A Season on Earth

by Gerald Murnane

  Reverend Father Sherd followed a path past the sports oval. The shouts of girls made him look up. A women’s hockey team was practising only a few yards away. They wore thin blouses and short skirts. As they ran and jostled and feinted, the muscles moved in their calves and thighs and their breasts leaped and bounced.

  He opened the book at the last of the markers. The photograph was captioned: A high-spirited dance in the French Cameroons celebrates a betrothal in the Tikar tribe. Adrian stared at the flurry of bare limbs and especially at one young woman whose skirt had been partly raised by her primitive movements. He remained quite calm. Even the shadow under the skirt did not make him wish the sun had shone from a slightly different angle or the photographer had chosen his moment with more care.

  He walked on—past the university library with its shelves of Thomas Hardy’s novels and the Philosophy Department where the lecturers undermined the faith of students, and through a throng of young women who actually brushed their bare arms against his sleeves. He recalled a day long before, at Frenchmans Cove in Sydney, when he had been tempted to give up his vocation for these things. Then he laughed aloud and strode on to his meeting with the learned Jesuit.

  It was the season of Lent. Each day the prayers of the mass spoke of penance and mortification. Adrian examined his conscience.

  He was still thinking too much about the future—perhaps because the daily routine of the seminary wasn’t providing enough stimulation for his imagination. Life in the seminary was still too easy.

  He told the Master of Students he wanted some extra penances for Lent. The priest insisted that no penance was more suitable for a fellow in Adrian’s position than the faithful observance of his daily routine. He gave Adrian a book for spiritual reading and said, ‘Read that and you’ll see what true penance is.’

  Adrian took the book into the chapel for the fifteen minutes of spiritual reading before the midday meal. He studied the title—in bold crimson letters against a background of subdued gold. He repeated it under his breath: ‘Suffering with Christ.’ He was cheered up already. He moved to the centre of a patch of warm sunlight and settled himself comfortably in his seat to read.

  But he could not enjoy the book. Its message was no more than Father Camillus had told him. True suffering, according to the book, was not something you could choose for yourself. It came from submitting to God’s Will and denying all your own inclinations and preferences. The model for anyone who wanted to suffer properly was Christ Himself, who spent every moment of His life in perfect obedience to the Will of His Father.

  The author was a French Benedictine and a renowned authority on the interior life, but Adrian disagreed with him. If he, Adrian, were to give up looking for severe penances and do no more than follow the Will of God, instead of suffering properly he would only feel continually miserable.

  There was another way to refute the Benedictine. If the most perfect form of suffering was to oppose all one’s personal preferences and desires, then Adrian would have to oppose his greatest desire, which was to suffer. He ought to gorge himself at meals and heap his bed with extra pillows and make sure his showers were comfortably warm to avoid the sort of suffering he preferred. But this was absurd. Therefore the Benedictine’s argument was illogical.

  After this, Adrian could not endure to read Suffering with Christ. In spiritual reading periods he propped the book open in front of him and devised sufferings that would really satisfy him.

  He made himself sit absolutely still in class and timed himself by his watch. One afternoon he sat for eighteen minutes without moving a muscle and only gave up because he thought the priest was looking curiously at him.

  He remembered the story of St Benedict Joseph Labre, who was despised as a halfwit all his life but was really a great saint. He, Adrian, would suffer the humility of appearing a fool in the eyes of the world. When he combed his hair before mass each morning he deliberately did not touch the unruly tuft on the crown of his head, so that it stood up like the long spikes of hair on Dagwood Bumstead in the comic strip.

  If he found a pimple on his face ready for squeezing, he left it with its white head plump and prominent for anyone to see and shudder at. Sometimes, if his skin was clear, he dipped his finger in black shoe polish or scraped it across the soap and put a little black or white smear on his face. One of the students usually told him about it on the way to breakfast so that he had to wipe it off, but at least he had looked ridiculous during morning prayers and mass.

