Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

While Arthur’s drop of unnatural blood continued to glitter, like suspicion of an incurable disease.

Waldo was infected with it.

About four o’clock he went down, Tiresias a thinnish man, the dress-box under his arm, towards the pit where they had been accustomed to burn only those things from which they could bear to be parted. He stood on the edge in his dressing-gown. Then crouched, to pitch a paper tent, and when he had broken several match-sticks — increasingly inferior in quality — got it to burn. The warmth did help a little, and prettiness of fire, but almost immediately afterwards the acrid years shot up his nose.

So he stood up. He began to throw his papers by handfuls, or would hold one down with his slippered foot, when the wind threatened to carry too far, with his slippered foot from which the blue veins and smoke wreathed upward.

It was both a sowing and a scattering of seed. When he had finished he felt lighter, but always had been, he suspected while walking away.

Now at least he was free of practically everything but Arthur.

After he had lain down on the bed he began to consider how he might disembarrass himself, not like silly women in the news who got caught out through falling hair or some such unpremeditated detail, but quick, clean, and subtle, a pass with the tongue he had not yet perfected, but must. As he lay, he raised himself on one creaking elbow, because of the urgency of his problem.

That was when Arthur came in and saw him.

“Waldo!” Arthur was afraid at last. “What are you trying to do to me?”

When Waldo had always wondered, fainter now, whether Arthur noticed the hurt which was intended for him. Or Dulcie. He had never shown her he had noticed that moustache. And Dulcie’s moustache might possibly have been the means of her destruction.

But Arthur so practically smooth.

Through the pain of destroying Arthur he noticed more than heard Arthur’s last words.

“I know it wasn’t much of a poem.” Arthur was shaping his defence. “Oughter have destroyed it at once. Apologise, Waldo.”

The warmed stones of words.

“That poem? That disgusting blood myth!” Waldo gasped to hear his own voice.

“I would have given the mandala, but you didn’t show you wanted it.”

“I never cared for marbles. My thumb could never control them.”

He was entranced by Arthur’s great marigold of a face beginning to open. Opening. Coming apart. Falling.

“Let me go! Wald! Waldo! ”

As dropping. Down. Down.

IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS THE SEA OF SLEEP OF SUCH blue in which they lay together with iced cakes and the fragments of glass nesting in each other’s arms the furry waves of sleep nuzzling at them like animals.

Dreaming and dozing.

The voices of passengers after Capetown promised icebergs to the south, two-thirds submerged.

He looked but only saw the sea in varying depths of light and blue. Sometimes in the stillness of a wave he heard a seabird mewing which might have accounted for his sad stomach. He wasn’t sick. He hadn’t been sick. Waldo was the sick one, they said, Arthur has always been strong. So he must continue to be.

Then suddenly he noticed for the first time without strain, it seemed, the red gold disc of the sun. He was so happy, he ran to reach, to climb on the rails, reaching up. His hands seemed to flutter his breath mewing with the willing effort.

Voices screaming lifted him back, and he noticed he had been scratched by ladies.

“You must never never climb on the rails at sea!” said Mother. “You might fall over, and then you would be lost for ever.”

He looked at her and said: “Yes. I might. For ever.”

Feeling the cold circles eddying out and away from him.

Mother was soon calm again, sitting talking to the lady who, arranged from head to toe in veils, became always more of a silkworm the tighter the better she arranged her veils.

“Yes, he is very different,” Mother agreed, and laughed. “But they are honestly twins. I can vouch for it! The other one — Waldo — has gone with his father to make friends with someone — the Chief Engineer, I believe. Neither George nor Waldo likes engines, but perhaps they feel it is manly to try.”

The Silkworm said she could not bear the ship, there were cockroaches in the Ladies, she could not bear the passengers, they were so common, she could not bear the voyage, it was too unnecessarily long.

“Never again round the Cape!” The Silkworm shuddered inside her cocoon. “All the nicer people travel via the Canal. But Mr Viney-Smith — my husband says we wouldn’t stand up to tropical heat.”

“Yes,” Mother said, and sighed, “it is long. But we have come this way because it is cheap. And I don’t expect we shall ever travel by any other route. When we arrive, we shall have to stay where we are put.”

That night there was to be a ball. So presently the Silkworm went, to get herself up as the Primrose Pompadour, and win the prize.

Arthur was glad to be alone with Mother. He held the back of her hand to his cheek and rubbed it with the only ring she wore.

But Mother ignored him, or at least half. She half-spoke to the setting sun.

“We mustn’t exhibit ourselves,” she said.

“We mustn’t what?”

“We mustn’t show off. I have given the most disgusting exhibition of false humility. To which I know I am prone.”

Then she looked at him again, and this time it was only for him.

“Promise me never to show off.”

She was all for promises, and he was always promising, even those promises he would have to break.

Because he knew he loved to exhibit himself. He loved it when other people showed off. He loved the feel of the velvety seats.

“How do you like being in a box, Arthur?” It was Granny asking.

They were all for asking how he felt, and he could not have answered, except that he was sleepy and excited. He could only run his hands along the velvet edge, of what was not, except jokingly, a box, floating in the sea of music.

Everybody talked a lot in the box while the ladies in the huge lit scene were singing against one another.

Again it was: how do you like? what do you make of?

This time it was the person who was Mother’s Uncle Charlie leaning over the back of his chair.

“Well, what does the young fellow make of Götterdämmerung? ” Uncle Charlie asked.

To that Arthur could only try to stroke his left shoulder with his cheek. The answer would have been too velvety, too foolish.

“It’s a wonder Anne allowed us to carry off her brat to this unrewarding experiment.” Uncle Charlie yawned.

“Poor Anne! She’s too harrassed,” said Cousin Mollie Thourault, smelling so flowery, “too upset by the other one’s being ill.”

Uncle Charlie, Arthur could feel, had become in some way interested again. He could feel his relative’s hand on the nape of his neck. He would have liked to throw the hand off, but was afraid of disturbing Uncle Charlie’s thoughts. For his fingers were thoughtful as his voice increased.

“Wouldn’t you have thought, Adelaide,” he said to Granny, and against the singing his speaking voice sounded enormous, “she might have suspected some irony of intention? You wouldn’t expect it of Him. Irony is not for Baptist-rationalists even when it kills off a few more unacceptable gods.”

“How brutal you are, Charlie!” Granny said laughingly. “Men are more brutal than women, and far more complicated.”

Arthur could not tell, but found out later Granny was right, that even dogs are less brutal than men, because they are less complicated.

For the time being, lapped so deliriously in linings of dark red velvet, sleep was carrying him off. Or music. Who and where were the gods? He could not have told, but knew, in his flooded depths. Tell Waldo about the lady in the brass helmet. The primrose pomp. If the crimson flood of music had been of Waldo’s world.