A Season on Earth

by Gerald Murnane

  It was one of the pictures that Cerini had given him years before at Blenheim—a view of the Cistercian monastery at Yarra Glen. While he tried to explain what the photo had once meant to him, his voice quavered. He realised he had wasted his life. He had a lovely young wife and several children and it was years since he had committed a mortal sin. But far away under the night sky, in a lonely valley in the Warburton Ranges, the white-robed Cistercians in their dark choir stalls were chanting the office of Compline, and he should have been among them.

  The train was pulling in to Gundagai. Adrian thanked God he had remembered his true vocation before he was bound for life by the sacrament of matrimony. Luckily the girl at Yass had barely noticed him looking at her, so she wouldn’t be disappointed if he made no effort to meet her again. He kept his eyes closed while the train was stopped at Gundagai in case some other girl was seeing her grandmother off.

  Past Gundagai he went over his plans to pass his matric exam and join the Cistercians. The only problem was his mortal sin. He would confess it the very next Saturday. After that he would regard himself as a Cistercian postulant and regulate his life as though he was already in the monastery—mass every morning, special prayers eight times a day, frugal meals, silence (unless his parents spoke to him) and solid work for the rest of the time (his studies, of course, but after the exams he could try a bit of manual labour in the backyard).

  Late in the afternoon when the train reached Albury, Adrian still considered himself a Cistercian. Across the Murray and into Victoria he thought of the great monastic revival sweeping America. If it had spread to Australia there might not be room for him at Yarra Glen. But then he remembered from Elected Silence that the monks always made a new foundation whenever an existing monastery became too crowded.

  Adrian suddenly realised what this meant. He might not spend the rest of his life in those few paddocks at Yarra Glen. Somewhere else in Australia was a landscape that would one day belong to the Cistercians. Adrian himself might be sent by his abbot to choose the site of his new monastery. How would he decide on a fitting landscape?

  The train was somewhere near Wangaratta. He would practise assessing landscapes according to the spiritual uplift they provided. It was the sort of task he could never grow tired of. And to do it in the service of God made it doubly satisfying.

  He tried to contemplate a dry hillside lightly strewn with granite boulders. But he was not being entirely honest with himself. He knew now that looking at landscapes and observing their effect on his emotions was what he really wanted for his life’s work. Why, then, was he planning to join an enclosed order? As a Cistercian he would probably spend the rest of his life looking at only one landscape. There was only a slender chance that the abbot would send him out to prospect for the site of a new foundation. (If the abbot learned of his passion for landscapes he would probably keep him locked up at Yarra Glen, away from temptation.)

  The train was slowing down, although there was no sign of a town. Adrian saw a sign beside the track: TWENTY MILE CREEK. He whispered the name aloud like a prayer and thought of a broad shining stream. It was a fitting place to discover his true vocation at last.

  The train was barely moving. There were men beside the track. A bridge was under repair. Adrian was looking at things honestly for the first time in his life. What he had been searching for was not the perfect religious order but the perfect landscape. He was not called to be a priest. From that moment on he was a poet in search of his ideal landscape.

  The ground fell away beside the train. Adrian’s carriage crossed a small bridge. Beneath the bridge was a dried-up watercourse a few yards wide with eroded banks. This was Twenty Mile Creek. Its dry runnels wandered away across a parched paddock. Adrian saw clumps of grass growing from its bed and decided that whoever named the creek must have been seeing things.

  Adrian’s parents and his two brothers met him at Spencer Street station and told him how much they had missed him. He was irritated by the fuss they made. They seemed to think it was homesickness that had persuaded him to leave the seminary. Yet he had told them clearly in his last letter that he was only leaving because it was God’s Will that he should serve Him in some other vocation rather than as a Charleroi priest.

  Adrian’s mother served his breakfast in bed on his first morning at home. He enjoyed it, but he let her know that the students ate huge breakfasts at Blenheim, in case she thought he had come home half-starved.

