The young woman fell silent. Around her, the men of the settlement looked from one to another and then at the lifeless body of Ivan Veliki, still slumped and bleeding in sight of his killers and his former subjects. The young woman, in her innocence, had not grasped the full import of what she had told, but the men who had heard her out knew now something of the torment that their dead leader had for long endured—the same torment that had given rise to his best poems. Far from wondering at his frailty, his loyal followers felt urged to praise the man who had turned his sufferings into exquisite verse.
A voice rose from among those who had heard the young woman’s report. ‘Vengeance for Ivan Veliki! We will avenge our lonely leader!’
‘Vengeance!’ The cry was repeated from a hundred throats.
The visiting horsemen drew back, their hands on their weapons. The followers of Ivan Veliki soon surrounded them. A man rushed forward from the throng. A sword slashed. The executioners were themselves dealt a rough justice.
The poem ended with the visiting horsemen all dead and the body of Ivan Veliki being carried at the head of a procession of all his subjects. Over his heart rested the manuscripts of all the poems he had ever composed.
The plan of Ivan Veliki: An Epic Poem in Two Cantos was finished. The poem would be written in blank verse, with stanzas of eight or ten lines each. Adrian spent a weekend working on the first two stanzas, which were to describe some of the main features of the steppes of Buryat Mongolia. On the Sunday night he put aside his working sheets to calculate when the poem would be completed and published.
Soon after its publication, Ivan Veliki, by U. Shaw, would be reviewed in the Literary Supplement of the Age. All over Melbourne, people who had known Adrian Sherd would read the review but probably none of them would guess the identity of the author. He would be spared such embarrassing questions as whether the poem was based on his own life and whether he himself had once dreamed of being alone with young women in scenic landscapes.
But what if Denise McNamara read Ivan Veliki? If the work was not completed and published until some years later, Denise might have been married in the meantime. She would show the book to her husband.
DENISE: There’s something that puzzles me in this book, darling. (Shows her husband a passage in Canto Two.) What on earth was troubling that poor fellow when he went through that agony on the steppes?
HUSBAND: (Reads a little, then thrusts the book from him in anger.) What sort of smut is this? And how the hell did it get past the censor?
DENISE: You’re misjudging it completely. It’s a very moving story with some wonderful descriptive passages. But I wish I could understand that section I showed you.
HUSBAND: Well, it seems as if this hero of yours was having some sort of impure temptation. Wait on! (Looks closely at the text.) Yes, he’s staring at that girl as though he might go away afterwards and commit what we call a sin of impurity by himself. And from the way he’s behaving I’d say it wouldn’t be his first sin of that sort, either. (Glances hesitantly at his wife.) I’m sure I told you about that sin after we were married, didn’t I?
DENISE: Yes, but you told me only poor unfortunates did it. This man is a hero. He dies a tragic death.
HUSBAND: The way I read it, the author is only trying to trick you into feeling sorry for that kind of sinner. Who wrote the confounded thing anyway? (Looks at title page.) U. Shaw. Sounds like a pseudonym. I’ll bet he’s done it a few times himself, whoever he is.
Denise would read again and again the stanzas describing Ivan Veliki alone with the girl on the steppes. When Ivan Veliki turned abruptly away from the girl, Denise would be troubled by a vague recollection that she herself had once witnessed something similar. And at last she would remember the intense young man—Adrian was his name, Adrian Sherd—who had courted her silently on the Coroke train for almost a year. One night, without any warning, he had disappeared from her life.
She had always supposed he must have had grave reasons for abandoning her as he did. Now, years later, Ivan Veliki offered an explanation. She was not rash enough to conclude that Adrian Sherd and Ivan Veliki suffered identical troubles. But U. Shaw’s poem made her aware for the first time of the torments that could afflict a young man trying to reconcile spiritual or literary ideals with the demonic urgings of the flesh.
