Free Riders in the Chariot by Patrick White Page A

reasoning, and she grew quite frantic that something might happen to the animal: some disaster to follow those which she herself had been permitted to outlive, or, simply, that it might decide to leave.
    So, when night began to fall, the mistress would run to shut her creature in a little tipsy shed, within sight of the kitchen, on the edge of the yard. Heaping boughs and pouring endearments, she would padlock her goat every night, and return, and return, to see whether her love might not have vanished in the course of some devilish conjuring act. But there the goat would be. As she shielded her lamp, the white mask glimmered at her through the dark. The amber eyes pacified her fears, and the long lip would move in what she knew was sympathy.
    Even on the morning of the mistress's severest trial, the abstraction of a goat's mask continued to communicate. Even though the goat itself had become a skull and shred of hide in the ruins of the black and smoking shed.
    How she herself survived the holocaust of her discovery, Mary Hare could never be sure. But the morning was kind. Leaves were laid upon her face. The earth was soft to her trembling knees. For she went off into the scrub almost immediately, and remained there how long nobody was able to tell her, because nobody knew that she had gone. She remained there probably two or three days, for she returned stiff and scratched, hungry, at least for one who was almost never visited by hunger, and anxious to recall even the painful reason for her absence.
    As she sat chewing a crust of stale bread, for which she had immediately rummaged in the crock, she had to suppose: Eventually I shall discover what is at the centre, if enough of me is peeled away.
    Never in her life, she felt, had she reasoned so lucidly, with the result that she swallowed a whole lump of softened bread.
     
    Mrs Jolley was in two minds.
    It could have been the cobwebs. She would drag them down. They could have been ropes. They could have been chains. Then she would pick, and flick, not to say dash, and bash, all thumbs and fingers, elbows too, as she struggled to divest herself. But would never be free. The grey skeins clung, like a sense of guilt.
    "Who isn't nuts!" she would cry at times. "But, of course, a person can always give notice--tomorrow, or the day after, any day of the week."
    Nobody would have thought to accuse Mrs Jolley of not being rational at every pore, even at moments when, netted in cobweb, clamped with bobby-pins, teeth upstairs in the tumbler, her answer might stumble. As she pursed her lips, and turned her head, to disengage the reluctant words, was she guarding a secret, or merely having trouble with her lolly?
    At least she would remain a lady, whatever else might come in doubt.
    For the mirrors had begun to follow her down the passages, and on one occasion, she had been compelled to finish a flight of stairs at the run. For no obvious reason. Her legs had simply taken over, and her calves, still strong, and firm, and glossy, had bulged rather frantically; her breasts were jumping under the corset by the time she reached the top.
    "Everybody has their off days," Mrs Jolley liked to say.
    When, for instance, one of her eyes--blue for mothers--would water from the corner.
    "I am so afraid you are not happy at Xanadu," remarked Miss Hare--it was at breakfast, over the crispies, in the kitchen.
    "It is not that I am not happy," answered Mrs Jolley. "I am always happy, of course, more or less. It is that a lady does expect something different."
    Miss Hare mashed her crispies.
    "What?"
    "Oh, you know," said Mrs Jolley, "a home, and a Hoover, and kiddies' voices."
    "I do not know," replied Miss Hare. "This is my life. This is my home."
    And she munched the crispies.
    "You are that hard at times," Mrs Jolley protested, "and unwilling to understand."
    Miss Hare munched her crispies.
    "When a loved one passes on, it is as if you was lost for a bit. See?"
    Miss Hare would not. She was familiar