After ten minutes of play, Luton held a narrow lead. The Accrington captain asked for ‘Time Out’, and called Adrian and the other reserve onto the court.
Adrian was tense and excited. He was sure Luton must win with their girls watching them, but he was glad to be out on the court where the forces of love were at work. When the game resumed he was still trying to think of some line of poetry or some beautiful image that would do for him what the cries of the girls did for the Luton players.
He had discovered on the previous night that he was not entirely useless at basketball. He could not bear to compete for the ball in a pack, but he was quick enough sometimes to lead into an open space and take a pass on his own. On the Luton court he kept a few yards away from the packs and waited for the ball to dribble his way or for a teammate in trouble to knock the ball out to him.
He was alone near the goal with the ball rolling towards him. He grabbed it and took aim. A big Luton fellow knocked him off balance and he found himself in a pack of players with the ball gone from his hands. But the whistle blew and someone handed the ball to him. He was allowed two free shots at goal.
The first shot missed. He aimed a second time. And then, while his eyes were on the goal and the players of both teams stood poised around him (and the girls on the bench, no doubt, watched every move he made), he thought of the words to inspire him. As the ball left his hands he uttered them, discreetly disguised as grunts and gasps: ‘The Unknown Eros!’
The ball hung on the edge of the basket. It started to roll around the rim. It travelled almost the whole distance around. Then it fell in. Someone clapped briefly. One of Adrian’s teammates slapped him on the shoulder. Adrian trotted away from the goal hissing to himself, ‘The Unknown Eros!’
It became his private war cry. He scored no more goals, but his teammates seemed to pass to him a little more. Each time he took the ball and sent it nearer Our Lady’s goal he muttered again, ‘The Unknown Eros!’ When his captain asked for ‘Time Out’ and sent Adrian off the court he whispered his slogan as he walked past the girls on their bench. He didn’t want them to hear the actual words (they would have been needlessly puzzled), but he wanted them to see that the thoughtful-looking fellow from Accrington, who flashed into the play whenever his team needed him, had some private source of inspiration. The more perceptive girls might even secretly prefer him to their supposed heroes from St Kevin’s Luton, who enjoyed the luxury of having actual girls to smile on them.
For six weeks Adrian went to the YCW meeting and basketball training on Tuesday night and played in the Seconds on Wednesday night. On other nights he added to his notes for his poem on the sublimity of married love. During those weeks the only girls who turned up to watch Our Lady’s team were the fiancée with the knitting and two girlfriends of fellows in the Firsts. As soon as Adrian saw these girls holding the fellows’ hands and looking into their eyes he realised they were going steady. After that he was careful not to look directly at them in case they or their boyfriends thought he was interested in them.
In every match he followed the packs or dropped back into empty areas of the court. At least once each night he found himself alone with the ball close to the goal. At the instant he threw for goal he whispered his battle cry. Sometimes as he jogged away after the ball had rolled in, he chanted softly, ‘Pat-more, Pat-more,’ which was easy to fit to the rhythm of his feet.
At work in the Education Department he spent his spare time studying the lists of teachers who were newly out of teachers’ colleges. He was working on a scheme for the third term when another batch of temporaries would have to be moved around the state. Now that he believed the most ennobling experience in life was married love (rather than the contemplation of English landscapes or of immense plains) he was going to arrange his temporaries so that single women with attractive names would arrive at schools where young men with heroic names were waiting for them.
At East Bendigo was a young teacher named Roland V. Marston-Cobb. As soon as a vacancy occurred for a temporary at East Bendigo or any nearby school, Adrian would send one of a pool of young women temporaries he had listed from schools around Melbourne. They were Priscilla J. Silk, Trudy H. Ravenswood, Virginia D. A. Honeychurch and Naomi Rosenbloom.
Adrian had other groups of women with appealing names ready for Marcus V. Treadwell at Yarram, Ralph Drum at Mooroopna and several others. If his schemes worked, exceptional young men and women in all parts of Victoria would have the opportunity to experience the truth of Patmore’s doctrine.
