“By gosh,” he said quite boyishly, “the old Municipal’s fairly going to hum.”
“How?” asked Arthur out of a yawn.
As he grew older he liked to take it easier. He would lie in bed until he heard the fat spitting. Then he would rise, in a flurry of iron joints, a ringing of brass balls.
“Matters are coming to a head,” said Waldo, but would not explain beyond: “It concerns our friend Crankshaw.”
“You’ll have my blessings,” Arthur said, “as you gather round the boree log.”
Actually Waldo was surprised he had succeeded in forming any kind of plan during the years of anxiety and stress through which he had been living. Quite apart from everything else he had always been expecting Cissie Baker to return clutching those few poems perpetrated by her dead brother and his former colleague Walter Pugh. He could not have borne the first sight of her black figure creaking through the turnstile.
That morning the old Municipal, as if regretful of having provided a setting for what Waldo had catalogued as Inquisition of a Living Mind, was spreading snares of nostalgia and regret. Even ugliness has its virtue in the end. Certainly Waldo’s corner was darker than ever, but it had driven him on occasions to pour light on obscurity, just as the stench of disinfectant on that morning sternly assaulted a wretched catarrh and stripped the last vestige of doubt from his intention. He was so spare and purposeful as he went and stuck his nose for the last time in one of the linted books, which, ever since his youth and the patronage of the late Mrs Musto, had reminded him of the stink of old putrefying men in raincoats. Smelling them for the last time he laughed out loud in the deserted stacks.
Then he sat down and wrote several drafts before the final version.
He let it be eleven before knocking on the Librarian’s door. There was still a mouthful of muddy tea in Crankshaw’s cup, and he had not yet started looking for something to do. The room smelled, as always, of the beastly treacle in an old and bubbly pipe.
“What can I do for you, Mr Brown?” Crankshaw asked, ever so affable, moving a box of pins from A to B.
Little realizing how he would be pricked.
“Mr Crankshaw, I have decided to resign,” Waldo said, coming to the point. “In fact, I am tendering my written resignation.”
And he fetched the paper round on Crankshaw’s desk with a frivolous twirl, unrehearsed, which reminded him once again of the maid in a Restoration play, though this time he did not care.
Crankshaw was obviously stunned.
“Have you given it all possible thought?” he asked between bubbling into his filthy pipe.
Waldo appreciated the all possible. Thoroughly characteristic.
“I have been thinking it over for years,” he said not quite accurately.
“Made any plans?”
Waldo said no he hadn’t though he had but wasn’t going to tell.
The Librarian looked at Waldo, who was again conscious of the cleft chin, which, so it was said, is the sign of a lover.
“If there is any way in which I can assist,” Crankshaw offered.
It was the exact tone of his dictation.
“We have never, it seems, got to know each other, not, I mean, as human beings, and everyone, I expect you will agree, has the potentialities.” So Crankshaw uttered. “I would have liked to see you out at Roseville. We might have had a chat. But apparently I was slow in asking.”
Tell that to the priests and the white hats! Waldo smiled the smile which left the token of a dimple in his lean right cheek. He could not be caught so late in the piece.
He went out and took down his homburg. They would think the Librarian had entrusted him with business of a confidential nature. So he escaped without further embarrassment from the scene of Cissie Baker’s offering him, in another war, her soldier-brother’s poems.
The streets were full of soldiers now. Waldo Brown could have outmarched the most virile of them, up King and along Macquarie, to the big new Public Library they had opened a couple of years before, and where he began without delay offering his services.
Time thus spent is not life lived, but belongs in a peculiar purgatorial category of its own. Waldo got used to it, and even detected in his face signs of moral purification. If any, his religion had become a cultivation of personal detachment, of complete transparency — he was not prepared to think emptiness — of mind. In this way he suffered no immediate hurt, and would only remember years afterwards fragments of conversation overheard.
For instance, from during his petitioning:
“This Brown cove — this Waldo — sounds nutty enough to me.”
“Oh, Crankshaw agrees. But advises we should give him a trial. Says he’s a glutton for continuity.”
“All very well for old Crank.”
“He’s an honest man, Mr O’Connell.”
“Except when it comes to his throw-outs. No man can afford to be honest then.”
(This part alone made Waldo Brown inclined to lose the faith he didn’t have in human nature.)
“Ah well, fit him in somewhere, I suppose. Waldo Brown. Somewhere amongst the introverts. Some corner. They like that. Let him sharpen his pencils and sweep up the crumbs of his rubber in peace.”
Such was the texture of mind he had cultivated, Waldo only saw this dialogue printed black on its transparent screen perhaps six years afterwards, and immediately realized O’Connell was somebody to hate.
Arthur’s dog helped him reach his conclusion.
One Saturday morning when Allwright had allowed him to knock off early, Arthur had gone in to Barranugli and bought from the pet shop a blue pup. Waldo found his brother seated on the edge of the veranda grunting apparently with joy, kneading the formless lump of fat, gazing at it, snout against snout, staring into the animal’s rather unpleasant marbles of eyes.
The puppy, grunting or growling back, bristled up on seeing Waldo.
“Don’t tell me!” the latter rattled. “I thought we had this out last time you did it. You were younger then, Arthur. But look at you now, an old man!”
“Fifty-six,” Arthur said.
He could not cuddle the puppy less.
“Well, then,” said Waldo. “At your age. You won’t outlast that dog. And what am I going to do with one? Arthur? Quite apart from that, what about his biting the postman, shitting in corners, or not even corners? What it will eat, too, a large dog, at post-war prices. At cheapest, stinking horseflesh, fetching in the blow-flies.”
“Keep the meat in a bucketful of water. Under the coral tree.”
Arthur’s hands grew noticeably gentler wrapping the pup in enormous velvetty flaps of dough. The pup was either grinning back, or waiting to sink its teeth in Arthur’s not too human snout.
“But all that yellow fat on horseflesh! Ugh! There’s something about an old man with a dog. Arthur? Now, young children. Parents, I’ve read, often invest in a pup to teach their children the facts of life. That’s unpleasant in itself, though practical. You can’t say it isn’t normal. But later on it’s the people who are in some way denied or denying — sexually frustrated women, selfish, childless couples, narcissists — who keep dogs. People in some way peculiar.”
Waldo’s voice continued on a curve with no prospect of coming full circle. When Arthur interrupted.
“I am peculiar,” he said.
So dreamy since shutting the pup to sleep in his arms, this old man was looking peculiarly awful.
“I warn you,” Waldo said irrelevantly.
Anyway, this time Arthur refused to return the pup.
He called it Scruffy, and might have created what he named. Arthur present, the dog’s attention was all for Arthur, its large tongue lolling out of its smaller mouth, its nose perpetually swivelling. In Arthur’s absence, the marble-eyes were fixed on distance and some abstraction of the man.