I first met Nancy in the late summer of 1959, when she and I became classmates in the training-college for primary-school teachers. When I met her, I had been without a girlfriend for nearly three years. My only previous girlfriend had been Christine, who was mentioned earlier in this piece of fiction, but who had turned away from me. During my three solitary years, so to call them, I followed the policy of approaching only those young women who seemed likely to be readers of books of fiction or of poetry and who might therefore be supposed to take kindly to hearing me talk about the fiction and the poetry that I intended to write. During my three solitary years I approached, in fact, no young women.
Books of fiction or of poetry were seldom discussed during classes at the training college where I met Nancy. Even so, I formed the impression during one of the first classes in the subject called English in 1959 that Nancy might sometimes have read such books in private and might have been influenced by them. If I had followed the policy mentioned in the previous paragraph, I should have approached Nancy early in 1959. For nearly six months, however, I found excuses for not approaching her. Before coming to the training college, Nancy had spent a year at university, where one of her chosen subjects had been English. I had avoided going to university partly from a fear of being compelled there to study books of poetry or of fiction that might distract me from writing the sort of poetry and fiction that I hoped to write and partly because I had once seen in a Melbourne newspaper a photograph of a lawn at the university during lunch-hour on a warm day in summer and had noted among the crowd of students sprawled or seated on the lawn many groups in which males and females were intermingled and some of the females wore dresses with low necklines. I had not wanted to be one of such a crowd. Moreover, Nancy was a champion swimmer and served as a life-saver during summer at the beach near her home.
Six months after I first met Nancy, I began to read Tess of the D’Urbervilles, although it was not part of the required reading for the teacher-training course. Long before I had finished the book, I understood that it would be out of character for me if I were to approach Nancy during the foreseeable future.
In answer to the question posed at the head of this section: I admit that I have sometimes paused while reading about one or another fictional personage. I have sometimes paused as though I had met up at last with an imagined character. I have sometimes paused but then I have gone on reading; the seeming character has become one more of the many personages in the background of my mind; Catherine Earnshaw is indistinguishable from a young woman, hardly more than a girl, whose name in my mind is Christine; Angel Clare and I are of one accord.
The reader should not suppose that I fail to recognise the workings of the imagination in other writers of fiction because I search out too eagerly and read too hastily passages referring to young female persons. I tried to recall just now the occasion when I read for the first time the passage of fiction that has affected me more than any other passage that I have read during sixty years of reading fiction. I seemed to recall that I was walking across a courtyard on my way towards the front door of a mansion. I had been invited to an afternoon party that was then taking place in the mansion. A motor-car just then arriving in the courtyard passed close by me, causing me to step suddenly backwards. My stepping thus caused me to find myself standing with one foot on each of two uneven paving-stones. What happened afterwards is reported in the relevant passage in the last volume of the work of fiction the English title of which is Remembrance of Things Past.
Leaving aside for the moment much of what has been written so far in these pages, have I never wished to be able to report, as it were, events that might have happened, as it were, at such a time and in such a place that I could never be supposed to have witnessed them?
I admit to having wished from time to time that my exerting some faculty previously unknown to me might enable me to recreate in vivid detail, as some or another reviewer might later put it, a certain series of events that took place not a great distance from where I sit writing these words and much more recently than the great days of the Australian bushrangers or of the ancient Egyptians. That series would consist of the most decisive of the many events that could be said to have resulted in my being conceived.
What would have been some of those seemingly imagined events?
On a certain afternoon in the early 1930s with a hot sun in a clear sky but with a cool breeze blowing from the nearby sea, a man aged about thirty years was riding on horseback towards a swampy area overgrown with tea-tree and with other sorts of dense scrub. The swampy area was near the centre of a low-lying island within sight of the mainland of south-eastern Victoria. Perhaps two hundred persons lived on the island, which could be reached from the mainland only by boat. Most of the persons were from farming families, few of them prosperous. The rest of the persons were either convicted criminals serving their sentences on a so-called prison-farm on part of the island or the prison officers who lived on the same farm and who guarded and supervised the convicted men. The man on horseback was a prison officer. He had grown up on a dairy farm in south-western Victoria but had left home early and had then wandered over much of Australia. More recently, he had worked as a prison officer in Melbourne, but he had then applied to be transferred to the island prison-farm because he liked to be out of doors in sparsely settled districts. He had come to the island also in order to be far away from racecourses and bookmakers. For most of his adult life he had bet recklessly on racehorses and had several times won in a single bet more money than he could have earned from six months of work, but when he had set out for the island he was without reserves of money.
These paragraphs, of course, are only a summary of what I might have written if I had been otherwise gifted. The persons mentioned in these paragraphs hardly deserve to be called fictional characters. Even so, I intend from here onwards to call the young man on horseback the chief character, if only to remind myself continually of how short he falls of being an imagined character and of how far is this report of him from being a product of imagination.
