Stream System

by Gerald Murnane

  He told the young woman that the owner of a racehorse could know that his horse was supremely fit before a particular race and could bet large sums of money on his horse but could never be sure that his horse would not be narrowly beaten in the race by a horse whose owner had known about his horse and had bet as the first owner had known and bet. He told her that on the afternoon far into the future, the owner that he would be at that time would have known several times in the recent past that his horse had been supremely fit and would have bet several times large sums of money on the horse but would have seen the horse narrowly beaten. But on the afternoon that he foresaw, so he told her, with a certain mellow light in the air and a view of the Dandenong Ranges on the far side of the racecourse, his run of losses would come to an end at last. He did not tell the young woman that he always foresaw that he would understand on that afternoon in the far future that a certain woman of a few years less than his own age would be among the crowd who would watch him standing beside the winner’s stall in the mounting yard as his horse returned to scale; that he would not know the name of the woman or any detail of her history, although he would have recognised the woman at once if he had happened to see her face at any time during the afternoon; that the woman would have wondered for a few moments about him when she saw him standing with no wife or child beside him and only the trainer of his horse for company but would not have known what he would have known if ever he had seen her face, namely, that she was the woman he would have met and married if his life had taken the course it would have taken if he had not decided as a young man to be in the future a bachelor and the owner of a racehorse.

  At some time during the afternoon while they sat together in the canvas enclosure, he told the young woman that the colours carried by the horse that he had foreseen himself as owning would be one or another combination of pale green and dark blue. When the young woman had asked him why he had named those particular colours, he did not answer truthfully. He told her that his chosen colours were the most striking of the many colours in the main window of stained glass above the altar in the Catholic church in the large town in the south-west of Victoria where he had often spent his summer holidays. This much of what he told her was true. One Sunday morning during his summer holidays five years before, while he had been kneeling in the church beside one of his unmarried aunts, he had noticed the prominence in the window above the altar of the colours that he had already adopted as his racing colours: the dark blue in the mantle of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the pale green in what he supposed to be a shower of divine grace or some other spiritual emanation reaching down to the Virgin from on high. But he had decided on his colours at some time during the previous year while he had been in his room in his parents’ house one evening. He wanted colours that were seldom used by other owners, and he wanted his colours to suggest what was most distinctive about him. He knew already that he would never be able to become the owner of a racehorse unless he remained a bachelor throughout his life, and he believed that his bachelorhood would be what most clearly defined him. When he asked himself what colours best suggested bachelorhood, he thought at once of his bachelor-uncle in his paddocks in the south-west of Victoria. He, the chief character, then saw those paddocks as pale green and the line of trees that seemed always in the distance as dark blue. Even while those colours were occurring to him, he was aware that the combination of pale green and dark blue hardly ever appeared on the racecourses of Melbourne or the country districts of Victoria.

  Few sentences in this piece of fiction are of the kind that might be verified by reference to other publications in the world where the book containing this piece of fiction will later be published, but the sentences in this paragraph are of that kind. On almost every Saturday during the years of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the racebook containing, among many other details, the details of the colours worn by the riders of all the horses entered at the race meeting in one or another suburb of Melbourne on that day contained no details of any jacket and cap of only pale green and dark blue. On some Saturdays, the colours green, blue spots, red cap were listed in the racebook. One of the few horses that raced under those colours, the green of which appeared as pale green on the silk of the actual jacket so that the colours could be imagined as consisting only of pale green and dark blue when the jockey wearing the colours stood in the mounting yard with his cap not yet on his head, was named Grassland, and the sire of this horse was a horse imported from England with the name Black Pampas.

  After the race meeting at Caulfield, the young woman insisted that the chief character of this story must not go to the expense of taking her to her home in a taxi, even though he and she would otherwise have to travel by train and then by tram to the end of her street. He was pleased to travel by train and tram because this would give him much more time for talking to her, but the train was too crowded for talking privately, and as soon as they were alone together at the tram stop, she began talking to him. She told him that she had very much enjoyed his company but that she would very probably not be able to go out with him again. She told him that she had been going out regularly for some time with a man who had proposed marriage to her; that if she were to accept the man’s proposal, he and she would have to be engaged for several years at least, since the man had taken on certain financial commitments that would not allow him to marry at present; that she sometimes seriously doubted whether it would be morally advisable for herself and the man to enter into such a long engagement as they would have to enter into; that she had gone out with him, the chief character, because he was an interesting person, because the man who wanted to marry her was often unable to get to Melbourne from the country district where he lived, and because she did not consider in any case that she should go out exclusively with him until they had become engaged, if that should happen; but that he, the chief character, should understand that she could not consider becoming interested in anyone else until she had made up her mind about the man she had told him about.

