The trouble with this absurd reverie was that it presupposed Adrian would reject his vocation to the priesthood for the selfish pleasures of a life among books and gardens. As soon as he saw this, he drove the temptation from his mind.
The bus reached the outer suburbs of Sydney. The dense traffic, the acres of factories and the jumble of advertising signs made Adrian uneasy. Thousands of people were making goods in factories or carrying them in trucks or selling them in shops as if their lives depended on it. The people of Sydney had all the wrong priorities. In the calm of the seminary Adrian had seen the world as it really was. Everything depended on prayer. On the Day of Judgement the world would be amazed to discover how often God had almost let it destroy itself but relented because of the prayers of a few faithful priests and religious.
The students and priests and brothers left the bus at a little wharf in a suburb of Sydney and boarded a boat for their trip round the harbour. The boat took them first into some of the bays and inlets upstream from the city. Adrian saw back gardens reaching down to rocky beaches with private boat ramps, and blocks of flats whose windows overlooked miles of blue water.
It was a block of flats that gave rise to his second temptation. The topmost flat was a kind of penthouse with trees in tubs and sun umbrellas in a walled roof garden. A. M. Sherd was a lecturer in philosophy at Sydney University. He had obtained his master’s degree with a thesis that constructed an entire system of philosophy starting from basic questions about the nature of man and ending with the conclusion that the highest good a man could pursue was the enjoyment of intellectual and aesthetic pleasures. True to his philosophy, Sherd had purchased an apartment overlooking the harbour, where he sat each day admiring the beauty of the waves and jotting down corollaries to his conclusions.
Adrian fought this temptation by exposing it to ridicule—he could never end up like that because no honest philosophical investigation could explain away the Christian revelation and its message of self-denial in place of hedonism.
In mid-afternoon the boat stopped at a little bay somewhere east of the city. The New South Wales students looked awed and said the place was Frenchmans Cove, one of the toniest beaches in Sydney.
Adrian’s party all went swimming. They were almost the only people in the water. The students ganged up on the priests and brothers and ducked them in the waves. They roared, ‘What’s the matter, Cam?’ or ‘Poor old Sylvester!’ and enjoyed the chance to call the men by their religious names without the usual ‘Father’ or ‘Brother’.
Adrian soon left the water and walked towards the dressing sheds. They were part of a new cream-brick building on a neat lawn above the sand. He walked with his head down. He was trying to overcome a temptation to be angry with his fellow students for romping and yelling like schoolboys on such an exclusive beach. One of his feet was planted firmly in the sand before he saw it was only inches from a deep-tufted dark-green beach towel.
He sprang sideways. A slight noise—something between a drowsy murmur and a snarl of resentment—told him there was a woman on the towel, but he dared not look at her. She would have seen the boatload of boys and men arriving at the jetty and heard their rowdy horseplay in the water. Now, one of the louts was sneaking up to spy on her while she sunbathed.
Adrian hurried away with his face averted so she wouldn’t be able to describe him to her husband or boyfriend or recognise him in years to come if she saw him in the streets of Sydney in a clerical suit. And he wanted to be as quick as possible in the dressing sheds so the woman on the towel (and anyone else who had seen the incident) wouldn’t think he had gone into a toilet cubicle to masturbate like a common pervert.
He put his foot so firmly on a royal-blue-and-yellow towel that he undermined the leg of a woman lying face downwards. The leg rolled slightly towards his own and a few square inches of lean brown calf muscle touched his pale hairy skin before he could pull away. A head tossed angrily under a huge sunhat and a face glared at him. It was framed by a white silk scarf. The lips were unnaturally pale.
All the way up the beach Adrian repeated under his breath the word ‘sorry’ in the idiotic voice that must have sounded to the woman like a child’s. She herself was in her twenties—too old for him to court on a beach in real life, but the ideal age if he had been a schoolboy again and looking for companions for his American adventures.
