During one of the first mornings that he spent at his new workplace, he overheard a young woman he had never previously seen explaining to a young woman at a desk near his desk that she, the young woman he had never previously seen, would not be able to attend a party she had been invited to on the forthcoming Saturday evening because she would be doing during the following weekend what she did on many another weekend, which was to travel by train to the district in Gippsland where she had formerly lived and to spend the weekend on the dairy farm in that district where her parents lived with her three younger sisters.
During the days following the morning just mentioned, he learned the name of the young woman just mentioned and the whereabouts of the desk where she worked and he found opportunities for observing her and for listening to her conversations with other young women. The young woman did not resemble any image of any young woman that he had fallen in love with in his mind during his lifetime, but an image of her face had begun to appear in his mind soon after he had first seen her, and he supposed that he was about to experience once again the series of states of feeling that he had not experienced during the four years and more since he had gone with the young woman mentioned previously to a race-meeting at Caulfield.
He was no longer interested in his studies at the university but he intended to finish his degree for the sake of his career, as he had begun to call what he had previously called his job. When he had joined the state public service fewer than ten years before, most of his seniors had seemed to be grey-haired men, but younger men and even a few women had lately been promoted to responsible positions. Some of these people dressed and conducted themselves as though they wanted to be mistaken for persons in private enterprise, which was the name that public servants used for the world outside their office buildings. He, the chief character, knew he would never want to go along with anything that his workmates considered fashionable – he was already known among them as an eccentric – but he was confident that his degree and his thoroughness with paperwork would earn him promotions up to a certain level. He did not want to reach a position in which, to use the language of his place of work, he would be expected to formulate policy; he wanted to make his career at the highest level at which, to use the same language, policy was implemented. In his most frequent daydream of himself in his mid-thirties and later, he was the editor of publications in the department where he had worked for six of his eight years as a public servant. In that position, he would choose and edit for publication reports and articles and photographs and diagrams from foresters and technical officers and scientists all over Victoria. He would commission staff from his own office sometimes to travel far from Melbourne. He himself would hardly ever leave Melbourne. Years would pass, and the glass display case in his office would be filled with sample copies of the issues he had edited of Our Forests, each cover showing an aerial view of forested hills or mountains or a glade or a clearing or a track or a road in a forest or, sometimes, a single tree. One cover would surely show blackened trees after a fire. He would enjoy correcting a visitor sometimes when the visitor had said that he, the editor, must have seen a good few forests in his time. He would take pride in being the sort of expert who understood his subject from a distance.
One reason for his not wanting to be a formulator of policy was that he supposed such a person would use by day the energy that he, the chief character, used of an evening and wanted to go on using. Whenever he was not reading or writing in order to achieve a safe pass in the subject he was currently studying at the university, he was trying to be a Helvetian, which task he expected would take up most of his time away from work during the rest of his working life. Even as a child, he had ceased to hope that he would see again in his mind the scenery of the place that he afterwards thought of as True Helvetia, and he had still been a child when he learned in which country of the actual world a postage stamp had once been issued with the word Helvetia on it. Yet, the word Helvetia was often in his mind during his later life. Even though he sometimes saw behind the word a vague outline of steep, forested mountains with grassy valleys deep among them, he meant by Helvetia at different times many other kinds of place. Until a certain evening, which will be mentioned in the following paragraph, his trying to be a Helvetian was no more than his going on with his search for what he had earlier called precious knowledge. He carried on this search mostly by looking into books but sometimes by trying to write poems.
During the evening mentioned above, he had reached, as he often did, the point of admitting that he would never write a poem likely to be found suitable for publication in any of the periodicals that he sometimes sent a poem to. The words in which he admitted this to himself included an expression to the effect that there was no place where his poems might be published. The word place stayed in his mind for a few moments, and its staying there seemed to him afterwards the nearest thing to an explanation for his deciding at the end of those few moments that he would have been a published poet if he had lived in Helvetia.
Soon after he had made the decision just mentioned, he decided that he was an inhabitant of Helvetia (and, of course, a published poet of that country) for as long as he was at his desk and writing poetry. Soon afterwards again, he decided that he was a Helvetian for as long as he happened to be thinking of himself as a writer of poems or thinking of any word or phrase from his poetry. Soon afterwards again, he decided that any image appearing in his mind while he wrote any word or phrase of a poem or while he read afterwards any such word or phrase was an image of a person or a place or a thing in Helvetia.
He began to write poetry every evening. He took even more care with his poems than previously, being aware that every line, as soon as he had thought of it as finished, became part of the latest volume from one of the foremost poets in Helvetia.
