There he sat, exposed, though, under the dismal grease-spots. Munching and mumbling over, of all things, a book. Playing with a glass marble. How it would have crashed, shattering the Public Library. But never smashed. Arthur’s glass was indestructible. Only other people broke.
Having to decide quickly what action to take Waldo pulled out an excruciatingly noisy chair and sat down exactly opposite. His attitude at the table was so intense, he was so tightly clamped to the chair, he realized at once he might be giving himself away, not only to Miss Glasson, but to all those others who would be watching him. At least he had the presence of mind to relax almost immediately.
Arthur, as soon as he had swum up out of his thoughts, closed his mouth, and smiled.
“Hello, Waldy,” he said rather drowsily.
Waldo winced.
“You have never called me that before. Why should you begin now?”
“Because I’m happy to see you. Here in the Library. Where you work. I never looked you up on any occasion because I thought it would disturb you, and you mightn’t like it.”
This was so reasonable a speech Waldo could only regret he was unable to squash it.
“Do you come here often?” he asked.
“Only on days when I run a message for Mrs Allwright. Today she sent me to fetch her glasses, which are being fitted with new frames.” He felt in his pocket. “That reminds me, I forgot about them so far. I couldn’t come here quick enough to get on with The Brothers Karamazov.”
Arthur made his mention of the title sound so natural, as though trotting out a line of condensed milk to a customer at Allwrights’.
“But,” said Waldo, ignoring the more sinister aspect of it, “is there any necessity to come to the Public Library? You could buy for a few shillings. In any case, there’s the copy at home. Dad’s copy.”
“I like to come to the Public Library,” said Arthur, “because then I can sit amongst all these people and look at them when I’m tired of reading. Sometimes I talk to the ones near me. They seem surprised and pleased to hear any news I have to give them.”
He stopped, and squinted into the marble, at the brilliant whorl of intersecting lines.
“I can’t read the copy at home,” he who had been speaking gently enough before, said more gently. “Dad burned it. Don’t you remember?”
Waldo did now, unpleasant though the memory was, and much as he respected books, and had despised their in many ways pitiful father, his sympathies were somehow with Dad over The Brothers Karamazov. Which George Brown had carried to the bonfire with a pair of tongs. Waldo found himself shivering, as though some unmentionable gobbet of his own flesh had lain reeking on the embers.
“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.