A Million Windows (14 page)

On a certain day towards the end of what our turncoat, so to call him, intended to be his last year as a teacher, the principal of
his school brought to the door of his classroom the dark-haired young woman mentioned previously, introduced him to her, and told him that the young woman was an expert in the teaching of drama and would spend a half-hour in his classroom during each of the next four weeks teaching dramatic skills to his pupils.

Long afterwards, the teacher and poet came to understand the circumstances behind the unexpected appearance at his classroom door of the most noteworthy of all the dark-haired female persons he had met up with or had observed from a distance or whose images he had kept in mind. She had arrived from England not long before. She was entitled to put after her name a series of letters that intimidated the teacher-poet when he saw them during her first session in his classroom but which failed to intimidate the director of primary education after the young woman had gained an interview with him soon after her arrival from London, where she had completed the courses that had entitled her to put the series of letters after her name. She probably expected the director of primary education to appoint her at once to the staff of one or another training college for teachers as an expert in drama, but he allowed her only to visit one or another primary classroom each week for four weeks, to have charge of the children there for a half-hour each week, and then, during the fourth week, to demonstrate to the local district inspector of schools her skills as a teacher of drama. The school selected for her trial was the school where the young unpublished poet taught a fifth grade. He supposed, long afterwards, that the principal of the school would have
approached several or, perhaps, all of his fellow teachers but that these would have refused to allow into their classrooms the pushy young Englishwoman with the fancy letters after her name, as they would have called her. He, the young teacher of a fifth grade, would not have thought of refusing the young woman, even if she had not seemed to him at once the most fetching of all the dark-haired female persons that he had admired or had kept in mind. He was not opposed to having visiting teachers lighten his own teaching duties. As well, he was at that time still far from developing the antipathy that he later developed towards live theatre, so to call it. He even supposed sometimes that he might compose, after he had established his reputation as a poet, such a poem as could be performed on stage as a poetic monologue, which was a phrase that he liked to hear in his mind.

He remembers nothing of what she taught, or tried to teach, to his pupils. He learned, some years afterwards and by chance, that she had later been on the staff of a teachers' training college, although he could not know whether this was a direct result of her dealings with his class. He remembers nothing of her final session in his class, when the district inspector of schools would have been present to assess her. (He suspects that he might have spent the time in the staffroom rather than watch her ordeal.) He remembers that she thanked him often and profusely for his help. When she left his class on each of her first three visits, she asked if he would rehearse with his pupils during the coming week some or another routine. This he did faithfully, as he would have done for any visiting teacher, and she always seemed overly
grateful afterwards. They addressed each other always as
Mr
and
Miss
, which was not unusual for that time and that situation, and the nearest that either of them came to familiarity was her calling him a brick when they said goodbye after her last visit.

Not once did he think of her as a possible girlfriend. He supposed that she must have been a year or two older than he in order to have acquired so many letters after her name. That alone would have excused him from thinking of her romantically, as another sort of writer might have written. But even if he had wanted to meet with her during a weekend or an evening, he could only have foreseen the two of them sitting in a coffee-lounge or a cinema and himself feeling out of place or even wretched. He spent most of his free time at his desk in the rented room where he lived or in the Reading Room of the State Library. On several weekday evenings he drank beer, mostly alone, in a shabby hotel in the city, in a back bar frequented by people he considered bohemians. His solitary reading and writing and drinking seemed to him not so much a hardship as a sort of apprenticeship leading at last to his becoming a published poet and somewhat the equal of female persons with dark hair and memorable faces and many letters after their names.

Given what is reported in the previous paragraph, I need hardly report in this paragraph that he felt no more that a mild annoyance a few hours after her last visit when he found among the books and papers on his classroom table an envelope with her name typed on the front. She had sometimes spread pages of notes on his table, and he assumed that the envelope had
spilled out of her large bag during her last visit and had been later overlooked. His annoyance came from his having to try to return the envelope to her when all he knew was her name, but when he handled the envelope he found it to be unsealed, and when he had opened the envelope he found inside a single typed page with the letterhead of a famous jeweller whose shop was in a fashionable quarter of the city. At the upper left of the typed page was the name of the young woman, although the series of letters was missing, and below the name was her address, which was in a suburb near his own. Much of the page was occupied by a list of items of jewellery owned by the young woman together with the estimated value of each item for the purpose of its being insured. Below the list was the signature of the valuer of the items. After he had read the page with the letterhead of the famous jeweller, he was relieved that he would be able to return the misplaced letter to its owner simply by inserting it into a larger envelope and then posting both to the address of the young woman, together with a few words explaining the matter. He recalls these events clearly, even more than fifty years later, and if ever he were to include these events, or a version of them, in a piece of fiction, he would have the narrator of the fiction assure the reader that the chief character of the fiction entertained at the time no possibility that the young woman with dark hair and the many letters after her name had not genuinely misplaced the letter from the famous jeweller, although he supposed briefly that a young man very different from himself might have dared to suppose otherwise.