  Mrs Corcoran from down the street popped in to see him after breakfast. She said, ‘I know the Charlerois are a very strict order. Was their rule just too hard for you, Adrian?’

  Adrian said, ‘No, Mrs Corcoran. I was surprised how easy it was to live the Charleroi life. I only left for private spiritual reasons.’ The woman nodded solemnly, but he knew she was puzzled.

  That evening his father asked him what he was going to do with his life. Adrian said he wanted to pass his matriculation exam. His father said he was mad to attempt a whole year’s study in six months after all the strain he had been under. Adrian agreed to apply for a clerical position in the Victorian public service and to study one matric subject in the evenings. The following year he could study the remaining subjects full-time at a coaching college. He could pay his fees from the money he saved during his six months in the public service. If he passed his exams he could go to the university.

  Adrian asked how his parents could support him while he did his degree. His father said he would have to apply for a teaching studentship. The Education Department would pay his university fees and a living allowance as well. Mr Sherd said, ‘You’ll have to teach in a state high school for three years after you graduate. That’s not too much to put up with, is it, in return for a free degree?’

  Adrian had never thought of teaching. He said, ‘Would they let me teach in a country town?’

  His father said, ‘From what I’ve heard, they’ll send you to the country for three years without even asking you.’

  Adrian agreed to the scheme. His father said he could resign from teaching at the end of his three compulsory years, but Adrian planned a lifelong career as a teacher. He could teach English by day and write poetry in the evenings. The school would be a rambling brick building with ivy round its chimneys. From his desk in the upstairs classroom he could see past the leafy streets of his provincial town to the fertile farmland and the far ranges. Whenever he or his students needed inspiration during his English periods they only had to look through the windows at the great arc of rural landscapes beyond. With his matriculation students he formed a poetry society. He advised them on poetic techniques and read them some of his less personal works.

  Adrian’s father advanced him the money for his textbooks for matriculation English Literature. He bought the books in Melbourne a few days later and sat up until midnight looking for outstanding poems.

  By far the best was ‘The Scholar Gipsy’ by Matthew Arnold. Adrian had always thought of England as a crowded country, but the poem allowed him to hope that in rural counties such as Oxfordshire there were hills and meadows so remote that a man could wander there for years meditating on mysterious subjects or striving for a secret ambition beyond the understanding of ordinary people.

  He was getting ready next morning to visit the State Library to study a detailed map of Oxfordshire when his father reminded him that he had to be interviewed that morning for a position in the Administrative Division of the Public Service of Victoria.

  On the train into Melbourne Adrian started to learn ‘The Scholar Gipsy’ by heart. When he saw the strained faces of the people around him he realised there was something fateful in his discovery of the poem just when he had come back from the seminary to the secular world. Many a young man in his position would have been so dazzled by the attractions of modern living that he would have forgotten his high ideals and plunged into a life of pleasure. ‘The Scholar Gipsy’ was a reminder to Adrian that even though he had put aside his ambition to be a priest or a monk, h
e was still called to a special vocation and marked out from other men.

  Walking from Flinders Street Station to the State Government offices, he bent his head low and gripped the lapels of his suit coat in one hand as though he wore an antique cloak that flapped around him in the English wind. Whenever he caught sight of himself in a mirror or a shop window he adjusted his expression to give himself the vague abstracted air of the Gipsy.

  He walked so fast that he arrived early at the State Offices. He was pleased to see that the building overlooked a large park with plenty of English trees. There was time for a short walk under the elms. He avoided the paths and kept to the shelter of the tree trunks like a man who did not want others to grow curious about his great secret.