  Having become a confirmed bachelor in his mind some hours before, he was not made unhappy or anxious by her speech, but he was curious to know what commitments the man mentioned had entered into and what the young woman had been thinking of when she said that a long engagement might not be morally advisable. He, the chief character, assumed that the man who had proposed marriage must have been at least as fervent a Catholic as the young woman. He, the chief character, found himself thinking of the man as being a member of one of a few Catholic cooperative settlements that he, the chief character, knew about. One of the settlements was in remote mountain country in the north-east of Victoria, which was a region that he could only imagine as a blue haze of mountains. Another settlement was in the foothills of the mountains to the north of Gippsland, which settlement he imagined as a clearing in a forest, with log cabins for houses. The third settlement that he knew of, and the one where he imagined the proposer of marriage to be living, was in the next range of mountains on the far side of the Dandenong Ranges. He, the chief character, had heard that these cooperative settlements, which had been founded ten or fifteen years previously when many Catholics from Melbourne had wanted to live a simple life away from the evils of city life, were struggling to survive. He supposed that the man who wanted to marry the young woman beside him at the tram stop in an eastern suburb in the late afternoon of a day in the early autumn was at that moment milking cows by hand or weeding a potato paddock or felling a tree with a crosscut saw in order to add to the meagre wealth of the cooperative so that it could pay him back in cash for the cash that he had invested in it some years previously, which cash had been his life-savings. But then he, the chief character, supposed that the man was toiling at the cooperative not because he wanted to leave it and return to Melbourne but because he wanted to earn enough units of credit according to the system of exchange that operated in the cooperative so that the other members would help him at some time in the future to clear and to fence a small area and to b
uild a simple cottage in the area and so to be able to provide a home for his bride after their marriage.

  As for the question why a young Catholic woman would wonder whether a long engagement was morally advisable, he, the chief character, had tried to answer this to himself from the moment when the young woman had used the words that had caused the question to occur to him, even postulating answers in his mind while he and the young woman went on talking about trivial matters in the tram that would take them to the end of her street. What seemed to him the most likely answer was as follows. The proposer of marriage had somehow conveyed to the young woman by hints and murmurings that he would be likely to commit regular if not frequent mortal sins alone and in both thought and deed if his and the young woman’s engagement should be unduly prolonged. He, the chief character of this story, supposed that the young woman was unable to imagine in any detail how such sins might be committed, but he imagined the sinner as being compelled from time to time to walk alone into the forest surrounding the cooperative settlement and to relieve himself there while the undergrowth prickled his bare forearms and while he imagined certain young married women of the cooperative rebuking him or commanding him to stop.

  After he and she had got down from the tram, she took his hand and squeezed it for a moment and thanked him for a very pleasant day and asked him not to bother to walk with her to her house. He said goodbye to her and stood waiting for a tram to take him back the way he had come. The place where he stood was on the western side of a slight hill, so that he could not see Mount Dandenong, but he could see, on the next hillside towards the city, what he believed to be part of one of the buildings of her old school, and he wished that he had asked her whether she had been able to see Mount Dandenong from any of her classrooms when she had been a schoolgirl. A few more than thirty years later, he would be passing her school one day and would notice an estate agent’s noticeboard stating that a large number of apartments would soon be for sale on the site, most with splendid views of the Blue Dandenongs.

  In the Bois de Boulogne

  The words just above came into his mind one day during the mid-1980s when he was trying to remember from the English translation of the book of fiction À la recherche du temps perdu, by Marcel Proust, which he had read ten years earlier, a certain phrase that he believed had first brought to his mind when he read it in the book an image that had occurred to him often during the following ten years, which image seemed sometimes connected with his feelings when he remembered certain events on a certain afternoon in the autumn of a certain year in the mid-1960s and also with his feelings when he remembered a certain passage at the beginning of the section of the book with the title “Cities of the Plain.”

