Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

“We both did,” said Arthur, “so that we could have something additional — reliable — to love. Because we didn’t have faith in each other. Because we are — didn’t you say yourself, Waldo? — abnormal people and selfish narcissyists.”

Waldo was looking in every direction at once, and especially at that Miss Glasson, who, although standing at the far end of the room, might have been holding a telescope. She had that kind of eye.

“Afraid,” Arthur was saying, and now he did begin to feel a kind of terror rising in him. “Like our father. I mean Dad. Not the one they pray to. But Dad putting Dostoevsky on the fire.”

He knew the flames of argument must be colouring his face in the way which distressed strangers, even Waldo, most. But for the moment he was almost glad he couldn’t control himself.

“Afraid of the blood and the nails, which as far as I can see, is what everyone is afraid of, but wants, and what Dostoevsky is partly going on about. Do you see, Waldo,” he was bursting with it, “what we must avoid?”

Suddenly Arthur burst into tears because he saw that Waldo was what the books referred to as a lost soul. He, too, for that matter, was lost. Although he might hold Waldo in his arms, he could never give out from his own soul enough of that love which was there to give. So his brother remained cold and dry.

Arthur stopped crying almost at once, because the reason for his beginning was so immense it made the act itself seem insignificant. He was ashamed.

“But we’ve got to keep on trying , Waldo, just as we get up every morning and lace our boots up again.”

I don’t know what you mean, Waldo could have been on the point of saying. At that moment he looked so lost, Arthur had to lean across the table and try to take him by the hands. He, the lost one, taking his lost brother by the hands.

When Waldo started snatching back his property.

“You’re drawing attention to us!”

Arthur did not understand at first.

“You will leave this place,” Waldo was commanding, and very loudly: “ sir! ”

Indicating that he, Arthur, his brother, his flesh, his breath, was a total stranger.

It was then Arthur began to tear the Grand Inquisitor out of The Brothers Karamazov , he was so confused. And Waldo shaking him like any old rag, which he was, he admitted, he was born so, but not to be bum-rushed against and through the swing-doors. As if you could get rid of your brother that way.

He walked across the hall, steady enough, and out the main entrance, his shadow following him in the sun, as he carried away inside him — his brother.

In the circumstances Arthur was glad they had the pups — or dogs they were by then — to return to, to cherish, though Waldo would never have admitted to cherishing anyone or anything. The dogs used to rush out on Arthur, their supple, flashing bodies, their strong white teeth revealed in pleasure, and he would go quite passive, though wobbly, allowing them to lick his hands. By the time their saliva had dried on his skin, he was usually restored. Then he would potter round a bit, talking, or grunting, to his dogs. Mostly in little pleased noises or phrases of gasps. Though on the evening of his scene with Waldo, he announced from the depths of him: “I got a proper flogging today.”

Waldo never talked to a dog, and on his arriving home, they would prowl round him, lifting their pads as though they were sprung, and whining through their sharp-looking noses.

“Those dogs of yours,” Mrs Allwright used to complain when they followed Arthur to the store, “I wouldn’t trust them an inch. Not on my heels. On a dark night. Not by day neether. Look, Arthur! Arrrr rrhh! Arthur? ” she would call, stamping, her voice rising. “Dogs! Dogs!” she would moan. “Filthy brutes! Soiling the produce!”

And the dogs would growl back, but make off across the paddocks, home.

Mrs Allwright was not in a position to create about the dogs as much as she would have liked, because, on the death of her husband, she became too dependent on Arthur at the store. When Arthur needed a day at the Library, she didn’t even dock his wages. If she complained a certain amount, well, complaint was in her nature.

“I shan’t let you down, Mrs Allwright,” Arthur promised. “Not in other ways. I owe it to Mr Allwright since he died.”

“Mr Allwright didn’t die,” his widow used to maintain. “He is all around me.”

Then Mrs Mutton her sister would suck her teeth, and ejaculate: “It’s a mercy you have your faith, Ivy.”

It was fortunate Mrs Allwright had her faith in faith, for she hadn’t any in man or dog, and on her deciding to sell the store, and retire to Toowoomba with her sister and her Christian Science, Arthur’s only regret was that he had never got to know Mr Allwright; he had been saving it up for the future when his employer died. If he hadn’t got to know Mrs Mutton either, it was because there was nothing to know. Mrs Mutton was more a monument than a woman.

So Arthur retired, and the convenience of it was: his twin brother Waldo began his retirement at the same moment.

If it had not been for the dogs they might have succumbed to the silence of their suddenly unfamiliar house. It seemed as though the house had grown elastic with time, and they would have to accustom themselves to its changing shapes. The rooms which they had used before, or not, according to their needs, began using them. So much of what they had forgotten, or never seen, rose up before their eyes: the dusty paper-bags still hanging by their necks as Dad had left them, rattling with husks when the wind blew or they hit you in the face; a simple, deal chair suddenly dominating the shadows; the smell of old milk rags, of turps, and rotted quinces, mingling and clotting so thick as to become visible in memory’s eye, a string of solid glossy days to chase the pong out of the present; dates of years ago turned to fly-shit on the calendars; a ball of Mother’s hair in the corner of a dressing-table drawer; a dress of Mother’s. For a long time Arthur had been afraid to touch the dress in case it stood up in a crash of remonstrative beads.

So the dogs were a blessing. And the walks. Waldo did not take to walking till later, because at first his papers demanded too much of his time. He was putting them in order.

“A disorderly life, a disorderly mind,” Waldo said. “You won’t understand, Arthur, the mental handicap physical disorder can become. You don’t need to. In my case an absence of method could undo the plans of a lifetime.”

He continued fussing over the old cardboard box in which Mother’s dress used to be.

Arthur went out. He liked to moon across the paddocks with the dogs. It was very soothing. On keener mornings he would put on that old coat in stained herring-bone tweed, which had belonged to Uncle Charlie, and which was still wearable in spite of moths. When he grew tired he would sit on a log and only at first wonder what he had come there for. The morning was reason enough — breaking into phrases of sound bursts of light threads of thought. He would sit in some sheltered bay of dripping blackberry bushes, the winter wire of which whipped him to greater appreciation of all he had experienced in the past. While in the present the dogs sat licking their pads or, jacked on their sterns, lavished respectful tongues on the blue perfection of their balls.

Arthur laughed, for all roundnesses. He took out the marble and looked at it.

One year he went up to look at the wheel-tree, again in the season of its second flowering, and as though by contrivance, the Chinese woman was standing beneath it. Only the crackle of her surface more pronounced, her bones more obviously breakable. On this occasion she turned even quicker, and went somewhat angrily behind the sheds. Perhaps seeing him on his own, without the benefit of Mrs Poulter. Well, he expected that sort of thing. But the wheel-tree fairly sizzled with fire, burning its way back through time to the other afternoon.