The book with its pages open in the hands of the Archbishop is my prize. The two girls have finished first and second in the essay competition; my prize is for honourable mention. Yet because the girls are thirteen or fourteen and I am only eleven, and also because I am the only boy to have won any sort of prize that day in any of the different competitions for different ages in essay-writing, painting, or drawing – the only boy in my short trousers among all the pleated tunics and bowl-shaped hats and gloved hands and thick stockings; the only boy in my plain grey among all the fawns and browns and bottle-greens and sky-blues with crests and Latin mottoes on breast-pockets and thin stripes of two or three colours around necks and wrists and waists of pullovers – I have been chosen by the photographer from the morning newspaper to pose with Archbishop Mannix and the prize-winning girls.
All four of us – His Grace, the two girls, and myself – are looking with a show of interest at the book which is my prize. Anyone who glanced at the picture in the newspaper next morning and then read quickly through the caption would have found the picture quite unremarkable. But I have been looking at the picture each year for thirty-five years and learning a little more each year.
I am quite out of place in the picture. I am by far the smallest, and beside the aged face of Doctor Mannix and the pretty faces of the two girl-women my own face seems almost babyish. My short haircut exposes my jug-ears, and my child’s forehead is absurdly knitted from the effort to appear solemn in the presence of my elders and betters. If I look at the clothing of the four people, I see the voluminous soutane and cape and the lofty biretta and pom-pom on the Archbishop, the elegant uniforms of the schoolgirls, and my own unbuttoned collar and kiddie’s pullover – as though I have only just been called in to this formal gathering from playing in the sandpit outside.
Sometimes I look at the book that I am looking at in the hands of the Archbishop. Twenty years ago I used to suppose that the book was a book I had written myself. I had written every page of the book myself in an out-of-the-way place, and then I had left the book lying where it was sure to come under the notice of young women or girl-women. Two girl-women had found the book and had looked in its pages. Then they had brought the book and me, the writer of the book, to the Archbishop of Melbourne County. The girl-women had told the Archbishop that the book contained filth. They preferred to say no more – only that the book was full of filth.
Twenty years ago I used to see the two girl-women looking with stern faces at the book; the Archbishop first holding the book at arm’s length and then turning a few pages gingerly; the Archbishop agreeing with the girl-women that the book was a vile book; myself being handed over to a room full of affronted girls for a summary trial and a humiliating punishment.
Ten years ago I still supposed that the book was a book I had written myself. The book was not vile or filthy, but its contents had still angered the girl-women. Once again they had brought me and my book before the Archbishop. But the venerable man was not interested in reading about grasslands and vast houses where silent young women stared out from library windows in the late afternoon. His Grace had stifled a dignified yawn and had given back the book to the girl-women, telling them the book contained nothing directly contrary to faith or morals. But that had not placated the girl-women. How, they asked one another, could this so-called prodigy with his naked knees and his clothes of plain grey – how could this child from the backlands in the north of their county dare to write about the dream-countries of elegant girl-women such as themselves? And then in the room filled with girl-women the fearsome sound of female tittering had broken out while I waited again for my sentence to be handed down.
On some nights in this room I think of rooms I will never see in the Institute of Prairie Studies and I wonder who has risen by now to become editor of Hinterland.
I used to fear the man in the archives surrounded by colour-plates of birds and relief-maps of plains, but the people I fear today are the women who were once the prize-winning schoolgirls.
The man with his colour-plates and relief-maps is no longer at the heart of the Institute of Prairie Studies. No footsteps sound today in the corridors leading past his suite of rooms. But the women who were once the prize-winning schoolgirls walk with short, firm steps across the red and the green of carpets between many offices with names of women on their doors. The skin of the women is still clear and their eyes are still wide. The women would still consent today to look at the opened pages of a book in order to oblige a photographer, although they would not consent to stand beside a shabby stranger.
Seated at their desks each morning, the women read the first of the latest letters to have reached them. Then the women prepare their replies – not by writing with pens on paper but by pressing with their fingers on buttons or by speaking to their secretaries in other rooms. The women tell their secretaries what to write in reply to the latest of many letters that begin by explaining that the writer of the letter has kept for many years a certain clipping from a newspaper.
When the women have told the young women their secretaries what words to write in reply to all the writers of letters, then the main business of the day begins. The women go on with their task of preparing the contents of Hinterland. They touch rows of buttons on quiet machines and they look into panes of clouded glass.
In my thinking I tread softly past the offices with the names of women on the doors. Many years ago I got up from my game of arranging glass marbles in the dust. I got up and washed my hands and knees and sat down at a desk and wrote as the nun my teacher suggested. My parroted words were read by a society of people who wanted the Holy Ghost to live in the hearts of writers and painters. When the society of people had seen that my words were as well-parroted as the words of girl-women two or three years older than me, then I was invited by the society into a room filled with many-coloured school uniforms and with calm female faces staring out from under bowl-shaped hats. In that room the many girl-women ceased their murmuring and watched while I walked forward boldly with my baby-face and my pink, scrubbed knees and while I accepted with no surprise or nervousness the book that was presented to me as my reward for having out-parroted so many girls and girl-women.