  He could not do these things too often in case one of the students realised they were penances and told the others about his extraordinary piety. The only penance he could use every day was a small, sharp pebble in his sock. He trod on his pebble as often as he could. He veered from side to side to add extra steps to his walks along the cloisters. And if someone called to him in the recreation room he walked to the fellow by the most circuitous route he could devise.

  But even with the sharpest edge of his pebble pressing into his heel and his tuft of hair standing straight up on his head, he was not content. Arranging his own sufferings day after day was a hardship. It would have been much easier to live under a strict rule that provided easy opportunities for penance.

  At Easter the mood of the liturgy changed from penance to rejoicing. On Easter Sunday the students were served three separate desserts with their midday meal and allowed the whole afternoon for recreation. Adrian sat in the sun and watched a game of quoits. He had eaten too much and his stomach was aching. He kept shifting in his seat to relieve his pain. He blamed it on the Charlerois and their absurd custom of forcing students to eat extra sweets on great feast days.

  Near him a student named Cerini was talking about some monastery he had visited before he decided to join the Charlerois. Adrian suddenly realised the fellow was talking about the Cistercians. He questioned Cerini afterwards and learned his story.

  Cerini came from Albury, New South Wales, where his father was a wealthy builder. At the age of fifteen he had read Elected Silence by Thomas Merton and longed to give up his comfortable life and join the Cistercians. He wrote to the abbot of the monastery at Yarra Glen near Melbourne and spent a week of his school holidays in the Cistercians’ guest house. But his parents had persuaded him to join an order nearer to home. He told Adrian he would never forget the Cistercians and offered to answer any questions about their life.

  That night Adrian knelt beside his bed for nearly an hour after ‘Lights Out’. A layman or someone with little faith would have said it was only an amazing coincidence that he should have heard about the Cistercians again just when he was looking for a better way of life. But Adrian saw the Hand of God behind it. He could not have applied to join the Cistercians the previous year because he had been too young. So Divine Providence had led him to Blenheim to prove that he had a religious vocation. And now, when he realised he was called to a more demanding order than the Charlerois, God had put a fellow in his way who could answer the few questions he still needed to ask before he found his way to his true vocation.

  Next morning Adrian stopped Cerini outside his room. He made sure the Dean was not about (because talking was forbidden in the corridors) and whispered to Cerini, ‘What’s it like in the monastery at Yarra Glen—the silence, I mean?’

  Cerini said, ‘It’s wonderful. Pure silence. Nothing like what they call silence at this place.’ And he and Adrian whispered together for a few minutes about the advantages of perpetual silence.

  That afternoon Father Camillus asked the students to give up their sport and dig a drain in the seminary grounds. Adrian made sure he was put in the same gang as Cerini. He asked Cerini about the hard manual work of the Cistercians. He leaned on his shovel and listened to stories of monks ploughing and harrowing and harvesting all day in the hot sun.

  When they were going inside for the evening Adrian stood with Cerini on the path beside the long beds of crimson-flowered cannas. Adrian looked across the gently sloping paddocks towards the t
own of Blenheim. He said to Cerini, ‘In the Charlerois’ vocations pamphlet they had a photo of this side of the building with Blenheim in the distance. That picture was the only thing that persuaded me to join the Charlerois.’

  The afternoon sun picked out a few windows in Blenheim. The town was not all that far away. With a pair of binoculars he might have seen people in their backyards. Or someone in Blenheim could have seen him and Cerini beside the cannas.

  Adrian said, ‘I suppose the Cistercian monastery is pretty remote.’

  Cerini said, ‘Miles from anywhere. Would you like to see some photos of it?’

  Adrian wondered why he hadn’t thought of this before. He clutched Cerini’s arm out of gratitude. The bell rang for showers. While they hurried inside Cerini promised to smuggle the photos to him as soon as he could.