In the dressing sheds he dragged the towel roughly across his skin. (It was a seminary towel—thin and faded and stiff from being boiled every week in the laundry copper.) When he lifted his right leg he saw a thin coating of sand grains on a part of his shin. He stopped and stared. Underneath these grains was a smear of oil from the calf of the leg of the golden-skinned woman in her twenties. She had rubbed the oil on with her fingers. The same fingers had rubbed other parts of her body. Wherever her suntan extended, the fingers had been—spreading the gentle oil with delicate strokes.
He stared at the patch of sand until he began to tremble. He would not touch it. He would pull on his trousers with the sand still clinging to his skin, and that night in his room he would anoint his own fingers with the last traces of the precious oil to see what images it might bring to his mind. On the contrary, he would put on his bathers again and run back down the beach into the cold water and stay close to the priests and brothers all afternoon. Better still, he would knock on Father Camillus’s door that night and say that an extraordinary occurrence had made it necessary for him to go to confession at once, and when he had confessed his temptation or sin, whichever it was, he would ask for some crushing penance such as having to stay home when the students went on their next Whole Day’s outing.
There were other possibilities. He could pull on his trousers and walk around naturally all day and wait to see whether the friction of the cloth rubbed off the oil anyway. If it had gone by night he could take it as a sign that Our Lady of Dalriada or Blessed Isidore of Portugal had come to his aid in a time of danger.
He could even take the most extreme course of all—give up his struggle against impure temptations and devote himself to a life of lust with glamorous suntanned women like those at Frenchmans Cove. It would be so easy. He saw clearly every step he would have to take—walk in to Father Camillus next morning and say he was going home because the Charleroi life was too hard; get a job in the Victorian public service and study for his matriculation at night; pass his matric and enrol at the university in the Arts Faculty, where female students outnumbered males; then, on the first warm day of the first term, stroll round the lawns looking boldly at the bare arms and legs until he found a girl who was in one of his lectures or tutorials and think up some excuse to start a conversation with her.
He noticed he was dressing himself even while he considered all these alternatives. And in the end the best course of action suggested itself. He dressed nonchalantly, as if there was nothing wrong with his right leg, then rolled up his towel and bathers and decided to look for an omen in the first thing that met his eyes when he was outside again.
He strode across the sunlit courtyard of the dressing sheds and made for the exit. He noticed two men sitting astride a wooden bench in the courtyard. They were white-haired and stout but their skins were dark brown and leathery and they were both naked. They were playing cards quietly and solemnly. One old fellow put his cards down for the other to see. On the bench between his legs was a wrinkled bag. Adrian thought it was a pigskin purse for coins or poker chips. But when the man turned idly around to look at the staring boy the bag moved with him. It was the larger side of a huge old scrotum.
Adrian hurried outside away from the stern, creased face and the sun-blackened naked skin. He hoped the man hadn’t thought he was a rare kind of homosexual who was attracted to older fellows.
He supposed they were wealthy retired businessmen. He wondered how they could sit so calmly in the nude while young women in twopiece bathers were sprawled on the sand only a hundred yards away. Their organs, lolling on the bench, were unnaturally
torpid. If Adrian Sherd, a student for the priesthood, had sat there naked he couldn’t have seen his cards for his towering erection.
Perhaps the men were so exhausted by years of lust that their bodies no longer responded even to the stimulation of a day at the beach. And perhaps this was the omen he was looking for.
