Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

He leaned over across the table and appeared about to take Waldo’s hands.

Waldo removed his property just in time.

“You’d better get out,” he shouted. “This is a reading room. You can’t shout in here. You’re drawing attention to us.”

Arthur continued sitting, looking at the book, mumbling, seeming to suck up some last dreg.

“But I don’t understand. All.”

“You will leave this place, please, at once,” Waldo commanded in a lower voice. “Please,” he repeated, and added very loudly: “sir.”

Arthur was so surprised he looked straight into Waldo’s face.

“Okay,” he said, his mouth so open it could scarcely form words.

“But the Inquisitor,” he said, recovering himself.

And again looking down, he began to tear several pages out of the book.

“You have no right!” Waldo screamed, and snatched at what he discovered afterwards he had stuffed in his own pocket.

“This is a public library,” Arthur mumbled.

Whom Waldo was shoving running in something approaching the professional manner through the inner swing doors.

Arthur did not look back, but walked in his raincoat, over the inlaid floor, through the hall. Nor did the Lithuanian attendant, from some charitable instinct, attempt to arrest the offender, for which Waldo was afterwards thankful.

In the meantime Miss Glasson had come running up.

“Oh dear!” she was panting. “What a scene! How embarrassing for you! And I feel I’m the one to blame. But you came out of it splendidly. I was afraid he might grow violent. One can never be certain of any of these peculiar old men. I am so relieved,” she said, “you are not in any way hurt.”

He was in fact only hurt that Miss Glasson did not appear to see. But what could you expect of her, or anybody else?

He began to sleek back into place his thin, but presentable hair, and to pull down the sleeves of his coat, which had rucked up towards his elbows, and stuck.

And later on, as he was passing, O’Connell came out of his office and congratulated Mr Brown on his neat handling of a vandal, not to say madman. Waldo would have liked to enjoy praise, but in a flash of frosted glass and closing door he suspected he saw, seated on leather, at the other end of O’Connell’s room, Crankshaw, was it? and a priest.

The rest of the day was not quite in focus. In the evening he returned as usual to Sarsaparilla, carrying a small parcel of New Zealand cod he had bought for their tea. As the train rocked his bones the hoardings were proclaiming a millenium. He was too tired to contradict, even in his hour of personal triumph. He was so tired he would not have been able to resist the figure in the old raincoat, for he realized the other side of Lidcombe that his brother was sitting ahead of him. Arthur either remained unaware, or made no attempt to approach, anyway, there and then.

For at Barranugli he came and sat, equably, silently, beside Waldo in the Sarsaparilla bus, and they remained together after getting down.

As they walked down Terminus Road, Waldo realized that, somewhere, he had left his parcel of New Zealand cod. He was too tired to care.

The children running along behind them — as would often happen, on account of Arthur — were playing a game dependent on a string of screams from which occasional words would dangle.

“One a one makes two,”

the children seemed to scream.

Screeeeee they went on the evening air damp with nettles.

“One a one a one,”

they sang,

“Two a two is never one.”

Perhaps understanding they should not advance beyond the pale, the children dissolved on seeing the Brothers Brown enter Terminus Road.

And when there was silence, Arthur took Waldo by the hand.

“Whatever happens,” Arthur said, “we have each other.”

“Yes,” said Waldo.

Who was otherwise too weary. As his brother led him along and down their familiar road he was too tired to cry.

The incident at the Library did not exactly wind up Waldo’s career, for it happened two years before his retirement, and in the time left he presented himself regularly for duty. He could not feel he was running down, and nobody ever suggested it. He was content. He would himself have admitted to the incidental signs of age: red rims under watery eyes, papery skin which, if pinched up, remained standing in a blue ridge, his tyrant bladder. But the physical, the superficial, was of minor concern. He was still young and twitching at the level where the Incident — the incidents, were continually being re-enacted.

Arthur continued remarkably active. After the death of Allwright in 1951, the widow had kept him on. He was necessary to her, especially for the deliveries, and because he remembered the prices she forgot. At home as usual he baked the bread three times a week. And made the butter twice, from whichever cow. Waldo never remembered the names, the number in the series. He hated cows.

All this while the mutton fat was curdling round them in skeins, clogging corners, filling bowls with verdigris tints and soft white to greyish fur. You couldn’t be bothered to empty the mutton fat out. Like a family, it was with you always. Set.

And dogs. The dogs had reached what was probably their prime. They would lay themselves out in glistening sleep on warm bricks, or coming to, would narrow their eyes at the sun, and lick their private parts, and contemplate the flavour. The young strong dogs loved each other in the end, which was strange, considering. Scruffy used to wander off in search of sexual excitement, and once Waldo came across him locked in a little bitch outside the Sarsaparilla post-office. Waldo hurried in to buy his stamps, not wanting several ladies to connect him with Arthur’s dog.

Scruffy returned on that occasion, as on many others, holding his tail at an angle, fulfilled, and yet respectable.

Runt was less inclined to stray. Though he was Waldo’s dog he waited longing for Arthur to return. He preferred games of mounting, rounding his eyes, twitching his impeccable tail. Runt and Scruffy loved each other.

Then suddenly Waldo Brown was retired. All that had to be said was said, the documents and the objects received, the addresses exchanged. He realized that Miss Glasson, Cornelius, Parslow, Mr Hayter — who had never joined them in the intellectual breathers on the edge of the Botanic Gardens — even O’Connell himself, had grown brittler, if jollier, their silences deeper, their vision in-turned. Though there was none of them who would not ignore his own involutions, looking up in friendship even after he had been caught out picking his nose the moment before.

Waldo said good-bye to them all. They made arrangements to meet, to discuss Bartok, Sartre, the milder statements of Picasso — it was so important to keep abreast — and Waldo smiled, agreeing, while knowing he would not care to. Not now that he was retired. He had work to do.

He said to Arthur: “A good job the Widow Allwright is selling out. Because it’s time you retired too.”

There was no reason why his brother should be let off.

“I, of course, shall find a lot to look into,” Arthur said. “But what about you, Waldo? What will you do?”

Knowing that Arthur’s contradictory eye was on him, Waldo answered: “I have my work.”

As if it wasn’t twitching inside, barely contained by, the dress-box on top of the wardrobe.

“Oh yes,” said Arthur, satisfied, “the book you’re going to write.”

As if Waldo, and all those in collaboration, hadn’t been writing it all his life. Now that he was retired it was only a matter of settling himself, of sifting and collating the evidence, of A progressing to B.

So, they were retired.

When the two old men returned from the walk which wasn’t Arthur’s last, pushing at the gate which had not yet fallen down, pushing with their chests in places at the grass which had swallowed up shoes, crockery, sauce bottles, salmon tins, anything of an incidental or ephemeral nature, including the sticks of rosebushes and stubborn trunks of long-dead rosemary, they came to the house in which they must go on living. For the moment at least, Waldo saw, Arthur could not die. If they hadn’t been knotted together by habit he might have continued resenting Arthur’s failure to accept the plan he didn’t know about. As it was, Waldo could even make a compensation out of the prospect of prolonged mutual habit. Habit in weaker moments is soothing as sugared bread and milk.