The filthy mutton was sticking in his throat. His rejection of the Feinsteins seemed connected with some far deeper, even less desirable, misery. On the outskirts of the lamplight Dulcie hovered, in that same dress, the sleeves of which were embroidered with the bracts of loose hydrangeas. How he resented brown eyes, whether in Dulcie Feinstein, Arthur, or George Brown, whether offering themselves for martyrdom, or like soft brown animals burrowing in, unconscious, but still burrowing.
“Well, I have been guillotined!” said Waldo Brown cheerfully, throwing his knife and fork together on the plate.
For once he was glad he would be leaving for the Library in the morning. For once too, Arthur was not joining in. Arthur sat munching on his thoughts, his eyelids drooping, so that you could only see the moons of heavy skin. If he had had to face the brown verdict of Arthur’s eyes, Waldo suspected the same unhappiness might have risen up inside him to trouble the surface.
In the morning he left for the Library. And then again. Always.
“That girl Dulcie,” Walter Pugh returned to the subject on a later occasion, “what became of her?”
“I had a letter from her. She’s in Brussels,” Waldo said with the naturalness of inspiration.
“Some people have all the luck! Or spondulicks.”
“It’s not luck. It’s practical, an investment. They’ve taken her to Europe to learn the languages.”
Walter Pugh was breathing hard.
“Not that Dulcie wasn’t a cultured girl already,” Waldo said. “Plays the Beethoven piano sonatas. Does embroidery, too. Petty point.”
After that, Walter invited Waldo to spend the evening at the home of his sister and brother-in-law. Once before Waldo had accepted, and eaten a sociable braise with Cis and Ern — we’re going to treat you just as if you were one of the family — and Wally had spoken about his plans for the future, which were uncomfortably familiar.
This time Waldo said: “Sorry, Wal. Too far. All this train travel — I’m played out by the time I reach home.”
It was true, too. Everywhere was too far from Terminus Road. From time to time he resented it bitterly, and planned to rent that small room in the city where his thoughts might take finite shape instead of remaining the blurred mess he could never sort out. On the other hand, living under grass down Terminus Road allowed his thoughts their flowing line, to tighten which might mean extinction.
So he continued living too far, soon even farther still. Their Brown world, at the end of the yellow-green tunnel called Terminus Road, contracted before the pressure of events. Because war was breaking, had already broken out. Waldo decided in secret that it shouldn’t concern them, though his parents’ unhappiness, viewed through the glare of yellow grass, caused him temporary doubts. His father couldn’t wait to open the papers, but stood by the road, in his braces, perched lopsided on his surgical boot. His mother used to bring out her knitting, out to the veranda, and sit on the day-bed, under the classical pediment. The anger in her flashing needles could not compete eventually with the penumbra easily slicing the classical façade, right through, and the wool; the ineffectual steel, she sat holding.
The gothic arches of dead grass were taking over from the classical. But he would not, would not let it happen.
Waldo Brown at this stage was becoming a smart young fellow. At the Municipal Library they had put him on the catalogue. So the least desirable part of his life was war and all that it implied. In particular he recoiled from those of the enlisted men who wished to make confidences, to turn out all that was most secret, personal, emotional, painful, as though they were emptying a paper bag. Naturally he disguised his feelings, because under the influence of war nobody would have believed in them, least of all those wide-open faces needing to confess, the country faces cured to bacon tints and textures, the faces of the Boys.
Of course everybody loved the Boys, sang to them, with them, about them. All those blouses full of bust with which the streets were suddenly filled, the cheery young matrons who presided over stalls in Martin Place, and the girls, the girls selling metal badges and paper flags — all of them loved the smell of khaki.
But Waldo hated what he could never in any way take part in. At least his physique would not have made him acceptable. If there were moral reasons for his aloofness he had not yet thought them out. Where the War did concern him in any way personally was through Mrs Feinstein and Dulcie stranded somewhere in Europe. On one occasion he visualized them as victims of a zeppelin, but the zeppelin in his mind’s eye was little more than a toy against a paper moon. And he turned his face to the pillow, for the discovery that he could not succeed in transforming his moon into the throbbing flesh which in theory he knew it to be.
Oh God oh God, he repeated, in one of the rare moods of intellectual debauchery he allowed himself.
He evolved a kind of taut joviality with which to counter the confidences in trains, of those who were about to embark. Perhaps if he cut his throat he might atone for his own nature, though he doubted it. To one or two he promised to write from his side of the grave. He would have liked to. Oh yes, he would have liked to. He would have liked to be.
Walter Pugh was Waldo’s gravest source of disturbance. Wally decided to enlist.
“Like any decent bloke has to in the end. Not that I’m holding anything against those who don’t. Or not against you, Waldo. You can’t be all that strong.”
“I mightn’t be very good at it,” Waldo answered truthfully.
“Who knows who’ll be good at what?” Wally said; it was an evening of truths, and he had written poems in his day.
(Wally, in fact, was so good at war he got killed for it, and they sent a medal to Cis.)
Wally, who had become one of the Boys, with a leather strap under his lip, and the smell of khaki, took time off to entertain his pal Waldo Brown, at the expense of Cis and Ernie Baker, before leaving for that hypothetical Front.
Cis had got hold of a boiler and done it up in egg sauce. Afterwards, over the port and nuts, Waldo disclosed that he had a voice. He sang In the Gloaming, The Tide Will Turn, and Singing Voices, Marching Feet — all light, appropriate stuff. The silkiness of his voice brought the tears to Cis’s eyes, and Waldo himself rubbed his pince-nez with a handkerchief between the items. He was smiling slightly for the success of his contribution.
Only Wally sat set stiffer than usual. He had put on weight since the declaration of war, but camp had turned the fat to meat. The pimples were gone, the movements of his buttocks were controlled, and he needed to talk less about the tarts, perhaps had even done one or two of them in the scrub before you got to Permanent Avenue.
He was a good bloke. Waldo might have loved Wally, if that truth had been admitted. As it was, after several beers on the last night but one — the relatives naturally claimed their soldier on the last — they embraced in George Street, furtively, though affectionately, and the stench of khaki was inebriating.
“Do you remember that girl?” Waldo felt it was required of him to ask as they staggered in each other’s arms.
“What girl?”
“That Dulcie.”
“Oh,” said Wally.
Soon after that he was sailing away, and the incident was one to forget.
Waldo had to remember the morning Cis came into the Library. He knew it must have happened, because she was in black. At once he would have liked to look for some excuse in the darker warren of the stacks.
When she had told him, Cis said: “And there’s these three or four poems, Waldo. I brought them because you’re the literary one. What am I to do with them?”