She felt a deep gratitude to U. Shaw for enlarging her understanding of the male soul and shedding light on a puzzling episode in her own life. She looked at the dust jacket of the book for some information about him, but there was none. She imagined him as a man who had read and loved poetry all his life.
It would be some days later, perhaps, before she recalled one of the many afternoons on the Coroke train when Adrian Sherd had read books of poetry with obvious delight. And then the thought would strike her like a lightning flash—could U. Shaw and Adrian Sherd be the same person? The strange and moving poem of Ivan Veliki—was it a message for her after all these years from the mysterious young man who was once so attracted to her but had been forced to desert her?
Adrian Sherd, with his notes for Ivan Veliki in front of him, wondered again how long it would be before the poem was published. If Denise was already married before she read it, she could do no more than admire his success and wish she had understood him better in the old days. But if she read it while she was still unattached, he might one day receive a letter (forwarded through his publishers) beginning:
Dear U. Shaw,
I trust you will not think it impertinent of me to send you this account of my reaction to your epic poem…
Adrian put aside his drafts of Ivan Veliki for two nights while he considered a problem that concerned his whole future as a poet. He saw he had been too hasty in assuming that a great poet had to live like Francis Thompson. He had overlooked the possibility that he might one day meet a young woman sensitive and intelligent enough to understand him and his work. Could he be the husband of such a woman and still write poetry?
There were sound arguments for and against. The happiness and contentment of married life might make it hard for him to compose poems of grief and spiritual suffering. On the other hand his work would benefit from being read aloud each evening to his wife for her sympathetic criticism. Adrian decided to postpone a final decision until he had learned whether any great poets had also been happily married and the fathers of large Catholic families.
He consulted his Anthology of Catholic Poets. The man he had been searching for was only a few pages away from Francis Thompson. And Thompson himself had described him as the greatest genius of the century. The name of this remarkable poet was Coventry Patmore.
Adrian had to admit he had never heard of Patmore, but the editor of the anthology lavished praise on him. His work was the high-water mark of English Catholic poetry. He had brought English religious poetry to unsurpassable heights. His masterpiece was The Unknown Eros, a poem which praised married love as the means by which the soul might experience a foretaste of union with God.
Unfortunately the anthology contained no extracts from The Unknown Eros or Patmore’s other great work, The Angel in the House. The editor had chosen only some exquisite shorter poems. Adrian planned to read Patmore’s major works in the State Library. In the meantime he discovered from a history of English literature in Cheshire’s Bookshop that Patmore had been married three times (his first two wives predeceased him), and that he had embraced Catholicism after the death of his first wife. In his last years he had lived at a quiet place in Hampshire.
That night Adrian did not open his folder of notes for Ivan Veliki. He sat thinking of the time when he turned his back on Denise McNamara and aspired to be a priest. If he had known of Patmore’s poetry in those days he would have realised that a pure marriage was just as sure a path to God as a life in Holy Orders. His dreams of Triabunna, the bush near Hepburn Springs and the settlement in the Otways could have led him towards the mystic’s goal if only he had taken them more seriously. He had turned away from Den
ise because he seemed in danger of lapsing into impurity. What he should have done was to elevate his love for her to a poetic emotion. But of course he had not heard of The Unknown Eros then.
Adrian took out a new folder. He would not discard Ivan Veliki entirely. It would be of interest to literary critics as an example of his early work. But all his poetic energy would now be devoted to a work on married love.
He tried for several days to compose a good introduction to his poem. On the following Sunday he attended the nine o’clock mass at Our Lady of Good Counsel’s. This was known as the Family Mass. Most of the congregation were parents with young children. Ten minutes after the mass had begun a young couple with four small children crowded into the seat in front of Adrian.
Adrian inspected the woman. She was perhaps twenty-five, with short blonde hair and a rather pretty face. Her oldest child was about five. The second and third children were toddlers of different sizes, and the youngest was a baby, struggling to sit up. The husband was a colourless fellow in sports trousers and a shawl-neck pullover. He yawned instead of praying, and kept fingering the crust of dried blood on a shaving cut near his Adam’s apple.
