Each day Adrian sneaked a volume of Butler’s Lives of the Saints into his room and skimmed through a few of the thousands of entries. He was looking for a saint whose name could be his own name in religion. He required only two things of the saint—his name must be unusual and distinctive, and he must have been a notorious sinner in his youth. After going through nearly half the entries, Adrian had a short list of two names—Isidore and Hyacinth.
Blessed Isidore of Portugal was a thirteenth-century Dominican. As a young man he had given himself up to every vice and even practised sorcery. One night a fearful demon appeared to him and cried out, ‘Amend thy ways!’ Isidore made a pilgrimage to the shrine of St James at Compostela and began a life of exemplary piety and severe self-mortification. He was received into the Order of Preachers and died in the odour of sanctity.
According to Butler, there was some doubt as to whether Blessed Isidore had actually existed. One afternoon when Kevin Gilchrist lost his wristwatch in the long grass of the sports paddock and the students were all sent out to look for it, Adrian prayed silently to Blessed Isidore and asked him to prove he was a real person by finding Gilchrist’s watch. Within a few minutes someone had picked up the watch, and Adrian quietly apologised to the saint for having doubted his existence.
St Hyacinth of Antioch was a holy hermit. In his youth he had been a pagan much given to luxury. His old schoolmaster became a Christian and engaged in philosophical dispute with Hyacinth until the young man embraced the true faith. Thereafter he sought only to commune with God in solitude, and repaired to a savage place beyond the city. In later years the fame of his holiness and the miracles that he wrought attracted so many pilgrims to his hermitage that the saint had to withdraw several times to more remote refuges.
Adrian found St Hyacinth not as attractive as Blessed Isidore. First, there was the name itself. Adrian wrote faintly on scraps of paper: Rev. Hyacinth Sherd CCR. He was quite prepared to bear a name that ignorant people might smile at. (He had learned that the Greek root meant simply a colour.) But he thought his superiors might advise him to take a more masculine name that would give the enemies of the church no excuse to mock the priesthood.
Then there was Hyacinth’s life story. It did not resemble Adrian’s own life as closely as Blessed Isidore’s did. Young Hyacinth had grown up in luxury, whereas the Sherds had no floor coverings in their house and Adrian had worn his school uniform to mass because he had no other good clothes. Hyacinth had been converted by his teacher, but Adrian would never have dared confide his troubles to the brothers at St Carthage’s.
On the other hand, Adrian’s gambolling with film stars in the green grass of the Catskills or the blue waters of Florida had been a sort of luxury. And St Hyacinth retreating further and further into the wilderness prefigured Adrian’s wanting to live a devout life in the remotest parts of the Otways.
At the novitiate he would live the full Charleroi rule, which was famous for its severity. People who knew almost nothing else about the Charlerois could tell you they broke their sleep each night to chant the first part of their office. Some students had asked Father Camillus about this at Blenheim one day.
The priest had said, ‘Of course you realise the Fathers here at Blenheim don’t do it. Because of the smallness of the community and the demands made on us as teachers, we say most of our office privately each day. But just wait till you reach the novitiate. The bell goes at two every morning. You fall out of bed and pull on your sandals (you sleep in your habit, of course). Then you stagger down to the chapel. If it’s winter your toes are freezing and your fingers are too stiff to turn the pages of your breviary.
‘But seriously, it’s a wonderful experience—especially on Sunday mornings. You think of all the other fellows your own age all over Australia coming home drunk after some party or taking girls home from dances and getting into all sorts of trouble—and there you are shivering in the chapel and chanting the beautiful words of the divine office and offering reparation to God for all the sins being committed all over Australia at that very moment.’
There were other hardships to look forward to in the novitiate. As a training in obedience, the novice had to ask the Novice Master’s permission to do anything that was not covered by the Charleroi rule. If he wanted a drink of water while he was working in the garden he had to ask permission first. And to train himself in humility, he had to confess his faults each week to the whole community—priests, lay brothers and his fellow novices—and ask them to impose a suitable penance on him.
Novices had to observe a severe fast during Lent and on Ember Days and Fridays throughout the year. And of course in the novitiate you made yourself a leather discipline and gave yourself your first taste of it.
After the novitiate, Adrian would take a vow to remain with the order for three years. He would spend those three years studying philosophy in the Charleroi house in Canberra. Then he would make his final profession—his vow to remain with the order for life—and do three years of theology before his ordination.
Adrian had no clear idea of what he would be studying in his six years of philosophy and theology. But he knew his philosophy would enable him to refute the arguments of any atheist or agnostic from a university. And his knowledge of theology would equip him to advise even Catholic surgeons and barristers in problems arising from their work.
Some of his courses would teach him things he would never have learned as a layman. For example, he would learn all the intricacies of the church’s laws on marriage—the acts that were forbidden to married couples because they were unnatural; the valid reasons (if any) on account of which a couple might decide to have no more children, and the means they might use to that end; such matters as how often a man might exercise his rights in marriage before his wife could reasonably complain to her confessor about his excessive demands.
After his ordination he would be so well informed that he could visit any married couple and look them both in the eye because there was nothing they could do in private together and no moral problem they could face that he had not read all about in his studies.
