The chief character liked to watch from the inside of some or another windowpane while rainwater fell against or trickled down the outside. He was watching thus in his classroom on the first floor of a building of two storeys on a day of rain four months before his final examinations, the so-called matriculation examinations. He was confident of passing the examinations and of obtaining a so-called Commonwealth scholarship that would enable him to study arts at university. Afterwards, so he supposed, he would train for a year as a teacher in secondary schools. He was indifferent towards so-called careers. He wanted only to be tolerably well paid and to be free during his evenings and his weekends to write poetry and, perhaps, prose fiction. He watched the rain on the window of his classroom as though the window overlooked a street parallel to the main street in some or another large town in the countryside of Victoria during one of the many years when he would teach English and history at the high school in the large town and would live as a bachelor in a self-contained flat on the upper floor of so-called business premises near the centre of the town. Even when the window was not blurred by rain, the man who lived behind the window could see through it no further than the nearest buildings. He understood that the large town was surrounded by mostly level grassy countryside and scattered trees but he believed that he was more likely to write poetry or prose fiction of worth if he was prevented from seeing the horizon in any direction. During the four years before he would be able to watch the rain trickling down the window of the upstairs room near the centre of the large town, so the chief character understood, he would be obliged to mix with young persons, both male and female, in a university. At some time during those years, he might decide to approach one or another young female person in the hope that he and she might later go out together, as the saying was, and later still might even become boyfriend and girlfriend.
I would have reported in my abandoned work of fiction that the chief character, while he watched the rain trickling on the window of his classroom, would have preferred to be already an older man remembering certain events or even regretting that certain events had never taken place rather than to be still a young man preparing to experience those events.
At some time during the day of rain, the chief character would have looked through a certain booklet from among a collection of booklets displayed at the rear of his classroom, so I would have reported if I had gone on with my abandoned work. The chief character had noticed the booklets often before but had never looked into them. For some months afterwards, he would suspect that he had been led to look into the booklets by what he called the intervention of Divine Providence. Each of the booklets in the collection was intended to persuade young men to apply to train as priests or lay-brothers in one or another religious order. The booklet that the chief character looked through contained both text and illustrations. A number of the illustrations were of a building of two storeys. From one of these illustrations the chief character learned that the building was surrounded on three sides at least by mostly level grassy countryside that was not without trees. From captions beneath the illustrations, the chief character learned that the building housed the novitiate of a certain religious order; the place where young men trained as novices of the order during the first year after they had joined the order. In short, as I reported in an earlier section of this present work of fiction, the chief character of my abandoned work of fiction had decided to apply to join the religious order in question before he had read the text of the booklet published by the order. The illustration that the chief character was looking at when he made his decision was an illustration of the interior of a room of the sort that was occupied by each of the novices of the order. The room was furnished with a bed and a table and a chair and a cupboard. The table was so placed that a person sitting at it would face the window of the room. Given that the view through the illustrated window was a view wholly of sky, the chief character supposed that the room was on the upper storey of the building of two storeys. Soon after he had supposed this, the chief character saw in his mind an image of rain trickling down a window that overlooked some or another view of the Riverina district of New South Wales in his mind. While he watched the image of the trickling rain in his mind, the chief character of my partly completed work of fiction was pleased to suppose that he had found a means of going to live in an upper room of a building of two storeys without first having to go to university, where he might have had to spend his time studying books of small interest to him or preparing to approach one or another young woman.
Six months before the day of rain mentioned above, during two days of his summer holidays, the chief character had read all of the three hundred and more pages of Elected Silence, by Thomas Merton, published in London by Hollis and Carter in 1954 but first published several years before in the USA. The chief character had never heard of the book or its author before he received it as a prize at the end of his second-last year of school, and several times while he read it he supposed that the book had come into his hands through the intervention of Divine Providence. Elected Silence was the autobiography of Thomas Merton, who had been a teacher and a poet before becoming a monk in a Cistercian monastery in the USA. Merton had been prepared to give up his writing when he entered the monastery, but his superiors had allowed him to write poetry and had later encouraged him to write essays and to have them collected and published. (The chief character did not know it, but I learned some years ago from a biography of Thomas Merton that the royalties from his books became the chief source of income for the monastery and that their author was often exempted from following the rule of the monastery and was allowed, when he so wished, to live alone and to go on with his writing in the so-called hermitage, which was a weatherboard cottage in a grove of trees in the grounds of the monastery.) After he had read the book, the chief character had made inquiries and had learned that the Cistercian Order had a monastery in Australia but he had been disappointed when he found that the monastery was in hilly countryside only thirty miles from Melbourne.
The religious order with its novitiate in the Riverina district had been founded in Italy during the eighteenth century by a pious Italian priest, so the chief character learned from the booklet that had persuaded him to join the order. Both priests and lay-brothers of the order wore a black soutane and a black cloak. Both soutane and cloak had an insignia of scarlet embroidered over the wearer’s left breast. The special work of the order in Australia was to visit one after another parish and to conduct there a mission, something that has been described elsewhere in this work of fiction. When the priests were not conducting missions they lived a strictly regulated life in one or another monastery of the order. This was much to the liking of the chief character. He had no wish to live as a parish priest in some or another suburban or rural presbytery under the notice of his parishioners. Even when he worked on the mission, he would be looking forward to returning to his monastery and working on his latest poem.
The chief character was not easily able to persuade his parents to allow him to go to the Riverina district instead of to university. Whenever his parents reminded him of the benefits to be got from an education at university, the chief character would recite in his mind certain phrases from the poem “The Scholar-Gipsy,” by Matthew Arnold. He recited the phrases in order to see more clearly the connections between himself and the chief character of the poem. For the chief character of my unfinished fiction, the Riverina district would be the retired ground preferred by the scholar-gipsy: the lone wheat-fields and the river bank o’ergrown. The cloak that the scholar-gipsy wrapped around himself was a likeness of the black cloak that the chief character would wear as a novice shut away from the world. The most striking connection, however, was reported in the note that preceded the poem. The young man who had inspired the poem, he who had left university and had taken up with the gipsies, claimed to have discovered that the gipsies could do wonders by the power of the imagination and had resolved to learn their arts.