Stream System

by Gerald Murnane

  He had first seen her image in his mind late in the summer and had first spoken to her in mid-autumn. One afternoon in the first week of winter, after having given much thought to the matter and having prepared his words beforehand, he asked her whether she would like to go with him to a football match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on a certain Saturday afternoon in the near future. She answered that she had been preparing for some time to ask him whether he would like to have afternoon tea with her at her parents’ house on a certain Sunday afternoon in the near future. After she had talked to her parents, it was decided that he should meet her family over afternoon tea before he and she went to a football match or on any other outing together.

  During the days before the Sunday of the afternoon tea, he felt at times proud to have acquired a girlfriend in whose house he was welcome but he felt at other times unhappy. He had already imagined himself leaving school at the end of the year and joining the state public service. She was two years younger than he, but she too would be leaving school at the end of the year, so she had told him, and would go to work in a bank, as her parents had advised her to do. He had already imagined himself going with her to a picture theatre or a party every Saturday night and calling on her at her parents’ house every Sunday afternoon for several years until he had saved enough money to buy a small second-hand car, after which time he and she would travel in the car every Sunday afternoon around the outer south-eastern suburbs in search of a block of land to buy. He had already imagined the house that would be built in time on the block of land and details of the life that he and she would live in the house as husband and wife. What made him unhappy was that he could not imagine what images he would have in his mind during all the years that he had already imagined.

  Of the events of the Sunday afternoon when he visited her house for afternoon tea, only the following belong in this story.

  While he walked from Dandenong railway station to her house, he saw often a view of Mount Dandenong so unlike the only view that he had previously seen that he sometimes lost his bearings and supposed that he was looking at the mountain from a position on what had always previously been to him the far side of the mountain and had therefore travelled a considerable distance into the region of Gippsland.

  About half an hour after he had arrived at the house, and while he and his girlfriend were sitting together in the living-room, someone let into the house one of the two or three dogs that the family owned. These dogs were of a breed that was very rare in the suburbs of Melbourne: the bull-terrier breed. The dog that had been let into the house had come at once into the living-room and before he had even learned its name or its sex it had risen onto its hind legs, had clasped its forelegs around one of his knees, and had thrust its haunches again and again at the lower part of his leg. In the first moments after the dog had mounted his leg, he could think only of pretending to be unaware of what was happening. Then his girlfriend reached out and slapped at the dog and drove it away from him.

  At some time while he and all her family were taking afternoon tea, he became aware that he and his girlfriend were the youngest persons at the table and he became concerned that her parents and even her older sisters might be alarmed or angry or even merely amused if they surmised that he had already imagined himself buying a block of land and marrying this girlfriend in the future. In order to prevent them from so surmising, he told her family, when the conversation had next turned to him, that he often foresaw himself living as a bachelor all his life and buying and racing horses with the money that he would have saved by not having married.

  After someone had mentioned the family photograph album, and after he had begged to be allowed to look at it, and after his girlfriend had sat beside him and had shown him what she said were the only pages he would be interested in and had closed the book and had put it aside, he had watched for an opportunity to pick up the book as though idly and to find again without anyone’s noticing his eagerness the page with the photographs of the house where his girlfriend had lived during all the time she had lived in England, which was a house of two storeys at the edge of a village, and to stare without anyone’s noticing his concern at the background of each photograph in turn in order to see more clearly what he had previously taken to be clumps of woodland.

  In far-off, smoke-hued hills

  The words just above were written by the chief character of this story on a line near the foot of a page of ruled paper while he sat in his room in his parents’ house on a certain evening early in the winter of the first year after he had finished his last year of secondary school. At the time when the words were written, no other words had yet been written on the page. During the first hour after the words had been written, the writer of the words wrote and then crossed out many other words on many of the lines above the first words. Soon after the end of that hour, the writer of the words put the sheet of paper in a manila folder containing a number of sheets of ruled paper with no words written on them and then placed the folder under a pile of books and magazines on the floor beside the small table where he sat. At the time when the folder was put away, the words at the head of this paragraph were the only words that had not been crossed out on the page that the writer of the words had been writing on.

  At the beginning of that year, he had started work as a clerical officer in a department of the state government. His first job was to check the details of the application forms filled out by persons wanting to be granted in return for a small fee the right to set up beehives or to distil eucalyptus oil from the branches of gum trees in forests on public lands in the north of Victoria, which was a region where he had never been. Before he started work, he had imagined the north of Victoria as a district of arid paddocks and of mullock heaps left behind by gold-miners, with a few pockets of stunted trees at intervals along the trickling creeks that flowed towards the inland from the Great Dividing Range. But each day at his desk, as he read one after another of the applications from apiarists and eucalyptus distillers, the north of Victoria in his mind became more of a forest and less of a parched grassland.