It would be seven years altogether from the time Adrian entered the novitiate until he was ordained and ready for his life’s work as a priest. Every day in the seminary at Blenheim he asked God to keep Australia safe for at least seven years. If a foreign power invaded the country or the Communists took it over from within, his whole future would be ruined.
The students at Blenheim never saw a newspaper or heard a radio. In all his letters home Adrian asked for news of the Emergency in Malaya and the crisis in the Labor Party. His parents couldn’t tell him much about Malaya, but his mother wrote in one letter:
Your Auntie Margaret McAloon wrote to me about a nasty business on election day. Your Uncle Cyril was handing out how-to-vote cards for the AntiCommunist Labor Party outside the Orford State School. After a while the ALP chap started moving up close to him and getting in his road and stopping your uncle from giving out his tickets properly. Cyril could smell spirits on the chap’s breath and he tried not to start trouble but then the fellow started mumbling foul language and calling Cyril a traitor. Well, Cyril touched his arm gently and asked him to move back a bit and then the fellow turned on him and swung a punch. Next minute there was a real donnybrook. Cyril tried to defend himself and he could have handled the ALP fellow all right only three or four criminal-looking types turned up from nowhere and said they saw Cyril start the fight and joined in on the ALP man’s side. Lucky for Cyril some Catholic men from the parish came to his rescue and in the end everyone backed off. Cyril heard later from someone high up in the Anti-Commo party that these sort of things were happening all over Victoria on election day.
Some of the big Communist unions sent tough fellows with criminal records to all the polling booths to start fights and grab all our men’s how-to-vote cards. It gave me a creepy feeling, especially when Margaret said the police were called to some booths but they wouldn’t lift a finger to ar
rest the guilty ones.
Adrian could sense some kind of disaster ahead for Australia or even the world. His worst fears came to him on the very days when the seminary and the countryside around it seemed most peaceful.
One fine autumn afternoon he stared through the classroom window at the great mass of cannas beside the driveway outside. One of the last blossoms suddenly came adrift from its stem. It fell, not to the ground, but onto a bare spike among the tattered foliage. The crimson petals flapped like the folds of a brilliant flag shot down from a masthead.
Adrian looked out past the garden. In the autumn sunlight the empty paddocks and the distant roofs of Blenheim were strangely distinct. Even the farthest hills were clear of haze. It all seemed beautiful, but it could not last. The landscape was poised on the brink of something.
Out of the tall grass beside a hidden creek, on an afternoon just like this, would come the burst of machine-gun fire that ripped the cannas to shreds and shattered the seminary windows.
What would the Charlerois do when they heard the first shots? The best plan would be for old Father Fidelis to go to the chapel and consume the Sacred Species and then wrap the chalices and ciboria reverently in clean cloth and bury them in the garden. Anyone who chose martyrdom could stay behind with Father Fidelis and old, lame Father Pascal. Meanwhile the rest of the community would go to the laundry and grab a shirt and trousers each from the old working clothes in the cupboards there. They would discard their habits and soutanes and sneak out into the world disguised as ordinary working men. Before they scattered they would arrange to write to some secular address to keep in touch with each other.
In the western suburb of Melbourne where Adrian had spent his early childhood, there was a football oval set in a small park with elm trees and dusty oleanders and a sparse lawn. In a corner of the park was a small weatherboard grandstand. Under its wooden tiers was a dark room where the curator of the little park stored trestles and benches and odd lengths of timber. In the sixth grade at primary school Adrian and a few friends had discovered where the curator hid the key to this storeroom. Sometimes after school they unlocked the room and shared a packet of Maypole cigarettes in the dark among the cobwebs and timber.
While the Communists were desecrating the Charleroi monastery, Adrian was making his way overland across New South Wales. He slept in haystacks and washed in creeks and lived on vegetables and milk from farms. Weeks later he reached the outskirts of Melbourne. He hid until evening in long grass in Fawkner Cemetery. Then, after dark, he crept through side streets to his old suburb. Miraculously, the key to the room under the grandstand was in its old place. Adrian unlocked the door to the dusty room, put the key back in its hiding place, and went inside and slammed the door behind him.
Years passed. Adrian studied and prayed by day in his hideout and visited loyal Catholic families and fellow religious by night. In a moving ceremony in a damp cellar he was ordained by a bishop disguised in overalls. His parents were present to receive his first blessing, but they had to leave soon afterwards because they were in a gang doing forced labour on a collective farm past Dandenong.
Alone under his grandstand each day, Sherd the priest (his religious name hardly mattered now) stared through a chink in the boards at the sunny park where he had played as a child. And he grieved continually over the sufferings of Australia.
The worst loss of all was the liturgy. No more could the faithful crowd their churches to watch their priests intercede for them with God in a cloud of incense at the high altar. There were boys growing up who would never see a priest, bowed down by a sumptuous cope and humeral veil, elevating a bulky gold monstrance in the sight of an adoring congregation. And Sherd, who would gladly have worn himself out in solemn processions or high masses that lasted for hours, was reduced to creeping into backyard sheds by night, dressed like a workman, and celebrating masses on tabletops for a few frightened onlookers.
