Riders in the Chariot Read Online Free PDF Page A

to know?"
    Who, indeed? Certainly she _ would not be expected to understand. Nor did she think she wanted to, just then. But they continued there, the sunset backed up against the sky, as they stood beneath the great swingeing trace-chains of its light. Perhaps she should have been made afraid by some awfulness of the situation, but she was not. She had been translated: she was herself a fearful beam of the ruddy, champing light, reflected back at her own silly, uncertain father.
    Then he had started frowning, and it became obvious they were again driving along the road from Barranugli to Sarsaparilla, returning through the comparatively humdrum light of the afternoon already past.
    "I do not like the off-side front mare," he complained. "Must replace the off-side front. She moves lame, without her being lame at all."
    For he required perfection in horses, as in everything, and usually got it, except in human beings.
    He looked at her, and was again irritated, she saw, because she was such an ugly little girl, and she, for her part, could do nothing for him but smile back in the way of those from whom nothing much is expected.
    Yet, the father's rather oblique remark, made when he was drunk, and uttered with the detachment and harshness of male egotism, encouraged the daughter to expect of life some ultimate revelation. Years after, when his stature was even further diminished in her memory, her mind would venture in foxy fashion, or more blunderingly wormlike, in search of a concealed truth. If fellowship with Himmelfarb and Mrs Godbôld, and perhaps her brief communion with a certain blackfellow, would confirm rather than expound a mystery, the reason could be that, in the last light, illumination is synonymous with blinding.
    In the meantime, life at Xanadu was disturbed less by transcendental problems than by the economic and social ones which come to those who enjoy nerves and invested income. The Hares never talked about money. To Mrs Hare that would have been an act in the poorest taste. To her husband, on the other hand, money was something he did not care to think about, but which he hoped fervently would still be there. He was not unlike a traveller walking into a landscape which may prove mirage. Fortunate in his inheritance from the wine-merchant father and commercial uncles, and in the devotion of an individual just stupid enough to be honest, just intelligent enough to be practical, who managed his late father's business, Norbert was pretty certain that his landscape was an actual one. But it unnerved him to discuss it, and if drink or insomnia forced him to consider his financial future, he would buy reality off by writing to his London agent to order a fireplace in Parian marble, or a Bonington, which, he was assured, would soon be coming up for sale. In that way he was fortified.
    In that way they continued to live at Xanadu, and soon it became clear the daughter of the house was a young girl. They put up her hair, and the nape of her neck was greenish and unfreckled where the red hair had lain. She was no prettier, however, and unnaturally small.
    The mother began to sigh a good deal, and remarked, "It is time we thought about doing something for our poor Mary."
    But immediately wondered whether her suggestion might not have sounded vulgar.
    The father could not feel the situation deserved his interest.
    "If anything is to happen, it will happen." He yawned, and showed his rather handsome, pointed teeth. "How does it happen to at least ninety per cent of the unlikely human race? How did it happen to us?"
    "We grew fond of each other," his wife ventured, and blushed.
    The husband laughed out loud.
    And the wife preferred not to hear.
    Not long after, Mrs Hare displayed excitement and her husband cynical interest when it was announced that Eustace Cleugh intended to undertake a tour of the world, in the course of which he would visit his relations in New South Wales. Except that he was a member of an English