  On the lawns of the Treasury Gardens he realised he wasn’t taking ‘The Scholar Gipsy’ seriously enough. He had been too anxious about the outward appearance of the Gipsy when he should have been adjusting his own inner life to follow the example of that dedicated solitary. Walking towards the main door of the State Offices, Adrian tried to sum up the Gipsy’s philosophy of life. But then he saw he had been confused all along—he had been too impressed by the similarities between the Gipsy and himself to realise that the Gipsy was not in fact a poet. It was all right to admire the zeal of the fellow as he journeyed through beautiful Oxfordshire landscapes with his head bent low and his thoughts on higher things. But the proper model for a young poet in Adrian’s position was Matthew Arnold himself.

  Adrian sat down quickly on a seat in the main hall of the State Offices and turned up the Biographical Notes in his poetry book. Unfortunately there was nothing inspiring about Arnold’s life. The man who wrote such magnificent poetry had ended up as an Inspector of Schools.

  Adrian walked up the massive stone stairway with his poetry book in his hand. It was almost time for his interview. He had less than two minutes to make up his mind on an issue that could affect his whole future. There was a strange significance in his finding out, just as he was applying to join the public service, that one of the greatest English poets had worked for the government as an Inspector of Schools. Work in the public service was supposed to be easy. A public servant’s mind would still be fresh at the end of the day. He could read and write until late at night. At weekends and during his fifteen days’ annual recreation leave he could travel around Victoria in search of poetic landscapes.

  Adrian considered giving up his studies for the matric exam and his career as a teacher, and becoming a public servant by day and a poet by night—the Matthew Arnold of the Victorian public service. Yet this would be a dreary life compared with the Scholar Gipsy’s. On warm afternoons he would be hunched over a desk instead of leaning on a gate watching the harvesters or lying on his back in a boat.

  He stood outside the room where he was due for his interview and asked himself bluntly was he going to be the Scholar Gipsy or Matthew Arnold. He looked up and down the enormous corridor. A public servant was walking towards him—a young fellow in his twenties. Adrian looked hard at him. The knees of his sports trousers were shiny, and his grey cardigan had grease spots down its front. The fellow carried a sheaf of papers. They looked important, but he held them carelessly as if to show he was not in awe of them.

  What decided the issue for Adrian was the way the young public servant walked. He was in no hurry. He dragged his feet a little; several times he veered slightly to one side for no apparent reason; and he stared slowly and thoughtfully all round him. Of course he wasn’t looking at the drab walls and ceiling of the State Offices. He was thinking of his real life in his quiet room at nights and weekends. He was probably not a poet, but he had a mysterious other vocation, and all day he saved his energy for it.

  Adrian knocked on the door, relaxed and confident. He could spend his life in the public service and still be a Matthew Arnold or a Scholar Gipsy or any other poet or hero of a poem.

  The interview didn’t bother him. His father had warned him that most of the top men in the public service were Freemasons. When he was asked what he had been doing since he left St Carthage’s College, he said he had been at a boarding school in New South Wales. He answered the other questions honestly and saw that the interviewer was impressed with his results in the Leaving Certificate examination.

  At the end of the interview the man said, ‘You’ll be advised by mail of the result of today’s interview. If you’re appointed, you’ll probably start on probation in the Education Department—we’re understaffed there at the moment.’

  Adrian thought the interview had been a little too impersonal. He wanted to end it on a friendly, informal note. He said, ‘The Education Department? That’s a coincidence. A man I admire very much spent many years as an Inspector of Schools.’

  The public servant was ushering Adrian to the door. He said, ‘Oh? And what was his name?’

  Adrian said, ‘Arnold. Matthew Arnold. But he lived in the nineteenth century.’

  The public servant looked hard at Adrian. It was the first sign of interest he had shown since the start of the interview. Adrian went away wondering whether the fellow read poetry in his lunch hour or at home in the evening.

  Adrian didn’t tell his parents that he planned to give up study and spend the rest of his life as a public servant and poet. He spent the last of his money for textbooks on a book called The English Countryside in Colour, a railway map of the British Isles, a loose-leaf folder and a ream of foolscap paper.

