the rector derived little consolation from his attempts to plant faith in the soul of this aboriginal boy, his sister grew quite skittish with what she liked to think the success of her instruction. Admittedly Mrs Pask had always liked the easy things, and admittedly Alf was learning how to please. Here was a whole sheaf of subjects, tastefully shaded, admirably foreshortened. It seemed that with a few ingratiating strokes the boy might reproduce the whole world as his teacher knew it.

That would have been consummation, indeed. If, from time to time, she had not come across those other fruits of her pupil's talent. Which made her frightened.

And on one occasion the pupil himself rooted out an old, battered box which she had put so carefully away, even she had forgotten.

"These are more paints," said Alf.

"Oh," she began to explain, half prim, half casual. "Yes. Some old paints I gave up using very early. They did not suit the kind of work which interested me."

Alf squeezed a tube, and there shot out, from beneath the crust of ages, a blue so glistening, so blue, his eyes could not focus on it.

All he could say was: "Gee, Mrs Pask!"

Even then he had to control his mouth.

Mrs Pask frowned in replying.

"I have tried to explain why we should not, on any account, use such a very horrid expression. I thought you might have remembered."

"Yes," he said. "But can I use the paints?"

After a pause, she decided: "I think, perhaps, it would not be advisable for you to work in oils."

"Arrr, Mrs Pask!"