The seven paragraphs following this paragraph comprise a summary of a portion of a certain unpublished work of fiction. The man who was the author of the unpublished work supposed from time to time after his fortieth year that he remembered the portion summarised below. In fact, the man remembered only certain words and phrases from the work, although he saw clearly in his mind from time to time a series of events or image-events such as had surely occurred to him while he was writing the work.
A boy aged ten years walked with a dog in an easterly direction across a paddock of mostly level grass during the first hour of daylight on a morning of thick frost during one of the first years after the Second World War. The boy was walking towards a line of trees that reached along one side of the paddock, which was part of a dairy farm where his father was employed as a sharefarmer. The dairy farm was one of many such farms in the district around, which was a district of mostly level grassy countryside with a line of trees on its eastern boundary. The trees were the nearest trees of a forest, much of which had already been cleared of trees and almost all of which would be cleared before the boy had reached his thirtieth year.
Most of the dairy farms in the district mentioned had been so thoroughly cleared that no tree remained in any of the mostly level grassy paddocks. However, the paddock where the boy was walking had along its eastern boundary a thick stand of the timber and undergrowth that had formerly covered the whole district. The boy thought of this timber as an outlying island of the forest-continent far to the east.
While the boy walked towards the stand of timber mentioned, he looked sometimes at a thin column of smoke above the place where the trees and the undergrowth were most dense. The boy had never been to that part of the farm, but he knew that the smoke came from a hut in a clearing there. The hut was the home of the owner of the farm, who was a bachelor aged about forty years. The boy’s father had told him that the owner of the farm had chosen to spend all his adult life in the hut and to allow his sharefarmer to live in the house where the owner’s parents had lived until their death and where the owner had lived as a boy.
The boy had often seen the owner of the farm, who arrived at the farmhouse on horseback nearly every day in order to confer with the boy’s father. The boy saw nothing in the appearance or the behaviour of the owner that might have explained why he lived as a bachelor in a hut in an island of forest, but he, the boy, often arrived at his own explanation.
The boy himself liked to be alone among stands of trees or even on mostly level grassy countryside. Whenever he was alone in such places, he felt as though he had been joined by some or another invisible female companion of about his own age who understood his interest in solitary places and in many other matters without his needing to explain himself. The boy sometimes supposed that the owner of the farm was sometimes visited in his hut among the trees and the undergrowth by a sympathetic but invisible female companion.
The boy hoped that he might one day meet up with an actual female person not unlike the invisible female companion mentioned above. And although he had learned from his father that the owner of the farm lived mostly a hermit’s life and was not known to have travelled out of the district where he had been born and brought up, this did not prevent the boy from supposing that he, the owner, still waited for some or another female person to learn of his existence and to find her way to the stand of timber and the undergrowth and then to the hut in the clearing.
The reader should remember that the boy mentioned is the chief character of an unpublished work of fiction mentioned in a recent paragraph of this work of fiction. If the author of the unpublished work had read a certain celebrated work of fiction in the French language, he might have recalled, while he wrote about the matters summarised in the previous two paragraphs, a certain passage reporting some or another personage’s having placed one day on a certain windowsill a certain rare orchid in the hope that the flower on the rare plant might be pollinated if only some other person in the same quarter of the same city had put that day on some or another windowsill a plant of the same rare kind and then a nearby passage reporting the unlikely meeting on the same day of two male characters whose sexual needs, so to call them, were so unusual that they had been hardly ever satisfied but which needs were well satisfied soon after the unlikely meeting.
The boy and the dog were searching for a cow that was named Stockings for her three white legs on a red-brown body. The cow was known to have calved recently. Cows on the many treeless dairy farms in that district were obliged to calve in mostly level grassy paddocks, but when a cow was about to calve on the farm owned by the bachelor she was free to follow her instincts and to go in among the trees and undergrowth as though to protect her calf from predatory animals. While he approached the nearest of the trees, the boy saw in his mind image after image that had appeared in his mind while he had read, a few months before, a certain book of fiction that had been first published in Sydney eight years before his birth. The chief character of that book was referred to always as the red heifer or the red cow. Towards the end of that book, the narrator reported that the district where the chief character lived with other members of a herd of wild cattle was being cleared of its trees and undergrowth. The boy had hoped while he read that the chief character and the calf that she had recently given birth to might be reported as having found one last stand of trees and undergrowth where she and her calf could survive and where she might even meet up, in the future, with some or another male survivor from the wild herd.
The matters reported in the previous paragraphs were earlier reported in a long work of fiction that was read by one literary agent and four publishers but was never published. While the long work was being read by one or another of the persons mentioned, the author of the work completed a work of fiction different in many ways from the long work. This work of fiction was published first as a hardcover book and then as a paperback book. A number of reviewers praised the book. Some months after the book had been published, the author of the book was invited to lunch in a fashionable restaurant by the editor of what was often described as a leading literary quarterly. During the lunch, the editor told the author that he was being widely talked about as a rising star among authors of fiction, although the author felt sure that the editor had not read the recently published book. The editor then asked the author if he had anything suitable for publication in his, the editor’s, literary quarterly, as though the author might have had always on hand a variety of works of fiction ready for sending to any editor who might request some or another work. (The author had worked intermittently for nine years on the unpublished work and for four years on the published work.) The author later sent to the editor an edited version of certain passages from the work that had been rejected by four publishers. The passages reported, among other matters, some of the matters reported in earlier paragraphs of this section of this work of fiction. The editor later published the passages mentioned in what was often described as a leading literary quarterly.
In the mind of a man aged nearly seventy years, a few details appeared of a young woman with dark hair and a faintly olive complexion. The man waited, but no further image-details appeared to him. He then went on packing the travelling bag that he was going to take with him on a journey that he was obliged to make by railway train to a distant city.