Barley Patch (12 page)

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.

More than a year passed before the daughter was able to become a postulant of an order of sisters at a convent in a suburb of Melbourne. The order that she joined was not an enclosed order. While the daughter had been still keeping house on the farm on the island but preparing to join one or another religious order, the chief character had visited her no less often than when he had been courting her in his mind. He went on trying to persuade her not to lock herself away from the world in a convent of an enclosed order but to join the order of nuns that he himself admired most, which was an order founded by an Australian woman who had grown up in a remote district that was the furthest south-east district of South Australia and was just short of the border between that state and Victoria. The chief character’s motives in this matter were unselfish; he believed that the enclosed life was pointless and cruel for both women and men. His arguments won over the daughter. She joined the order that he had recommended, and she made her final vows in the year when his eldest son was conceived.

What would have been others of those 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 boy aged about thirteen years was walking towards a swampy area overgrown by clumps of rushes. The swampy area was in the furthest paddock from the house on a dairy farm in south-western Victoria. The tops of the tallest rushes were as high as the boy’s head when he walked amongst them, but the boy was afraid that he might still be seen from any of the paddocks around and so he walked further in towards the centre of the swampy area. The boy trod carefully between the green tussocks. He was looking out for snakes, which were often seen in the swampy area. He was also trying not to spill a jam-jar of water that he was carrying in one hand.

At certain times of the year, the swampy area was under water, but the season was now summer and the boy was able to walk far in among the rushes before he felt soggy ground underfoot. He stepped back from the dampness and then sat down in the shade of a clump of rushes. He looked around and made sure that he was surrounded by clumps of rushes. Then he sipped from the jar of water and afterwards placed it on a level piece of ground. He sipped because he knew that the water in the jar was the only drinking-water that he would have during the rest of the day. The boy had gone into hiding and intended not to show himself again until evening.

The boy had chosen the swampy area for his hiding-place not only because it was far from his house but also because the clumps of rushes were the tallest growing things in all the paddocks of the farm. Fifty years before, the boy’s grandfather had cleared from the farm the many trees and patches of scrub that had formerly grown there. The farm was the very last expanse of fertile land short of the coast. Beyond the southern boundary of the farm, the land sloped upwards and became scrub-covered cliff-tops before coming to an end. Where the land came to an end, sheer cliffs stood above the Southern Ocean.

While the boy sat in the swampy area, he heard the sounds of wave after wave bumping against the bases of the nearer cliffs. The boy and all of his family heard almost continually the sounds of waves of the ocean bumping against cliffs or breaking on beaches. The exceptional times were certain days and evenings in late spring and in summer when the wind blew from the north. The north wind not only quietened the ocean; the north wind brought to the coastal district the feel and the smells and the sounds of the mostly level grassy countryside that reached for hundreds of miles inland.

The north wind had blown hard on a certain day only a few days before the day when the boy had gone into hiding in the swamp. On that certain day, a certain image had come into the mind of the boy while he was standing in a paddock at some distance from the swampy area. The boy was not looking for a hiding-place on that day; he had been sent on an errand by his father, the owner of the farm. Just before the certain image had come into his mind, the boy had been watching, as he often watched, the waves made by the north wind in the grass of the paddocks around him and had been thinking, as he often thought, of how quiet were the waves of grass compared to the least noisy of the waves of the ocean. Then he noticed in his mind an image of a building of two storeys. The boy supposed at first that he was looking at an image of the bluestone presbytery that stood beside the Catholic church in the coastal city that he sometimes visited with his parents. But then he understood that he was looking at an image of one or another house of two storeys that might have stood far back from the road on one or another large grazing property far away to the north-west of his father’s farm and on the way to the South Australian border. The boy had never seen an actual house on any such property, but he had travelled several years before with one of his father’s brothers to a town north-west of his father’s farm and had glimpsed at a certain moment during his journey a distant point of fiery light that his uncle had explained away as the reflection of the late-afternoon sunlight in a window of some or another grazier’s mansion.

