Riders in the Chariot (10 page)

It was like this.

Miss Hare had come out from behind a clump of eggs-and-bacon, on the edge of the scrub, at the bend in the road below Xanadu. She had come out, and was herself standing on the edge, where, she realized at once, she had been caught. For she heard feet approaching over stones. And there he was, the dark man, almost level with her.

On this occasion the stranger appeared to take their situation for granted. He was all bones, and might have seemed to shamble, if it had not been for a certain convinced bearing. His full lips were slightly, lazily open, on obviously excellent teeth, and his voice sounded agreeable, direct, and unexpected. For he addressed her immediately, as though it had always been intended that he should.

"The water," he said, and pointed, "is creeping up on you. Don't you know it? Eh? You are standing in a bog."

Miss Hare did, then, look at her feet.

"The water," she repeated, or choked.

"In a minute you will know all about it," warned the voice. "It will come in over the tops of your shoes."

Then he passed, and she was left standing at the roadside, where she could recently have witnessed a procession.

Her shoes did not matter, of course. It was a mild morning, ruled by a still air. The leaves were resting together.

As the man continued along the road, the stones were crunched steadily, but easily beneath his feet. He was excessively thin, and slack-bodied, but his shoulders, she saw, were at peace. At least, for the moment. It was doubtful whether a human being, any more than the weather, could remain permanently at rest.

She watched his back, gratefully rewarded. Both the illuminates remained peacefully folded inside the envelopes of their flesh. Each knew it was improbable they would ever communicate in words. Yet, they had exchanged a token of goodness, which would remain forever in each other's keeping. From behind closed eyelids, each would have recognized the other as an apostle of truth. And that was enough.

Then the water did come in over the tops of Miss Hare's shoes, as the stranger had predicted, but she did not altogether mind, nor did she withdraw immediately.

When she got in, Mrs Jolley had returned from church.

"Oh, the lovely hymns!" the latter exclaimed. "And the sermon! The clergyman was lovely."

"I am glad you were satisfied," said Miss Hare.

"Religion is not a meal," protested the housekeeper.

"It is everything anyone wishes it to be."

"There are the heathens, of course. And what have you been up to, I would like to know?"

"I have been in the bush," Miss Hare confessed.

Mrs Jolley sucked her perfect teeth.

"And on a Sunday!"

"Every day is the same," replied Miss Hare.

"But Sunday is not a day for scarecrows," Mrs Jolley could not resist.

"No," Miss Hare began, rather more timidly. "It is a day for Christians."

Mrs Jolley did not hear.

"Did you see nobody you knew?" she asked her employer, but very cold. Employer, indeed! On that wage, she was doing a favour.

"No," said Miss Hare, in a sense truthfully.

But feared for what, in truth, had also been a lie.

"That is," she corrected herself, "I saw the dark man."

"Pooh! Some dirty abo bloke! I would not have an abo come near me. And in the bush! They are all undesirable persons. And in the bush! You will run into trouble, my lady. Mark my words, if I am not right."

Though she had to smile, and not to herself.

"I am told the aboriginals
are
_ a very dirty lot. And drunk, and disorderly," Miss Hare had to admit.

But it was she herself who felt dirty. Mrs Jolley had dirtied her.

Mrs Jolley had hung her fur on the back of a kitchen chair. It was a silver fox, she would declare, and a present from the family. Mrs Jolley's fur was, incontestably, a reminder.

Miss Hare felt miserable.

Mrs Jolley began to know it. She yanked a pan out of a cupboard and clanked it extra hard.

"And what was the name of this abo?"

"I do not know," said Miss Hare, "but will inquire of the Godbolds, if it is of interest."

"Who are the Godbolds?"

"They are some children. Their mother is my friend."

"You don't say! You have a friend, then?"

"Yes."

"Is she a nice lady?"

"She lives in a shed below the post-office, and takes in washing." Mrs Jolley breathed hard.

"I would not of thought that a lady like you, of Topnotch Hall, and all, would associate beneath them. Mind you, I do not criticize. It is not my business, is it? Only I cannot truly say I have ever been on any sort of terms with a lady living in a shed."

