Riders in the Chariot by Patrick White Read Free Book Online

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