A Season on Earth

by Gerald Murnane

  But Adrian knew of places in Victoria that were worthy settings for a great love story. They were landscapes so different from the suburbs of his childhood that even the trivial events of his married life would seem momentous, and Adrian, the husband, would forget all those Sundays when he had come home from mass with nothing to do but climb the solitary wattle tree in the backyard and look across rows of other backyards and wait for the six o’clock Hit Parade in the evening.

  As a boy Adrian had travelled each January by train from Melbourne to his uncle’s farm at Orford. On the morning of each journey he leaned against the dark-green leather backrest and studied the photographs in the corners of his compartment.

  The titles of the photographs were brief and sometimes curiously imprecise—Erskine Falls, Lorne; In the Strzelecki Ranges; Road to Marysville; Walwa; Camperdown with Mount Leura; Near Hepburn Springs. In some of the pictures a solitary traveller, with arms folded, leaned against a tall treefern, or a motorcar empty of people stood motionless on an otherwise deserted gravel road leading towards a tiny archway where distant trees closed over against the daylight. Adrian knew from the waistcoats and moustaches of the travellers and the shapes of the cars and the brown hues of the sky and land that the photos had been taken years before. The bewhiskered men and the unseen people who had left their motorcars standing on dusty roads might have died long since. But Adrian was sure, from their grave gestures and solemn faces and the way they had stationed themselves at unlikely spots in the forest or by the roadside, that these travellers of olden times had discovered the true meaning of the Victorian countryside.

  Leaning back in his window seat at Spencer Street station while drab red suburban trains dragged crowds of clerks and shop assistants into Melbourne to work, Adrian wanted to leave the city forever and journey to the landscapes of the dim photographs. Somewhere among forests of mountain ash or damp treeferns or beside a foaming creek, he would search for the secret that lay behind the most beautiful scenery in Victoria.

  But the Port Fairy train followed the same route each year and Adrian had to get out at Colac and travel with his uncle to the same bare paddocks near Orford. Yet, as a married man at Triabunna, Tasmania, Adrian had still not forgotten the country of the photographs. He told his wife they would make their home in a valley beside a waterfall at Lorne, or on a hillside overlooking Camperdown with Mount Leura, or, best of all, in the trees above a bend in the road near Hepburn Springs.

  He would need a suitable job or profession. Farming was too hard—it would leave him too little time with his new wife. But there were men who drove up sometimes to his uncle’s farm and strolled around the paddocks without soiling their hands. He would be one of them—a veterinary surgeon or an expert from the Department of Agriculture. Looking back, he saw he had always been destined for this sort of life. As a boy in Form Four he had often relieved his boredom by staring at pages in his General Science textbook with diagrams of dissected rabbits or pictures of soil erosion labelled Before and After.

  Sherd took his bride to their new home on a timbered hillside near Hepburn Springs and bought a savage Queensland heeler dog to protect her while he was away in the daytime. On the first night, after they had arranged their furniture and unpacked their wedding presents, he sat down with her in the spacious lounge room and looked thoughtful.

  When she asked him what was the matter, he said, ‘I was only thinking of the grave responsibility on my shoulders—to carry on where the nuns and priests left off and teach you the rest of the facts about marriage. Perhaps I should deal with one topic each night.

  ‘Tonight I’ll discuss a subject that probably made you shudder if ever you heard it mentioned when you were young and innocent—birth control. What I’m about to say is a summary of all I’ve read about birth control in Catholic pamphlets, and all I’ve been taught by priests and brothers.

  ‘Any impartial observer would agree that the marriage act—that operation I’ve performed on you in the privacy of the marriage bed—must have a serious purpose quite apart from the fleeting pleasure associated with it. The purpose, as any rational person will agree, is the procreation of children. Now, this purpose is a part of what philosophers and theologians call the Natural Law. And the Natural Law was designed by Almighty God to make the world run smoothly. It must be obvious, then, that any tampering with the Natural Law is likely to have disastrous consequences. (Can you imagine the consequences if someone interfered with the way the planets revolve around the sun?)

  ‘Well, birth control violates the Natural Law by removing the purpose from the marriage act. (You may be wondering how this is done. Without going into the sordid details, I can tell you there’s a certain little piece of slimy rubber that non-Catholic chemists sell for profit. Armed with this disgusting weapon, a man can enjoy the pleasure without the purpose and defy the Natural Law.)

  ‘You won’t be surprised to learn that this grave sin has grave consequences. It’s a known fact that artificial birth control causes profound physical and mental disturbances. I’ve heard from a priest who knows all about these matters that many non-Catholic couples are so afraid of the psychological effects of birth control that they just will not practise it. So you see the Natural Law is not just something the Catholic Church made up.’

  While Sherd paced up and down the lounge-room carpet, his wife reclined on the sofa and drank in every word he said. Behind her the huge windows framed a vista of a twilit forested valley more satisfying than any of the scenes that the young Adrian used to stare at in railway carriages, wondering what was the secret behind their beauty.

  When the Sherds had first moved into their home near Hepburn Springs, they were so happy that they seemed to be enjoying a taste of heaven on earth. But looking through his lounge-room window after his discussion of birth control, Sherd realised that all they were enjoying was their rightful reward for following the Natural Law.

