For nobody would be able to accuse him of not fully understanding a cow. And they sat looking at him, almost crying for his tragedy. As he stamped up and down, pawing and lowing, for the tragedy of all interminably bleeding breeding cows. By that time his belly was swollen with it. He could feel the head twisting in his guts.
Everybody had begun to share his agony, but that, surely, was what tragedy is for.
When Mother suddenly tried to throw the expression off her face, and said: “Oh Arthur, we understand your tragedy without your showing us any more.”
And at that moment he felt Dad turn against him. It was some question of afflictions, Except in theory, the afflicted cannot love one another. Well, you couldn’t altogether blame Dad. With his aching leg.
“I wish I knew how it felt,” said Arthur.
“Why?” asked Dad, biting his moustache.
“It would make it easier, wouldn’t it? if I understood.”
Dad didn’t seem to think it would. And Arthur knew that he was right. Their limping and lumbering together would not help. For his father it would have been detestable.
As for Waldo, Arthur was closest to his twin when silentest, the moment before falling asleep, or walking down the side roads at Sarsaparilla, or in the class early, after seeing their father off. Dozing awake amongst the quickly solidifying rows of desks, they sat propping each other up.
Except on the morning when Waldo accused.
“You’re just a big fat helpless female.”
Arthur did not tell him: If that’s the way you want it. He simply said: “I’m that tired.”
He layed his face sideways on the desk, and dreamed a short, unsatisfactory dream about someone he was on the point of meeting.
Then Waldo punching. Waldo shouting.
“Wake up, you dope! They’re coming in!”
“They’ve seen us, haven’t they? before, Waldo?”
Waldo gave him that extra punch for luck.
“Waldo the dope and Arthur the dill,” Arthur chanted as the kids came in.
He gave the performance they expected of him. They seemed to like him for it. Arthur was only wretched for betraying Waldo so easily.
Nobody could remember, not even Arthur Brown himself, when he developed his head for figures. The gift was found growing in him, as naturally as hair for instance. He was safest with numbers. The steel springs of clocks could not be unwound so logically. Arthur’s awkward fingers would become steel tentacles reaching out for the solution of his problem. What Waldo called those messy-awful melting-chocolate eyes would set hard in the abstraction which should have been foreign to him. How did he do it? He just knew. And immediately after, was laughing it off. The brown sloppy awful eyes had a squint in them too, or in one of them.
“Music and mathematics have something in common,” Mother was happy to remember.
Arthur would have liked them to. But it was Waldo who learned to play, with care, from Miss Olive Fischer of Barranugli, The Raindrop Prelude, The Turkish Rondo, and Fur Eliza.
That was later on, however. Till then, Waldo grumbled: “When can I have those real lessons?”
“When the money has been saved up,” said Mother, “you shall both have lessons.”
“What! Arthur?”
“Why not Arthur?” Mother said. “Arthur may be a musical genius.”
Waldo went so silent he must have been offended.
But Mother was determined Arthur should be a genius. She sat beside him remembering all that she had learnt — sometimes of an evening she would flop down on that hard stool and play the Paderewski minuet, crossing her wrists at the moment they were waiting for — but sat beside Arthur stiff and stern to supervise his scales. Arthur’s hands became ungovernable then. He could not manage the angular scales, though of course he could hear, he could see in advance the splotches of sound. If he could only have moulded music like he knew how to work butter and knead the dough. Or add up the notes until they made a musical whole.
He couldn’t. And Mother gave up. She grew sad, though not, she said, on account of that. Instead, they entered deeper into their conspiracy of butter and bread. Only she and Arthur were to understand the mystery they had to celebrate. Arthur was only too glad to adopt the rites she imposed on him. By lamplight he and Mother became their own closed circle in the kitchen.
This development gave Arthur Brown a satisfaction more intense than any he experienced before the coming of Mrs Poulter.
In the meantime they decided schools were wasted on him. Arthur Brown was taken on by Mr Allwright about the time Waldo began at Barranugli High. Arthur Brown’s apprenticeship was arranged quite quickly and easily, in spite of, he learned at once, the opposition of Mr Allwright’s wife.
He went to the store, and on finding himself the right side of the counter, grew more serious for a bit, took to damping down his orange hair, got the hiccups frequently, and would stand alone waiting for custom, twisting an invisible ring on his little finger.
If he stood alone it was because his employer would be out delivering the orders, and his employer’s wife inside, pouring tea for her sister Mrs Mutton, who was almost always visiting behind the shop.
“You must realize, Arthur,” Mrs Allwright explained, “my sister depends on my support. She has never been the same since Mr Mutton passed on. You must just do your best, and make your mistakes, and learn things, like all of us, the painful way.”
When Mrs Allwright said painful she meant painful, that he knew. He knew Mrs Allwright and Mrs Mutton were sitting out there on the closed-in veranda waiting for him to make those mistakes. Like the incident of Mrs Musto’s change. That sort of thing was what gave him the terrible hiccups. On one occasion Mrs Allwright administered so large a drink of vinegar it shrivelled his inside and left him winded. From the way she laughed he must have looked comical.
His own solemnity did not last too long. He learned too thoroughly the extent of Mrs Allwright’s stock, and could tot up so quick she herself got sarcastic about it.
“Oh dear!” she shrieked. “Don’t you put me to shame, Arthur! I’ll have to watch out while you’re around. You’ll catch me out, won’t you?”
“You’re not all that mathematical, Mrs Allwright,” Arthur had to admit.
Which made her turn nasty.
“I never cared for brass,” she said, “in particular from subordinate young men.”
“Sub-what?” he asked, hiccuping.
But Mrs Allwright had returned to Mrs Mutton.
Even before he learned to drive the buggy his outside duties were more diverting. To run outside and chase away the dogs when they began pissing on the overflow produce. To stack on the veranda the cases delivered by farmers’ wives, almost all of whom enjoyed his jokes. Sometimes he would simply lean against a post with the empty theatre of the distance spread around him, no sound but the hooting of a train in the cutting or a chattering of sods in the coral tree, as he took out one of those glass marbles left over from the school yard. Not to play with. It had developed into something more serious than play. For the circle of the distant mountains would close around him, the golden disc spinning closer in the sky, as he contemplated the smaller sphere lying on the palm of his hand.
He would put it away quickly, though, on hearing anyone approach from behind. He was less afraid of theft, or even total destruction, than he was of damage by scorn.
Once or twice Mr Allwright descended on him before he could hide the marble. But it did not seem to matter. For Mr Allwright’s smile slid around and away from it.
He would make a remark such as: “Mare cast a shoe other side of ‘Ferndale’. Remind me Thursday morning, Arthur, to take her up to Harry Booth’s.”