  A week after his interview he received a letter advising him of his appointment on probation to the Administrative Division of the Public Service of Victoria. On the following Monday he caught a train to Flinders Street station and walked through the city streets towards the Treasury Gardens and the State Offices. The footpaths were crowded with office workers and shop assistants. Adrian saw they were no better than the city dwellers of the nineteenth century who had made Arnold so unhappy.

  He knew much of ‘The Scholar Gipsy’ by heart. Along Flinders Street he recited appropriate passages under his breath. He hissed:

  …this strange disease of modern life,

  With its sick hurry, its divided aims

  at a young fellow who was thumping his leg with his rolled-up newspaper as he walked, and staring through the locked glass doors of a cinema. He murmured:

  And then we suffer; and amongst us One,

  Who most has suffer’d, takes dejectedly

  His seat upon the intellectual throne

  when he saw an old fellow in a gaberdine raincoat sitting at a tram stop with his lunch in a brown paper bag in his lap.

  When he rounded the corner into Spring Street, he almost broke into a run. Ahead of him were the Treasury Gardens—a walk of five hundred yards between trees and shrubs before he reached the State Offices. Because it was winter and the elms were bare, he recited the stanza describing the Scholar Gipsy’s winter journeys.

  He said the words aloud quietly until a fellow with rubber-soled golf shoes came up quietly behind him. When he saw the fellow beside him, Adrian started singing the words as though they were part of some sentimental ballad from the hit parade. But the fellow still looked at him suspiciously. He had a small brown leather case and he was heading for the State Offices. If he turned out to be one of Adrian’s immediate superiors, Adrian would have to start singing whenever he passed his desk or met him in the corridor to convince the fellow that he hadn’t really been talking to himself in the Treasury Gardens.

  Adrian began work in the Teachers’ Branch of the Education Department. The officer in charge of the branch said, ‘We’re up to our eyes in work and we haven’t even got a proper desk for you yet. If you wouldn’t mind taking that table and chair we’ve pulled up beside young Stewie’s desk and giving him a hand. He’s your Section Leader. He’ll show you what to do.’

  The officer in charge left Adrian with a man in his twenties named Stewart Coldbeck. Coldbeck put a few bundles of papers in front of Adrian and gave him some instructions. Adrian obeyed wi
thout knowing what it was all about. He spend the rest of the morning finding names of teachers or telephone numbers of schools or going to a big cabinet and reading details from teachers’ record cards.

  In the afternoon Adrian began to understand what was going on. Coldbeck and the fellows in his section were arranging temporary appointments of teachers to primary schools. The second term of school had just begun, and many teachers had transferred from one school to another. The Teachers’ Branch was supposed to fill the vacancies that had arisen as a result of these hundreds of voluntary transfers. The branch couldn’t send just any teacher to fill a vacancy—only a teacher whose present appointment was a temporary one.

  Coldbeck explained: ‘They’re at our mercy, the temporaries. We just ring up the headmasters of their present schools and bung these forms into the mail and they go wherever we tell them to. Most of them are young—the experience does them good.’

  Adrian looked at the form that Coldbeck bunged into the mail. It was headed in bold capitals:

  EDUCATION DEPARTMENT OF VICTORIA

  NOTICE OF APPOINTMENT

  (TEMPORARY)

  He had never dreamed he would handle anything so powerful on his first day in the public service. He put the form carefully back on its pile and said to Coldbeck, ‘You mean, even if a teacher had lived all his life in Melbourne you can use one of these forms to send him to Portland or Mildura?’

  Coldbeck said, ‘If they’ve only got a temporary appointment we can give them another appointment anywhere in the state. Mind you, we’re supposed to be reasonable. If Ouyen or Sea Lake needs a temp we sometimes try to find someone who’s already in that area. The trouble is we hardly ever have time to search through our lists for someone like that. We’re usually so busy we just grab the first temp we can lay our hands on.’