The Solid Mandala (24 page)

Tell that to the priests and the white hats! Waldo smiled the smile which left the token of a dimple in his lean right cheek. He could not be caught so late in the piece.

He went out and took down his homburg. They would think the Librarian had entrusted him with business of a confidential nature. So he escaped without further embarrassment from the scene of Cissie Baker's offering him, in another war, her soldier-brother's poems.

The streets were full of soldiers now. Waldo Brown could have outmarched the most virile of them, up King and along Macquarie, to the big new Public Library they had opened a couple of years before, and where he began without delay offering his services.

Time thus spent is not life lived, but belongs in a peculiar purgatorial category of its own. Waldo got used to it, and even detected in his face signs of moral purification. If any, his religion had become a cultivation of personal detachment, of complete transparency — he was not prepared to think emptiness — of mind. In this way he suffered no immediate hurt, and would only remember years afterwards fragments of conversation overheard.

For instance, from during his petitioning:

“This Brown cove — this
Waldo —
sounds nutty enough to me.”

“Oh, Crankshaw agrees. But advises we should give him a trial. Says he's a glutton for continuity.”

“All very well for old Crank.”

“He's an honest man, Mr O'Connell.”

“Except when it comes to his throw-outs. No man can afford to be honest then.”

(This part alone made Waldo Brown inclined to lose the faith he didn't have in human nature.)

“Ah well, fit him in somewhere, I suppose. Waldo
Brown
. Somewhere amongst the introverts. Some corner. They like that. Let
him sharpen his pencils and sweep up the crumbs of his rubber in peace.”

Such was the texture of mind he had cultivated, Waldo only saw this dialogue printed black on its transparent screen perhaps six years afterwards, and immediately realized O'Connell was somebody to hate.

Arthur's dog helped him reach his conclusion.

One Saturday morning when Allwright had allowed him to knock off early, Arthur had gone in to Barranugli and bought from the pet shop a blue pup. Waldo found his brother seated on the edge of the veranda grunting apparently with joy, kneading the formless lump of fat, gazing at it, snout against snout, staring into the animal's rather unpleasant marbles of eyes.

The puppy, grunting or growling back, bristled up on seeing Waldo.

“Don't tell me!” the latter rattled. “I thought we had this out last time you did it. You were younger then, Arthur. But look at you now, an old man!”

“Fifty-six,” Arthur said.

He could not cuddle the puppy less.

“Well, then,” said Waldo. “At your age. You won't outlast that dog. And what am
I
going to do with one? Arthur? Quite apart from that, what about his biting the postman, shitting in corners, or not even corners? What it will eat, too, a large dog, at post-war prices. At cheapest, stinking horseflesh, fetching in the blow-flies.”

“Keep the meat in a bucketful of water. Under the coral tree.”

Arthur's hands grew noticeably gentler wrapping the pup in enormous velvetty flaps of dough. The pup was either grinning back, or waiting to sink its teeth in Arthur's not too human snout.

“But all that yellow fat on horseflesh! Ugh! There's something about an old man with a dog. Arthur? Now, young children. Parents, I've read, often invest in a pup to teach their children the facts of life. That's unpleasant in itself, though practical. You can't say it isn't
normal
. But later on it's the people who are in some way denied or denying — sexually frustrated women, selfish,
childless couples,
narcissists —
who keep dogs. People in some way peculiar.”

Waldo's voice continued on a curve with no prospect of coming full circle. When Arthur interrupted.

“I am peculiar,” he said.

So dreamy since shutting the pup to sleep in his arms, this old man was looking peculiarly awful.

“I warn you,” Waldo said irrelevantly.

Anyway, this time Arthur refused to return the pup.

He called it Scruffy, and might have created what he named. Arthur present, the dog's attention was all for Arthur, its large tongue lolling out of its smaller mouth, its nose perpetually swivelling. In Arthur's absence, the marble-eyes were fixed on distance and some abstraction of the man.

Once when Arthur wasn't there Waldo tried kicking Scruffy, and the dog growled back, but realizing its own inferiority, did not attack its punisher. Waldo was satisfied. It occurred to him then to go to the bucket where they kept the horseflesh, he couldn't get there quick enough, to cut off a strip of the submerged meat, and dangle the purple spongy stuff under the puppy's frantic nose. The animal gulped, would have eaten more, but was content instead to slobber over Waldo's hands and wrists. Waldo, too, was content, but to feel so immensely superior.