  Fifteen minutes later when Adrian was leaving the showers in his shorts and singlet, he saw Cerini making signs to him near the door to the toilets. Adrian understood. The two of them walked over and stood at neighbouring urinals. Each of them held his hands in front of him as if to open his flies. But Adrian saw the folder of photos in Cerini’s hand. He edged his own hand across, took the folder and palmed it into his pocket—all without moving his head sideways. He pretended to shake the last water out of himself and then washed his hands at the handbasins. Two or three fellows were hanging round but none of them had noticed anything.

  Adrian almost ran back to his room. He shut the door and leaned against it. He opened the folder and dragged the photos out and pored over them. They were the first pictures he had ever seen of a Cistercian monastery.

  Adrian knew he had to make a momentous decision. He did not intend to make it lightly. He put three pictures back in the folder and hid it under the lining of his bottom drawer. He put the fourth photo in the pocket of his shorts. Then he pulled on his soutane and put on his shoes and socks and walked down to the chapel as usual for meditation.

  He made sure he was last to leave the chapel after meditation. While the others climbed the stairs towards the study hall, he slipped out of the cloisters through a side door and stood on the steps overlooking the beds of cannas.

  It was almost dusk. There was just enough light for what he had to do. He took out the photo of the Cistercian monastery and held it at arm’s length in front of him. He stared at it for perhaps half a minute. In the fading light he made out a building that looked like a farmhouse with wings and a tower built onto it. Beyond the building was a wide paddock ending in a belt of dark trees. Beyond the trees there seemed still more paddocks. And the whole landscape was surrounded by forested hills.

  He looked away from the photo to the vista of farmland in front of him, with Blenheim in the distance. He looked briefly at the photo again and then compared it once more with the country before him. Then he put the photo away and went inside and bounded up the stairs.

  He caught up with the last stragglers at the door of the study hall. His troubles were over. He had made his decision. He actually looked forward to an hour of study. It was easy to throw himself into the Charleroi life now he knew he was leaving at the end of the year to join the Cistercians.

  Next day Adrian returned the photos to Cerini and told him his plan. Cerini promised to keep it to himself, and from then on they seldom talked about the Cistercians for fear of being overheard.

  But the next time they met in the corridor, Cerini pretended to talk to Adrian in sign language like the Cistercians’. And when Adrian caught Cerini’s eye in chapel he put his hands to his neck and ducked his head. Anyone else would have thought he was loosening the collar of his soutane, but Cerini knew he was pretending to pull his monk’s cowl over his head.

  Often at sport or recreation when no one was looking they mimed the manual work of the Cistercians—pulling on a crosscut saw, milking a cow by hand, driving a tractor, or simply dashing the sweat from the face with a sleeve.

  Once, at the midday meal, Cerini made as if to eat his chops and vegetables with a soup spoon. Adrian nodded at him and grinned—the Cistercians had only soup and bread at midday.

  A few hours later in the chapel Adrian made a show of knocking over the statues of Our Lady and the Sacred Heart and painting over the ornate Stations of the Cross because Cistercian chapels were supposed to be bare of decoration. But Cerini didn’t seem to understand. He looked alarmed—as if Adrian was desecrating the whole chapel and giving up his vocation. Adrian had to explain later what he had meant.

  Each morning before mass Adrian performed a simple spiritual exercise. By an effort of willpower he caused his fellow students and the inessential details of his surroundings to disappear, and in their place he put the chapel at Yarra Glen filled with white-robed monks. After this he prayed as devoutly as any Cistercian. Many times during the day he worked a similar transformation. He was praying and working and studying harder than ever before to meet the challenge of the Cistercian life.

  In the month of May the nights were frosty on the Southern Tablelands. In the mornings at the washbasins Adrian’s fingers were too numb to feel the difference between the hot and cold water. He tried to ignore the cold and offer it up like a true Cistercian. But one morning before mass he could think of nothing but his fingers and toes and his ribs that cringed when he hugged them under his soutane. He could not even begin the exercise that changed him to a Cistercian. He had to spend the whole of mass in the unwelcome surroundings of the Charleroi junior seminary among boys in black soutanes who were almost strangers.

