Riders in the Chariot (5 page)

Eustace Cleugh had, in fact, performed most nobly almost all that had been expected of him that night. He had appeared to listen attentively to all those statistics with which the graziers had provided him. He had lent a sympathetic ear to graziers' wives, condemned to use up their lives on Australian soil, removed from all those material advantages which their sensibility, not to say spirituality, required. He had danced, how he had danced with the daughters. At least, his body had accepted the dictatorship of music, and his face had not let him down. But now he had gone upstairs, into the study of his Cousin Norbert Hare, to nurse his numbness, and to look through an album of engravings of German churches in the Gothic style.

Here his Cousin Eleanor found him.

"Eustace," she exclaimed, "I cannot imagine how you have allowed yourself to overlook Miss Antill. Such an exquisite dancer, and a lovely girl. I cannot rest until I see you lead her out."

And she took him by the wrist,
guiding
_, as she was convinced.

Eustace Cleugh was far too well brought up to wrench himself free of gentle compulsion. All he said was, "Yes, Miss Antill is very lovely. "

So Mary Hare watched their cousin brought downstairs. She watched him move out across the treacherous floor. That he was
brought
_, and that he no more than
moved
_, was something which perhaps only Mary noticed, but she, of course, spent so much of her time observing timid behaviour: of birds, for instance. Now here was her cousin, Eustace Cleugh, netted by the music and Miss Antill. How the mirrors in the dress flashed and reflected. Eustace did not struggle, but revolved most correctly, holding his partner; Mary alone saw how he was held. Almost the colour of nougat, his face asked the expected questions: about theatrical entertainments, the races and the weather. In the short space of his visit, he had grown surprisingly well informed on matters of local importance.

But Miss Antill seemed to remain unconvinced. As they revolved and revolved, the phrases into which she bit could have tasted peculiar. She could not quite believe in some
thing
_, some failure--was it her own? Or could the bird have died before the kill? They continued, however, to revolve. As Miss Antill clutched her partner's expensive cloth and the travesty of experience, she could have been flickering, although it was attributed by almost her entire audience to the clash between light and mirrors. Such splendour as hers did not encounter uncertainties.

Then there was a pause in the music, and Mr Cleugh did behave very oddly, everybody agreed. He simply excused himself, wiped his face with a horribly white handkerchief, and walked away. It was in the end far less humiliating for Miss Antill, in spite of the slight she had suffered, for practically the whole population of the bachelors' quarters rushed upon her, to say nothing of several susceptible solicitors and elderly, unsuspected graziers.

Eustace Cleugh disappeared in the direction of the terrace. One or two ladies just noticed in the confusion of movement that dotty Mary went, or rushed, rather, after him, dropping wilted flowers as she ran, but everybody was too distracted by the scene they had just witnessed to envisage further developments of an incomprehensible nature. Besides, they had been taught firmly to suppress, like wind in company, the rise of unreason in their minds.

Eustace was on the terrace, Mary found, not quite in darkness, for the lights of the house cast a certain glow, tarnished, but comforting.

"Oh," she began, "I shall go away if you would rather."

Though she would have hated to be sent.

"No," he said. "There is no reason to go away. In this glass house. One is fully exposed, everywhere."

"Is it different, then, in other houses?"

He laughed. He sounded almost natural.

"No," he replied. "I suppose not."

"How you hated it," she said. "The dance with Miss Antill. I am sorry."

He began to tremble. If she had not pitied, she might have been shocked. But there had been moments when she had absolved even her father from being a man.

Cousin Eustace did not speak. He stood and trembled.

She touched some ivy. Painfully.

"And you will not forget it," she said.

"There comes a point where one can't remember everything," Eustace replied, with reason as well as feeling.

Then she touched the back of his hand, and he did not withdraw. Of course her skin told her immediately that she could have been a dog, but she was grateful to be accepted if only in that form. In fact, she would not have thought of expecting more, and mercifully it had never yet occurred to her to think of herself as a woman.