  From the time when he began to work as a public servant until the evening mentioned in the first section of this story, he travelled in the morning of each weekday by suburban train from the south-eastern suburb where he lived with his parents into the central city. In the late afternoon of every weekday he travelled out of the city in a train with the word DANDENONG at its front. One of the many stations that he passed on his way to and from the city was the station where he had formerly left the train each weekday morning to walk to his secondary school and where he had formerly waited each afternoon for the train with the word DANDENONG at its front. During the evenings of weekdays, he stayed in his room and read books or magazines or listened to what he called classical music on his radio. Each Saturday, he went to the races. Each Sunday morning, he went to mass. On three Saturday evenings out of every four, he travelled to his girlfriend’s house in an outlying street of Dandenong. During the previous year, her parents had allowed him to take their daughter only twice to a football match and to visit her only once each month at their house. Now, he was allowed to visit her more often.

  On two of the three Saturday evenings mentioned above, he travelled with his girlfriend in the so-called picture bus from her home to the main street of Dandenong, where they attended a cinema before returning to her home in the same bus. On the third Saturday evening of those three, he had a meal with his girlfriend and her family and afterwards went with her and one of her sisters and the boyfriend of that sister to the dance that was held once a month in the hall beside his girlfriend’s parish church. (On this Saturday evening and on many others, his girlfriend’s other sister stayed at home and watched television with her parents and her fiancé in order to save money for the house that he and she intended to build on a block of land that they were buying by instalments in a grassy paddock that they said would be the next part of Dandenong to go ahead.) On the Sunday following
the one Saturday in each four when he did not visit his girlfriend, he visited her home in the afternoon, sometimes walking with her through the streets around her home, sometimes attending with her the ceremony of benediction in her parish church, and sometimes having afternoon tea in her home with her parents. He travelled to and from his own home and his girlfriend’s home mostly by bicycle. Even when the weather was cold, he had to pedal slowly on his way from his home to Dandenong so as not to sweat. If the weather was in the least warm, he carried a small towel in a haversack on his back so that he could wash his face and his underarms when he arrived. On most of his journeys to Dandenong, he carried in his haversack what his mother called a respectable shirt and a tie and a jacket.

  He was pleased to mention his girlfriend to his workmates or to any of his former schoolfellows that he met in the city, but he never spoke of her as his girlfriend or of himself as her boyfriend when he was speaking to her or to any of her family. He suspected that her parents thought he was much too serious about their youngest daughter, who had only recently turned sixteen and left school. And he suspected that her parents and her sisters thought he was somewhat crazy.

  He supposed that his girlfriend’s family thought him odd because he talked too much. He talked continually when he was in their house, and not only to his girlfriend but often to her parents and sisters. Someone in the family would sometimes comment on his talking, but he always assumed the comment was made in fun. He talked, so he understood many years later, because he mistook his girlfriend for the person with the same face who had been his wife-in-his-mind since the days soon after he had first read Wuthering Heights. He did not make the opposite mistake. At least once in every waking hour when he was away from his girlfriend, he confided one or more matters to the female presence in his mind who was clearly not his girlfriend, the sixteen-year-old bank clerk, even though the two faces were almost identical. And he did not expect that the young woman he talked to for a few hours each week in her home or in the picture bus or on the way to the parish dance would give any sign of her having been entrusted with his confidences for days past. But during the few hours each week when he was with his girlfriend, he talked to her as though she had been listening to him for years past and as though she would go on listening until he had told her every word that he could tell about himself and would then interpret for him the whole of what he had told her.

  Much of his talk was about things he had learned from books. He had told his girlfriend and her family on one of his first visits to their house that he had earned higher marks in his last year at school than some of his former classmates who were now at university; that he was going to teach himself from the books he chose in future to read far more than a person could learn at university; that he read each week three or more books from cover to cover and many other books by looking into various pages that had taken his interest. He had announced during an early visit that he preferred not to read popular or well-known books or books that were regarded as authoritative in a particular subject. He suspected, so he had said at the time, any theories or beliefs subscribed to by large numbers of people. (When he had said this, he had gone on at once to say that he did not question the teachings of the Catholic Church, which, as everyone knew, had millions of followers. But he had sometimes recently thought for a moment that he might one day read some book that would persuade him to become an agnostic or an atheist. He had thought this only for a moment on each such occasion and had then felt giddy and afraid. He had glimpsed himself-the-agnostic-or-atheist as a man walking alone in a grey or black borderland far from the places he knew.) He quoted the first two lines of the poem “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” by John Keats, and then said that he, like Keats, thought of reading as travel. He said that the best sort of books made him feel as though he was exploring the borderlands of the landscape of knowledge.