The tired old weatherbeaten genitals had been shown to him as a sign. It was God’s way of telling him, ‘All right, walk down to the water’s edge right now and call out, “Cam, I’m giving up my vocation here and now. The other boys can go back to Blenheim tonight. I’m going to spend the rest of my life taking pleasure from the bodies of young pagan women on beaches.” Then do just that. Let your eyes roam freely over their golden-brown thighs and midriffs and cleavages. Then lock yourself in a cubicle in the dressing sheds and sin foully in thought and deed. Go back to Melbourne and follow your plan to live a life of lust at the university. Take your fill of carnal pleasures. I won’t lift a finger to punish you. Your punishment will be the natural result of your excesses. One day you’ll find yourself with white hair and a wrinkled belly playing cards in a sunny corner with some worn-out boon companion. The beach nearby is alive with suntanned women. But your once-proud organ lies slack and useless against your thigh. And when you lift it gently to gather up your cards it gives no sign of recognition—even to the man who served it so faithfully all his life.’
In the bus back to Blenheim Adrian worked out the implications of the day’s events. He had experienced three serious temptations. The first had been to give up his vocation for the life of a lecturer in English. He had to convince himself once and for all that the attractions of literature were only an illusion compared with the real happiness that awaited him as a priest.
Adrian had always got high marks in English at St Carthage’s because he wrote so enthusiastically about the set texts. Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson, Macbeth and Twelfth Night by Shakespeare, The Ballad of William Sycamore by Stephen Vincent Benét, Prester John by John Buchan, X=0 by John Drinkwater, Captain Dobbin by Kenneth Slessor, Felix Randal by Father Gerard Manley Hopkins—it had been so easy to study them. The worlds they had opened up for him were almost as real as the Great Plains of America or the forest near Hepburn Springs. And there was almost nothing in those worlds that went against Catholic teaching. The authors were not all Catholics, but their ideas were sound. A brother had even said one day that scholars had listed hundreds of quotations to show that Shakespeare thought like a Catholic.
But in Form Five Adrian had realised there were mysterious areas of English literature where a Catholic went at the risk of his faith. The public examinations syllabus for that year allowed a choice between two novels—The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. The brother at St Carthage’s told Adrian’s class to cross Hardy off their book lists and buy only the Dickens title. There was just a hint of vehemence in the brother’s voice when he dismissed Hardy from the course. Adrian noticed it at once and asked, ‘Is there something wrong with Thomas Hardy, Brother?’
The brother said, ‘Dickens had a healthy Christian attitude to man. Thomas Hardy was a pagan and an atheist. Most critics agree that his books are much too gloomy and pessimistic to be considered good literature. The man himself led a most unhappy life and died in a state of despair. There’s an anti-religious clique at the university who take a delight in pushing this sort of book onto impressionable young people—especially Catholics. I can assure you a page of Dickens will interest you much more than a whole novel by poor old Hardy.’
Adrian went on earning high marks for English and passed comfortably in the public examinations at the end of the year. But he often thought of Thomas Hardy and visualised the landscape of the novels he had still not read.
It was only vaguely English. Adrian could not have enjoyed the real England. He remembered the wrongs that English Catholics had suffered since the days of Henry the Eighth and the plundering of the monasteries. But in Hardy’s country he could almost forget he was a Catholic. It was a green place neither good nor evil. The scenery did not tempt a man to sensual sin as America’s did. Instead it provoked a longing for refined emotional pleasures. And over it all hung the threat of despair—the danger that a traveller there might find himself lost, far away from both heaven and hell.
In the bus back from Sydney to Blenheim Adrian saw the meaning of his temptation in Camden that morning. It was his old feeling for Hardy’s country—his dream of escaping into a landscape where he need not judge things according to strict Catholic values.
Safe among his fellow seminarians, and with Father Camillus in the seat behind him (he was ‘Father’ again now that they were nearly home), Adrian looked out at the lonely paddocks beside the highway. He was somewhere on the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, about forty miles from Blenheim and four hundred miles from Melbourne. He wondered how he had ever thought of tramping the bleak moors and heaths in search of Casterbridge or the Woodlanders. And he thanked God that he was going back to the familiar life of the seminary, where heaven and hell were always within reach.
Then there was his temptation to give up his vocation for philosophy. He had never understood what philosophy was about until a brother had explained it all in a Christian Doctrine period in Form Five.