Adrian did some quick calculations. The couple had been married about six years. They had produced a child every sixteen months or so. On one of those very nights when he was mistakenly searching for happiness in America, somewhere in his own suburb of Accrington the couple had been engaged in the marriage act that gave rise to their third child. And one night in 1954 while he was using his numbered tickets to determine the moods of his wife, Denise, the pert, pretty face (it was only a few feet from his own as he knelt behind her) looked up at the colourless one (he was yawning again) in an invitation to the embrace that produced their fourth.
These people had actually experienced what Adrian was about to celebrate in his poetry—the blissful union of bodies and souls in the sacrament of matrimony. If they had abandoned themselves properly they might already have felt, however briefly, that oneness with the Divine that Patmore had written of.
But had they? They were sitting back now, waiting for the sermon to start. The man had a toddler on each knee. The woman held the baby in her arms while the oldest child sat leaning against her. Adrian looked hard at them. There was no evidence that they had achieved anything by their marriage. They had probably never heard of Coventry Patmore, let alone read The Unknown Eros or reflected on the true significance of conjugal affection.
If anything, marriage had dulled them. The young woman was already neglecting her appearance. Adrian noticed on her neck, below her ear, haphazard blotches of powder. She had dabbed the stuff on hurriedly instead of giving her skin the uniform delicate texture that would inspire tender thoughts in a husband. There was a small spot on the front of her linen coat, as if a child had touched it with a greasy finger days before and she had not even noticed it. She was beginning to forget the importance of dress as a means of maintaining a husband’s interest.
As for the man, he seemed almost asleep. He only opened his eyes when one of the children clutched at him or threatened to fall from his knee. He was apparently unaware that one of the greatest joys of a Catholic marriage was to worship with your spouse beside you and to sense that you and she were bound inseparably together and to God.
Adrian suddenly knew how to start his poem. The opening stanzas would describe a man and his wife who complained after five years of marriage that they still had not experienced true bliss. The poet would question them, and it would emerge that the couple had been too preoccupied with worldly things and not sufficiently aware of the spiritual opportunities in marriage.
It was strange to think that one day, when the poem had been reviewed in the Advocate, the young woman and her husband might buy a copy and read it and say to each other, ‘If only someone had pointed out these things to us years ago when we used to slump in our seats every Sunday in Our Lady of Good Counsel’s and wonder why our marriage seemed to have gone stale,’ and never suspect that the author they admired could have leaned forward one Sunday and whispered his message in their ears if he had been sure they were ready for it.
Coventry Patmore had been married three times. Adrian realised that before he could execute the finer details of a poem on the divine qualities of love he would need to have a Catholic girlfriend.
He remembered O’Mullane’s talk about the YCW dances and picnics. The YCW branch in Our Lady of Good Counsel’s parish met every Wednesday night in the basement of the school building. On the following Wednesday, as soon as he had eaten his tea, Adrian told his parents he was walking to the school to join the YCW.
It was the first time Adrian had been out of the house (apart from his work and his Sunday mass) since coming back from Blenheim. His mother said she was so pleased he was going to mix with young people his own age instead of studying every night of the week. He realised he still hadn’t told his parents he had given up his studies in favour of poetry, but he wasn’t going to tell them about it just then.
It was midwinter. Darkness had come hours before. Adrian picked his way through the unmade streets towards the school. He knew he would meet no girls at a YCW meeting but he expected to hear the boys talking about some dance in the district where there were plenty of Catholic girls. (He had never learned to dance, but his mother might teach him some steps if he gave up his poetry for a few nights.) Or he might learn about some picnic arranged jointly by the YCW and the NCGM.
About a dozen young fellows were sitting round a ping-pong table in the school basement. There was no heating, and most of them had kept their overcoats on. Adrian felt the chill reaching through his shoes from the concrete floor. The president came over and asked Adrian his name and where he worked. The president said his own name was Barry Goonan and he worked as a moulder at Plasdip Products.
