Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

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.

He was so exhilarated.

Then the Peace, the crucial moment, came, and naturally it brought its disappointments. It had its mundane aspects. It was a grand opportunity for everyone to get drunk as though they hadn’t done it before. Waldo accepted to drink a glass of something at a pub down near the Quay with Parslow and Miss Glasson, though he had not cared for Parslow since his colleague’s projected, practically immoral, assault on his private self. As he chose a port-wine, Waldo wondered whether Parslow realized the degree of his forgiveness.

On that night, when he unavoidably missed his usual train, swamped as he was by the chaos of drunken faces, hatched and cross-hatched in light and lust, laughing right back to their gold, singing, sweating, almost everybody dancing as though it came naturally to them, Waldo was accosted by a woman in Bent Street. On such an occasion, he decided, he must return at least a token civility by listening to her. But how relieved he felt that Arthur was not present to pervert an already dubious situation.

It was not a question of listening, however, for the woman, of vague age and positive colours, her face and body blown up over-lifesize by drink and emotion, fastened her greasy lips on his mouth, and as though she had been a vacuum cleaner, practically sucked him down. Waldo had such control of himself he was able to laugh afterwards while re-adjusting his hat.

The reeling woman refused to believe in failure on such a night.

“Come down by the water, brother,” she invited with her body as well as with her tongue, “under oner those Moreton Bay ffiggs, and we’ll root together so good you’ll shoot out the other side of Christmas.”

But Waldo declined.

And so did the Peace. Though not at once. On his way home from work some weeks later, still intellectually drunk on that idealism which an almost blank future can inspire, Waldo bought the doll for Mrs Poulter. Certainly it was cheap, considering its size, and rather ugly. Nor did Mrs Poulter come spontaneously to mind, more the desire to exercise his generosity on some unspecified human being. Then, who else, finally, but Mrs Poulter? There could not have been anyone else.

All the way home in the train Waldo was conscious of the huge doll lying on his lap, and of the eyes of his fellow passengers boring through paper wrapping and cardboard box. Long before Lidcombe he resented buying what had started as a bargain and a gesture. The dolls were being offered at one of the stores to demonstrate the versatility of plastics. So that he might enjoy the reality of plastic flesh the young lady at the counter had even undressed the doll for Waldo, and buttoned her up again in what she referred to as “the little lass’s bubble-nylon gown.” Waldo’s first qualms set in. The continued weight of the doll on his crotch did not lighten them. Nor was it probable that the idealism or the outlay of his gesture would be appreciated at the other end.