The chief character observed and reflected on the breeding behaviour of animals and birds. He could not admire the males that kept harems and drove off or fought and defeated rivals: the bull with his cows or the cock with his hens. The chief character sympathised with the bachelor-males that were obliged to watch the breeding-flock from a safe distance for season after season. The chief character thought of the world as too closely settled; there should have been more scope for each bachelor-male to lead away a young female or two into an empty landscape.
The swampy area where the chief character set free his pheasants was one of several areas where he found himself forgetting for the time being that he was on an island, so low-lying was the land and so dense was the line of trees that he saw not far off in whichever direction he looked. After he had watched the last of the birds fluttering in among the tea-tree, he turned his horse away from the swamp and towards the farming district. He had planned his outing so that he would arrive at a certain farm at mid-morning. At that time, the farmer and his two sons would be working in one or another shed or paddock while the farmer’s daughter would be alone in the house. The chief character was no furtive visitor. He intended to chat briefly with the farmer, who would then invite him to call at the house and to ask his (the farmer’s) daughter for a cup of tea.
The chief character had visited the farm often during the few months since he had arrived on the island. During almost every visit, he had talked with the daughter, who was the only female in the house. (Her mother had died three years before, and she, the daughter, now kept house, as the saying was, for her father and her two older brothers.) The daughter was seventeen years of age. Except for three brief holidays spent with an aunt and an uncle in a suburb of Melbourne, she had lived all of her life on the farm on the island. Whenever the chief character visited the farm, she mostly listened while he talked about interesting persons that he had met during his travels through New South Wales and Queensland.
Both the chief character and the daughter, as I intend to call her, were Catholics, to use the language of their time and place. There was no Catholic church or school on the island, and only a few Catholic families. Once each month, a priest came from the mainland and celebrated Mass either in the lounge-room of the farm where the daughter lived or in the mess-hall at the prison-farm. The chief character had never doubted his Catholic faith, as he himself would have put the matter, but he disliked any show of religious zeal or piety. Even so, he had looked with approval at the daughter whenever she had bowed her head and had closed her eyes during each of the Masses that he and she had attended. The occasion when he had looked with the most approval had been that of her returning to her place after she had received Holy Communion, to use the language of those days. As soon as she had returned to her place, the daughter would close her eyes and would then bow her head and cover her face with her hands. Most Catholics of that time made a similar show of reverence after having received Holy Communion, as they would have called it, but the daughter, so the chief character had observed, was always the last person in the congregation to lift her head again and to open her eyes. While he was walking to the back door of the farmhouse soon after he had let loose the pheasants at the edge of the swamp, the chief character kept in mind an image of the daughter with her head bowed and with her face covered by her hands.
Words came easily to the chief character. On some of his many visits, he had talked for an hour and more to the daughter, who had seemed content to listen. On the morning after he had freed the pheasants, the chief character was rather less talkative than usual with the daughter. He tried to work his way by several different routes towards a speech that he had been preparing for a week and more. The chief character was about thirty years of age but he had had few dealings with young women. On the morning in question, he might have been afraid to deliver his prepared speech to the daughter if he had not been able to keep in his mind the image mentioned in the previous paragraph. For as long as he had that image in his mind, the chief character felt confident that the daughter had not yet been courted by any young man.
The chief character delivered the short speech mentioned above, but not until after he had talked to the daughter for perhaps half an hour about matters that he had not intended to talk about during that visit. One of these matters was horse-racing. He had never told the daughter about his betting on horses, but while he was trying to work his way towards his prepared speech, he heard himself telling her that he intended to enjoy in the future only what he called the innocent pleasures of horse-racing: watching each race as a spectacle only; learning the patterns of the jockeys’ silk jackets; trying to imagine the feelings of the owner whose horse, a moment before, had won a so-called classic race, or of the owner who had backed his horse at long odds to win a large sum but had seen the horse, a moment before, beaten by a narrow margin. At another time during his visit, the chief character heard himself calculating aloud for the benefit of the daughter the amount that a man might have saved by the end of a year if he had set aside from his wages during every week of that year a certain number of shillings and if he had lived throughout the year in accommodation provided cheaply by his employer. At still another time during his visit, the chief character heard himself asking the daughter for a pencil and a scrap of paper so that he could set down for her inspection the calculations that he had been making aloud. (Throughout his life, the chief character had a habit of reaching for pencil and paper whenever he was alone and of making detailed calculations. During periods when he was trying to stay away from racecourses, the calculations were of the sort that he made for the benefit of the daughter in the kitchen of the farmhouse on the morning after the release of the pheasants. During periods when he was going often to the races, the calculations were attempts by the chief character to predict the betting markets of races not yet run or even his likely winnings from this or that bet at these or those odds. During the last year of his life, the calculations ought to have had to do with the chief character’s many unpaid debts to bookmakers and unpaid loans from generous relatives, so his elder son thought at the time, although the calculations were mostly part of one or another scheme for selling the only house that he had ever owned, for moving with his wife and their younger son to some or another house owned by the Housing Commission of Victoria in some or another country town in Victoria, and for buying with the meagre proceeds from the sale of the house the first motor-car that he would ever have owned.)
The reader will have surmised that the short speech mentioned previously was a proposal of marriage from the chief character to the daughter. During the weeks before he delivered the short speech, the chief character had imagined, to the best of his ability, some of the ways in which the daughter might respond to the speech. What the daughter actually said to him, however, after he had delivered his short speech, he had been far from imagining.