The chief character was a skilled horseman, but he was mounted somewhat awkwardly as he rode towards the swamp. He was carrying about him in several sacks at least six adult birds of one or another variety of the species phasianus colchicus, the common pheasant. During some of his ample leisure time as a prison officer on the island, the chief character had tried to breed pheasants in roughly-made aviaries. He had learned in time that his captive pheasants were what he chose to call shy breeders. He had hoped that his pheasants might supply table-birds for the kitchen of the prison-farm. He had also hoped to enjoy the pleasures available to a breeder of livestock: he would select pairs suitable for mating; he would observe the persistence of qualities and traits from one generation to the next. But his caged birds produced few chicks, and he had decided not long before the afternoon mentioned above that he would release many of his birds into the wild.
The chief character was not unhappy while he carried his sacks of pheasants towards the swamp that lay near the centre of the island. Certainly, he got pleasure from his breeding of birds or animals, but he enjoyed equally seeing, or even thinking about, certain creatures that were free to wander and to reproduce out of the reach of humankind. In anxious or restless moods, he was sometimes able to calm himself by recalling the distant sights he had had of the pair of peregrine falcons that had nested during several years of his boyhood on Steeple Rock, the island-pinnacle that stood far out in one of the bays of the Southern Ocean near his father’s farm. In his room at the prison-farm, he often composed himself to sleep of an evening by imagining (his word) the comings and goings of the herd of wild deer that lived in the least-frequented part of the island. He had not yet seen any of the deer, but he had several times seen the small herd of wild cattle that survived on the island although one or another cattle-farmer would sometimes ride out with his dogs and would try to round them up. The chief character looked forward to a time when the scru
b-covered districts of the island would be densely populated with pheasants; when he could dismount in any isolated place and could creep into the scrub and could see his birds foraging or courting or raising their young.
The chief character observed and reflected on the breeding behaviour of animals and birds. He could not admire the males that kept harems and drove off or fought and defeated rivals: the bull with his cows or the cock with his hens. The chief character sympathised with the bachelor-males that were obliged to watch the breeding-flock from a safe distance for season after season. The chief character thought of the world as too closely settled; there should have been more scope for each bachelor-male to lead away a young female or two into an empty landscape.
The swampy area where the chief character set free his pheasants was one of several areas where he found himself forgetting for the time being that he was on an island, so low-lying was the land and so dense was the line of trees that he saw not far off in whichever direction he looked. After he had watched the last of the birds fluttering in among the tea-tree, he turned his horse away from the swamp and towards the farming district. He had planned his outing so that he would arrive at a certain farm at mid-morning. At that time, the farmer and his two sons would be working in one or another shed or paddock while the farmer’s daughter would be alone in the house. The chief character was no furtive visitor. He intended to chat briefly with the farmer, who would then invite him to call at the house and to ask his (the farmer’s) daughter for a cup of tea.
The chief character had visited the farm often during the few months since he had arrived on the island. During almost every visit, he had talked with the daughter, who was the only female in the house. (Her mother had died three years before, and she, the daughter, now kept house, as the saying was, for her father and her two older brothers.) The daughter was seventeen years of age. Except for three brief holidays spent with an aunt and an uncle in a suburb of Melbourne, she had lived all of her life on the farm on the island. Whenever the chief character visited the farm, she mostly listened while he talked about interesting persons that he had met during his travels through New South Wales and Queensland.
Both the chief character and the daughter, as I intend to call her, were Catholics, to use the language of their time and place. There was no Catholic church or school on the island, and only a few Catholic families. Once each month, a priest came from the mainland and celebrated Mass either in the lounge-room of the farm where the daughter lived or in the mess-hall at the prison-farm. The chief character had never doubted his Catholic faith, as he himself would have put the matter, but he disliked any show of religious zeal or piety. Even so, he had looked with approval at the daughter whenever she had bowed her head and had closed her eyes during each of the Masses that he and she had attended. The occasion when he had looked with the most approval had been that of her returning to her place after she had received Holy Communion, to use the language of those days. As soon as she had returned to her place, the daughter would close her eyes and would then bow her head and cover her face with her hands. Most Catholics of that time made a similar show of reverence after having received Holy Communion, as they would have called it, but the daughter, so the chief character had observed, was always the last person in the congregation to lift her head again and to open her eyes. While he was walking to the back door of the farmhouse soon after he had let loose the pheasants at the edge of the swamp, the chief character kept in mind an image of the daughter with her head bowed and with her face covered by her hands.
