Riders in the Chariot by Patrick White Read Free Book Online Page A

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."
    The abstractions made her shiver. If she could have touched something--moss, for instance--or smelled the smell of burning wood.
    He continued sitting in the chair, and might even have started to relent.
    So, she saved him that further humiliation by going outside, and there were the stars, swimming and drowsing towards her as she put out her hands. She was walking and crying, and gulping down the effusions of light, and crying, and smearing her cheeks with the sticky backs of her rough hands.
     
    Long after her father was dead, and disposed of under the paspalum at Sarsaparilla, and the stone split by sun and fire, with lizards running in and out of the cracks, Miss Hare acquired something of the wisdom she had denied possessing the night of the false suicide. Sometimes she would stump off into the bush in one of the terrible jumpers she wore, of brown, ravelled wool, and an old, stiff skirt, and would walk, and finally sit, always listening and expecting until receiving. Then her monstrous limbs would turn to stone, although her thoughts would sprout in tender growth of young shoots, or long loops of insinuating vines, and she would glance down at her feet, and frequently discover fur lying there from the throes of some sacrifice. If tears ever fell then from her saurian eyes, and ran down over the armature of her skin, she was no longer ludicrous. She was quite mad, quite contemptible, of course, by standards of human reason, but what have those proved to be? Reason finally holds a gun at its head--and does not always miss.
    Often in the evening as she watched from the terrace of her deserted house for the chariot of fire, the woman wondered how her father would have received