  That afternoon the sun was bright and warm. The students played tennis and handball in their sports period. Adrian sat beside the tennis court waiting for his turn and hoping it would never come. He was trying to reach an important decision.

  He could last the whole year at Blenheim as a Cistercian but not as a Charleroi. If the winter was too cold for him to live like a Cistercian he would go home to Melbourne.

  But if he was going home he would have to do it soon because he must pass the matriculation exam before he could join the Cistercians. He was smart enough to coach himself in English and Latin and History if he bought all the books and stayed home all day at Accrington to study. But he would need something more than studies to sustain him during the long months before he went off to the Cistercians.

  He leaned back and stretched himself in the sunshine and looked out past the tennis courts. It was the same view of grazing paddocks and distant bush that he saw every day from the upstairs windows. Usually it made him vaguely uncomfortable. It was all part of the world that a Charleroi was supposed to convert to the kingdom of Christ. But the yellow-brown undulating paddocks, the scattered roofs of farmhouses, the subtly folding forested hills seemed always to be drifting slowly out of his reach. By the time he was ordained, the whole of Australia might have been beyond saving. It would lie forever, a lost country, under a sunny pagan sky.

  Now, when he thought of leaving the seminary, a glimpse of a secretive roof or a tantalising pattern of paddocks no longer troubled him. Somewhere out there, he knew, were thousands of people who would never be fitted into God’s plan for the world. But Adrian would never have to rescue them or alter their obstinate landscapes. He was free to sit back and admire the fragile beauty of the land in the autumn sunlight. And in a few months’ time, as a monk of the Cistercian order, he would contemplate his own private landscape—a few miles of grass and timber in the ranges above Melbourne.

  He recalled in detail the vista of paddocks in Cerini’s photograph. Already it had started him thinking lofty thoughts. And then he remembered that Thomas Merton was a poet as well as a monk.

  Adrian himself loved poetry. Each year at St Carthage’s, while other boys read only the few poems set by their English teacher, Adrian had searched his anthology for poems about remote and beautiful landscapes. His three favourites from his last year at school were ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ by Alfred Tennyson, ‘The Hunter’ by W. J. Turner and ‘Kubla Khan’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge—in that order
.

  He half-closed his eyes and tried to recite ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ as though its setting was the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales on an autumn afternoon. But he could not remember more than the first ten or twelve lines. He realised it was the fault of the Charleroi life. There was no time for contemplating poetic landscapes in the frantic routine of the seminary.

  The Cistercians were much more reasonable. Thomas Merton had taken his poetry notebooks with him into the monastery, and his superiors had let him go on writing as a monk. Adrian would start writing poetry as soon as he got back to Melbourne. When he joined the Cistercians he would show them his works and ask could he keep on writing. He would explain that he drew his inspiration from landscapes and had already admired photographs of their farm. They would almost certainly encourage him to keep up his poetry.

  It was all settled. Someone called him onto the tennis court. He played a set. He threw himself into it. He played for the Cistercians against the Charlerois and wasn’t surprised when he won. All the omens were urging him forward.

  After showers he went with the others to meditation in the chapel. He spent the time preparing what he would say to Father Camillus that very evening. He would not trouble the priest with the whole story of how he had finally discovered his true vocation. He would say just enough to convince him that his motives for leaving were purely spiritual.

  Adrian remembered the words of the Charlerois’ vocations pamphlet: ‘If, during his stay at the junior seminary, a boy decides that he is not called to the religious life, he is free to leave at any time. No one will put any pressure on him to stay.’ He would quote these words to Father Camillus if the priest tried to win him back from the Cistercians.

  As soon as evening study had started, Adrian left his seat and asked the Dean for permission to see Father Master. He knocked at the priest’s door. A Charleroi always called out, ‘Ave Maria’ instead of, ‘Come in.’ Adrian heard the priest’s call and went in.