I did the things mentioned above on the morning of the day mentioned above. After lunch on that day, I was only just settling myself on my knees beside the settlement of Grasslands when I heard someone walking up behind me through the long grass.
I was a child, but I did not lack guile. I went on staring ahead. I pretended not to have heard her footsteps behind me. I sat back on my thighs and stared ahead of me as though I was contemplating fold after fold of an endless landscape. She remained for a short while a female presence just out of sight behind me, and then she stepped forward and asked me what I would have expected any visitor to the Farm to ask about my dirt clearings, my lumps of cracked mud, and my forked twigs standing crookedly here and there.
I told her as much of the truth as she needed to be told: that I had founded a settlement in a remote place; that I had been inspired by the example of Outlands, even though I had only heard a little about it…
She reached down and drew her fingers through my hair and then told me she hoped to welcome me one day to Outlands, which was still hardly bigger than my own settlement in the grass but which would grow and thrive. And then she went back to the house.
After she had gone, I began to modify somewhat my original ground plan for Grasslands. Somewhere at the edge of the settlement there would have to be space for a house, and perhaps a small garden, for the first two of the settlers who were a married couple. Later, other such houses would be needed for other couples and their children. But these plans of mine were never carried out. On the next day, my father arrived without notice at the Farm. The electricity had been switched on in the partly built house on the far side of Melbourne where my parents and my sister and I were going to live happily together during the foreseeable future. (In fact, we lived there for four years, until my father, who had become for several years a reformed gambler, became again a gambler and had to sell the house in order to pay his latest debts.)
I suppose the last traces of Grasslands would have melted away several years after I had left the Farm. And yet, the settlement of Outlands did not outlast Grasslands by many years. At some time in the 1960s, I heard that the settlement no longer existed, although several of the married couples who had been among the last settlers still remained on the site. They had bought a share each of the land and had survived as farmers.
At some time in the early 1970s, after I had been married for several years and was the father of two children, I decided I had better make my Last Will and Testament with the help of a legal practitioner. While I was looking into the telephone directory at the pages where legal practitioners advertise their services, I saw a very rare surname that I had only once previously come across. I understood from what I saw that the bearer of the surname was the principal of a firm of legal practitioners in an inner eastern suburb of Melbourne, where the value of the most modest house was three times the value of my own house. After I had looked at the initial of the first given name of the principal just mentioned, I became convinced that the man I had heard of twenty and more years before as one of the founders of Outlands was now a prosperous legal practitioner in one of the best suburbs of Melbourne, so to speak.
Only a year or so after the events reported in the previous paragraph, I heard of the death of Nunkie. I had seen him only occasionally during the years since I lived briefly at the Farm, but I took steps to attend his funeral service.
I sat near the rear of Nunkie’s parish church and saw hardly anything of the chief mourners until they came down the aisle with the coffin. Among the leading mourners was a man of middle age whose appearance could only be called commanding. He was very tall, strongly built, and olive-skinned. He had a mane of silvery hair and a nose like an eagle’s bill. He looked continually about him, nodding to this person and that. He did not nod at me, but I was sure he took note of me. And while his black eyes measured me, I was aware of what a weak, ineffectual person I have always been and of how much I have needed to be guided and inspired.
At the side of the commanding man was a woman with a pretty face. She was perhaps ten years younger than the man and was herself approaching middle age, but I could readily recall how she had looked twenty and more years before. She kept her eyes down as she passed.
Behind the couple mentioned above were four young persons who were obviously their children. I estimated from the seeming age of the oldest that the parents had been married in the very early 1950s.
In one of the last years of the twentieth century, I pressed by mistake a certain button in the radio of my motor car and heard, instead of the music that I usually hear from that radio, the voices of persons taking part in what was probably called by its makers a radio documentary. I was about to correct the mistake mentioned above when I understood that the actors taking part in the program were reading the words previously spoken or written by several persons who had been among the settlers at Outlands almost fifty years before. After I had understood this, I steered into a side street and stopped my motor car and listened until the program about Outlands had come to an end. (The program was one of a short series. The following week I listened for an hour to a similar program about the place mentioned in the second paragraph of this piece of fiction.)
I learned less than I had expected to learn, except for what will be reported in the last paragraph of this piece of fiction. The details of the daily lives of the Outlanders seemed to have been hardly different from what I had imagined while I lived at the Farm. Even when the actors spoke the words of the early settlers (who would have been aged seventy and more when they were interviewed) explaining why they had left the secular world for a communal settlement, I was not surprised. The Outlanders too had felt that the world was becoming more sinful and that the cities of the world were in danger of being bombed flat. I was beginning to be disappointed while I listened. But then a number of younger female voices began to report the recollections of the earliest female settlers at Outlands while they asked themselves what had finally persuaded them to leave the world and to join the settlement in the mountains. The reports were at first rather predictable. But then a name was mentioned: the name of a man. The surname had a musical sound and ended in the fifteenth letter of the English alphabet. The reports from the young female settlers became more specific, more in agreement, more heartfelt. I shall end this piece of fiction with a paragraph reporting my own summary of what I understood the female actors to be reporting from the females who claimed still to remember their feelings of nearly fifty years before.
He was the sort of person who would be called today charismatic, truly charismatic. He had graduated in law but had declined to practise. He was a cultured European in the dull Australia of the 1940s and 1950s. He had a Spanish father, and he spoke Spanish beautifully. We had never heard such a musical language. And he played the guitar. He would sing Spanish folk songs for hours while he played the guitar. He was inspiring.
The Boy’s Name Was David
The man’s name was whatever it was. He was more than sixty years of age and he spent much of his time alone. He was never idle, but he was no longer in paid employment, and on the most recent census form he had described himself as a retired person.