So Waldo raced the traffic up the Barranugli Road.
“Hey, steady on!” Arthur called bumpily. “What are you up to? What’s the point?”
As Waldo raced the traffic towards Sarsaparilla, unfortunately some of it was going in the wrong direction.
But he would arrive, and after they had struggled with that gate, and pushed the grass aside with their chests, because by now in places you might have said they were living under grass, he would go as straight as possible in, and collect the box from on top of the wardrobe, that old David Jones dress box in which Mother had kept the little broken fan and some important blue dress, only in the earlier style, with a pattern of rust where the hooks and eyes had eaten in. The D.J. box was, or had been, the ideal receptacle for papers of a private nature. He had even printed PRIVATE on it, not that it ever helped much. But now he would make it actually his, all those warm thrilled and still thrilling words falling from their creator’s hands into the pit at the bottom of the orchard into ash smouldering brittly palpitating with private thoughts. Because fire is the only privacy the thoughts of great men can expect. Allow them to be turned into sculpture and you are lost.
The wind helped him, and to a certain extent the onward traffic. Arthur was against him of course, as was the opposite stream. But they did arrive at last, on the ramparts of Sarsaparilla, erected laboriously brick by brick, to withstand some hostile thing, by those who had not yet died: the infallible ones with professions and offspring. It was pathetic to think about them. Perhaps like Goethe he was vain, but if small minds could be so obsessed by illusions of permanence, how much less convincing was his own illusion of death?
So Waldo slowed or was slowed down. It is ridiculous, he panted, to think I may pop off, today, or tomorrow, why, I am good for another twenty years, taking reasonable care, keeping off salt, animal fats, potatoes, and white bread.
“What’s up?” Arthur asked. “Don’t tell me you’re running out of energy?”
Because Waldo was standing. Still.
“No,” he said, so slow. “I was looking at that rose.”
He was too, on another level.
“A good specimen of a rose. I like a rose, a white rose,” Arthur said.
It was not its beauty, its whiteness, its perfection, which interested Waldo, it was the solidity of it. Only apparent, however. If he had come closer and alone, he might have torn the rose to show he was that much stronger. Roseflesh on occasions had made him shiver. How much less exposed to destruction was the form of youth, even with time and memory working against it.
Waldo liked that. It made him look rather sly. Now they would go home, and while Arthur was occupied with some bungling business of his own, he would take down the private box, he would take out the current notebook. Always taking, taking renews, give too much and the recipient expects all. He liked that, he would write it down. For his PRIVATE pleasure. And the bit about form of youth, time and memory. In that way he would continue living. In the notebooks. In his secret mind. In spite of Arthur. And Goethe.
Youth is the only permanent state of mind. There was no stage in his life when he hadn’t felt young — he insisted — except sometimes as a little boy. If growing old is to become increasingly aware, as a little boy his premature awareness irritated his elders to the point of slapping. So there are, in fact, no compartments, unless in the world of vegetables.
Today I am thirty, he had calculated, looking at himself in the glass of the deal dressing-table he shared with Arthur, his brushes and bottles to the right, Arthur’s to the left, as he insisted. His face trembled down one side as he tried to accept the incredible. Sometimes he wondered whether anybody realised there was still the little boy inside him, beside his other self, looking out. His eyes, like his mother’s, were blue, though his were watered down. It always gave him some satisfaction to acknowledge blue eyes in the street, especially those of women. He made them conspirators. Or members of a select club. Though naturally he would never have informed them. (Brown eyes he blackballed automatically. Ugh!)
It was a penetrating voyage into the glass of the dressing-table (deal for the boys). According to mood, he might take his pince-nez off, blurring the image, allowing his imagination to play amongst the hydrangeas, or alternately he would clip the lenses firmly on, and refuse himself any avenues of escape from that intellectual ruthlessness he knew himself to possess. (He had once described the geography of his face in seven foolscap pages.) The optician’s formula made his eyes appear paler, his chin less pronounced, his moustache patchier under the brilliantine, but hadn’t the whole botched mess — he was prepared to face it — helped give birth to that proven sensibility?
On his thirtieth birthday he smiled at himself in reflection, for the strangeness of it. Then he shuffled the expanding arm-bands up his sleeves, put on his workday coat, and went into the kitchen where she was getting his breakfast for him.
“It’s odd to think I’m thirty,” he said, forestalling the probable question of how he felt about it.
He stood looking down at the pair of eggs, their ruffles edged with a brown frizz.
“I think, dear, you were born thirty,” she said.
In her cool voice. Allowing him her cool kiss. She, if anybody, should have known.
His mother was wearing the old blue dressing-gown with the safety-pin which failed to disguise the financial truth or her operation. Since Dad died in 1922 she had been dependent on him. (Arthur contributed something.)
Some people would have considered his — their mother, dowdy. He could only think of her as timeless, actually so, because she was not taken in by his thirtieth birthday. She, too, realized there were no compartments. Thirty or seventeen.
At seventeen — on his seventeenth birthday as it turned out — he had presented himself at Sydney Municipal Library, to take up the position he got thanks to Fairy Flour. So it had been hinted. Only the malicious could have ignored the true state of affairs: a spotty youth wheeling trollies of books between the stacks. Neither light nor air played much part in the sinecure his patroness had bought him. Sometimes the cages were jammed so full, his fellow-suffering and cracking ribs caused him to wonder how easily a person might contract consumption and retire early on a pension. He read one or two works on the subject of that disease. Shoving them back according to numbers he got to hate the physical presence of books. Never lost his respect for them, of course. But could have hurt any book shoving it back. Occasionally he shoved one so far away from its recorded cell he hoped it would never be found again. The thick porous pages of some of the old public books, ravelled at the edges into lint, clotted with snot, smeary with spittle and nicotine, smelled of old men in greasy raincoats, in hats which their foreheads melted, but which soon set stiff and cold if left standing.
Pffeugh, the books! The injustice necessity had done him was proclaimed by the mirrors of many public lavatories, along with the warnings against venereal disease. He would drop in to wash his hands, though who knew if you mightn’t pick up something worse from the tap. Still, you had to wash your hands. There was a period when he couldn’t wash them enough.
His purple hands. It was the ink-pads. He was marked from the start. But hadn’t he given himself to books? Waldo is the bookish one, takes after his father in that. And sometimes even then, in the stacks of the Municipal Library, in the sound of dust, and the smell of decaying, aged flesh, he would open a book to dedicate himself anew. And he would stand shivering for the daring of words, their sheer ejaculation.