Words came easily to the chief character. On some of his many visits, he had talked for an hour and more to the daughter, who had seemed content to listen. On the morning after he had freed the pheasants, the chief character was rather less talkative than usual with the daughter. He tried to work his way by several different routes towards a speech that he had been preparing for a week and more. The chief character was about thirty years of age but he had had few dealings with young women. On the morning in question, he might have been afraid to deliver his prepared speech to the daughter if he had not been able to keep in his mind the image mentioned in the previous paragraph. For as long as he had that image in his mind, the chief character felt confident that the daughter had not yet been courted by any young man.
The chief character delivered the short speech mentioned above, but not until after he had talked to the daughter for perhaps half an hour about matters that he had not intended to talk about during that visit. One of these matters was horse-racing. He had never told the daughter about his betting on horses, but while he was trying to work his way towards his prepared speech, he heard himself telling her that he intended to enjoy in the future only what he called the innocent pleasures of horse-racing: watching each race as a spectacle only; learning the patterns of the jockeys’ silk jackets; trying to imagine the feelings of the owner whose horse, a moment before, had won a so-called classic race, or of the owner who had backed his horse at long odds to win a large sum but had seen the horse, a moment before, beaten by a narrow margin. At another time during his visit, the chief character heard himself calculating aloud for the benefit of the daughter the amount that a man might have saved by the end of a year if he had set aside from his wages during every week of that year a certain number of shillings and if he had lived throughout the year in accommodation provided cheaply by his employer. At still another time during his visit, the chief character heard himself asking the daughter for a pencil and a scrap of paper so that he could set down for her inspection the calculations that he had been making aloud. (Throughout his life, the chief character had a habit of reaching for pencil and paper whenever he was alone and of making detailed calculations. During periods when he was trying to stay away from racecourses, the calculations were of the sort that he made for the benefit of the daughter in the kitchen of the farmhouse on the morning after the release of the pheasants. During periods when he was going often to the races, the calculations were attempts by the chief character to predict the betting markets of races not yet run or even his likely winnings from this or that bet at these or those odds. During the last year of his life, the calculations ought to have had to do with the chief character’s many unpaid debts to bookmakers and unpaid loans from generous relatives, so his elder son thought at the time, although the calculations were mostly part of one or another scheme for selling the only house that he had ever owned, for moving with his wife and their younger son to some or another house owned by the Housing Commission of Victoria in some or another country town in Victoria, and for buying with the meagre proceeds from the sale of the house the first motor-car that he would ever have owned.)
The reader will have surmised that the short speech mentioned previously was a proposal of marriage from the chief character to the daughter. During the weeks before he delivered the short speech, the chief character had imagined, to the best of his ability, some of the ways in which the daughter might respond to the speech. What the daughter actually said to him, however, after he had delivered his short speech, he had been far from imagining.
While the daughter went on with her reply to his speech, the chief character seemed to be hearing that he had been too late with his speech; that this hardly-more-than-girl who had lived almost every day of her life on the lonely island and who dealt with hardly any male persons apart from her father and her brothers—that this shy-seeming and softly spoken person had already come to an understanding with some unseen rival of the chief character. While the daughter went on further with her reply, the chief character learned that his supposed rival was no man but was the being that went by the name of God with both himself and the daughter, although he and she might well have imagined that being rather differently. In short, the daughter had decided at some time before she had first met the chief character that she wanted to spend her life in one or another religious order of women; that she wanted to be a nun.
However eloquently the chief character tried to persuade the
daughter to give up her ambition, she was immovable. And yet, she was vague about her chosen future. Having lived all her life on the island and having attended only a state school, the daughter had met hardly any nuns and knew about the so-called religious life only from reading pamphlets posted to her by various orders of nuns at the request of a helpful aunt on the mainland. When the chief character visited the daughter a week after the visit reported above, she told him about the contents of these pamphlets although she preferred not to show him the pamphlets themselves. She told him further that she had chosen from nearly a dozen different orders of nuns a certain enclosed order, as it was called. The chief character was not sure of the expression “enclosed order” although, as he said to the daughter, he had his suspicions. The daughter then explained, using a number of words and phrases that she had obviously learned from one or another of her pamphlets, that the members of an enclosed order served God not by teaching or by nursing but rather by keeping to their convent and by leading a strictly regulated life. Much of their day was given over to prayer, both in choir and in private. An enclosed nun prayed not only for her own spiritual good but also for the good of the world outside her convent: the world that she had turned away from. The daughter finally told the chief character that she had looked often at certain photographs in one of her pamphlets. One photograph showed part of a room containing a bed and a chair and a table with a crucifix on it. Behind the table was part of a window overlooking part of a treetop. The other photograph showed part of a fish-pond on part of a lawn that would have been surrounded on all sides by a cloister that would have been surrounded on all sides by a two-storey building that would have been surrounded on all sides by a high brick wall. The daughter said that she was able to imagine herself living for the rest of her life in the places shown in the photographs.
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