After a bit, he began to cough and move about without direction or elegance, like an ordinary person when nobody is there. Rather clumsily. But he did not repudiate his companion.

"Oh, dear!" He sighed, and laughed, but again roughly, and unlike him. "Do you ever crumble? Suddenly? Without warning?"

"Yes," she cried. "Oh, yes! Often. Truly."

It was most important that he should know.

But he was yawning. It could have been that he had not heard her reply, or that he had heard, and did not believe in the existence of anything outside the closed circle of himself.

She saw, however, that he was tamed, and that in future she might walk calmly, though quietly, in his vicinity, and watch him, and he would not mind. Only soon after the ball at Xanadu, Cousin Eustace resumed his tour of the world, as had always been intended, and took refuge finally on the island of Jersey, with a housekeeper, and what eventually became a famous collection of porcelain.

Even if her husband had allowed it, Mrs Hare would never have been able to forget how her cousin had insulted her guest. What she did forget, conveniently, was that she had expected of him something impossible, not to say indelicate. It was only in after life, in the régurgitation of memories, that she sometimes came across her true motive for giving the ball at Xanadu. It would drift up to the surface of her mind, almost complete, almost explicit, but always it had a horrid, quickly-to-be-rejected taste.

If Mary was less upset by Eustace Cleugh's behaviour, it was because she already expected less of the human animal, and in consequence was not surprised when he diverged from the course which other people intended he should take. The ugliness and weakness which his nature revealed at such moments were, she sensed, far closer to the truth. So she could understand and pity her cousin, even understand and pity her father, even when the latter looked at her with hate for what she saw and understood. In her time she had seen dogs receive a beating for having glimpsed their masters' souls. She was no dog, certainly, and her father had not beaten her, but there had been one occasion when he did start shooting at the chandelier.

It was a summer evening, on which the weather had not broken. The expected storm still hung heavy on the leaden mountains to the west, and the air was full of flying ants, dashing themselves against glass and flesh, and fretting off their wings in the last stages of a life over which they seemed to have no control.

As the servants, with the exception of an old coachman, who was somewhere in the region of the stables, had not yet returned from a picnic, the family had just finished helping themselves to a supper of cold fowl. This fowl had been coated, all with the best intentions, with an egg sauce, to which in the heat and the dusk the flying ants were fatally attracted, their reddish bodies squirming, with wings, without, as they died upon the baroque carcass of the anointed fowl.

"Loathsome creatures!" protested Mrs Hare, to whom any insect was a pest.

Mary did not contribute an opinion, as the remarks of parents seldom seemed to ask for confirmation, but continued to eat, or munch, rather loudly, a crisp stick of celery, and to scratch herself, because the heat had made her prickly. In intolerable circumstances, she alone was tolerably comfortable.

To the others, it was insufferable. The light in the dining room had turned a dark brown.

Then Norbert Hare took the fowl by its surviving drumstick, and flung it through the open window, where it fell into a display of perennial phlox. It was one of his misfortunes to be led repeatedly to ruin his effects.

He was still eating. His mouth was, in fact, too full. His cheeks were swollen, and his eyes appeared almost white.

"Norbert!" cried his wife. "Whatever are the maids going to say?"

Knowing that she herself, with a lantern, would rummage amongst the phlox.

Then Norbert Hare took a loaf of bread, and flung it after the boiled fowl. He took a carving knife, and decanter of port wine, and threw.

He felt freer.

His wife began to cry.

"There," he said, for himself. "But it is never possible to free oneself. Not entirely."

His wife cried and cried.

"I am to blame," offered the daughter, in case that was what they wanted.

"If we are to decide on the objects of blame," her father shouted, "it could well be the boiled fowl."

And seemed to madden entirely.

He was running and pouncing on some intention not yet matured.

Then he seemed to remember, and went to a desk, and got out the pistols.