  What he saw through his window was a valley where no sexual sin was ever committed. The Natural Law governed everything in sight. It caused the sky to glow and the treetops to tremble all over the forests near Hepburn Springs. It was at work too at Walwa, on the road to Marysville and in Camperdown with Mount Leura.

  Sherd knew now what had drawn him to these scenes in the Port Fairy train years before. The mysterious secret beyond those lonely roads, the thing that travellers had abandoned their cars to search for, was the Natural Law.

  He himself would never have to search for it again. He could see it in operation outside his lounge-room windows and even in the privacy of his own bedroom.

  One night when the dice and the numbered tickets had transported Adrian to a night in the fourth month of his marriage when he would have liked to be intimate with his wife but she wasn’t feeling up to it, he lay back with his hands behind his head and began to discuss with Denise the history of marriage down the ages.

  He said, ‘The union of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden was not only the first marriage—it was the most perfect marriage in history, because it was God who introduced the young couple to each other and because the way they behaved in marriage was exactly as He had intended.

  ‘You can imagine them meeting for the first time in some leafy clearing far more pleasant than any place we know of near Hepburn Springs. They were both naked—yes, stark naked, because Adam’s reason was in full control over his passions and there was no need for Eve to practise the virtue of modesty. With their perfect understanding of what God wanted them to do, they would have agreed to live together there and then—there was no long courtship such as we had to observe. No doubt they went through some simple wedding ceremony, and surely it was God who officiated. What a wonderful start to married life!

  ‘They had no need to go away for a honeymoon. There were scenic spots and secluded walks all round them already. What happened next? Well, we can deduce that their acts of sexual communion would have been the most perfect ever performed. They would have looked into each other’s eyes one
afternoon and understood it was time to co-operate with God in creating a new human life. As they lay down together Adam’s body would have shown none of those signs of uncontrollable passion that you might have glimpsed on me some nights in bed. Of course, at the last moment, when it was time to deposit his seed in the receptacle designed for the purpose, his organ must have behaved more or less like mine, but whereas I (with my fallen human nature) tend to lose control of myself for a few moments, he would have lain there quite calmly with his reason fully operative. He may well have chatted to Eve about some gorgeous butterfly flitting above them or pointed out some inspiring view through the trees around them.

  ‘They lived in such close contact with God and obeyed His Will so completely that in all probability it was He who reminded them now and then that it was high time they mated again. The Bible tells us that God came and walked with them in the cool of the evening. You can imagine Him politely suggesting it to them as the sun sinks below the treetops of Eden. They smile and say what a good idea it is and then lie down on the nearest grassy bank and do it without any fuss.

  ‘Of course they wouldn’t have been the least ashamed to have God beside them while they did it. And He wouldn’t have been embarrassed either—after all, it was He who invented the idea of human reproduction. I can see Him strolling a little way off to look at a bird’s nest or let a squirrel run down his arm. Occasionally He glances back at the young couple and smiles wisely to Himself.

  ‘Just to remind you of the vast difference between our First Parents in their perfect state and ourselves with our fallen natures, I’d like you to imagine how we would have managed if we’d tried to live like Adam and Eve.

  ‘Think of me getting into your compartment on the Coroke train for the first time. I haven’t got a stitch of clothing on and neither have you. (We’ll have to suppose the other passengers are naked too.) I look at your face to try to assess your character, but I’m such a slave to my passions that I let my gaze fall on your other charms below. Meanwhile you notice the way I’m looking at you, and you can’t decide whether I’m thinking of you as a possible mate for life or just the object of my momentary lust. So you don’t know whether to sit still and meet my eyes or fold your arms in front of you and cross your legs tightly.

  ‘And when I put my schoolbag on the rack above your head and I lean on tiptoes over your seat and the most private parts of me are only a foot or so from your face, what do you do? If your human nature was as perfect as Eve’s in Paradise, you would look calmly at my organs to satisfy yourself that at least I was a fully developed man capable of fathering children. But because you have a fallen nature you’re too frightened or horrified to look at them dangling in front of your eyes, so you go on reading your library book.

  ‘This example might seem far-fetched, but believe me, it’s the way God intended us to court each other. It was the sin of our First Parents that made us shy with each other. If we hadn’t been born with Original Sin on our souls, our whole courtship would have been simple and beautiful. Instead of waiting all those months just to speak to you, I would have walked hand in hand with you to your parents’ place on the first night I met you. (Your home would have been a mossy nook with walls of some vivid flowering vine—Accrington before the Fall would have had a subtropical climate and vegetation.)

  ‘We find your parents sitting happily together coaxing a spotted fawn to eat from their hands. They come forward smiling to greet me—both naked, of course, but their bodies have no wrinkles or varicose veins or rolls of fat. I take no notice of your mother’s body because I’ve seen thousands like it all over Melbourne. Your parents talk to me and soon understand what an ideal partner I’d be for their daughter. Next morning I come to take you away. There’s no long-winded ceremony or speeches. They give us their blessing and we go off to find our own bower of blossoming foliage.