But by now Miss Hare was too rapt to have been acquainted with any other.

"Ah, but she," she told very humbly, "she is the best of women."

Miss Hare would remember how she used to listen for the footsteps on the stairs. Very firm, rather heavy, relentless, they had seemed, until time and familiarity drew attention to the constancy of those sounds. Soon the woman lying in the room above could barely endure the tumult of her own emotions as she waited for the door to open.

It was during a winter of the Second War that people--at least one or two of them--began to wonder what had become of that old Miss Hare. It was a harmless thought, and so, quickly dropped, until one morning, running through the frost across what had been the lawn at Xanadu, young Gracie, who, of all the Godbolds, had made that place her especial hunting ground, saw something at a window, and went and told her mum.

Although she had not seen
much
_, because of the dressing-table mirror jammed against the window, she thought she had recognized a piece of old Miss Hare. And Miss Hare had looked queer. Now, Gracie Godbold had never seen a ghost, but if she had, she knew it would have looked sort of misty-dirty like.

So it was natural for the mother, a conscientious woman, to put on her hat, and sober coat, and go down to investigate.

Nobody ever heard what emotions Mrs Godbold had experienced in the rooms and on the stairs at Xanadu. Discreet by nature, she was also uncommunicative. But she did at last, by peering and calling, arrive at the cell which contained the survivor, somewhere in the centre of that vast and crumbling comb.

Miss Hare was lying on a bed of pomp and tatters.

She said, "Mrs Godbold, is it? I have been feeling rather unwell for several days. But hope it will pass with patience. I do not believe in fussing and doctors, because, look at the animals. Oh, dear, but I become breathless, and it is terribly cold when the frost sets in."

"I see," said Mrs Godbold, and thought.

She began very soon to do things. Simple, but soothing, as accorded with her own nature. She made Miss Hare comfortable. She washed her at evening using a crystal basin the Hares had brought from Vienna--was it?--but long ago. She heated bricks and wrapped them in a blanket. And from the shed in which she lived, she brought, on that, and many evenings after, milk in a little white-enamelled can, a brown egg, and a slice or two from an enormous loaf.

So Mrs Godbold nursed Miss Hare the winter the latter had pneumonia. Many people remained unaware, because Mrs Godbold did not talk, and Godbolds were no-hopers of the worst kind, and who, anyway, ever saw or spoke with that old, dirty, mad Miss Hare?

Yet, she reappeared. She had begun, very tentative, supporting herself on the furniture, and, like a dog, listening for familiar sounds on the empty stairs.

"You see, miss," said Mrs Godbold. "Soon you will be outside again."

"Ah," said Miss Hare, "then I shall breathe."

But quickly looked at her companion's somewhat flat and pallid face.

"I shall be sorry, too," she added, "because you will come to me no more."

Mrs Godbold made a little noise that was difficult to interpret.

Then they glanced together, out of the window, at Xanadu, on which the mists had begun to hang, so that if it had not been for their own group of solid statuary, the world might have seemed at that hour ephemeral and melancholy.

For Miss Hare, Mrs Godbold had become, and indeed remained, the most positive evidence of good. Physically she was too massive, and to some, no doubt, displeasing: too coarse, too flat of face, thick-armed, big of breast, waxy-skinned, the large pores opened by the steam from her copper. But nobody could deny Mrs Godbold her breadth of brow. She wore her hair in thick and glistening coils, and her eyes were a steady grey.

As for her existence, that was endless. She knew by heart the grey hours when the world evolves, and would only rest a while to enjoy the evening star. Strangled by the arms of a weaned child, she was seldom, it seemed, without a second baby greedy at her breast, and a third impatient in her body. She would scrub, wash, bake, mend, and drag her husband from floor to bed when, of an evening, he had fallen down.

"You will exhaust yourself," Miss Hare warned.

"I am used to it," Mrs Godbold replied. "And am strong, besides. When I was a girl, we would work in the fields, and walk for miles. That was in the fens. Before I came out. Flat country, certainly, but it does not let you eat it up all that easy." She laughed. "We would skate, too, all of us girls and boys; we was nine in the family. We would skate across the flooded country during a hard winter, miles and miles, everything so brittle. The twigs on the hedges looked as if you could have broken them off like glass."