Goonan turned to the other fellows and said, ‘A new member tonight, men. Adrian Sherd. He’s a clerk in the public service. Let’s make him welcome.’ Three or four fellows moved along their bench, and Adrian sat down. Then the meeting began.
It was very brief. The only business they had to discuss was whether they should ask the parish priest again to install a heater in their meeting room. But Goonan ended the discussion by reminding them that the parish was deeply in debt and the priest had promised to buy them a heater as soon as he could afford it.
Adrian sat quietly and watched them. He guessed from the rough way they spoke that none of them had got far at secondary school. It would be easy for him to win the affection of a girl from the NCGM if these moulders and grinders and apprentice toolmakers were his only rivals.
As soon as the meeting was over the YCW boys stripped off their overcoats and clothes. Underneath they were all wearing black shorts and gold singlets with OUR LADY’S in dark-green lettering across their chests. They got sandshoes and gym boots out of their Gladstone bags and pulled them on. Someone opened a locker and three basketballs tumbled out. The fellows fought over the balls and ran outside yelping and grunting and calling to each other, ‘Macca, Macca!’ ‘Titch, Titch!’
The president saw Adrian still in his street clothes and said, ‘Here. Grab some spares, mate.’ Adrian went to a locker and picked out a singlet and shorts and a pair of sandshoes. The singlet had the last two of the dark-green letters missing but he wore it anyway. When he was changed he walked outside.
The school basketball court had a floodlight at each end. The night was freezing cold and the fellows’ breath rose in clouds against the lights. They were all dodging and passing and shooting for goal. Adrian jogged on the spot and rubbed his bare arms. A ball flew at him. It bounced off the court with a cruel metallic sound and hit him in the stomach like a huge ball bearing. The fellows called out, ‘Mate! Mate!’ or ‘Sport! Sport!’ Most of them had forgotten his name. But one voice said, ‘Shirt! Shirt!’ and Adrian passed the ball in that direction, although he couldn’t see the fellow because his eyes had filled with water from the cold and the blow of the ball agains
t his stomach.
They stayed on the court for more than an hour. Adrian chased them and called out to them and took some of their passes and tried to learn the tactics of the game. When they were all dressing afterwards, the president read out the teams for their match against St Kevin’s, Luton, on the following night. Adrian was an emergency in the Seconds. The president said, ‘We all meet at Accrington station tomorrow night at seven. Anyone can’t make it?’ No one spoke.
Adrian walked home thinking he could spare one more night from his poetry. He expected some of the NCGM girls to turn up as supporters at Luton. He would look them over and make a preliminary selection of three or four.
He sat with the YCW basketballers on the train to Luton. One of the older fellows had his fiancée with him. She sat knitting in a corner. Adrian wondered where the other female supporters were. He tried to join in the conversation. The YCW fellows talked and joked continually. Adrian understood each word they said, but when they gasped or chuckled or threw their heads back he realised they saw some deeper meaning that was hidden from him. He wondered if they were using some elaborate code, but they looked too honest and simple to invent such a thing. In the end, he sat back with a grin fixed on his face so that whenever they laughed and looked round at each other he would seem to be in on their joke. And he thought he would probably not include in his poem any dialogue between rough uneducated people for fear of getting it wrong.
At the Luton basketball court a group of girls sat on a bench under the scoreboard, but they were all supporters of the home side. The Second teams played their game first. Adrian sat beside the court with his sweater over his gold singlet. (His mother had stitched a Y and an S into place for him. They were the wrong shade of green but he thought no one would notice in the glare of the lights.) Close beside him, the Luton girls clapped and cheered whenever their team scored. Adrian was sure Patmore would have approved. The young people of Luton seemed instinctively aware of his doctrine. They relied on the power of love between the sexes to bring out the best in their players.
A Season on Earth Page 36