I still have the newspaper clipping to remind me of what a parroter I was, but in my thinking today about Hinterland and the Calvin O. Dahlberg Institute, I step softly across the red and the green and past the offices where the women look into their panes of glass. I step softly on my way to the depths of the building with many rooms and many windows – to the room where my reader reads that Barnardius barnardi is most often seen close to the ground and among grasses.
On the day when the first north wind made me think of the colours of the fish pond, I thought also of the girl from Bendigo Street but I was afraid I would not see her again after the school year had ended and the summer holidays had begun. Each of us was going to leave the school where we had sat all year in the same classroom. Before the coming summer had ended, we would be travelling away from our district in different directions each morning, each of us dressed in the uniform of a Catholic secondary school.
In my backyard, from the time when the leaves of the fig-tree had come forth, I had been preparing for the summer. I was afraid that the girl from Bendigo Street would be noticed by boys older and taller than myself when she travelled by tram or train away from our district.
The girl and I were almost the same age – a few months younger than thirteen years. I was still in short trousers. She was thin and flat-chested. I sensed that her body would soon grow, as some bodies had already grown among the girls in our class. I was not afraid that this would change things between us, but I was afraid that some boy-man two or three years older than myself would notice the growing body and would mutter a few words to her with the easy authority of such boy-men and would compel the girl-woman from Bendigo Street to go off with him and to forget me.
When I tried to see myself in future walking around my native district a
nd knowing that a certain girl-woman still lived in Bendigo Street but that some boy-man or some young man had power over her, I saw my native district drained of colour like the newspaper photographs of grey, ruined places in Europe after the war.
Someone reading this page deep in the Institute of Prairie Studies may wonder why a man of my age and standing writes at this table for day after day about a twelve-years-old child. But I am not writing about a twelve-years-old child. Each person is more than one person. I am writing about a man who sits at a table in a room with books around the wall and who writes for day after day with a heaviness pressing on him.
The girl from Bendigo Street was not a native of the district between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri. She had been born a few kilometres to the south, among the loops and wanderings of the Yarra as it approaches the sea. The girl and her parents had come to live in my district early in the year when we were both twelve. They had come from East Melbourne, which at that time was a district of rooming houses and shabby rented cottages and what the writers for newspapers called underworld haunts. One of the ways that the girl found for annoying me was to talk about what she called her old gang in East Melbourne: how they had played together all through the weekends and late on summer evenings on strips of lawn in the middle of streets or in the corners of a small park. The girl would tell me she was homesick for her native district, and I would try to look indifferent while I thought of some gangster’s son kissing her among the bushes of East Melbourne.
Two or three couples among the older children at my school were widely known to be boyfriend and girlfriend, and few children had commented when I let it be known soon after the girl from Bendigo Street had arrived at my school that I considered her my girlfriend. The girl herself tried to appear indifferent to me or even annoyed with me in public. I believed I understood her, and I tried not to force my company on her, and every few days she rewarded me by telling me quietly something that was unimportant in itself but seemed a message from beneath the surface of her. Away from school we were more easy with one another. If I walked my dog Belle along Bendigo Street on a Sunday afternoon, and if I loitered near the girl’s house until her dog began to bark in the backyard, the girl would nearly always come out through the front door. She would step into her black rubber boots that had been standing beside the doormat. Then she would walk to her front gate and talk with me for a few minutes agreeably, and even a little shyly.
That was how things stood between myself and the girl from Bendigo Street for the first six months after we had met. I called her my girlfriend and she sometimes spoke warmly to me. She was clever with words, although probably not as clever as I was. Yet I did not try to impress her with words. I had never thought to tell her of how I had won a prize for an essay in the year before she had arrived in my district. I could only think of impressing her by some feat at football or cricket or running, none of which I was clever at. I did not know in those days that young men sometimes performed feats with words in the hope of impressing young women.
That was how things stood between us until a certain day of heavy rain six months after I had first met the girl from Bendigo Street. The day of rain was one of the last days of winter according to the newspapers of Melbourne County. The same day was about half-way through the season after Pentecost according to the calendar of the Church.
Late in the afternoon of the rainy day our classroom was for some reason half-empty and our teacher was not with us. The girl from Bendigo Street was sitting with one of her girlfriends just behind the desk where I was sitting alone. Somehow the girl from Bendigo Street and I began the game of talking to the other girl as though she was carrying messages between us and as though we two were out of earshot of one another. The girl from Bendigo Street might have told the girl in the middle to tell me that she, the girl from Bendigo Street, was sick to death of me hanging around her in the schoolyard. I might then have told the girl in the middle to tell the girl from Bendigo Street that I was fed up with her stories of the gang of slum kids in East Melbourne.