  During much of his life, whenever he heard or read another person’s account of his or her having read one or another book of fiction, he supposed that he was the only person who remembered having read fiction in the way that he remembered it. Whenever he remembered his having read one or another passage in one or another book, he remembered not the words of the passage but the weather during the hour when he had read the passage, the sights or sounds that he had seen or heard around him from time to time while he read, the textures of the cushions or curtains or walls or grasses or leaves that he had reached for and had touched from time to time while he read, the look of the cover of the book containing the passage and of the page or pages where the passage had been printed, and especially the images that had appeared in his mind while he had read the passage and the feelings that he had felt while he had read.

  Whenever he remembered having read the passage of fiction mentioned in the first paragraph of this section of this story, he remembered himself as sitting on a patch of green lawn among green shrubs in the yard behind the house in the outer northern suburb of Melbourne where he lived with his wife and their two children and as seeing in his mind among many other images an image of grey-blue roofs of houses, each of several storeys, which image he understood to be an image of a certain suburb of the city of Paris, which he had never visited, and an image of a margin of green around part of the area of grey-blue, which image he understood to be an image of part of the forest that surrounded part of the suburb of Paris. Whenever he remembered having read the passage of fiction just mentioned, he remembered himself as believing while he read the passage that the insect that was needed to bring to the flower of the rare plant exposed in a certain courtyard in the suburb just mentioned a certain grain of pollen kept mostly to the forest just mentioned but would bring the grain of pollen on some day in the future from deep inside the forest and so would cause to be fertilised the plant that had remained for so long unfertilised.

  (The writer of this piece of fiction has just now looked through the early pages of the section with the title “Cities of the Plain” in each of the two English translations that he has read of À la recherche du temps perdu but has found no reference to any view of any part of any forest seen or remembered or imagined by the narrator of the section.)

  Whenever he remembered having read the passage of fiction mentioned several times above, he remembered himself also as having seen in his mind soon after he had seen the margin of green an image of a photograph he had once seen of part of the green grass and the white railings of the racecourse of Longchamps and a caption explaining among other things that the racecourse was in the Bois de Boulogne.

  Whenever he remembered having read the passage of fiction mentioned several times above, he remembered himself also as having remembered whenever he read in that passage the references to the character mostly referred to as M. de Charlus the notions that he, the chief character, had had as a boy and later as a young man about the men referred to as bachelors. One of these notions was that each of these men had wanted as a young man to marry a certain young woman but that she had not wanted to marry him and that this had brought so much unhappiness to the young man that he had never afterwards approached a young woman. Another of these notions was that each of these men had fallen in love as a young man with an image of a young woman in his mind but had never met an actual young woman who was sufficiently like the young woman in his mind for him to want to approach her.

  Whenever he remembered having read the passage of fiction mentioned several times above, he remembered himself also as having remembered while he read that he had often supposed as a boy and as a young man that he would be a bachelor throughout his life.

  Whenever he remembered having read the passage of fiction mentioned several times above, he remembered himself also as having remembered while he read certain events that had led to his learning on a certain afternoon in a certain clearing on a hillside covered with forest that he would not be a bachelor in the future, which events may be summarised as follows.

  During his twenty-seventh year, when he had passed more than half of the subjects of a degree of bachelor of arts, he was promoted in the department where he worked to an editorial position on a publication with the title Our Forests. His duties were wholly editorial; he was not required to visit any of the places that were the subjects of articles or illustrations in Our Forests. However, he now worked on a higher floor of the building where he had worked for nearly ten years, and his desk was near a window with a view to the north and the north-west, and on clear days he could see the blue-black ridge of Mount Macedon.

  During one of the first mornings that he spent at his new workplace, he overheard a young woman he had never previously seen explaining to a young woman at a desk near his desk that she, the young woman he had never previously seen, would not be able to attend a party she had been invited to on the forthcoming Saturday evening because she would be doing during the following weekend what she did on many another weekend, which was to travel by train to the district in Gippsland where she had formerly lived and to spend the weekend on the dairy farm in that district where her parents lived with her three younger sisters.