The brother drew two circles on the board—a large one enclosing a smaller one. He labelled the larger circle TRUTH and the smaller one REASON. He used the diagram to prove that human reason could discover only a small amount of all that was eternally true. The only Mind that could comprehend all truth was God’s. Furthermore, because human reason was itself created by God, its proper function was to discover Divine Truth. Anyone who tried to use his reason for any other purpose was perverting a gift of God.
Proper philosophy, as it was taught in seminaries and great Catholic universities like Louvain, used human reason to uncover some of the noblest truths about God and man. (The brother tapped at the large circle on the board.) There was another kind of philosophy, however. This kind was taught in such places as the Philosophy Department at Melbourne University, which was a hotbed of atheists and agnostics. The half-baked university philosophers would tell a student to forget all he had ever been taught at school (yes, even his religion if he happened to be a Catholic) and start all over again using his reason to build up any sort of philosophy that took his fancy. It was not hard to imagine where this would lead. (The brother tapped various points on the board far outside the larger circle.)
In the bus among the Charlerois, Adrian closed his eyes and used pure reason to defeat his philosophical temptation at its own game.
Suppose he went back to Melbourne, passed his matriculation exam and enrolled for an honours degree in philosophy at the university. And suppose he did what the atheists told him and built up a system of philosophy based on his own reason. He was not a fool. He had been told by the brothers that he had a better than average mind. Sooner or later the iron laws of logic would compel him to admit the truth of the church’s teachings.
It might not happen until the final year of his course, or even until he was a tutor or lecturer adding the finishing touches to his philosophical system. But one day he would have to be honest and step back inside the circle that the brother had drawn on the blackboard years before. And then there would be nothing left for him but to write humbly to the Charleroi Fathers and ask to be accepted as a late vocation. The atheists at the university would jeer at him, and it would serve him right.
The last of his three temptations had been his scheme for a life of debauchery beginning with his pursuit of female students at Melbourne University. The trouble had started on the beach when Adrian was doing his best to guard his eyes. (It was typical of the modern world that a celibate couldn’t walk fifty yards staring at the ground without stumbling over near-naked female bodies.) If he couldn’t avoid seeing such temptations, he must learn to stand up to them and fight them.
That night at the semina
ry Father Camillus told the boys they could have an extra hour’s sleep in the morning in place of morning study. Adrian woke at the usual time. He dressed quietly and sneaked along the corridor to the library cupboard. He took down a book he had found by chance a few weeks before and smuggled it back to his room. It was a volume from an old encyclopedia called Peoples of the World. He found three pages that suited his purpose and marked them with strips of paper. Then he closed the book with the three strips dangling from between the pages.
He sat on the bed with the book beside him and closed his eyes. He was about to perform a spiritual exercise. Its purpose was to strengthen him against the most common of all temptations. He would perform it regularly until he was completely indifferent to the sight of bare skin on a woman.
He was Rev. Isidore Sherd CCR and newly ordained. His superior had sent him to visit a Jesuit in the Catholic College of Melbourne University. He had taken a short cut through the university grounds. It was lunchtime on a warm day. Students of both sexes were sprawled on the grass in light summer clothing. As he walked along a path near the Old Arts building he noticed a suntanned girl in a low-necked frock almost beneath him on the grass.
Adrian opened the book at the first marker and stared at the full-page photograph with the caption: A haughty Latuka maiden from the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan displays her finery. The young Latuka woman was bare above the waist, with prominent black nipples.
Sherd the priest walked on. Near Wilson Hall he had to stop and tie a shoelace. He happened to glance up just as a young woman strolled along the elevated pavement. A light breeze lifted her frock a little.
Adrian opened the book at the second marker. The caption read: These Nuba women believe their mutilations beautiful. Adrian concentrated on the foreground of the photo, which showed a close-up view of a young woman’s bare buttocks.
A Season on Earth Page 30
