The Solid Mandala

by Patrick White

  “I think he was afraid of it,” said Arthur. “There were the bits he understood. They were bad enough. But the bits he didn’t understand were worse.”

  All the loathing in Waldo was centred on The Brothers Karamazov and the glass marble in Arthur’s hands.

  “And you understand!” he said to Arthur viciously.

  Arthur was unhurt.

  “Not a lot,” he said. “And not the Grand Inquisitor. That’s why I forgot Mrs Allwright’s glasses today. Because I had to get here to read the Grand Inquisitor again.”

  Waldo could have laid his head on the table; their lifetime had exhausted him.

  “What will it do for you? To understand? The Grand Inquisitor?”

  Though almost yawning, he felt neither lulled nor softened.

  “I could be able to help people,” Arthur said, beginning to devour the words. “Mrs Poulter. You. Mrs Allwright. Though Mrs Allwright’s Christian Science, and shouldn’t be in need of help. But you, Waldo.”

  Arthur’s face was in such a state of upheaval, Waldo hoped he wasn’t going to have a fit, though he had never had one up till now. And why did Arthur keep on lumping him together with almost all the people they knew? Mercifully he seemed to be overlooking the Saportas.

  “The need to ‘find somebody to worship’. As he says. Well, that’s plain enough.” Arthur had begun to slap the book and raise his voice alarmingly. “That’s clear. But what’s all this about bread? Why’s he got it in for poor old bread?”

  He was mashing the open book with his fist.

  “Eh? Everybody’s got to concentrate on something. Whether it’s a dog. Or,” he babbled, “or a glass marble. Or a brother, for instance. Or Our Lord, like Mrs Poulter says.”

  Waldo was afraid the sweat he could feel on his forehead, the sweat he could see streaming shining round his eyes, was going to attract even more attention than Arthur’s hysteria.

  “Afraid.” Arthur was swaying in his chair. “That is why our father was afraid. It wasn’t so much because of the blood, however awful, pouring out where the nails went in. He was afraid to worship some thing. Or body. Which is what I take it this Dostoevsky is partly going on about.”

  Suddenly Arthur burst into tears, and Waldo looked round at all the opaque faces waiting to accuse him, him him, not Arthur. But just as suddenly, Arthur stopped.

  “That’s something you and I need never be, Waldo. Afraid. We learned too late about all this Christ stuff. From what we read it doesn’t seem to work, anyway. But we have each other.”

  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.

  Arthur was now preparing to go in and make that bread and milk, faintly sweetened, which soothed away the flapping of acidulous stomachs after walks. He used to serve it out in pudding basins, and they would take their basins and eat from them in whichever room they wanted to be. Sometimes they would find they had chosen the same room, or Arthur had flopped down in Waldo’s, there was no escaping, nor from the glup glup of someone else’s bread and milk. The louder Arthur glupped, the more ingeniously Waldo managed his spoon. He could feel his teeth, in self defence, moving like the false ones of some over-refined female in a business-women’s luncheonette, though his own teeth, he knew, were still sound as nails, and when alone, and there was no need to set an example, he would worry food like an animal, his pleasure increasing with the violence of the physical act.

  In his brother’s company he felt compelled to wipe his mouth, and fold his handkerchief, and say: “If you could listen to yourself eating bread and milk you would hear the tide turning in a sewer.”

  Arthur didn’t mind. He very rarely cared what people said.

  “Why don’t you care?” Waldo used to ask because it exasperated him so.

  “I dunno,” Arthur said, sucking a tooth. “I think it was that time at the Public Library, before we retired, when you called me sir. After that I didn’t bother. I don’t care what people say.”

  Waldo couldn’t be expected to remember every word which had ever been uttered, certainly not those it did your health no good to remember.

  So he insisted: “But you should. You ought to take a pride in yourself, and care what other people say.”

  Arthur continued sucking his teeth.

  “Don’t you care if people don’t like you?”

  “No,” said Arthur. “Because they mostly do. Except Mrs Allwright. And she went away to Toowoomba.”

  Waldo hated his brother for moments such as these. While knowing he should be thankful for Arthur’s insensitivity.