Her eyes were suddenly brightened by what she was telling. Solidity in herself seemed to give to the glass twigs some mysterious, desirable, unattainable property of their own.

Once while Miss Hare was feverish, and really very ill, she confided in her nurse, "I am afraid I may fall and hurt myself on so much glass. Will you let me hold your hand?"

"Yes," agreed the other, and gave it.

She might have severed it, if necessary, with its wedding ring and all.

"Gold," Miss Hare mumbled. "Champing at the bit. Did you ever see the horses? I haven't yet. But at times, the wheels crush me unbearably."

Mrs Godbold remained a seated statue. The massive rumps of her horses waited, swishing their tails through eternity. The wheels of her chariot were solid gold, well-axled, as might have been expected. Or so it seemed to the sick woman, whose own vision never formed, remaining a confusion of light, at most an outline of vague and fiery pain.

"Never," complained Miss Hare. "Never. Never. As if I were not intended to discover."

Whereupon she succeeded in twisting herself upright.

"Go to sleep. Too much talk will not do you any good," advised the nurse.

And looked put out, at least for her, as if the patient had destroyed something they had been sharing.

"Oh, but I am ill," Miss Hare whimpered.

Mrs Godbold let the silence slip by. Then, ever so gradually, she had ventured on a suggestion.

"I will pray for you," she said.

"If it will do you any good," Miss Hare sighed. "I hope you will take the opportunity. But leaves are best, I find, plastered moist on the forehead."

Then she drifted off, and Mrs Godbold continued to sit beside her for a while. Evening was a perfect silence. The tranquil light, interceding with the darkness, held for a moment a thread of cob-web in its balance.

When she was recovered, Miss Hare decided on one occasion to sound her friend.

"I believe we exchanged some confidences while I was so ill."

Mrs Godbold did not wish to answer, but felt compelled to.

"What confidences?" she asked, turning away.

"About the Chariot."

Mrs Godbold blushed.

"Some people," she said, "get funny ideas when they are sick."

Miss Hare was not deceived, however, and remained convinced they would continue to share a secret, after her friend had returned to carry out her life sentence of love and labour in the shed below the post-office.

That some secret did exist, Mrs Jolley also was certain, with her instinct for doors through which she might never be admitted. Not that she wanted to be. Oh dear, no, not for a moment.

"Sounds a peculiar person to me," she had to comment, when her employer had concluded the story of her illness, or such parts of it as were communicable.

Miss Hare laughed. Her face was quite transformed.

Mrs Jolley swelled, only just perceptibly.

"And what will become of her," she asked, "in that shed, with all those children, and the husband--what about the husband?"

Had she put her finger on a sore?

"Oh, the husband comes and goes. On several occasions he has hit her, and once he loosened several of her teeth. He has been in prison, you know, for drunkenness.

"Oh, yes, the husband!" she was forced to add.

And she began to sway her head from side to side, in a manner both troubled and grotesque, which gave her companion considerable satisfaction.

"There is so much evil," finally cried the distraught Miss Hare. "One forgets."

"I can never forget," Mrs Jolley claimed. "It is always with us, in the daily papers, not to mention the back yard."

"I had forgotten," Miss Hare realized, "until
you
_ reminded me of it."

"But," said Mrs Jolley, doing something dainty with a white of egg, "why doesn't she leave this husband?"

"She considers it her duty to stay with him. Besides, she loves him."

Miss Hare pronounced with difficulty that amazing word.

"One day, on my way past, I shall give her a piece of advice."

"You would not dare!" cried Miss Hare, protecting something breakable. "She is a very sensitive woman," she said.

"Squeezing the water out of sheets!" retorted Mrs Jolley.

Then Miss Hare suspected that her housekeeper might ultimately have everybody at her mercy.

"Nobody who is a believer could fail to derive consolation from her faith," Mrs Jolley decided.

"Few could fail to believe in Mrs Godbold," Miss Hare followed up.

But feebler. Mrs Jolley had experience of words. Mrs Jolley had her family in a phalanx, her three daughters, and her sons-in-law, to say nothing of the incalculable kiddies.