Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

Waldo couldn’t help noticing a certain ferment in the streets. Arthur wouldn’t have let him ignore it.

Arthur said: “Over in Europe they’re dragging the fingernails out of all those Feinstein relatives. They’re sticking whole families in ovens.”

“What’s that to do with us? We don’t put people in ovens here.”

“We didn’t think of it,” Arthur said.

Arthur had a pen friend who was a soldier. He sent his friend a comb, short enough to fit inside the envelope. It began haunting Waldo, the young corporal combing his hair in a desert, singing Yours to a red sunset. The wretched Arthur would not leave anyone alone. Though of course the censor would never allow the comb to arrive.

Waldo was relieved to think that not everybody was irresponsible. Only at night his doubts would return, when the waves of yellowing grass thundered down Terminus Road, to break against what, in spite of the classical pediment, was a disintegrating wooden box, and the great clouds rolled down out of Sarsaparilla to collide in electric upheaval over his undeserving head. Thus pinpointed, he stood accused of every atrocity over and above the few minor ones he had committed unavoidably himself. If it had not been for the insufferable mental climate occasioned by the War, and his incidental, though demanding public career — to say nothing of his ever present family problem — he might have committed to paper that metaphysical statement for which he felt himself almost prepared. One great work, no longer question of an oeuvre . As it was, the War killed Tiresias a Youngish Man . Its substance was bound to return, of course; creative regurgitation would see to that. But in the meantime, in this state of perpetual night and frustration, Waldo would throw himself on the knife-edge of his body in the bed in which they slept, or his twin Arthur did — he himself was more often than not incapable of sleep for dreaming.

Not long after Dad died Mother had said: There is no reason why you boys shouldn’t have this larger bed, after all you are men, and I shall take the bed and room you have outgrown. So they moved into what had been their parents’ bed, where Waldo gradually overcame his distaste. It was not for Arthur, Arthur was inescapable. It was their father’s limp disjointing his thoughts, it was even more, the great baroque mess of their Quantrell heritage, which Waldo loved to distraction, its crimson rooms and stone corridors extending through the terrors of sleep and war. By comparison, their own immediate Tudor imbroglio was a mere bucket of blood.

On one occasion, during the night, during the despair, Arthur had comforted Waldo.

“You had the blues last night,” Arthur yawned.

You never knew what distortion of fact he might come out with. But Waldo could not feel concerned on such a clear morning, himself a man of responsibility and discretion, almost of action, as he dashed at his hair with a touch of brilliantine. His hair lost that dusty look. He settled the expanding arm-bands on purposeful arms.

“By gosh,” he said quite boyishly, “the old Municipal’s fairly going to hum.”

“How?” asked Arthur out of a yawn.

As he grew older he liked to take it easier. He would lie in bed until he heard the fat spitting. Then he would rise, in a flurry of iron joints, a ringing of brass balls.

“Matters are coming to a head,” said Waldo, but would not explain beyond: “It concerns our friend Crankshaw.”

“You’ll have my blessings,” Arthur said, “as you gather round the boree log.”

Actually Waldo was surprised he had succeeded in forming any kind of plan during the years of anxiety and stress through which he had been living. Quite apart from everything else he had always been expecting Cissie Baker to return clutching those few poems perpetrated by her dead brother and his former colleague Walter Pugh. He could not have borne the first sight of her black figure creaking through the turnstile.

That morning the old Municipal, as if regretful of having provided a setting for what Waldo had catalogued as Inquisition of a Living Mind , was spreading snares of nostalgia and regret. Even ugliness has its virtue in the end. Certainly Waldo’s corner was darker than ever, but it had driven him on occasions to pour light on obscurity, just as the stench of disinfectant on that morning sternly assaulted a wretched catarrh and stripped the last vestige of doubt from his intention. He was so spare and purposeful as he went and stuck his nose for the last time in one of the linted books, which, ever since his youth and the patronage of the late Mrs Musto, had reminded him of the stink of old putrefying men in raincoats. Smelling them for the last time he laughed out loud in the deserted stacks.

Then he sat down and wrote several drafts before the final version.

He let it be eleven before knocking on the Librarian’s door. There was still a mouthful of muddy tea in Crankshaw’s cup, and he had not yet started looking for something to do. The room smelled, as always, of the beastly treacle in an old and bubbly pipe.

“What can I do for you, Mr Brown?” Crankshaw asked, ever so affable, moving a box of pins from A to B.

Little realizing how he would be pricked.

“Mr Crankshaw, I have decided to resign,” Waldo said, coming to the point. “In fact, I am tendering my written resignation.”

And he fetched the paper round on Crankshaw’s desk with a frivolous twirl, unrehearsed, which reminded him once again of the maid in a Restoration play, though this time he did not care.

Crankshaw was obviously stunned.

“Have you given it all possible thought?” he asked between bubbling into his filthy pipe.

Waldo appreciated the all possible . Thoroughly characteristic.

“I have been thinking it over for years,” he said not quite accurately.

“Made any plans?”

Waldo said no he hadn’t though he had but wasn’t going to tell.

The Librarian looked at Waldo, who was again conscious of the cleft chin, which, so it was said, is the sign of a lover.

“If there is any way in which I can assist,” Crankshaw offered.

It was the exact tone of his dictation.

“We have never, it seems, got to know each other, not, I mean, as human beings, and everyone, I expect you will agree, has the potentialities.” So Crankshaw uttered. “I would have liked to see you out at Roseville. We might have had a chat. But apparently I was slow in asking.”

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.”