Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

But Waldo hated what he could never in any way take part in. At least his physique would not have made him acceptable. If there were moral reasons for his aloofness he had not yet thought them out. Where the War did concern him in any way personally was through Mrs Feinstein and Dulcie stranded somewhere in Europe. On one occasion he visualized them as victims of a zeppelin, but the zeppelin in his mind’s eye was little more than a toy against a paper moon. And he turned his face to the pillow, for the discovery that he could not succeed in transforming his moon into the throbbing flesh which in theory he knew it to be.

Oh God oh God, he repeated, in one of the rare moods of intellectual debauchery he allowed himself.

He evolved a kind of taut joviality with which to counter the confidences in trains, of those who were about to embark. Perhaps if he cut his throat he might atone for his own nature, though he doubted it. To one or two he promised to write from his side of the grave. He would have liked to. Oh yes, he would have liked to. He would have liked to be .

Walter Pugh was Waldo’s gravest source of disturbance. Wally decided to enlist.

“Like any decent bloke has to in the end. Not that I’m holding anything against those who don’t. Or not against you, Waldo. You can’t be all that strong.”

“I mightn’t be very good at it,” Waldo answered truthfully.

“Who knows who’ll be good at what?” Wally said; it was an evening of truths, and he had written poems in his day.

(Wally, in fact, was so good at war he got killed for it, and they sent a medal to Cis.)

Wally, who had become one of the Boys, with a leather strap under his lip, and the smell of khaki, took time off to entertain his pal Waldo Brown, at the expense of Cis and Ernie Baker, before leaving for that hypothetical Front.

Cis had got hold of a boiler and done it up in egg sauce. Afterwards, over the port and nuts, Waldo disclosed that he had a voice. He sang In the Gloaming, The Tide Will Turn , and Singing Voices, Marching Feet — all light, appropriate stuff. The silkiness of his voice brought the tears to Cis’s eyes, and Waldo himself rubbed his pince-nez with a handkerchief between the items. He was smiling slightly for the success of his contribution.

Only Wally sat set stiffer than usual. He had put on weight since the declaration of war, but camp had turned the fat to meat. The pimples were gone, the movements of his buttocks were controlled, and he needed to talk less about the tarts, perhaps had even done one or two of them in the scrub before you got to Permanent Avenue.

He was a good bloke. Waldo might have loved Wally, if that truth had been admitted. As it was, after several beers on the last night but one — the relatives naturally claimed their soldier on the last — they embraced in George Street, furtively, though affectionately, and the stench of khaki was inebriating.

“Do you remember that girl?” Waldo felt it was required of him to ask as they staggered in each other’s arms.

“What girl?”

“That Dulcie.”

“Oh,” said Wally.

Soon after that he was sailing away, and the incident was one to forget.

Waldo had to remember the morning Cis came into the Library. He knew it must have happened, because she was in black. At once he would have liked to look for some excuse in the darker warren of the stacks.

When she had told him, Cis said: “And there’s these three or four poems, Waldo. I brought them because you’re the literary one. What am I to do with them?”

Everybody was watching.

“Oh yes, Mrs Baker,” Waldo said, when he had been in the habit of calling her Cissie. “I’d take, I’d keep them,” he said, “if I were you — well, for the time — wait and see.”

So Mrs Ernie Baker took the three or four poems, which were so unlike her brother, they would in no way help her to realize he had existed. It was reasonable enough, however, it appeared from her face, to suppose the poems might mature by keeping, like wine for instance. She left the Municipal Library in her squashed black hat, her varicose vein just beginning.

Waldo wondered whether anybody listening had expected him to offer nobler advice in the light-coloured, young man’s voice he sometimes overheard. He himself was enraged and mortified, not so much by the death of his friend and colleague Walter Pugh, as by the nobler rage which eluded him.

That week-end he went so far as to begin a poem which he hoped might be to some extent expressive of the nobler rage. He wrote:

Oh to die where poppies shed their blood

On youths grown faceless in the mud

For Freedom’s effigy to rear its head ….

(As an old man Waldo Brown discovered these lines amongst his papers, and got a thrill, the “genuine frisson ” as it had come to be called. It was a pity he hadn’t finished the thing. In the same sheaf was that other fragment of his youth scribbled on a piece of official note-paper he must have swiped from the Librarian:

In my dry brain my spirit soon,

Down-deepening from swoon to swoon,

Faints like a dazzled morning moon …

That was it! His hands trembled, and the sheet of paper gave out a stronger smell of enclosure. The light had looked different in those days, keen and expectant, at Sarsaparilla. Not even Goethe, a disagreeable, egotistical man and overrated writer, whom he had always detested, could have equalled Waldo Brown’s dazzled morning moon .)

Towards the end of the War, when it had been on so long people had begun to accept the killing as a clause in a natural law, thus making Waldo Brown feel somehow less responsible for the state of affairs, he walked home one evening by way of O’Halloran Road, to find lights on at “Mount Pleasant”, the jig-saw of partly illuminated lawn looking and smelling freshly mown. He was still wondering when a woman or girl came out, and stood observing from the veranda. Then, she came running down the steps, at such a speed her bosom flew up and down with the exertion — she hadn’t yet set in the formal concrete of womanhood — and there, it was Dulcie Feinstein.

“Why,” he said, “I thought you got stuck, over the other side.”

“For goodness sake, Waldo, whatever made you think that?” she babbled in her pleasure. “We came back not long after the outbreak of war. It was a bit hair-raising, I admit. There was a submarine.”

Dulcie’s formerly frizzy hair was neatly done in a bun at the nape of her neck. She was a very neat, pleasant young woman. There was no mystery, probably never had been. The dark sleeves, ending in narrow white above her elbows, ruled that out. She was too emphatically defined.

“But the house,” he said, “looked dead” — when he had meant deserted; he could have kicked himself for using a word so full of recoil.

“Daddy couldn’t bear to come here,” said Dulcie. “He’s been so upset by everything. You remember all those intellectual theories about human progress!”

She would have liked, and did try, to keep it light, giggly, and Australian, but in spite of herself the muted ’cello notes rose from her thicker throat, as he had heard them also in her mother. Dulcie, though, it was obvious, the matter-of-fact yet still ready-to-become-hysterical young girl, had not yet experienced the full agony of ’cello music.

“Daddy’s not so hard-boiled and materialistic, not to say theoretical, as you might think,” Dulcie was telling Waldo, while keeping her face turned from him, perhaps so that he shouldn’t see her eyes.

Still, there was a touch of velvet.

It had grown darker too.

Perhaps feeling that the temporary circumstances, of whatever colour, were slipping from them, she began again girlishly to babble, leaning over the gate, spitting slightly from between her teeth in her effort to get it all out, but all.