Our Lady’s First and Second teams reached the semifinals of the YCW competition. On the Sunday before the semi-final, among the notices read out at each mass was a request for supporters to turn up and cheer Our Lady’s boys.
While Adrian was in the dressing room before the big match he heard a sound that started his heart racing. It was the babble of young women beside the basketball court. The NCGM had come at last.
Adrian watched them while he warmed up for his match. There were four of them. One was ruled out because she was lightly touching hands with a fellow in Our Lady’s Firsts. Of the other three, one hung back a little and only smiled when the others laughed loudly at a joke that some fellow had made. She was pretty, but not in the conventional way that would attract loutish boyfriends. The basketballers spoke familiarly with the other girls but kept their distance from her. She looked reserved and thoughtful—she knew there were more important things in life than flirting with YCW boys. Adrian saw the smile of wonderment on her face as he explained to her one day the teachings of Coventry Patmore. He saw the two of them on rainy Saturday mornings searching the shelves of Melbourne’s second-hand bookshops for the copy of The Unknown Eros that he would buy her as an engagement present.
The basketball game had started, and Adrian’s most urgent task was to attract her attention. He abandoned his usual style of play and rushed into packs. He leaped for the ball against fellows six inches taller. He saw she was following the game closely, but she seemed unaware of him as an individual.
He decided there was only one sure way to make her notice him. It might bring about his team’s defeat, but it was absurd to weigh the outcome of a parish basketball game against the vindication of a major religious poet. When the ball came near him he pretended to trip. He stood up and hobbled towards the edge of the court. His captain saw him and called for ‘Time Out’.
Adrian limped off the court and saw her look his way at last. He felt the same elation that he had once got from standing near Denise McNamara on the Coroke train. But whereas in those days there was only his boyish ardour to prompt him, now he was following in the footsteps of an eminent poet-philosopher, thrice married.
The following Sunday at mass, Adrian heard about a bus trip organised by the YCW and the NCGM to the snow at Mount Donna Buang. Adrian bought a ticket and thought how appropriate it was that he would first speak to his future wife in a snowy landscape such as Patmore must have admired while he courted one or other of his wives.
On the Sunday of the picnic, the bus pulled up at the church gate and Adrian was one of the first aboard. He took a seat at the very back because he wanted to watch his girl all the way and observe how the changing scenery affected her.
As the young fellows and girls filed into the bus Adrian realised they were dividing themselves into distinct groups. At the rear were the fellows who had no girlfriends and, from the look of them, no hope of winning any. On either side of the aisle, in the seats for two, were the steady couples—the girl usually in the window seat as if her boyfriend wanted her safe from marauders. In the longer, less-private seats at the front was an indeterminate group of young fellows and girls. None of them belonged to one another as the steadies did in their cosy seats. But behind their jokes and loud laughter and exaggerated gestures, the YCW fellows were all anxious to win a girl before the picnic was over. Adrian’s girl, the one he had marked out at the basketball, was sitting quietly in a front seat.
On
the way to Mount Donna Buang Adrian came two stages nearer his goal. He asked the fellow next to him the names of several girls in the bus and learned that his chosen one was named Clare Keating. And a little later, at the front of the bus, Clare herself pulled a face at a fellow who was paying attention to her, and looked as if she meant it.
The bus stopped at a picnic ground halfway up the mountain. During lunch the young people mostly kept to the three divisions they had formed in the bus. After lunch, on the steep path up to the summit, the groups were mixed together as some people stopped to rest or scoop up handfuls of snow and others scrambled past them.
Adrian adjusted his pace up the mountain until he was close behind Clare Keating. He wondered how he could let her know he was near her. Two or three times he said something funny, but no one turned round. He supposed his voice was not carrying as far as usual in the thin mountain air.
