Riders in the Chariot (67 page)

So that those who were watching saw the most inhuman behaviour develop in one they had taken to be human until now.

"Miss Hare!" they called. "Are you mad?"

Almost as though they had always thought her to be sane.

And now were overwhelmed by ugliness and terror, as the woman in her great wicker hat walked into the burning house.

By this time the framework had become quite a little temple of fire, with lovely dionysiac frieze writhing on its pediment. Similarly, all its golden columns danced. But Miss Hare, who was involved in the inner tragedy, did not notice any of that.

The fire came at her first to push her out, but returned as quickly to suck her in. And she was drawn, drawn, sturn-blingly, inside. The agony might have been more intense if she herself had not been molten. The molten stream of her passion ran down the skin of her cheeks and her outstretched hands, the tears ran out of her eyes to burn fire.

So she stood in the everlasting moment. A revelation should have been made to one possessed of her especial powers, and indeed, a more rational curtain of flame was almost twitched back for her to see. She did almost, from under her by now transparent eyelids. The sparks were halted. She almost saw the body of her friend, a rather frail old man, or at most, inflammable prophet, his ribs burning like the joists of a house. But it was not possible, she moaned, to go to him as she would have chosen. Or not yet. She was, after all, crinkling up. Under threat of burning, the sticks of her arms were becoming distorted. Her singed trunk was presented to the shimmering, rushing, revolving teeth of fire.

Then, mercifully, she was returned to her animal self. She began to scream. The smell of burning fur or feathers had always terrified her.

Nobody who saw would ever forget how Miss Hare had emerged from the burning house. She was a blackened thing, yet awful. Her wicker hat was turned to a fizzy Catherine wheel, wings of flame were sprouting from the shoulders of her cardigan, her worsted heels were spurred with fire. Most alarming was the swollen throat from which the terror, or more probable, the spectators felt, the orders and the accusations would not immediately pour. Moving forward, she halted those who might have come to meet her. Then one or two more responsible men did get possession of themselves, ran towards her, and began to beat at the avenging angel with their coats. Until she was at least materially extinguished.

All the time this monster of truth was struggling to give vent to her feelings, and did finally bring out, "You have killed him!"

"Who?" they asked.

"There is no reason to suppose there is anyone," they said, "inside."

And continued to belt at her, now with their dislike and their consciences, in addition to their coats.

Miss Hare was crying and choking. She hated those who were saving her.

"You have burnt my dearest friend!" she bellowed. "I am going to report to the police."

Parrying the blows of hateful coats.

"I will take the matter, if necessary, to court. By raising funds. By some means. My cousin in Jersey."

Just then two ladies, who had come down in second-best hats to enjoy the spectacle, happened to reach the brink of the fire. They realized at once how things stood, though too late, alas, to choose a better moment.

Miss Hare saw, too, and advanced.

"You," she cried, "are the devils!"

More she could not.

Mrs Jolley retreated a few paces, and might have escaped altogether if she had not been chained to her protector. The latter stood, pointing a toe at their accuser. She was thinner, yellower perhaps, but retained considerable faith in her oblique powers.

Mrs Flack said, "For your own sake, I would not care to hear you repeat that, madam. Accusations are very often confessions."

The crowd grew murmurous in appreciation.

But Miss Hare, perhaps because of her powerlessness, did dare once again.

"The devils!" she repeated, certainly aiming more at random, through the bubbles and the blisters.

Then she began to walk away, trailing ribbons of smoke, and of course, crying mad.

Longer than any other witness would Constable McFaggott remember that night, and the object which presented itself in the station doorway.

"You have done nothing," it cried, "to protect my friend from persecution and arson."

"Himmelfarb," Miss Hare at last succeeded in wrenching out the name, "Himmelfarb has been burnt to death!"

McFaggott, a personable man, of pretty teeth, strong legs, and white eyeballs, was somewhat in dishabille considering the importance of the evening. Now he touched the holy medal which he wore in the hair of his chest, and which had accompanied him in the past through the most unlikely circumstances.