On most evenings, a few of us spend an hour or more in the common room that serves this corridor. The room itself is a dreary space, hardly better furnished than the so-called commercial room that was provided in some of the two-storey hotels in country towns long ago, when numerous commercial travellers or sales representatives drove in their station wagons on the roads of the state where are set, so to speak, many sections of this work of fiction and needed, of an evening, a table or a desk-top where they could do what they called their paper-work while they drank their beer. The only books on the few shelves are so-called reference books: dictionaries, atlases, and those books that pronounce on correct usage of words, correct spelling of difficult proper nouns, and the like. The remainder of the shelves contain hundreds of back numbers of a soft-covered monthly publication,
The Australian Journal
. The earliest numbers date from the early 1930s while the most recent are from the late 1950s, when the
Journal
, so to call it, ceased publication after its former readers had taken to watching television during all of their leisure time. The man who deposited this publication on our shelves is almost the only one of us who looks into the back numbers. He has told us often that the collection had been amassed by his parents. They had bought and read the
Journal
from the first year of their marriage. As soon as he had learned to read, he had looked into whatever number was lying about the house and had tried to make sense of the text. As he grew older, he fell into the habit of reading every one of the dozen and more pieces of short fiction
or short stories, as they were called, in every issue. He is aware, so he has often told us, that most of us dismiss those pieces or stories as popular fiction of no deep meaning or lasting worth, but he claims to have learned from the pieces or stories what he calls the power of straightforward narrative.

This same man told some of us one evening in the common room that he still recalled, sixty and more years afterwards, certain series of narrated events from some of the earliest numbers he had read of
The Australian Journal
, by which he meant not only the scenes that had appeared in his mind while he first read but some of the words of the narrative. Even when he examined what remained to him of books that might be called works of literature, the last traces, as he called them, nearly always comprised a narrative, however brief. He gave as an example an autobiography that he had read nearly thirty years before and had not looked into since. The author had flourished, as the old expression used to have it, in the mid-twentieth century as a paleontologist at several universities in the USA. The man had had a humble and a troubled upbringing. There was much difficulty between him and his mother, which resulted in his leaving home when he was a young man, hardly more than a boy, and having to live as a hobo for some years during the early 1930s. During one of those years, he had been camped alone at evening on a hillside near a railway line. He had lit a campfire and was cooking a simple meal. He understood that a freight train would pass close to the campsite later in the evening, and he intended to jump aboard the train when it was slowed by the
hill. When his meal was almost ready, a dog came up to him. The dog appeared to be starving, and the man gave it a portion of his meal. After he and the dog had eaten, the dog rested beside the man as though he and it were now master and faithful servant, and the man speculated that he might have been the first person ever to have fed the dog or to have treated it less than harshly. As the time approached for the arrival of the freight train, the man stood beside the railway line with his pack on his back, and the dog stood close behind him. The man understood that he could not take the dog with him. Not only could he not succeed in getting both himself and the dog aboard the freight train, but he could not live the life of a hobo with a dog to provide for. When he heard the train approaching, the man stood ready to jump aboard. The hill where he stood was well-known among hoboes as a place for jumping aboard, and the man expected some of the hoboes already on the train to have opened some of the doors of the freight vans for someone such as himself. The train slowed; the man saw an open door; the man ran beside the train; the man clambered aboard. As soon as he was securely aboard, the man looked for the dog. He saw it keeping pace with the train and looking up at him. The dog was able to keep pace with the train for as long as it climbed the low hill, but when the train passed the hill, the dog began to fall behind. The man lay in the doorway of the freight van and watched the dog falling further behind. The man later wrote in his autobiography that he had recalled often during the remainder of his life his sight of the dog while it tried to keep pace with the train. He had recalled in particular
his sight of the nearer eye of the dog while it tried to keep pace. The eye had seemed to be turned sideways and upwards, or so he had thought, as though the dog had struggled, before it lost sight for ever of the only person who had fed it or had treated it less than harshly, to fix in mind an image of that person.

While the man had been telling us in the common room what is reported above, one among us was seen to stop his ears with his fingers. Most of us surely knew that the man with his fingers to his ears believed himself to be following the example of Henry James, who is mentioned surprisingly often in our part of this building, in not wanting to hear to its end an anecdote that might later provide him with matter for fiction, and I was not surprised when there began in the room one of those inconclusive discussions that some of us seem to enjoy. I heard little of what went forward in the bare, harshly lit room. I was recalling a morning when I was in my twenty-first year and was preparing to move out of my parents' home. There was much difficulty between me and my mother at the time. Every Sunday morning, I would leave the house as though to walk to our parish church but would call instead at a milk-bar and would sit for an hour at a table inside, sipping a malted milk and reading from the pages of the
Sporting Globe
the results of horse-races contested on the previous day in every state of the country before returning home as though I had been to church. On one such morning, which I remember as having been cold and overcast, I happened to look at two children in the front yard of one of the many newly built weatherboard houses in the outer suburb
where I then lived. The front yard had not yet been turned into any sort of garden. Between the front porch and the front fence were tussocks of grass, clods of earth, and puddles of rainwater. I supposed that the young man and his wife who had recently bought the house had as yet no money to pay for paths or lawn-seed or garden-plants. The two children that I happened to look at were a girl and a boy. The girl may have been six or seven years of age; the boy was a little younger. They were playing the game that many children have surely played: one of the two was a pretend-horse and was steered by the other with a string or a cord. I cannot even recall which child was horse and which was driver. Nor can I recall any detail of the appearance of the boy. I recall only the girl and only the sight of her face when she looked towards me during the first moments after she had become aware that I was passing her house and that I had noticed her and her brother playing among the clods and the tussocks and the puddles. I seemed to learn from her face that she was kindly disposed towards me; that she might have trusted me if ever she had been obliged to do so; that if our circumstances had been vastly different she would have welcomed me into her game. And while the men around me in the common-room went on with their debate as to the worth of anecdotes, I supposed that my eyes must have been turned sideways and downwards while I had passed the front yard where the children were playing, as though I had wanted to fix in mind an image of the first female-person who might have invited me into her pretend-world.