Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

“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.