‘The author (a priest, of course) says marriage is a sacrament that goes on providing grace for the marriage partners all their lives. Year after year they can draw on this bottomless reservoir of grace to increase their own sanctity and earn for themselves a higher place in heaven. How? Well, believe it or not, every act of sexual intimacy between the partners (provided it’s performed with the right motives and isn’t sinful for some other reason) actually earns them an extra amount of grace.
‘That’s something to think about some night when you’re just about to say you’re too tired for it. If you can make a special effort to oblige me, you’ll enjoy a spiritual reward.’
It was now completely dark on the veranda. Sherd couldn’t see his wife’s face, but she squeezed his fingers to show she was quietly thrilled by what he had told her.
Inside, the boys had finished their discussion and the priest was walking out from his corner into the middle of the room to sum up.
The priest said, ‘You’ll notice I kept right out of the discussion, boys. It’s very important in a job like mine to hear the views of people like yourselves who have to live in the world, and let you explain your attitudes without any fear of having your heads bitten off by a priest for contradicting the church’s teachings.
‘By and large, most of you seem to have a fairly sound idea of where a young Catholic man stands when he’s dealing with the opposite sex. But I think the whole discussion went wrong somehow when you got onto this business of the goodnight kiss.’ (He looked at the notes in his hand.) ‘Now, I don’t want to single out any one boy for what he said, but one of you seemed to think that just because “it’s the custom nowadays” or “everybody’s doing it” or “you see it in all the latest films”, then a Catholic has to be in it and go along with the mob for fear they’ll laugh at him or think he’s old-fashioned.
‘If any boy still thinks after all his years at a Catholic secondary school that he’s going to decide what to do in life by what the rest of the world is doing, he’d better use the time remaining in this retreat to sit down and ask himself some very serious questions. Or, better still, he’d better make an appointment to see me or one of the other priests for a man-to-man chat.’
The priest paused and looked at his notes. The boys all knew it was childish and unfair to look at Alan McDowell just then, but most of them sneaked a look, even so. McDowell was pale and still, but otherwise he was taking it fairly well.
The priest said, ‘Perhaps this is the time to go over very briefly the few facts a Catholic has to know about this whole matter of mixed company-keeping.’
While he talked, the priest looked hard at one boy after another. Adrian was sure the priest was annoyed with the boys. He hoped the priest had noticed how he himself kept aloof from the childish discussion. Perhaps the priest would even realise from the look on Adrian’s face that he was far beyond the stage of kissing on doorsteps and already deep into the church’s teachings on married life.
The priest was saying, ‘It’s quite simple, really. The basic rules cover all possible situations that you’re likely to come up against. To commit a mortal sin you have to fulfil three simple conditions. There must be grave matter, full knowledge and full consent.
‘Now, there’s no need to explain about knowledge and consent. All of you are sane, rational creatures and you all possess free will. You know what it means to know fully what you’re doing. And you know what it means to consent to something fully with your will. These things are clear-cut. The third condition—grave matter—might not be so clear in your minds, but the church’s rules are very simple.
‘The pleasures of the body are for married people alone. At your age anything you do with a girl that gives rise to physical pleasure is sufficient material for a mortal sin. With regard to the bosom, the breasts of a girl—those are grave matter at all times. And you shouldn’t have to be told that her private places are absolutely out of bounds.
‘But of course you can commit a mortal sin with any part of a girl’s body. I can readily imagine the circumstances when a young fellow would sin over a girl’s hands or arms, the exposed skin around her neck, even her feet or her bare toes.
‘It’s no use saying afterwards, “But I only intended to give her an innocent kiss.” The church is older and wiser than any of you. Listen to her advice.’
While the boys followed the priest into the chapel for evening prayers, Adrian looked at their solemn faces and pitied them. They could do no more than look at the faces and forearms, and perhaps the ankles and calves, of all the girls they met until they finally married. How could they face such a bleak future without the thought of someone like Denise to inspire and console them?
Sherd’s daily life at Our Lady of the Ranges left him plenty of time for thinking. Thrusting his potato fork into the clotted red soil and lifting out the ponderous tubers, swollen with nourishment, or perched on a handmade stool in the milking-shed, resting his head against the glossy flank of a Jersey cow and squirting her warm creamy milk so that it rang against the silvery metal of the bucket or lost itself with a rich satisfying sound in the fatty bubbles all over the surface, he looked back on his youth or pondered over the problems of the modern world.
He often remembered the year before he met Denise—the year when he became a slave of lust and couldn’t sleep at night until he had seduced some film star. When he looked back on that year from the peace of the Otways (where he and his wife went to mass and communion every morning and confession every fortnight—although they had only a few petty faults to confess) he squirmed with shame. It was the episode in his life that still disturbed him.
