Riders in the Chariot (65 page)

So they pushed him up against the tree trunk. Ramming. And jamming. His head was heard once.

"Hey, hold hard!" shouted Blue.

He was not exactly protesting, but could not lose sight of the convention which demanded that cruelty, at least amongst mates, must be kept at the level of a joke.

With that perhaps in mind, he broke away briefly, and ran into the plating-shop. And returned with a rope, or coil of lithe cord.

The others were not sure they were going to approve. Some of them felt, in fact, they could have attempted heights of tragedy, they could have made blood run redder and more copiously than ever before. However, the majority were pacified by the prospect of becoming involved in some episode that would degrade them lower than they had known yet; the heights were not for them.

Blue was very active. Fixing and tying. Shouting orders.

Dubbo saw they had begun to hoist the Jew. They would tie him to his tree. Already higher than the crowd, he had been grazed by nail or tin, so that blood, quite a lot of it, did flow. At least one of his hands was pierced. Through the torn shirt, it could be seen that the disgraceful ribs were gashed.

The crowd howled, and pushed.

A lady who had begun to feel sick saved herself by remembering: "It is the foreigners that take the homes. It is the Jews. Good old Bluey! Let 'im 'ave it! I'll buy yer one when the job's finished."

And the lavender curls lolloped on her old head.

Now Dubbo knew that he would never, never act, that he would dream, and suffer, and express some of that suffering in paint--but was, in the end, powerless. In his innocence, he blamed his darker skin.

Somewhere clocks were chiming.

At that hour, descending the stairs at Xanadu, Miss Hare saw the marble shudder, the crack widen a little farther. She waited for the structure to fall. But it did not. And when she had reached the foot of the stairs, she went on out into some unhappiness of trees. Her skin could read the air. She went, touched and fretted, fretting and touching. So she trundled through the misery of that morning, of which she herself was a troubled particle. In fact, as she shuffled over leaves, she followed the narrowing spiral of her dread almost to the core of it.

At that hour, Mrs Godbold took the sheets which she had washed earlier, and which were dry by now, and smelling of their own freshness. She began to iron the sheets, and soon had them ready in a pile. She would work fast and skilfully, even while remembering painful things: how the women, for instance, had received the body of their Lord. At that time of year Mrs Godbold would experience all that had happened, from bitterest dregs to joyful evidence.

And now was pierced, never more deeply. But accepted it as always.

And would lay the body in her whitest sheets, with the love of which only she was capable.

Mrs Flack, who had just poured them a cup of tea, looked at the surface of it, to see.

"The truth will always out," she said.

"It depends," Mrs Jolley dared.

"What depends?" returned Mrs Flack, sucking in her breath.

"It depends on what you believe the truth to be."

Mrs Flack was awful.

"The truth," she said, "is what a decent person knows by instinct. Surely that is so?"

"Yes," her friend had to agree.

Sometimes now Mrs Jolley took fright, particularly at the leaves of the
monstera deliciosa
_, at the holes in their dark surfaces. Suddenly to catch sight of them, looming higher than the window-sill, gave Mrs Jolley a turn, but it would have hurt Mrs Flack to cut them back.

The Jew had been hoisted as high as he was likely to go on the mutilated tree. The rope pulleys had been knotted to a standstill; one of Blue's accomplices had fumblingly, but finally, fastened the ankles. There he was, nobody would have said crucified, because from the beginning it had been a joke, and if some blood had run, it had dried quickly. The hands, the temples, and the side testified to that in dark clots and smears, too poor to attract the flies. If some of the spectators suffered the wounds to remain open, it was due probably to an unhealthy state of conscience, which could have been waiting since childhood to break out. For those few, the drops trembled and lived. How they longed to dip their handkerchiefs, unseen.

Others had to titter for a burlesque, while turning aside their faces in an attempt to disguise what they suspected might be blasphemy.

Blue was laughing, and swallowing his excessive spittle. He stood looking up, with his throat distended on his now rather convulsive torso: a decadence of statuary.

He called up out of the depths, "Howyadoin up there, eh? 'Ad enough, eh? Bugger me if the cow don't go for it!"