He was writing his Helvetian poetry during the evenings of the days when he was observing the young woman mentioned earlier, but he sometimes put aside his poetry to study maps borrowed from the collection in the library of the department where he worked. The maps were detailed maps of the district where the parents of the young woman lived, so she had told him one day when he had spoken to her as one workmate to another. The district seemed to consist of plains, with hills to the south – the same hills that covered much of Gippsland – and to the north the first of the mountains that covered most of eastern and north-eastern Victoria.
On a certain Saturday afternoon in the winter of his twenty-seventh year, he sat with the young woman mentioned in the previous paragraph in an enclosure of green canvas called a private box at Moonee Valley Racecourse. From where they sat, he and she could see across a wide valley through which the Monee Ponds Creek flowed, although it was out of their sight at the far side of the racecourse. Except for the large green rectangle of the racecourse, most of the floor of the valley and all that they could see of its sides were closely covered by the older sorts of houses of the inner northern suburbs of Melbourne. When he and the young woman looked out across the racecourse from their private box, they were looking in the direction of Mount Dandenong, far to the east, but they could see no further in that direction than the far side of the valley where the creek flowed and the racecourse lay.
For several weeks past, he had been sitting or walking with her for a few minutes on each fine day in the gardens near their office building. He was puzzled at how calm he was in her company. He thought this might have been because he himself had grown older by five years since he had last approached a young woman. But he thought of other possible reasons: he had not yet fallen in love with the image of her face in his mind, although he often saw the image in his mind; she was five years younger than he; he thought of himself from time to time as a poet of Helvetia.
He had at first asked her to go with him to a race meeting at Sandown Racecourse, which had recently been built on a site near the site of the racecourse of the same name mentioned earlier, but she had told him that she was already obliged to return to he
r parents’ house on the weekend of the meeting at Sandown. He had not been troubled at having to put off their first outing. Her returning so often to her parents’ farm told him that she had no boyfriend in Melbourne, and he imagined her spending her weekends on the dairy-farm in Gippsland with only her parents and sisters for company.
More than six months later, she told him that she had, in her words, gone out with a man nearly ten years older than herself on some of the weekends when she was staying in Gippsland. The man was managing and would later inherit his father’s farm. The man and his parents had been friends of her parents for many years. The man had been interested in her since she had left school four years previously and had asked her out whenever he had broken off with a girlfriend. She, the young woman who told this later to the chief character, had never been seriously interested in the farmer. She had always hoped that she would meet in Melbourne a man who could talk to her about many more things than a farmer could talk about. She had stopped going out with the farmer as soon as she had been sure that he, the chief character, had been seriously interested in her. When she had told the farmer that she would not be going out with him again, he had told her that he had been preparing to ask her in the near future to marry him, but this had not changed her mind.
During the afternoon in the private box at Moonee Valley, he told her that his father and his mother had both been the children of farmers in the district of mostly level grassy paddocks that covered most of the south-west of Victoria and reached all the way to some places where the western suburbs of Melbourne had long since been built and might be said to have reached as far as the Moonee Ponds Creek, so that he, the chief character, and she, the young woman, might have been sitting at that moment at the easternmost extremity of his native plains and looking towards the creek where they finally ended. She told him that the district of Gippsland where her father owned a dairy farm was mostly level and grassy but that she could remember having lived as a young child among steep and bare green hills in a district in the south of Gippsland, which district had been covered in forests until the first settlers had arrived and had cut down every tree. She told him further that her father had settled in the mostly level district where he now lived in the early 1950s, when that district had been turned into what was then called a soldier-settlement area, with large estates being divided into small farms watered by irrigation channels.
During the six months following the afternoon mentioned in the previous paragraph, he and the young woman went together to a number of restaurants and cinemas and theatres and race meetings and football matches and cricket matches on Saturday afternoons or evenings and afterwards sat alone together in the front seat of the late-model Chrysler Valiant that he had recently bought, which was the first motor car that he had owned. When they sat alone together in the car just mentioned, it was parked in the street outside the block of flats where the young woman shared with three other young women from country districts of Victoria a flat with two bedrooms. The flat was in the eastern suburb of Melbourne that was mentioned in the first section of this piece of fiction and was only a few blocks to the west of a house mentioned earlier: the house where an aunt and an uncle of the chief character had a certain picture hanging on one of the walls of their house. During the six months mentioned above, he took the young woman several times to visit his parents on a Sunday afternoon, but he did not take her to visit his mother’s sister in the house that he himself had visited on many Sundays between the ages of about four and fourteen. As he had grown older, he had felt more sure that he was the son of his father and of his father’s people rather than of his mother and her people. Even though he no longer considered himself a Catholic and stayed in his room on Sunday mornings while his parents and his younger brother went to Mass, he still spent a week of his holidays each year in the south-western town where his unmarried aunts and his bachelor-uncle lived and he called on them every day during that week. His aunts and his uncle were Catholics, not so much from intellectual conviction, so he thought, as from their concern for the past. Their parents had died before he, the chief character, was twenty years of age, but the house was still furnished as the parents had furnished it, and most of the books and ornaments had either belonged to the parents or been acquired by the aunts and the uncle when they were children. He, the chief character, found all of this interesting, whenever he visited the house, but he never forgot that the house was only a sort of reconstruction of what was always spoken of as the old house. They had left the old house and had moved to the house in the town when he was only five years old, but he had several clear memories from his visits to the old place. He often remembered part of an afternoon when he had sat beside one of his aunts while she read to him extracts from the book Bevis, by Richard Jefferies. He and his aunt sat on a cane couch on the side veranda of the house. Beyond the veranda was a lawn of buffalo grass with a mauve-flowered veronica bush in a circular bed. Beyond the lawn was a hedge of wormwood. While he sat beside his aunt he was unable to see over the hedge, but from time to time he had stood on the seat of the couch and had looked again across the mostly level grassy paddocks towards the line of trees in the distance. And yet, he would not have felt comfortable visiting his uncle and his aunts with the young woman. In the past, he had not felt comfortable in their house whenever he was in love, even if only with an image in his mind.