He couldn't resist telling Arthur at least the conclusion of the story.

“It ate from me,” he said. “It took some meat.”

“Natural thing for a dog to do.”

Then Arthur began to look sly.

“Waldo,” he said, “how about letting Scruffy come and sleep in the bed? So as we'd all be together.”

Waldo almost spat, the way elderly, ignorant people used to spit at a bad smell to keep disease out of their mouths.

“What do you think a bed is for?” he asked.

His question inevitably turned him prim.

“For dogs to lie in, of course,” said Arthur.

But he did not try it on again.

And Waldo waited, before confessing a plan of his own. For it
was about this time that he allowed himself to remember a dialogue of the Public Library overheard six years earlier. The confirmed perfidy of Crankshaw, not to mention O'Connell, perhaps recommended the honesty of dogs.

So Waldo in turn grew sly.

He finally said: “What do you say, Arthur, if I get a mate for Scruffy, one which will be really mine, as Scruffy is obviously yours?”

“What, and breed together? That would be whacko! Nobody's breeding down Terminus Road.”

“My dog will not be a female.” Waldo was very firm.

“Any dog will be one more,” said Arthur. “Would you like me to choose it?”

“I shall choose it,” Waldo said, “because it's going to be my dog.”

Waldo brought back his pup. It could not have been much younger than Arthur's Scruffy, though rather smaller.

“That dog might be sick,” said Arthur.

“That's because it isn't yours;” Waldo replied. “The sort of thing people say when they grow resentful. It may be smaller than Scruffy, but, I should say, tougher.”

From clinging to life, perhaps. Though Waldo would not have admitted it at first. His dog, a shade of blue similar to that of Arthur's Scruffy, had a staring coat, plastered in places from confinement in the pet-shop window. It had a mattery eye, and its barrel-belly, swollen by the knots of worms probably inside it, gave surface shelter to a busy race of fleas.

But Waldo proposed to love his dog the way man does, according to tradition.

“What are you going to call him?” Arthur asked.

“Runt,” said Waldo, on a high note, and immediately.

His own honesty cut him painfully. For it was not the dog he was humiliating. To atone for dishonesty in other men, in Crankshaw, not to mention O'Connell — he had thought it out, oh, seriously — he would mortify himself through love for this innocent though in every other way, repulsive creature, his dog. At least Arthur neither applauded nor discouraged Waldo's moral
strength. To give him his due, there was a strain of delicacy in Arthur.

As for Runt and Scruffy, they accepted the fatality of their arbitrary relationship, gnawing, licking, tumbling each other over. They enjoyed the luxury of each other's farts.

And Runt grew fat. His glossy blue glimmered at its best like star sapphires. He would catapult suddenly at Arthur, always greedy for the taste of his hands. Or less impulsive, but no less desirous, the creature would roll over on its back, exposing its belly and a slight erection.

“Whose dog
is
this?” Waldo complained, jokily at first.

Then it became a serious matter. Runt was really Arthur's dog. Nor did Scruffy care particularly for anyone outside the triangular relationship chance had constructed, out of himself, with Runt and Arthur.

Waldo got to hate Runt. He got to hate both the dogs, on account of all the tenderness — the
tendresse
, to quote the French, and which sounded much more tender — he had promised himself, and been denied.

“Dogs, in the end,” he said, “are much like human beings. That is not a platitude, exactly. What I mean is, they lack perception. When one had heard differently.”

“The poor buggers,” said Arthur, “are only dogs. I love them!”

The rangier, the more shameless they grew, lifting their legs on furniture when men weren't looking, or even when they were, the more often was Arthur driven to scrabble on the floor amongst them, to grab himself an armful of dog, to plant his nose in one or other of the moist-blackberry noses so that he and dog were one.

Then Waldo would rush into their midst, putting the boot into those dogs.

“Do you think this is what we got them for?” he took to shouting.

“What did we get them for?” asked Arthur.