The Jew appeared, in fact, to have been removed from them, while the arch-tormentor himself might have been asking for respite from torments which he had always suffered, and which, in certain circumstances, were eased, he seemed to remember. So the marble body was contorted into the changing forms of wax at the foot of the tree.

The Jew hung. If he had not been such a contemptible object, he might have excited pity. Hoisted high at the wrists, the weight of the body threatened to cut them through. The arms strained to maintain that uneasy contact between heaven and earth. Through the torn shirt the skin was stretched transparent on the ribs. The head lolled even more heavily than in life. Those who had remained in touch with reality or tradition might have taken him for dead. But the eyes were visionary rather than fixed. The contemplative mouth dwelled on some breathless word spoken by the mind.

Because he was as solitary in the crowd as the man they had crucified, it was again the abo who saw most. All that he had ever suffered, all that he had ever failed to understand, rose to the surface in Dubbo. Instinct and the white man's teaching no longer trampled on each other. As he watched, the colour flowed through the veins of the cold, childhood Christ, at last the nails entered wherever it was acknowledged they should. So he took the cup in his own yellow hands, from those of Mr Calderon, and would have offered it to such celebrants as he was now able to recognize in the crowd. So he understood the concept of the blood, which was sometimes the sick, brown stain on his own pillow, sometimes the clear crimson of redemption. He was blinded now. Choking now. Physically feebler for the revelation that knowledge would never cut the cords which bound the Saviour to the tree. Not that it was asked. Nothing was asked. So he began also to understand acceptance. How he could at last have conveyed it, in its cloak of purple, on the blue tree, the green lips of detached, contemplative suffering.

And love in its many kinds began to trouble him as he looked. He saw the old man, the clergyman, searching the boy's body for the lost image of youth on the bedstead at Numburra, and Mrs Spice whirling to her putrefaction in the never-ending dance of the potato-sacks, and Hannah the prostitute curled together with her white capon, Norman Fussell, in their sterile, yet not imperfect, fleshly egg. Many anonymous faces, too, offered without expecting or frowning. There was that blandest experience of love: the milky light of morning poured out unadulterated over his naked shoulders. And the paints as they swirled, and he swathed them on a bare board, sometimes as tenuously as mist, sometimes moulding them with his fingers like bastions of stone. Perhaps this, his own contribution to love, was least explicable, if most comprehensive and comprehensible.

Now the Jew stirred on the lump of an ugly tree trunk on which they had stuck him.

The crowd pressed forward to see and hear, jostling the stick of an abo half-caste who did not exist for any member of it.

The Jew had raised his head. He looked out from under those rather heavy, intolerable lids.

From the beginning Himmelfarb had known that he possessed the strength, but did pray for some sign. Through all the cursing, and trampling, and laughter, and hoisting, and aching, and distortion, he had continued to expect. Until now, possibly, it would be given. So, he raised his head. And was conscious of a stillness and clarity, which was the stillness and clarity of pure water, at the centre of which his God was reflected.

The people watched the man they had fastened to the tree. That he did not proceed to speak his thoughts was most unnatural, not to say frustrating. The strain became enormous. If they had seen how to go about it, they would have licked the silence from his lips, as a substitute for words.

Then a young girl of thin mouth and smoothed hair began to run at, and struggle with the backs of the bystanders, who would not let her through. But must. Hysteria would see to it. The scarlet thread of lips was drawn tight on some demon that she would on no account give up. When she reached the foot of the tree, she took an orange she had brought, and flung it with her awkward, girl's throw at the Jew's mouth, but it fell short, of course, and thumped on his hollow chest.

The crowd laughed, or sighed.

Then a young fellow, one of the Sevens, called Rowley Britt, came down, who remembered his mother dying of cancer of the bowel. He had filled his mouth with water, and now attempted to spit it in the mouth of the damn crucified Jew. But it missed. And trickled down the chin.

The young man stood crying at the foot of the tree, swaying a good deal, because he was still drunk.

Many of the onlookers, to whom it had begun to occur that they were honest citizens, with kiddies at school, were turning away by this. Who knows, though, how the show might have dragged on, and ended, if authority had not put a stop to it.