After the boy had seen in his mind the image of the house, he felt as though he was standing in his mind in the garden of the house and was looking up at a certain window of the upper storey. A young woman was looking down from the window and was letting fall from the window towards the garden where the boy was standing in his mind length after length of the hair from her head. The boy had read some years before a story purporting to be a story for children in which a young woman imprisoned in a tower had let fall her hair in the form of a ladder so that a certain young man would be able to climb from the ground upwards and in through her window. While he had read that story, the boy had seen in his mind an image of abundant red-gold hair arranged in the form of a ladder. The hair let down by the young woman in the house of two storeys was black and was in the form of a veil or a curtain.

When the black hair in the image in the mind of the boy had been let down and was trailing on the lawn beside the house of two storeys, the boy felt as though he had stepped towards the hair and had reached both hands above his head and had clutched at the hair and had tried to drag himself upwards towards the window through which the young woman was looking down from the upper storey. The boy then felt as though he had lifted himself
a short distance upwards so that his feet were no longer on the lawn beside the house of two storeys. But then the boy had felt as though he had fallen and as though he was lying on the lawn beside the house of two storeys and was struggling to free himself from the folds of black hair in which he was entangled. And then the boy had understood that his efforts to drag himself upwards had torn the black hair from the head of the young woman of the upper storey. He had not dared to look upwards, but he had supposed that the young woman was still looking down from her upper window although the dome of her skull was now white and bald.

The north wind had blown all day but had ceased to blow during the early evening of a certain day several years after the day when the boy had fled with his jar of water into the swampy area. The boy sitting in the swampy area had, of course, no knowledge of what he was going to see during the evening of a certain day several years afterwards. The boy sitting in the swampy area and trying not to see in his mind the image of the bald, white skull of the young woman at the upper window of the house of two storeys far out on the mostly level grassy countryside that lay to the north of where he sat in hiding—that boy might well have turned his back on the waving grass that seemed to lead back to the house of two storeys and might have tried to call to mind the waves of the ocean that he could hear bumping and breaking not far away. The boy was not afraid of the ocean. His older brothers had taught him to swim, and he and they sometimes swam together on hot afternoons in the sheltered cove near their father’s farm. While he was swimming, the boy often thought of the ocean liners that travelled past the sheltered cove and the cliffs but always far out to sea. The boy had lived always beside the ocean but he knew about ocean liners only from books and magazines.

In the early evening mentioned in the first sentence of the previous paragraph, the boy had grown almost into a young man. He was so tall and so broad that he fitted comfortably into many items of clothing that his older brothers and his father passed down to him in the way that thrifty families passed clothing down during the time when these fictional events would have taken place if ever I had been able to report them. In the early evening mentioned previously, the boy-man, as I intend to call him, had been walking towards his parents’ house from a distant paddock of his father’s farm when he felt urged to look at the ocean from the cliff-tops near the sheltered cove mentioned previously. He felt so urged because the north wind had been blowing all day, and he wanted to admire the calmness that the north wind always caused on the nearer parts of the ocean.

As soon as the boy-man had looked down at the nearer parts of the ocean, he had noticed far out towards the horizon what seemed an oblong glow. He soon understood that he was looking at an ocean liner travelling from Melbourne towards Britain and Europe. He had never previously seen and would never afterwards see such a sight. While he watched, he tried to climb to a higher point on the cliff so that he could keep the ocean-liner in his view for as long as possible. While the boy-man was thus climbing, he noticed in his mind an image of himself approaching the ocean-liner as though he had swum towards the liner from the sheltered cove and as though the liner had altered its course so as to pass close by the cove. In the image, and in the images that followed, the boy-man was in the water beside the liner, holding a rope-ladder that had been thrown down to him, while numerous passengers leaned over the railings on the various decks of the liner and urged the boy-man to climb the rope-ladder and to join them on board the liner. The men-passengers wore stiff white shirts, black jackets and trousers, and black bow-ties. The hair on each man’s head was black and was so sleek that the boy-man saw reflected in it rays and beams from the lights all around the man. (The boy-man was sometimes reminded of those sleek black heads of hair ten or even twenty years later, when he had long since become a man and when he sometimes picked up a copy of the
Australian Women’s Weekly
that one or another of his sisters had been reading and when he looked at the line-drawings of Mandrake the Magician in the comic-strip of the same name on the inside of the rear cover of the magazine.) The women passengers wore dresses that exposed their shoulders and their upper arms and much of their chests. The lips of the women had been painted. Some lips were scarlet and reminded the boy-man of tomatoes. Other lips were almost purple and reminded the boy-man of beetroot.