One of the fellows from the back of the bus picked up a branch with wet feathery foliage. Before Adrian could stop him, the fellow touched the dripping leaves first against the neck of the girl beside Clare and then lightly against a pink ear of Clare herself. The girls squealed, although not as angrily as Adrian had expected. Adrian was ashamed to be seen near the fellow. When the girls turned around he stood frowning into the distance so Clare would realise he disapproved of the childish prank.
A little later, when Clare and her friends slowed down and said they were puffed out, two fellows from near Adrian got behind the girls and tried to push them up the path. The fellow behind Clare put his hands on her ribs in such a way that the tips of his outstretched fingers reached towards the forbidden area of her breasts. It was the sort of familiarity that Adrian would not have dared until after the engagement (or certainly not before a mutual declaration of affection). If Clare had called for help he would have fallen on the fellow and torn his fingers away (although without himself touching her body). But she only laughed and leaned her weight backwards until the fellow gave up trying to push her.
Near the top of the mountain they came out of the haze or cloud that had surrounded them and into bright sunshine. Adrian hurried past the girls. He had never climbed a mountain before, and he wanted Clare to notice how deeply he was affected by a wild landscape.
The summit was grassy and treeless with hard-packed snow lying in its hollows. Adrian stood alone looking towards the east. From Donna Buang to the horizon it was all mountains—hazy ridges rising one after the other out of shadowy dark-blue valleys. The scene affected him as profoundly as Near Parracombe, Devon, the wildest landscape in The English Countryside in Colour. He saw he had been too hasty in abandoning Australia for England and the steppes of Buryat Mongolia. He wondered how many Australian poets before him had discovered landscapes like the one he looked on, and had made their spiritual home in them. The next time he was in Cheshire’s he would spend a half-hour at the shelves marked AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE.
There was a blow on the back of his neck and the feel of icy water trickling down his skin. People were laughing and shouting not far behind him. He reached his hand to his neck and touched a dripping mass of snow.
He turned around. All the young people from the bus were pelting each other with handfuls of hard snow. Someone must have aimed one at him while he was staring at his landscape. Clare Keating and three young fellows were looking at him meaningfully. No doubt one of them had hit him. It was their way of inviting him to join their fun instead of moping over distant mountains. Perhaps even Clare herself had thrown the snow. On the way up the mountain she had noticed his interest in her, and now she was making it easier for him to speak to her without a formal introduction. He picked up some snow and tossed it aimlessly into the air. If he had thrown it at Clare or her group they might have thought he couldn’t take a joke.
On the way back to the bus Adrian said a few words to one of the fellows hanging around Clare. The fellow answered him politely and Adrian considered himself one of the group from the front of the bus.
He waited outside the bus while the fellows from the back seat and the couples from the private seats found their places. If he had rushed in and grabbed a seat at the front he might have alarmed Clare by his forwardness. Instead, he was going to stroll in and sit down nonchalantly at the front and seize the first opportunity to join the conversation of her group.
As he climbed aboard, it occurred to him that all the front seats might be taken, and he had a moment of panic. In fact, there were two or three empty spaces. He sat down and looked out of the window. When the bus started to move he looked around for Clare Keating. He turned his head slowly to conceal his eagerness.
He discovered that the people at the front were not all the same ones who had sat there during the morning. There seemed to be fewer girls. There were even a few of the fellows who had begun the day in the back seat. And Clare Keating was missing.
For the next mile or so, Adrian looked briefly in turn at each of the seats where the steady couples sat. He kept fairly calm. She was probably with a girl friend in one of the dual seats—she had noticed Adrian preparing to court her and had decided to resist him a little while longer. She was probably tired after climbing the mountain or more reserved than he had suspected.
It was almost dark before Adrian found her. She was next to the window in one of the steadies’ seats. Beside her was the same fellow who had thought it clever to tickle girls’ faces with wet branches.