  The day they returned from the walk on which Waldo had decided Arthur should die, the latter chose to remain in the kitchen after the bread and milk was served. Waldo was spared listening to the glup glup for the noise the dogs were making as they crunched, or gnawed, or dragged along the floor the mutton flaps on which they were feeding. It was from such treatment that the kitchen boards, which had sloughed their linoleum years ago, got their rich polished look.

  The scrape scrape of the mutton flaps, together with the steady crunching of bone, made at a distance a fairly companionable sound.

  Waldo was sitting with his legs apart. He was sitting in the room in which their mother had lived her last illness. He ate by full, openly greedy, quickly-swallowed mouthfuls, because now of course he was on his own, and the closeness of his collected works in the dress-box on top of the wardrobe gave him a sense of affluence. If he sometimes bit his spoon between the more voluptuous acts of swallowing, it was for remembering how he had contemplated burning his papers during those panicky moments on the walk.

  He was so annoyed at one stage he called out to Arthur: “You shouldn’t have given them the mutton flaps now. Kept them till evening. It’s only middle of the day.”

  “Yes,” called Arthur through his bread and milk, “I forgot it’s only middle of the day.”

  If Waldo did not criticize further, it was because they did forget. They both forgot. Sometimes the light reminded them, but the light could not tell them the day of the week. It could not remind them when they had been born, only that they were intended to die.

  Why were they always dragged back to this? Or he, Waldo. He was afraid Arthur didn’t think about it enough, which could have accounted for his unconcern when faced with signs and accusations.

  Just then Arthur came into the room, and caught his brother wiping out the basin with his fingers, which annoyed Waldo considerably.

  Arthur stood looking at him.

  “I want to talk to you, Waldo,” he said.

  “What is the schoolmaster, the head-master, going to announce?” Waldo grumbled.

  “We can talk to each other, can’t we? We are brothers, aren’t we?”

  Then Waldo saw it printed up as HA! HA!

  He only grunted, though, and looked with distaste at the empty basin. He would have liked to complain about the bread and milk he had just eaten, but there isn’t much bread and milk can lack.

  Arthur, the mountain in front of him, finally asked: “Do you understand all this about loving?”

  “What?”

  This, perhaps, was it, which he most dreaded.

  “Of course,” said Waldo. “What do you mean?”

  “I sometimes wonder,” Arthur said, “whether you have ever been in love.”

  Waldo was filled with such an unpleasant tingling, he got up and put the pudding basin down. One of the dogs, it was perhaps Scruffy, had come in to gloat over him.

  “I have been in love,” Waldo said cautiously, “well, I suppose, as much as any normal person ever was.”

  By now he suspected even his own syntax but Arthur would not notice syntax.

>   “I just wondered,” he said.

  “But what a thing to ask!” Waldo blurted “And what about you?”

  At once he could have kicked himself.

  “Oh,” said Arthur, “all the time. But perhaps I don’t love enough, or something. Anyway, it’s too big a subject for me to altogether understand.”

  “I should think so!” Waldo said.

  I should hope so, he might have meant.

  “If we loved enough,” Arthur was struggling, kneading with his hands, “then perhaps we could forget to hate.”

  “Whom do you hate?” Waldo asked very carefully.

  “Myself at times.”

  “If you must hate, there’s no reason to pick on yourself.”

  “But I can see myself. I’m closest to myself.”

  Then Waldo wanted to cry for this poor dope Arthur. Perhaps this was Arthur’s function, though: to drive him in the direction of tears.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, to offer his driest resistance.

  “Love,” said Arthur. “And that is what I fail in worst.”

  “Oh, God!” Waldo cried.

  The light was the whitest mid-day light, of colder weather, and Arthur was standing him up.

  “If,” said Arthur, “I was not so simple, I might have been able to help you, Waldo, not to be how you are.”

  Then Waldo was raving at the horror of it.

  “You’re mad! That’s what you are. You’re mad!”

  “All right then,” Arthur said. “I’m mad.”

  And went away.

  Although he was trembling, Waldo took down his box intending to work, to recover from the shocks he had had. After all, you can overcome anything by will. If the will, the kernel of you, didn’t exist — it didn’t bear thinking about.

  So towards evening he re-tied the strings round the bundles of unresponsive papers. He didn’t know what had become of Arthur. He went out and walked round and about, mowing down the tall grass, which stood up again when he had passed, because he was light-boned and old.