Sometimes, to make himself more humble and less self-satisfied, he deliberately paused just before making love to his wife and thought, ‘If I were to do to this angelic creature beneath me what I once did to those bold-faced film stars; if I grabbed those parts of her that I used to handle and slobber over on their bodies; if I did everything slowly to prolong the act and tire her as I tired them; or if I lost control of myself at the last moment and said to her the crazy things I used to blurt out to them—’ But he could never imagine what she would do—the very idea was preposterous.
He often tried to work out why he had turned, in that year, from a normal Catholic boy in a decent household to a sex-crazed satyr rampaging across America. Thinking it over in the quiet valleys of the Otways, he was inclined to blame American films.
Not that he had ever seen his favourite film stars on the screen. It was not as simple as that. Adrian Sherd the schoolboy never saw more than five or six films a year. Half of those were Walt Disney films and the rest were chosen by his mother because they were classified ‘For General Exhibition’ and recommended for children.
Adrian’s mother used to say before he went to one of these films, ‘There’s bound to be a bit of love and romance and that sort of rot. But just put up with it and wait for the adventure parts.’
From the distance of the Otways, Sherd suspected that these supposedly harmless films might have started him on his year-long orgy of lust. Meditating on a leafy hillside, he watched them again and blended their complex plots into one.
An American man arrives in a strange town near a jungle or a desert or an enemy country that he must soon venture into. He looks across a hotel lobby crowded with foreign faces and finds himself staring into the eyes of a beautiful American woman aged about twenty-five. He falls in love with her at once, but he knows from the cold way she meets his eyes that others before him have fallen for her and been repulsed.
The man goes to hire the native porters for his expedition or to rendezvous with an army officer or a master spy who will give him his final instructions. When he returns to the hotel, he finds the woman sitting alone at a table in the dining room. Because he is leaving next day on a mission that may well cost him his life, the man is keyed up to an extraordinary pitch of bravery. He sits down at the table without being asked, and even starts a conversation with the wom
an.
He soon learns that she is single. (If she had been married, the romantic interest of the plot would have ended there and then—the man would have apologised for bothering her and left the table.) She has never allowed a man to do anything more than hold her hand or give her a friendly goodnight kiss. (This becomes apparent when the man’s eyes glance downwards at the inch or so of cleavage above the neckline of her evening frock. She catches him at it and gives him a long severe look that makes him glance away and fiddle with his glass from embarrassment.) She is visiting remote parts of the world to recover from a broken heart. (She is understandably vague when she talks about her past, but the most likely interpretation of her pauses and broken sentences is that she fell in love with a man in her home town in America but found her love was not returned.) Finally, she has no steady boyfriend just at present. (She says quite explicitly, ‘There’s been no one else since—I don’t think there ever can be.’ The man at the table understands from this that he is free to become her suitor.)
The man and woman dance together in the hotel ballroom, then walk out to the marble balcony. He tells her a little about the journey that he must begin next morning. A stranger leaps out of the shadows and throws a knife at the man. The man dodges the knife and shields the woman with his body. He is so anxious to protect her that the mysterious stranger escapes. However, the man is well rewarded when the woman leans on him and clutches the lapels of his coat. He does not hide his pleasure at having her so close to him. And it makes it clear to her that she has awakened his strongest instinct—the urge to protect a beautiful helpless woman at a moment of danger.
Because she is now frightened of the foreigners in the hotel, the woman asks the man to her room for a drink. While he fills her glass and hands it to her, he looks her over. Her hair is so neatly done and her lipstick and make-up are so carefully applied that she would obviously not welcome any man who tried to kiss or embrace her and disturb it. Her dress is securely fastened across her breasts. (It has not slipped a fraction of an inch during the whole time that Adrian has been watching it.) The dress is such a tight fit that no man could hope to loosen it even a little without her noticing what he was trying to do. Below her breasts the cloth is as taut and forbidding as a suit of armour—and there are no fastenings visible on it that a man could try to interfere with. Even the furniture in the room is designed to keep a man at a distance. She sits with her arm outflung along the back of a thickly padded couch that makes her look as regal and unapproachable as a queen.
Nevertheless, the man does dare to kiss her once before he says goodbye and leaves her room for the night. He does it in a restrained polite way, pressing his lips against hers for no more than half a minute and holding her so that no other parts of their bodies come into contact.
The man starts on his journey next day. He has many worries on his mind, but when he looks back for the last time at the town where the young woman is waiting, he is obviously hoping she will be true to him until he returns to continue his wooing.
Soon afterwards, the woman learns how perilous the man’s journey is and prepares to set out after him. When she explains this to a girlfriend, the girlfriend teases her and accuses her of getting too serious about a man who is only an adventurer. The young woman denies this, but with a dreamy look in her eyes that suggests she really is falling in love. She appears to have known from the way the man kissed her that he was in love with her, and now her own heart is beginning to melt.
For a long time after this the film shows only the troubles of the man on his journey. The woman is captured on her way to join him. It seems as though they will never meet again and have the chance to declare their love for each other. But in the end, the man (helped by loyal natives or friendly foreigners) outwits his enemies and approaches the place where the woman has been kept captive.