He longed to live once more under a religious rule and to perfect himself by obeying its every detail. In a Charleroi monastery he would have had regular penances such as breaking his sleep each night for divine office and fasting every Friday. As a priest under Communism his life was disordered. He never knew what his hours of sleep would be or when he might have to leap up from his bed and flee for his life. And it was impossible to fast when he was half-starved for most of the time.
He would never know the joy of walking down a crowded street in a clerical suit and staring proudly back at the bigoted non-Catholics who looked at him curiously or even insolently. Now, if he made a show of his religion he might be shot on sight or arrested and tortured.
One of the advantages of dressing as a priest was the effect it had on women. Even the most attractive girl or young matron would have dropped her eyes modestly before Sherd in a clerical suit to acknowledge that he could not be affected by her charms. But under totalitarian rule he had no way of demonstrating his dedication to celibacy. The pretty women he met in the streets stared boldly into his face to see how he responded to their good looks.
In a religious house, with fellows like Medwin talking endlessly about the spiritual life or Drummond worrying aloud about the history of the Church of England, he could have earned merit by deliberately associating with the companions he liked least. As a priest in hiding he was often so lonely that he talked to people for no other reason than to enjoy their company.
He had once looked forward to the poverty of the Charleroi life—having to ask his superiors for train fares and the price of some devotional book that he needed. Under the grandstand he had no chance to practise the virtue of poverty—he had to spend hours each day devising schemes to feed and clothe himself.
When things got too bad for the priest under Communism he could always tell himself it was all a bad dream and melt back into the seminarian who was thinking of the future. But Adrian Sherd, looking across the paddocks in the mild autumn sunlight, could not be sure it was not real.
He wrote to his mother a few days later:
Tell Uncle Cyril the priests and seminarians of Australia are all praying for him and his party. It’s a pity there are so many lukewarm Catholics who can’t be bothered fighting Communism with him. If only they would try to imagine what life would be like in Australia with all the monasteries closed and all their priests in hiding. That would bring them to their senses!
One morning Father Camillus told the students he had arranged their first Whole Day for the year. They were going by special bus to Sydney to spend four hours on the harbour in a hired boat.
The younger students talked a lot about the trip but Adrian tried not to look forward to it, because a good religious lived only for the present and avoided vain speculations about the future.
Fathers Camillus and Fabian and two lay brothers were going with the students. Father Camillus warned the boys not to be shouting out ‘Father’ and ‘Brother’ on crowded beaches but to call him ‘Cam’ and the other priest ‘Fabian’ and the brothers by their religious names, Sylvester and Ambrose, so they wouldn’t attract attention or give occasion for idle gossip among non-Catholics.
The bus left the seminary at seven on a fine morning. The trip to Sydney was to take three hours. Adrian made sure he was last into the bus so as to miss out on a window seat (out of consideration for the others and to earn merit by an act of self-denial).
Apart from the weekly hikes to lonely stretches of the Blenheim river, it was Adrian’s first trip into the world since entering the seminary. He had intended to guard his eyes carefully all day—only glancing at the more striking scenery, avoiding all sight of girls and women and offering up a silent aspiration when he saw someone who obviously needed his prayers. But so many things disturbed him in the first few miles that he ignored his resolutions and gaped around him like any undisciplined layman.
After only two months in the seminary he had forgotten what an irreligious place Australia was. In Mittagong the morning sun caught the cross above the Catholic church wh
ile the neat paths and dewy lawns below were still in shadow. People were leaving the church after morning mass. Adrian counted only four women and three schoolgirls. He wondered what the other hundreds of people in Mittagong had been doing while the sacrifice of Calvary was re-enacted in their main street. He saw women beating mops and dusters, schoolboys feeding pet dogs and men yawning and stretching after heavy breakfasts. All of them would have said they were much too busy to share in the spiritual treasure that was poured out on Mittagong every morning of the year.
In Picton the shops were opening for the day. A chemist stood in front of his newly polished window and threw back his head and laughed at something the barber next door was telling him. Adrian read the chemist’s name: H. J. Carmichael. He was probably an Ulster Protestant. His laughter must have been forced—he had surely never known the true happiness that came from being in the state of grace. Adrian was in the state of grace, and he could have laughed a louder laugh than Carmichael if only he had understood why God allowed sinners to be just as happy as people who spent their lives obeying His will.
Adrian thought he might experience a few temptations during a day in the world. But the first one took him by surprise. Approaching Camden he saw an old brick house well back from the road and surrounded by a half-acre of lawns and trees. One of the front rooms had french windows.
Before he realised the danger he was in, Adrian had seen himself getting up from his desk and stepping through the french windows for an early morning stroll across the lawns. He was a lecturer in English at Melbourne University. After returning to Melbourne at the end of 1955 he had undertaken an honours degree in the School of English at Melbourne University. For four years he had done nothing but study. Poems, plays, novels—he interpreted and criticised them with the intellectual precision he had acquired in the seminary. His academic results were so outstanding that he reached the position of lecturer before the age of thirty. He lived alone in his rambling brick mansion, his only passion being his enormous library.
A Season on Earth Page 29