In the drawing-room at Xanadu, separated from the dining-room by folding doors, there was a chandelier of exceptional loveliness, which money had brought from some dismembered European house, and of which the crystal fruit now hung above antipodean soil. The great thing loomed and brooded, at times fiery, at times dreamily opalescent, but always enticing away from the endless expanse of flat thought. Mary Hare loved it, though she had always believed her passion to be secret.

Now her father went, after loading, and shot into the chandelier.

He looked very small and ridiculous standing beneath the transparent branches.

"Munching! Munching!" he shouted.

And shot.

"O God, save us all!" he shouted.

And shot.

There fell at intervals an excruciating crystal rain. How much actual damage was done, it was not yet possible to estimate, although Mrs Hare did attempt spasmodically.

"There!" shouted Norbert Hare. And: "There!"

"Come! I cannot endure your father any longer!" announced the mother, and drew her daughter into a little room which was only used when the doctor came, or someone asking for money.

Then, when the door was locked, she cried, "I do not know what I have done to deserve so much!"

The daughter remained silent, for she knew she was the greater part of what her mother had to endure. Besides, it was of more interest to listen to what her father might be doing.

The sound of shots was less frequent, but boards cracked, rooms shook, the whole house seemed under the influence of his passion. He must have been running about a good deal. Until, suddenly, silence took over, its passive structure rising in tiers of indifference and layers of suffocating feathers.

"What do you think can have happened?" asked his wife, perhaps as she was expected to.

"It is probably less fun when nobody is looking," suggested the daughter, but without bearing a grudge.

"That is true," agreed the mother, startled to realize the truth had been spoken by her daughter.

For Mary was stupid, and the truth something that one generally avoided, out of respect for good taste, and to preserve peace of mind.

"I shall go out now," said Mary, at last, "and look."

"How brave you are!" the mother cried, with genuine admiration.

"I am not brave," said her daughter.

But she was unable to explain that, burning as she was, there could be no question of her dying; life itself would have been extinguished.

She found the house big and empty. The weather had changed at last, with the result that a cold wind was blowing through the rooms, scattering dead ants from the sills. The curtains tugged, swollen, at their rings.

Then her father came downstairs, very quietly, as if he had been reading in his room, and come to get a glass of water. The situation might have continued innocent enough, if it had not been for the appearance of the outraged house, and the eyes of the man who had just arrived at the bottom of the stairs.

He was looking at her, trying to engulf her in a tragedy he was preparing. Looking, and looking. It might have been horrible, if less protracted.

As it was, and perhaps realizing his error in judgment, he took the pistol she had failed to notice he was still carrying, and shot it off at his own head. And missed. A piece of plaster thumped down from a moulding on the ceiling.

The sound could have completed his exhaustion, for he tumbled immediately into a big, strait wing chair, which stood at hand. All of it he did rather clumsily and ridiculously, because it had not been thought out, or else he had lost interest in the sequence of events.

But it seemed for a moment as though she would not allow him to break the thread. She could not prevent herself from continuing to look, right into him, as he sat in the uncomfortable chair, and although he had forgiven her for the crime of being, it was doubtful whether he would ever forgive her for that of seeing.

She did not expect it, of course.

She went and picked up a pistol lying on the floor, and put it back where it had been in the first place, whether innocently, or through an inherited instinct for malice, he was too exhausted to inquire of his own mind.

He continued to sit, looking at his own waistcoat.

"All human beings are decadent," he said. "The moment we are born, we start to degenerate. Only the unborn soul is whole, pure."

As she had turned away from him, and stood picking at some flaw in the lid of the little desk, he had to torment her. He said, "Tell me, Mary, do you consider yourself one of the unborn?"

"I don't understand such things," she replied. "Not yet."

And looked round at him.

"Liar!"

He would never forgive her her eyes, and for refusing to be hurt enough.

"Oh yes, you can twist my arm if you like!" she blundered, through thickening lips, for his accusation was causing her actual physical pain. "But the truth is what I understand. Not in words. I have not the gift for words. But know."