  He talked in his girlfriend’s house about such things as the haunting of Borley Rectory; the experiments in extra-sensory perception by Professor Rhine of Duke University in the United States; the life-story of Shaka Zulu and of Hannibal the Carthaginian; the man Ishi, who had lived for several years alone in the forests of California as the last survivor of his people; the Australians who had settled in Paraguay in the nineteenth century; and many other matters. Her parents asked him sometimes of what use his knowledge was to him. He answered that he would find before long a particular branch of knowledge which interested him more than any other and would study it until he became an expert in it, after which he would write a book on his chosen subject, after which he would be rewarded in some way by some person or some organisation. To keep the parents from thinking him too irresponsible to be the boyfriend of their daughter, he added that he would never give up his job in the public service unless he had first secured a better job and that he would do all his studying and even the writing of his book in the evenings.

  When he wondered what his field of expertise would be, he sometimes found himself thinking about his bachelor-uncle in the bungalow in the south-west of Victoria. His uncle had read a great many books and had put together as a result of his reading what his nephew thought of as a private history of the world. Many years later, the nephew looked into the book The Everlasting Man, by G. K. Chesterton, and recognised that the uncle had borrowed much from that one book, but even then the nephew admired the uncle’s creation. It seemed like a long, winding pathway that the uncle had followed in and out among the shadows of the cities and the mountains and the forests of the world towards the bungalow, with its single bed and its desk and bookshelf in the backyard of the house in a side street of a country town on the lower side of the world. In the uncle’s view of things, the first human beings had been created by God only a few thousand years before the birth of Jesus. The people that others called cave-men the uncle called pre-Adamites; they were a race of creatures who may or may not have been human but who were not among the people redeemed by the Son of God made Man. The history of the Christian era had been distorted by English Protestant historians. The so-called Dark Ages had actually been the true Golden Age. The Spanish had been far less blameworthy as colonisers than the ruthless English. Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh had committed crimes that cried out to heaven for vengeance. Elizabeth the First of England had been a man in disguise. The Catholic Portuguese had discovered Australia, and one of the first places they had come ashore was in the south-west of Victoria where they must surely have celebrated mass and taken possession of the land later known as Australia. The people known as the Aborigines had arrived in the land only a few hundred years before the Portuguese. The Aborigines were close relatives of the gypsies and had set out, like the gypsies, from India but at a later date and in a different direction. Among the most misguided of persons had been the Protestant do-gooders of the nineteenth century who had brought into being in England and Australia the cruel and wasteful institution of free, compulsory, and secular education. Most children were better off unschooled. The brightest boy in each parish should be taken in hand by the priest and given the run of his library; the other boys should be apprenticed as tradesmen or farmers or craftsmen. These and many other details made up the view of the world that the bachelor-uncle saw from the bungalow, and the nephew of the bachelor not only thought often about his uncle’s view but reported many details of it and elaborated on those details to the family that he visited in Dandenong and even told them that he, their visitor, considered his uncle an expert of a kind and would be proud if he, the visitor, could become an expert in his own way at some time in the future.

  In the past, he had been constantly unhappy not to be able to see the girl whose face was always in his mind and constantly jealous of those who were in sight of her. With his girlfriend from Dandenong (his first true girlfriend, as he called her to himself), matters were reversed. For as long as he was away from her, he felt as though a version of her was watching him in his daily life and smiling at his many odd little ways. When he wa
s with her, however, he was uneasy and, at times, jealous. Being with her reminded him of how little he knew about her. If she said something about her work in the bank, he remembered that he had never once supposed during the previous week that he was looking down through her mind into the Dandenong branch of the English, Scottish and Australasian Bank and sharing in her moment of perplexity or being touched by her pretty frown as she stood in her green and gold uniform and hesitated over the files she was searching through. (During the rest of his life, whenever he thought of the few months during which he had visited his girlfriend at Dandenong, he felt as though he could have written page after page about his own feelings at the time but no more than a few sentences reporting anything that she had said or done.)

  If he was talking to her or to some member of her family and if she seemed to be listening to him, then, at least, he was not unhappy, although he might have been concerned that she had not understood his latest narrative or argument as he had wanted her to understand it. But if he was compelled to be silent with her, as he was when they sat in the cinema nearly every week, or if he and she were merely two young persons among a crowd of young persons, as they were at the parish dance each month, then he would become afraid of seeming to her nothing more than a public service clerk of a lowly grade and he would expect that she would soon grow tired of his company. He believed he was distinguished only by what he saw in his mind. In the eyes of anyone who had been told nothing about the numerous landscapes and vistas that he was continually aware of, he was of no interest. He knew that he dressed drably, even shabbily. He played no sport. He did not listen to rock-and-roll music. He did not go to the beach in summer. He knew nothing about motor cars. Although he sometimes watched television, the images moved too fast for him, or his mind wandered, and he seldom remembered afterwards what he had seen.