The girl in the middle was herself new to the school, but I had known her three years before at another school in another district. That other school too had elm trees near by, and when I lived in that other district I had not wanted to leave it.
I have written already in these pages that I do not read the books on the shelves around me. I do not read the books nowadays but I read a few of the books when I was younger, and even today I still sometimes handle some of the books and I sometimes glance into the pages of some book that I read many years ago.
I keep mostly to this room. I am in this room every day, writing at this table with shelves of books on all the walls around me. I look up often at the books on their shelves. Sometimes I look at the words on the spines of the books, but mostly I look at the colours on the spines.
I find patterns when I look at the spines of two or more books together. Every day I notice for the first time a pattern in the spines of certain books. And every day the new pattern is a little wider than the patterns that I noticed on earlier days.
Last year, or it may have been another year, I used to admire such a pattern as three or four adjacent spines of white, red, white, red, or the like. Later I may have noticed that a similar pattern I had also admired on the shelf above could be seen as linked with the first simple pattern in a larger pattern if I could have recognised a half-dozen spines of dark green between the two simple clusters and if I could have recognised also a dark green at an outer corner of the newly forming pattern and perhaps another dark green at another corner as all belonging together. Now, in these days when I mostly keep to this room, my eye has learned to make out patterns reaching across three or four shelves and for as wide as my outstretched arms, and patterns of not just the obvious colours such as red, white, and green, but grey and gold and lilac and brown. And lately I have included in some of the wider patterns shades and variants of the first colours that I noticed: of the red and the white and the green.
Someone reading this page may expect me to write that I believe every colour of every spine on every shelf in this room is part of a pattern, and that I hope to recognise the pattern in time. I have to remind that reader, if such a reader exists, that this room has four walls and that every wall has shelves of books somewhere on it, which means that the room has no vantage-point from where I could stare at all the shelves together. I have sometimes thought of learning by heart the colour of every spine on every book in this room and of sitting here with my eyes closed and dreaming of myself seeing all four walls as one large wall in front of me. I believe I could memorise the colours and the exact positions of even more books than I see here in this room; but I cannot believe I could dream of seeing all those books at once and in one pattern. Faced with so many colours, I would need to have a few pages like these pages in front of me and a pen in my hand and my eyes open in order to write the few words needed to keep in front of my eyes the one wall and the one pattern. And if I must have pages and a pen, then I must have a table to rest them on. But a table and a chair for sitting at the table would have to be surrounded by a room, and a room has to have walls, and I cannot think of walls around me unless those walls have books somewhere on them. And so, in order to understand the pattern in this room I would have to sit in another room with other books on the walls around me. And in that other room I could not stop myself from trying to make out patterns and then larger patterns and then wanting to see all four walls as one wall where one pattern appeared. But in order to dream of that one wall, I would have to sit in another room.
I do not read books nowadays but I sometimes handle books and sometimes I even look into a book. If the book is a book that I read long ago, I look at a few pages. But if the book is one of the many that I have never read, I read the words on the dust-jacket and in the preliminary pages. I am not so stupid that I suppose the words I read are telling me about the other pages – the pages of the text that I will never read. I suppose in
stead that the words I read at the front and the back of the book and even the illustrations and the patterns on the dust-jacket are telling me about the pages of text in some other book. The other book is nowhere on my shelves. I may never see the other book. I cannot guess what colours might be on the dust-jacket of that other book, or what words at its front and its back might tell about the inner pages of some other book still.
Or the other pages – the pages of the text that I only read about – are between the covers of no other book. Those pages have drifted away who knows where. Sometimes I think of all the drifting pages of the world as having been collected and brought together in buildings of many rooms in grassy landscapes under skies filled with clouds, and as having been bound, after all their drifting, into dream-books with dream-patterns on their jackets and dream-colours on their spines and dream-words on their preliminary pages, and as having been stored on the shelves of a dream-library.
Yet sometimes a drifting page drifts away from the drifting pages around it. Such a page might drift in among other sorts of pages – even in among the preliminary pages of books such as these books around me here.
One day in this room I read in the preliminary pages of an unlikely book these words:
There is another world but it is in this one.
Paul Eluard
I cannot remember having read the inner pages of the book in whose outer pages I found these words. I have never taken the trouble to find out who Paul Eluard is or was. I prefer to think of who he might have been: a man whose life’s work was to compose, perhaps in some language other than my own, a sentence that has drifted far away from the pages where it was first written and has come to rest for the time being in one of the preliminary pages of a book in this room where I sometimes get up from my table in order to open the front pages of some book whose spine has made me dream of myself reading the pages that must have drifted long before into some dream-book.
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