Barley Patch (24 page)

I would have reported in my abandoned work of fiction that the chief character, while he watched the rain trickling on the window of his classroom, would have preferred to be already an older man remembering certain events or even regretting that certain events had never taken place rather than to be still a young man preparing to experience those events.

At some time during the day of rain, the chief character would have looked through a certain booklet from among a collection of booklets displayed at the rear of his classroom, so I would have reported if I had gone on with my abandoned work. The chief character had noticed the booklets often before but had never looked into them. For some months afterwards, he would suspect that he had been led to look into the booklets by what he called the intervention of Divine Providence. Each of the booklets in the collection was intended to persuade young men to apply to train as priests or lay-brothers in one or another religious order. The booklet that the chief character looked through contained both text and illustrations. A number of the illustrations were of a building of two storeys. From one of these illustrations the chief character learned that the building was surrounded on three sides at least by mostly level grassy countryside that was not without trees. From captions beneath the illustrations, the chief character learned that the building housed the novitiate of a certain religious order; the place where young men trained as novices of the order during the first year after they had joined the order. In short, as I reported in an earlier section of this present work of fiction, the chief character of my abandoned work of fiction had decided to apply to join the religious order in question before he had read the text of the booklet published by the order. The illustration that the chief character was looking at when he made his decision was an illustration of the interior of a room of the sort that was occupied by each of the novices of the order. The room was furnished with a bed and a table and a chair and a cupboard. The table was so placed that a person sitting at it would face the window of the room. Given that the view through the illustrated window was a view wholly of sky, the chief character supposed that the room was on the upper storey of the building of two storeys. Soon after he had supposed this, the chief character saw in his mind an image of rain trickling down a window that overlooked some or another view of the Riverina district of New South Wales in his mind. While he watched the image of the trickling rain in his mind, the chief character of my partly completed work of fiction was pleased to suppose that he had found a means of going to live in an upper room of a building of two storeys without first having to go to university, where he might have had to spend his time studying books of small interest to him or preparing to approach one or another young woman.

Six months before the day of rain mentioned above, during two days of his summer holidays, the chief character had read all of the three hundred and more pages of
Elected Silence
, by Thomas Merton, published in London by Hollis and Carter in 1954 but first published several years before in the USA. The chief character had never heard of the book or its author before he received it as a prize at the end of his second-last year of school, and several times while he read it he supposed that the book had come into his hands through the intervention of Divine Providence.
Elected Silence
was the autobiography of Thomas Merton, who had been a teacher and a poet before becoming a monk in a Cistercian monastery in the USA. Merton had been prepared to give up his writing when he entered the monastery, but his superiors had allowed him to write poetry and had later encouraged him to write essays and to have them collected and published. (The chief character did not know it, but I learned some years ago from a biography of Thomas Merton that the royalties from his books became the chief source of income for the monastery and that their author was often exempted from following the rule of the monastery and was allowed, when he so wished, to live alone and to go on with his writing in the so-called hermitage, which was a weatherboard cottage in a grove of trees in the grounds of the monastery.) After he had read the book, the chief character had made inquiries and had learned that the Cistercian Order had a monastery in Australia but he had been disappointed when he found that the monastery was in hilly countryside only thirty miles from Melbourne.

The religious order with its novitiate in the Riverina district had been founded in Italy during the eighteenth century by a pious Italian priest, so the chief character learned from the booklet that had persuaded him to join the order. Both priests and lay-brothers of the order wore a black soutane and a black cloak. Both soutane and cloak had an insignia of scarlet embroidered over the wearer’s left breast. The special work of the order in Australia was to visit one after another parish and to conduct there a mission, something that has been described elsewhere in this work of fiction. When the priests were not conducting missions they lived a strictly regulated life in one or another monastery of the order. This was much to the liking of the chief character. He had no wish to live as a parish priest in some or another suburban or rural presbytery under the notice of his parishioners. Even when he worked on the mission, he would be looking forward to returning to his monastery and working on his latest poem.

The chief character was not easily able to persuade his parents to allow him to go to the Riverina district instead of to university. Whenever his parents reminded him of the benefits to be got from an education at university, the chief character would recite in his mind certain phrases from the poem ���The Scholar-Gipsy,” by Matthew Arnold. He recited the phrases in order to see more clearly the connections between himself and the chief character of the poem. For the chief character of my unfinished fiction, the Riverina district would be the retired ground preferred by the scholar-gipsy: the lone wheat-fields and the river bank o’ergrown. The cloak that the scholar-gipsy wrapped around himself was a likeness of the black cloak that the chief character would wear as a novice shut away from the world. The most striking connection, however, was reported in the note that preceded the poem. The young man who had inspired the poem, he who had left university and had taken up with the gipsies, claimed to have discovered that the gipsies could do wonders by the power of the imagination and had resolved to learn their arts.

When the parents of the chief character gave their permission for him to join a religious order of priests, they were won over by his seeming sincerity and piety, or so the reader of my unfinished fiction might have supposed. Certainly, he had developed during the weeks after the rainy afternoon mentioned previously a keen longing to join the religious order of his choice. What he most longed for, however, was not to preach or to minister to other persons but to attend to his own salvation, as he would have expressed the matter. And whenever he thought of himself as attending thus, he saw himself in the future as reading or writing at a table in an upstairs room or as kneeling in a chapel or standing before an altar with his eyes closed and his head bowed.