The driver turned on the radio. The sound of Hit Parade music carried all through the bus. Some of the YCW boys and NCGM girls joined in the words of the best-known songs. Adrian realised he hadn’t heard a Hit Parade for some time—he had been too busy with his poetry on Sunday afternoons. As soon as he reached home he would throw himself once more into his poetry to stifle his grief at losing Clare Keating to an unworthy rival. But in the bus he had only the hit tunes to distract him.
The disc jockey announced a song that was sweeping America. Adrian sat back and let it sweep across him too. Its words were commonplace—an invitation to young people to involve themselves in a whirl of gaiety and pleasure. But the melody appealed to Adrian. A sensitive listener could discern something forlorn behind the insistent phrases—as if the composer recognised that for every young couple dancing together there was, inevitably, a young fellow with no other solace than the sight of distant landscapes. The tune was even more poignant because Adrian thought he would probably never hear it again. Even if he listened sometimes to a Hit Parade after he had gone back to his poetry, the song would have been forgotten long since, like so many others that had swept America.
He risked one last look at Clare. She and the oaf beside her were singing the words of the song. But for them there was no hint of sadness in its plaintive notes. They leaned their shoulders easily together and even looked occasionally into each other’s eyes as they gave out the words of ‘Rock Around the Clock’.
After the picnic at Mount Donna Buang, Adrian could not go on with his poem about married love. He put his notes carefully away—they could wait until he had found a steady girlfriend. Some of the couples in the bus on the way home from Donna Buang had rested their heads together and dozed off with looks of perfect contentment. When he reached that degree of intimacy with a young woman he would finish his poem about the mystical joys of love.
He intended to be more careful in his choice of girls in future. The best place to meet a girl with similar interests to his was surely Cheshire’s Bookshop in Little Collins Street, in the heart of Melbourne, and the best place in Cheshire’s was the seldom-used space between POETRY and DRAMA. Adrian remembered occasions when he had been bending over a poetry book and some young woman had passed him so closely that her skirt had almost brushed against him. When this next happened he would start a conversation, but first he needed to acquire an expert knowledge of poetry. Then he could answer any enquiry a girl might make about a poet or his works.
Every afternoon after work, Adrian hurried to the POETRY section of Cheshire�
�s. In the fifteen minutes that remained before closing time he studied the spines of the books on a given section of the shelves. His aim was to know the whereabouts of every poet represented in Cheshire’s. When he had achieved this aim, he would station himself near the POETRY sign each afternoon, and each Saturday morning, until a suitable young female person came along. He would wait until she was trapped in the cul de sac of POETRY and DRAMA and would then walk up quietly behind her and ask was she looking for any poet in particular. He would have to act swiftly. His boldness might frighten her away before he could put an appropriate book into her hands. His aim was to have a suitable book in her hands within thirty seconds, after which she could hardly refuse to speak to him.
He trained himself for three weeks. Then he took up his position and waited. He was not so foolish as to make himself conspicuous by simply standing. He tested his newly acquired skills. In his coat pocket he had dozens of slips of paper, each marked with the name of a poet. While he waited, he would pull out a slip and hurry to find the works of the poet named.
On the first two afternoons no suitable person turned up. The only person he was able to help was a young salesman who was surprisingly ignorant about his own stock-in-trade. On the third afternoon Adrian set himself to learn an additional skill. Instead of merely handing a book to a young female, he would make a comment on the poet whose work it was. Even the most reticent young woman would feel obliged to say something in these circumstances, especially if the comments he made went against conventional opinions of the poet concerned.
Adrian was surprised at how few poets he could comment on readily. He began to improve his knowledge by reading dust jackets and introductions in the less-familiar titles. One of the first books that he looked into had on its cover a sketch of a young man brooding over an English landscape. The book was the Collected Poems of A. E. Housman. Adrian read two or three poems. Then he took the book to the front counter and bought it. Inside its sombre green cover he had found poems describing his own state of mind so accurately that he might have written them himself.
A Season on Earth Page 37