"I will hold you responsible!" the mad thing was shouting.

"Steady on!" called the constable, in the high, soft tenor that they liked. "There is such a thing as libel, my lady!"

"There is such a thing as truth," replied Miss Hare. "Until it gets into the mouth of the law. Where it seems to fork."

It was fortunate for McFaggott that, on the evening of the fire, a difference of opinion with his wife had delayed his going on duty as usual at Mrs Khalil's. Thanks to his wife's contemptuous behaviour, he was available to investigate facts, not to mention face the press. Now he was tired, but amiable. He even touched the crazy creature as she stood in front of him, touched her with gentle, though manly authority, in the way that made normal ladies thrill inside their blouses.

McFaggott said, "It is all fate, you know, Miss Hare."

With promotion approaching, he would not have been so injudicious as to have called it anything else.

"It was fate, you might say, that caused the mechanical defect in the fire-engine, which did not arrive--or, by crikey, there it is!"

Indeed, it could be heard clanging, its tires groaning roundly on the stones of Montebello Avenue.

"Which did not arrive in time, you might say, to prevent the gutting of this Jewish gentleman's residence."

Miss Hare was marooned in her own emotions and the constable's sea of words.

"It was fate, too, which removed this same gentleman from his home before the conflagration had broken out."

"Removed?" Miss Hare moaned.

The constable reaped the harvest of his power and knowledge. He laughed, or showed his excellent teeth--real, as everybody knew.

"That is what I said," said the constable. "By Mrs Godbold, and Bob Tanner, the young feller who is going with her eldest girl."

"Then where is Mr Himmelfarb?" Miss Hare demanded.

"In the temporary dwelling in which Mrs Godbold lives," the constable informed.

"Oh," Miss Hare said. "Yes," she said. "I might have known. Mrs Godbold would never allow anything to happen. I mean, anything that might be averted."

The constable had to laugh again.

"Mrs Godbold is only a woman," he said.

"I am a woman," replied Miss Hare, "but do not claim to be her equal."

Constable McFaggott would wrinkle up his face to laugh, because he knew how crisp the skin would appear at the corners of his eyes. Now he could not laugh too much.

"One day, Miss Hare," he said and laughed, never so silkily, "we'll have to get your opinion of we men."

But the phone was again calling him from distant places.

"Oh, the men," she protested. "I do not know." Sputtering and muttering. "Not the men. A cock is for treading hens."

When she got outside, the sparks were settling down again into stars. The moist, blackberry darkness nuzzled against her drawn skin. She could no longer run, only stump, and flounder, past what she knew to be there. The framework of her friend's house was hissing by now beneath the play of water, but she did not really care whether the fire was extinguished or not.

On arrival at Mrs Godbold's shed, she forgot to knock, but went in, quite as though she were expected, which, indeed, she was.

"Ah, there you are," the owner said.

Mrs Godbold stood smiling in the depths of her one room, her solid form fluctuating inside its glistening apron of light. Children were distributed on all sides, watching, or taking for granted. More than this Miss Hare did not attempt to notice. Without wasting any time, she surged forward on the last gust of her physical strength. But her instincts, it seemed, had only to open their reserves of power, as she knelt to lay her scorched face, against the cotton quilt, at the foot of the huge iron bed.

Himmelfarb had returned to his house round about noon. By then his physical distress was considerably increased, not so much from the bruises, cuts, and possibly one or two broken ribs inflicted on him at the factory, but a deeper, numbing pain, above which his mind would burn and flicker with the obsessive blue clarity of an acetylene flame.

In the circumstances, the emptiness and silence of his wooden house offered him perfect consolation. How the carvings on the walnut surfaces would have oppressed, the plush fingers desolated, even at their most tenderly solicitous. Instead he lay down on the narrow bed in his bare room. His face was sculptured most economically in dead, but convincing, yellow wax, from which he issued, between spasms, to contend with the figure of Moshe his father, who flickered longingly within the acetylene nebula. Always separate during the illusory life of men, now they touched, it seemed, at the point of failure.