The administrative offices were placed in such a way that the three people contained in them had an excellent view, through either the glass hatchway, or the door which led to the workshop, and in spite of their determination to ignore, became involved, whether to positive or negative degree, in the present disgraceful incident.

It had been Mr Rosetree's intention to telephone a business connection, suddenly remembered, about an order for geometry sets. He sat and sweated, contracting and expanding like a rubber bulb under pressure, while Miss Whibley fiddled at her switchboard.

"For Chrissake, Miss Whibley," Mr Rosetree shouted, "I am waiting for this cheppie's number!"

"Bugger it!" blurted Miss Whibley. "It is the
switch]"
_

Most unusual. Miss Whibley never used words.

"It is the switch! The switch!" she attempted.

Her voice could have been nougat.

When Miss Mudge, who had ventured to look through the hatchway, exclaimed too loudly, "Oh, look! It is that Mr Himmelson. Something terrible is going to happen."

Mr Rosetree and Miss Whibley had always considered that Miss Mudge, a worthy soul, should not be allowed her freedom. This was not the moment, however, for Mr Rosetree and Miss Whibley to share opinions.

"It is the switch! It is the switch!" the latter repeated, demonstrating too.

Certainly the mechanism seemed most ineffectual.

Mr Rosetree bulged.

"They are doing something to Mr Himmelson!" Miss Mudge harped against the glass.

She was so colourless that any commentary by her sounded the more intolerable.

"They are pulling. On that tree. The jacaranda. Oh, no! They are. Mr Rosetree, they are
crucifying
_ Mr Himmelson!"

For the first time perhaps the knife was entering Miss Mudge, and the agony was so intense, it frightened her. All else that she had known--her invalid sister, trouble over pensions, the leaking roof--was slit from her, and she stood gulping and shivering.

Mr Rosetree still sat.

Miss Whibley had given the switchboard away. She had begun, "I will not look. Nobody can compel me." She took out her compact, to powder, knowing herself to be inundated with the inevitable purple. "Nobody," she said. "To look. I will hand in my resignation, Mr Rosetree, as from the holidays."

Mr Rosetree had not looked, but knew. Nobody need tell him about any human act; he had experienced them all, before he had succeeded in acquiring adequate protection.

"They are spitting
water
_," Miss Mudge just managed.

If it had been piss, it would not have scalded more.

"On the man," she protested. "That good man!"

What degree of goodness Miss Mudge implied, Mr Rosetree did not gather. But it made him feel he would have to look.

Miss Mudge was trembling horribly for the discovery she had made: that she, herself quite blameless, might be responsible for some man, even all men. Now her responsibility was tearing her. Her hitherto immaculate flesh, white and goosey, with the vaccination marks, did not know how to cope.

Mr Rosetree had tiptoed to the door. He was looking and looking.

"I will not look," announced Miss Whibley, unwisely blowing the powder out of her mirror.

"Do something, please, Mr Rosetree!" Miss Mudge was calling right across the three feet which separated her from the boss. "They are kill. Do. Do."

But Mr Rosetree was looking and looking. He might even topple over.

"To Mr Himmelson. They say he is a few."

Mr Rosetree could have burst out laughing. Instead, he started bellowing, "For Chrissake! Mr Theobalds! Ernie! Do something, please! What for are you employed in this establishment, if not to keep order? It must be restored at once, please, in the entire premises."

Then Ernie Theobalds, who was not a bad sort of a cove, not to say as good a mate as a man might expect, strolled out from where he had been standing, exploring the flesh under his singlet and watching events.

"Okay, Harry!" he called. "Keep your wool on! It ain't nothun to get worked up over."

He laughed that rather indolent, but in no way insolent laugh which revealed his comfortable denture. He walked across and kicked the arses of a couple of lads who were standing at one side. Other spectators began at once to turn, the mass to open for the foreman, who might, the waking eyes hoped, accept responsibility.

"What is going on 'ere?" asked Ernie Theobalds, jovial like.

As if he did not know. As if nobody knew.