On each evening when he sat alone with the young woman in the parked car outside her flat, he had asked her beforehand how many of the young women she called her flatmates were at that time in the flat and he had always been told that one or more of the young women was there. Towards the end of the six months mentioned in the previous paragraph, when he believed that he was in love with the young woman and when he suspected that the young woman was in love with him, and when he had become more bold with the young woman than he had previously become or had expected to become with any young woman, and when he wanted to be alone with her in a place more private and comfortable than a parked car in a street of an inner suburb, he asked her whether he and she could visit her family in Gippsland at some weekend in the future and whether he and she could go together on an outing on the Saturday or the Sunday of the weekend to some clearing in a forest.
At the desk where he worked during each week, he had looked over large-scale maps of every district of Victoria; had noted the areas covered by forest in each district; and had even noted the roads and tracks leading into those forests and the places beside the roads and tracks where persons were permitted to light fires for picnics or to camp overnight. He had even, as mentioned earlier in this section of this story, studied on a map the part of Gippsland where the parents of the young woman lived on their dairy farm. And yet, whenever he talked to the young woman during the six months mentioned above, he saw again in his mind one or another of the images that he had seen in his mind as a boy whenever he had tried to see Gippsland in his mind. And whether he saw Gippsland as the one forest with only a few tracks or roads leading into it or whether he saw it as bare green hills with isolated stands of blackened trunks of trees, he still sometimes saw as part of the image in his mind a few blue-grey ridges of mountains in the far background.
On a certain Friday evening in his twenty-seventh year, he drove his Chrysler Valiant with the young woman sitting beside him through the outer south-eastern suburb of Dandenong and into Gippsland, which he had never previously entered. The sun was already going down when he saw the first green countryside between Hallam and Narre Warren, and the sky was dark before he had reached Drouin, but he learned during his first hour in the region that Gippsland contained among its green hills many more stands of timber and patches of forest than he had supposed. He arrived at the young woman’s home long after dark. Her parents were wary of him. She whispered to him afterwards that they would have preferred him to be a farmer rather than an office worker. He wished that he could have stood on his dignity with her parents – perhaps by reminding himself that he was one of t
he outstanding young poets of Helvetia – but he smiled and spoke politely in their presence before they went in to the front room to watch television and left him and the young woman to have a late meal in the kitchen.
He slept in the tiny bedroom that belonged to the young woman, while she slept in the room that was shared by her younger sisters, one of whom was away from home while she trained to become a nursing sister. He woke up early, at the time when the young woman’s father was moving around before he went out to do the milking. He, the chief character, stepped to the window and saw in the distance a line of mountains still grey-black in the light before sunrise. He supposed that he was looking north-west and that the mountains were among the many folds of mountains that had been out of his sight in the far distance when he had looked eastwards from Mount Donna Buang nearly ten years before.
On that Saturday and on several of the remaining Saturdays before the end of his twenty-seventh year, he and the young woman set out in his motor car late in the morning on what she told her parents and her sisters was a picnic. On each of those Saturdays, he and she travelled during the middle of the day across mostly level grassy countryside and then between farms bordered by stands of timber or even by what seemed the edges of the same forest that covered the mountains far ahead of them. On each of those Saturdays he steered his motor car to one or another place that she had described to him beforehand as a peaceful and unfrequented place on the outskirts of the mountains, and he and she ate and drank and were alone together and surrounded by thick stands of timber on land that sloped upwards on either side, but he did not seem afterwards to have travelled into the blue-grey mountains that were visible from all over the mostly level and grassy district where the young woman lived and also, so she told him, from certain other districts of Gippsland.
Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane Page 42