How long Mordecai lay there, loved and tormented by his father, he could not have calculated, but when he opened his eyes, things were still preserved in their apparent shapes, and he was relieved to explore from a distance that of his single chair, down to the last crack and familiar abrasion.

At the same time he realized he was not alone. That somebody was touching his forehead and his wrists. That a presence of unwavering strength had begun to envelop his momentarily distracted being.

It was, he saw, his neighbour, Mrs Godbold.

"I have no intention of disturbing you," she said, speaking in tones both practical and absent, "but wonder what to do for the best."

In her state of doubt, she only half addressed him, standing by the bed with her face averted, her attention concentrated on a distant, and still confused idea. Her statue had been set down, it appeared, on the edge of a great open space, whether lake or plain he did not bother to investigate, only it was vast, he knew, from the expression of the face, and the unobstructed waves of afternoon.

"Yes," she decided at last, though still hesitant. "I shall fetch you down to my place, sir, if you do not mind, as it is close, and where I can give you every attention."

Watching the heavy knot of hair in the nape of the thick, but appropriate neck, he did not protest.

"I will go now," she said quietly, still addressing someone else; "I will go, but come soon with the others."

He did not answer, but waited for that and anything more to be done.

He could see now the rightness and inevitability of all that his wife Reha had been allowed in her simplicity to understand, and which she had attempted to convey, not so much by words, for which she had no gift, but by the light of her conviction. It seemed to him as though the mystery of failure might be pierced only by those of extreme simplicity of soul, or else by one who was about to doff the outgrown garment of the body. He was weak enough, certainly, by now, to make the attempt which demands the ultimate in strength.

In the meantime, as he prepared, or rid himself of minor objections, he had agreed unreservedly that Reha should become his voice and hands. They had seldom enjoyed such intimacy of spirit as when, in the course of the afternoon, a wind got up from the sea, and hollowed the shell of the house until its walls were thinner still. Willows whipped deliriously, and the rushing of air could have engulfed, if it had not been for his spasms of pain, and the rows of bean-sticks dividing the immense colourlessness at regular intervals.

At one such point she put her hand on his shoulder, and he opened his eyes, and saw that Mrs Godbold had returned.

The woman who was bending over him straightened at once, for modesty's sake, it seemed.

She said, "We are here, sir, as I promised. Else, you know, and this is Bob Tanner, a friend."

Else was blushing, and looking into corners, not for what she might discover, but so that she might not be forced to see. She was reddening most prettily, with a blush of hedge-roses along her milky skin. Bob Tanner, in whom Himmelfarb recognized the lad sent on a former occasion to summon him to Xanadu, was all boots and muscles. He was ashamed of the noises that he made by moving on the bare floors, or, simply, in the act of breathing.

"Now," explained Mrs Godbold, "we are going to move you onto this contraption."

They had made a kind of stretcher out of two saplings and several chaff-bags, onto which they began, awkwardly, to ease the Jew. Bob Tanner, who could carry full sacks on his back, would have undertaken it alone after his fashion, but the women had to have their part.

Mrs Godbold bit her lips till the blood almost ran.

Else could have cried for her lover's clumsy strength.

"Silly thing! Stupid thing!" Else would hiss, and hook an elbow into Bob Tanner's ribs.

She could not be too critical. She could not be too close. She loved the veins that were bursting in his strong, but clumsy arms.

So they moved the man out of the house in which he had never expected to live for more than a short interval.

They brought Himmelfarb down on the stretcher to Mrs Godbold's place. His head lolled. There was a rushing of willows, and a whispering of grass. As he passed, the spearheads of the dead grass pricked his wrists, but without malice now. Whatever the length of the journey, it was consecrated for the sick man by the love and participation of his people. So, whole deserts were crossed. He opened his eyes, and already they had left the most grievous of them far behind. From the fringes of Kadesh, a blue haze promised Nebo over on the right. How they jolted and swayed. Endlessly. But the back of the young man, the bearer at his feet, was a pillar of solid flesh, and the woman who bent above his head supported him less with the strength of her arms than with a pervasive warmth of spirit.