Even during the last weeks before he travelled to the Riverina district in order to study for the priesthood, the chief character felt no strong affection for the personages that he knew as God or Jesus or Our Lady or the angels and saints. Even when he told his parents that he was called by God to the priesthood, he did not feel as though the above-named personages felt any strong affection for him. He felt as though the personages were remote from him and perhaps indifferent towards him for the time being but prepared to look on him favourably if he could prove himself worthy of them. This would require from him much more than mere virtuous living or the recitation of prayers. His becoming worthy required him to see further than most persons saw; to see into the places, wherever they were, where the personages most clearly manifested themselves; to dare even to see the personages themselves as they saw one another.

The chief character was hardly more than a boy when he set out for the Riverina district but he intended to become a writer of poetry or, perhaps, prose fiction, and also a mystic. He had come across the word
mystic
in his reading and had interpreted the word in his own way. He did not understand until a few years afterwards that his notion of prayer and meditation was hardly different from his notion of writing. The writer struggled to discover, in some far part of his mind, subject-matter fit for poetry; the mystic struggled to glimpse God or heaven. (The chief character would not have conceded, when he set out for the Riverina district, that what the mystic saw, or hoped to see, was an image or images in his mind.)

The daily doings of the chief character while he lived in the building of two storeys in the Riverina district would have been no part of my abandoned work of fiction. He lived in the building for twelve weeks before returning to Melbourne and becoming employed as a clerical officer, so called, in a building of many storeys. While he lived in the building of two storeys, he had seemed to be accepted by the seven young men who were his fellow-novices and by the priests who were his instructors and his spiritual director. This last-mentioned man had even seemed disappointed when the chief character had announced that he wanted to leave the building of two storeys, although the man had not pressed him to stay.

The chief character wrote only a few notes for a poem while he lived in the building of two storeys. The novices followed strictly the Rule of the religious order; the daily time-table allowed him no time for poetry. Several times during his stay, the chief character wondered whether it would have been better for him as a writer of poetry if he had applied to join the Cistercian order, even though their monastery was in hilly country not far from Melbourne. As for his striving to be a mystic, he had only to close his eyes in the choir stalls in the chapel and numerous images would appear to him, but he was disappointed by their simplicity and by their seeming to be derived from the illustrations on the holy-cards that he had owned as a child or from the subject-matter of the stained-glass windows that he had stared at as a child. Once only, towards the end of his stay in the building of two storeys, he seemed to see certain images the origins of which he could not readily have explained. He had undertaken an ambitious task. He had understood from an early age that the ceremony of the Mass was a sacrifice which pleased God and made that Being better disposed towards the persons who had taken part in the ceremony. But he had never understood the technical details, so to call them, of the sacrifice: who or what was offered and by what means; why the offering was likely to appease God. During the periods set aside for so-called spiritual reading, the chief character searched through books of theology for answers but found only vagueness. Even Thomas Aquinas, reputedly the greatest of theologians, had had to concede that the exact workings of the sacrifice of the Mass were a mystery.

One morning during his last week in the building of two storeys, the chief character was straining to see in his mind some or another visual equivalent of the mystery mentioned in the previous paragraph when he lost sight of the usual images of crucifixes and chalices and wafers of unleavened bread and bearded deities looking down from on high. In place of these predictable images, he saw in his mind while he knelt with his colleagues in the chapel certain details of the image of a mounting-yard at a crowded and well-appointed racecourse. Perhaps twenty handsome horses were being led around the perimeter of the yard by their strappers. On the rectangular lawn at the centre of the yard, the owners and trainers conferred in small groups. At any moment, the glass doors of the nearest building would be flung open and the jockeys would step out and would stride onto the rectangular lawn where each jockey would join one or another of the conferring groups.

At this point in the work of fiction that had never been finished, the narrator would have reported that the chief character had attended several race-meetings before he had arrived in the Riverina district and that he had been much affected at those meetings by the sight of the horses parading in the mounting yard. While the horses paraded and while the owners and the trainers and the jockeys conferred, the chief character had been able to foresee many possible outcomes of the race about to be run. Almost every conferring group might have had grounds for hoping to win. Almost every owner might have looked with pride at the jacket worn by his jockey. The colours of the jacket would have been chosen to suggest the achievements or the distinctive qualities or tastes of the owner. Perhaps a few sets of colours hinted also at the distinctive landscapes of the region from which the horse and its owner and trainer had arrived. For as long as the horses merely paraded, it was possible to foresee almost any one of the coloured jackets returning ahead of all the others; almost any owner and trainer having their hopes fulfilled. The race was still to be run. Each contestant still deserved admiration.

On the morning during his last week in the building of two storeys when the image-horses paraded in the mounting-yard in his mind, the chief character understood, in the way that he understood certain matters in his dreams, that one of the horses was owned by no less a personage than God. From this, of course, the chief character understood further that one of the many men standing on the rectangular lawn, each wearing a suit and a tie and a grey felt hat and each listening impassively or speaking guardedly or glancing about anxiously, must have been God incarnate, the second Person of the Holy Trinity.

For weeks past, the chief character had been straining often to see in his mind images explaining some of the so-called mysteries of his religion. None of what he had seen had been half so clear and so eloquent as the image of the mounting-yard. The image was no more stable than any other image in his mind, but whenever he was able afterwards to see it wholly or even partly, he tried in all seriousness to interpret it. He decided that a thoughtful racegoer could probably give a clearer account of such matters as the mystery of the incarnation and the sacrifice inherent in the Mass than could a theologian. If God were to take his chance as an owner of racehorses, He would experience the gamut of human emotions. And what sacrifice could bring a person closer to God than that a person should risk a large sum of his or her hard-earned money by betting on God’s horse at its every start?