The image of the young woman had appeared to the man while he was putting into his travelling bag a certain book that he had first read more than twenty years before but had not since read. In earlier years, the man had bought some thousands of books and had read many of them. In more recent years, the man had bought hardly any books and had mostly read books that he had first read many years before. Most of the books that the man had bought and had read were books of fiction.
The book that the man put into his travelling bag was not a book of fiction but a report by a man who had spent a year and more during the Second World War in a telegraph station recently built by the Royal Navy on the island of Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic Ocean. The book contained perhaps twenty illustrations: small reproductions of black-and-white photographs. Some of the illustrations were of persons who lived permanently on Tristan da Cunha at the time when the author was stationed there, but no illustration was of a young woman with dark hair and a faintly olive complexion.
The man about to travel had wanted, many years before, to write a long work of fiction with the title Masthead of the World, which phrase he had found in a long poem the title of which was ‘Tristan da Cunha’. The long poem had been written by a man who had been born nearly forty years before the birth of the man who was about to travel. The poet had spent his early years in South Africa but had almost certainly never seen the island that was the subject of his long poem, according to his most recent biographer. According to this biographer, the poet knew the island of Tristan da Cunha only from photographs or from reproductions of photographs. The man about to travel supposed that one at least of those photographs must have shown the island as it had appeared in the first illustration that he himself had seen of Tristan da Cunha: as a distant conical mountain with its upper parts concealed by clouds. The man about to travel supposed also that the poet must have heard or must have read an account of the roaring noise made almost continually by the ocean against the cliffs beneath the meadows where the houses of the inhabitants were clustered.
The long work of fiction mentioned above had never been written. The work had been intended to comprise entries from the diary of a man who had lived during all of his life in one or another suburb of Melbourne but who reported the events of his life as though he had lived always on Tristan da Cunha. The man who intended to write the work had made notes for only one section before he abandoned the work. That section would have reported the experiences of the chief character after he had begun to court a certain young woman in the way that the young women were courted by the young men on Tristan da Cunha. Every Friday evening, the young man visited his best friend, a young man who lived with an older brother, a younger sister, and their parents in a house of many rooms in a certain eastern suburb of Melbourne. During his first hours in the house, the visiting young man would take part with the father of the family and his two sons in tournaments of ping-pong, darts and carpet bowls. Later, the visiting young man would excuse himself and would sit for an hour and more in the darkened living room, where his friend’s younger sister and their mother sat from seven every evening until midnight watching television programs. The men of the house seldom watched television programs, and so the young visitor was almost always alone with the mother and her daughter during his hour and more in the darkened room. The daughter mostly ignored the young visitor, but he was encouraged by the mother’s sometimes talking to him while some or another advertisement was showing. On Tristan da Cunha, the mother’s engaging him in conversation would have told him that she acknowledged him to be courting her daughter.
The man about to travel might have said that he remembered a few scenes from the book that he was packing among his luggage. The book, of course, contained no scenes; it consisted of nothing but words arranged in sentences. The few scenes that the man might have mentioned had appeared in his mind while he read and were all set, as it were, in an image-space intended to represent the interior of a certain house on Tristan da Cunha, which interior was not represented by any of the illustrations mentioned earlier.
Every item mentioned in the following three paragraphs is to be understood as being an image-item.
A young man who worked by day in a telegraph station on a remote island visited on many an evening a certain house on the island. During most of his time in the house, the young man sat beside a certain young woman on one of the beds in the house, which comprised a large living area and a smaller sleeping area with a curtain between. While the young man and the young woman sat together, the curtain mentioned was drawn back, so that he and she remained in full view of the persons in the living area, who were the parents and the siblings of the young woman along with one other person. This other person was a young man who had spent all his life on the remote island and who visited on many an evening the certain house mentioned, there to sit silently a little way in from the door in order to signal to the people of the house that he was courting the young woman who lived there.
During much of his time in the house, the man from the telegraph station helped the young woman to read more fluently. For some years past, the remote island had been without a school, and many of the young persons on the island were hardly able to read or to write. Recently, the chaplain attached to the telegraph station had set up a school and had distributed reading books to young adults wishing to read more fluently. The young woman mentioned above was of all the young adults on the remote island the most eager to read more fluently. On every night when the young man from the telegraph station visited her house, he brought for the young woman one or more reading books and sat beside her while she read them. During most of the time while the young woman read, she and the young man leaned against one another, and their nearer hands were clasped out of sight beneath the bed coverings.
Sometimes the young woman mentioned, having read to the end of one or another reading book, turned to the wall beside her and tried to read from one or another of the pages fastened there. (On the remote island, the inner walls of many houses were decorated with pages from illustrated magazines or even from newspapers. The remote island had no regular mail service, but ships called from time to time and the men from the island went aboard in order to exchange goods or foodstuffs from the island for anything of use to the islanders — even illustrated magazines for lining the walls of their houses.) The young woman tried to read the captions under the illustrations around her and the subheadings in the columns of text around her but she seldom succeeded. Sometimes the young woman became angry after she had failed to read one or another caption or subheading. Sometimes, in her anger, she rebuked or insulted the young man who had been sitting silently a little way in from the door for as long as he had been in the house.
The man filling his travelling bag would not have claimed to remember anything that was reported to have happened between the young woman who was eager to read and the young man her teacher while he was preparing to leave Tristan da Cunha at the end of his term of duty. The man seemed to remember, however, that he had read, in the last pages of the book that he had packed in his travelling bag, a report by the author, who had never returned to Tristan da Cunha after his term of duty there, of his having seen certain images of some or other islanders in some or another illustrated magazine published after the Second World War in England, or it may have been South Africa. The author had been sorry to learn from an article in the magazine that a commercial company had set up a plant on Tristan da Cunha for processing fish caught by the islanders and that currency was by then in use among the islanders, many of whom bought clothing and foods from abroad. However, before the man had learned these things from the text of the article he had searched among the images of female persons in the nearby illustrations for an image of dark hair and of a face with a faintly olive complexion. After he had found these images, he had learned from a nearby caption that the young woman whom he had taught to read had since become the wife of a young man other than the young man who had sat silently during evening after evening a little way in from the door of her parents’ house.