  ‘It all seems so impossible and of course it is, because we live nowadays in a fallen world. And the worst result of our First Parents’ sin is that a man can scarcely look at a woman now without his passions urging him to sin with her in thought or deed.

  ‘I can see you’re surprised to hear this, but you must remember that very few men have learned self-control the way I have. It’s unpleasant to talk about, I know, but many men use their wives entirely for their own selfish pleasure.

  ‘This sort of thing apparently began almost as soon as Adam and Eve’s descendants started to populate the earth. The oldest cities in the world, Sumer and Akkad, had their walls covered with obscene drawings and carvings, so Brother Chrysostom told us once in his History class. The men of those cities must have had sexual thoughts all day long. The hot climate probably helped, but the main reason would have been that they had never heard of the Ten Commandments.

  ‘You might have heard in your Christian Doctrine classes, Denise, that God gives every man a conscience, so that even a pagan in the days before Christ knew the difference between right and wrong. I’m afraid I find that hard to believe.

  ‘One day I deliberately imagined myself growing up in Sumer or Akkad in those days. I discovered I would have had no conscience at all. I would have been a thorough pagan like all the others and enjoyed scribbling filth on the temple walls. (Don’t be alarmed, darling. It’s not the real me I’m talking about. The real Adrian Sherd is the one who’s in bed beside you now.) I saw myself strolling along the terrace between the Hanging Gardens and the river. The sky was blue and cloudless. I was wearing sandals and a short tunic with nothing underneath. All the women walking past wore brief skirts and primitive brassieres.

  ‘Well, as soon as a young woman took my fancy, a kind of raving madness came over me. (Remember, it’s only an experiment I’m describing.) No thought of conscience or right and wrong entered my head. I was very different from the young Catholic gentleman who courted you so politely and patiently in the Coroke train. I was as bold as brass with the pagan girl—asked her name and address and arranged to meet her that evening at one of the lonely oases beyond the city walls.

  ‘I didn’t wait to see what happened after that, but it wasn’t hard to guess from the storm of temptations rising up inside me. From that day on, I knew that if I hadn’t been lucky enough to be born a Catholic and learn the proper purpose of my instincts, I would have been some kind of beast. No girl in Sumer or Akkad would have been safe from me.

  ‘But it wasn’t just the pagans who couldn’t control themselves. If you read your Old Testament you’ll realise how far some of the Patriarchs were from being good Catholic husbands. Solomon had hundreds of wives and treated them like playthings to minister to his lust, David coveted another man’s wife, and Abraham had a bondwoman to amuse himself with when he tired of his lawful wife.

  ‘I have to confess that when I was much younger I sometimes felt like complaining to God that I was born in New Testament times instead of the centuries BC. It didn’t seem fair that those old fellows all pleased God and got to heaven after having all the women they wanted, while young Catholic chaps like me had to turn their eyes away from pictures of girls in bathers and only go to films for general exhibition.

  ‘But after I met you and fell in love, I realised the men of the Old Testament were far worse off than me after all. They never knew the rare pleasures that I enjoyed in the years when I was wooing you. Solomon might have gazed all day at the hundreds of indecently clad wives sprawling on cushions in his luxurious palace, but he never knew the happiness of sitting in the Coroke train and waiting for one long soulful look from a girl who kept her beautiful body carefully concealed beneath a convent uniform. And no matter what pleasure he got from his women when he summoned them to his bedchamber, it could not have equalled my joy when I first kissed you on the day we became engaged and I knew I would one day possess a bride who had never even glanced immodestly at another man.’

  A few weeks before the September holidays, Adrian’s mother told him he deserved a rest from all his studies and homework. His uncle and aunt had agre
ed to have him at Orford for a week. If he behaved himself around the house he could go by himself on the train.

  Adrian was anxious to let Denise know about his trip. When he went with his mother to book his seat at the Tourist Bureau he took away a coloured leaflet entitled Spring Tours to the Grampians—Victoria’s Garden of Wildflowers. (The Grampians were a hundred miles from Orford, but there were no leaflets for any place nearer.) The following night on the Coroke train he stood near Denise and made sure she noticed him poring over the leaflet. She might have been surprised to think he was interested in wildflowers, but at least she would know what direction from Melbourne he was when she wanted to think of him during the holidays.

  Adrian had a window seat in the 8.25 a.m. to Warrnambool and Port Fairy. He left a few inches between himself and the window for Denise. He and she were not long back from their honeymoon, and the trip to Orford was to show her off to his relatives and let her see something of the Western District.

  The pictures in the carriage were Treeferns, Tarra Valley and Bulga Park, Yarram. Adrian whispered to Denise that a moist valley in Gippsland would be the perfect spot for a weekend trip. She snuggled closer to him and squeezed his fingers. She understood that he was thinking of the kisses he would give her under the shady treeferns.

  They looked into all the slum backyards between South Kensington and Newport and told each other how lucky they were to be able to live in a modern home with the bush right up to their windows. After Newport, when miles of grazing land came up to the windows for their inspection, they passed the time by imagining how they would like to live in this or that farmhouse, and giving each place a points score out of ten.