The very last scene between the couple has to be watched closely to reveal its full meaning. First, the man notices that the top buttons of the woman’s blouse have come undone during her struggles with her captors. She is still tied to a post with her hands behind her back. She is at his mercy. If he were only interested in her body he could lean forward for a moment and peep down the front of her gaping blouse or even slip his hand inside it or do much worse to her. But he does not even pause to consider these possibilities. He rips away the ropes that bind her and takes her tenderly in his arms.
This time she lets him kiss her more than once. She knows from the gentlemanly way he has rescued her that he really is in love with her. And in the excitement of being rescued she sees no harm in allowing him a few extra kisses, especially since the leader of the native porters or the foreign peasants is standing only a few yards off and grinning at them.
The film ends before the man actually proposes marriage. But anyone can see from the more relaxed way they behave towards each other that the man is only waiting for the right moment to ask her and that he knows already what her answer will be. And the woman seems to know what is in his mind and to be only waiting for the chance to say yes.
Looking back at such films from the pure air of the Otways, Sherd understood how they had contributed to his year of sin. The films had introduced him to a kind of woman he never came across in Australia—the attractive young woman in her twenties who had no boyfriend but travelled around waiting for the right man to fall in love with her and begin courting her. Because her heart had been broken in the past, she was fairly reserved with a new suitor. She only let him kiss her after he had given some proof of his devotion, and she would have slapped his face if he had tried to touch her improperly.
Adrian had never seen one woman of this kind in Accrington or anywhere in Melbourne. Yet he learned from films that thousands of them sat waiting at hotel tables from Maine to California—and even in foreign cities. If Adrian had had a girlfriend of his own at the time, he could have rejoiced to see films showing other people achieving the same kind of happiness that he himself enjoyed. But those were the days before he had met Denise. When the films were over he went home to his lonely bed and envied the men who met these young women on their travels.
What happened next was only too familiar to the man Sherd. He remembered it and did penance for it every day. In the heat of his lust he had invented a sequence of events that was a travesty of the films that inspired them. Like the male stars of the films, he had met eligible young women. But instead of courting them patiently and waiting for some sign of encouragement before he kept exclusive company with them or ventured to kiss them, he had undressed them and defiled them only hours after their first meeting. It was all so absurd compared with what really happened in films.
After years in the peaceful Catholic community of Our Lady of the Ranges, Sherd could see clearly all the faults of modern life in Australia. He knew there was something very wrong with a society that made it so hard for young men to meet young women with a view to marriage.
A young man growing up at Our Lady of the Ranges was free to choose a girlfriend from one of the families he mixed with every day. Their affection for each other grew steadily over the years. A smile from her at morning mass or a few words as they met on a rustic pathway would inspire him to work like a Trojan all morning in the potato paddocks or bend over his books of theology and church history all afternoon in the library. The years passed quickly until the fellow was old enough to call on her parents and ask for the young woman’s hand. From then until the day of the wedding, the young couple would sit together by the riverbank on Sunday afternoons, within sight of their elders but far enough away to talk privately together.
As more and more people left the cities and settled in co-operative rural communities, there would be fewer young women in any country who had to spend hours doing their hair and putting make-up on their faces and then sitting alone at hotel tables waiting for the right man to turn up. And of course there would be fewer single men walking past those tables and noticing the women sitting there. But best of all there would be f
ewer young men who had to spend years of their lives as solitary sex maniacs because they could only watch those single men and women meeting in films and never get the chance to do the same thing in real life.
During a House football match one Wednesday, it rained so hard that the brother who was umpire sent the boys to shelter under trees. Adrian Sherd and his teammates crouched under the dripping branches and looked for a break in the weather. The sky was unnaturally dark. Someone started talking about the end of the world.
The boys of Adrian’s class often discussed this topic when no brother was around. One or two of them had tried to bring up the subject in Christian Doctrine periods, but their teacher had always ended the discussion before it got interesting. The brother would agree that the world was going to end some day, but he insisted that no one—not even the most learned theologian or the holiest saint—knew whether it would happen tomorrow or a thousand years from now. The brother would allow that parts of the Apocalypse described the last days of the world and the signs of the coming end, but he said it was a risky business trying to look for these signs in the present day. All a Catholic boy had to do was to live each day of his life as though it was his last day on earth, and leave it to God to work out His plans for bringing the world to an end.
A boy looked out at the sodden football ground and said, ‘We know He won’t destroy the world again by water or send a terrible deluge again because in the Old Testament He showed Noah the sign of the rainbow when the flood had gone down.’
Another boy said, ‘It can’t happen yet because the prophet Elias hasn’t come back to earth. And there was someone else in the Old Testament who didn’t die properly either. Elias went up body and soul in a fiery chariot, and the church teaches that he has to come back to earth again and die properly. I’ve heard he’ll come back when the church is really in trouble and lead us in battle against our enemies.’
A Season on Earth Page 18