A big, porous, trembly lily, he was terrified for the fate of their dogs.

“What?” moaned Arthur.

Waldo could not always answer.

He once gasped: “Obviously not for copulation.”

Then when his panting had subsided, and he had thought it out: “Why,” he said finally, “to protect us from those who, those who,” he said, “make a habit, or profession, of breaking and entering.”

On that occasion Mrs Poulter was forced across the road, hands in the sleeves of her cardigan, to speak.

“You two men and your dogs!” she said. “To listen to you, anyone'ud think there was still a war on.”

Waldo's guilt at being reminded was not less than his irritation at somebody else's facetiousness.

The peace, he remembered, had caught up with him a couple of years after his momentous transfer to the Public Library. The new building was still smelling of varnish and rubber. By comparison with those of the old Municipal, the books themselves appeared new, or at least, the condition of their readers had not been ground into them. So Waldo could only feel quietly pleased. Particularly did he appreciate the discreet, the hallowed atmosphere of the Mitchell attached — all those brown ladies studying Australiana, and crypto-journalists looking up their articles for the Saturday supplements.

For a short time before, and especially during, the brief and ecstatic orgasm with Peace, Waldo's faith in man revived. Several of his colleagues at the Library appeared to be discovering the subtler qualities in Mr Brown as they strolled with their lunchtime cigarettes, along the railings, or into the gardens and a glare of public statuary. Merely by their choosing them, such intellectual concepts and moral problems as they happened to discuss were at once made urgent and original.

“What does Mr Brown think?” Miss Glasson might enquire, to draw him in.

And Cornelius and Parslow, also, seemed to expect his participation.

There were mornings, fuzzed with gold, splotched like crotons, when Waldo found difficulty in breathing the already over-pollinated air, and would return to his table almost spinning on his heels,
stirring the change in his pocket, slightly more than intellectually excited. It was the times in which they were living, of course. Because at his age, whatever he noticed in the behaviour of a certain type of gross business minotaur, to entertain sexual expectations would have been neither prudent nor dignified. Consequently, when Miss Glasson, so well balanced in her golfing shoes, and protected by her grubby finger-nails, asked him to her flat at Neutral Bay to drink coffee and listen to Brahms, he refused after giving it consideration. It was too far from Terminus Road, he could always explain. Miss Glasson blushed, and Waldo appreciated at least her sensibility. He was sorry about Miss Glasson. Whose two or three stories had been accepted by
The Bulletin
. (She had asked him to call her Honor, but he couldn't.)

Cornelius, that rather ascetic Jew, heard that Mr Brown lived at Sarsaparilla, and wasn't he perhaps acquainted with a certain family.

Waldo interrupted to explain that his own family had made too great a demand on his time.

And Parslow. Parslow, who remarked that by next Sunday he should have wangled petrol enough to drive out through Sarsaparilla, with Merle, and perhaps look in, Parslow had to be choked off. Because Mr Brown of the intellectual breathers in the Botanic Gardens must never be confused with the subfusc, almost abstract figure, living on top of a clogged grease-trap and the moment of creative explosion, under the arches of yellow grass, down Terminus Road. Waldo Brown, in whom these two phenomena met on slightly uneasy terms, would have suffered too great a shock on looking out, from behind his barricade of words and perceptions, to discover some familiar stranger approaching his less approachable self — as happened once, but later.

So Waldo, who was in frequent demand, continued to refuse, on principle, by formula.

To submit himself to the ephemeral, the superficial relationships might damage the crystal core holding itself in reserve for some imminent moment of higher idealism. Just as he had avoided fleshly love — while understanding its algebra, of course — the better to convey eventually its essence. He had the greatest hopes
of what they had begun to refer to as the Peace. Remembering Miss Glasson's success with
The Bulletin
(though you could never tell; she might have been somebody's cousin or niece) Waldo almost wrote, not an article, more of an
essay
, embodying his reactions to the Peace. Searching the faces in the streets for reflexions of his own sentiments, he almost composed a poem. But men were either dull or dazed, incapable of rising to the ecstasies of abstract more-than-joy
— die Freude
, in fact — which he could not help visualizing as a great and glittering fountain-jet rising endlessly skyward — never, till then, plopping back into reality.