The Survivor Read Free Page B

climate of this high town and university where, he liked to think, he had set like a jelly. It was a temperate place to work if you discounted the bitterness of the winters; and Extension faced a park full of thick British trees secreting deep cool beneath their heads of foliage. In Pinalba, he thought, they never saw shade so emphatic.
    â€œâ€¦ abused him afterwards for using slang,” Pelham was retailing. “Silly old cow.”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œMiss Fowler, the English mistress.”
    â€œAbused the poet for using slang?”
    â€œâ€˜Abused’ used in the local sense. Upbraided. As if those who give some increase to the language aren’t entitled to use slang.”
    â€œWhat did he say to them?”
    â€œOh, something about Australians not caring about the arts as long as they got their weekly screw.”
    â€œIs that all?”
    â€œYes, but I think Miss Fowler thought he was using the word in the American sense. One of the junior mistresses told me later that she’d lent the old lady a Norman Mailer novel, you see, where ‘screw’ doesn’t mean income, not by any means. Anyhow the girls thought he was marvellous. Not Mailer, of course. The poet.”
    Who, at that moment, appeared in the lobby. An inquisitive-seeming little man, no apparent extravagances in him, a widower in tweeds and a knitted tie for his course of four lectures in the university town. Forty-eight he might have been; visaged like a corner grocer, pert- and chatty-looking; probably secretly varicosed beneath the wide-cuffed trousers. Yes. But a genuine metaphysician, begetter of metrical fire, super-being.
    He had flown up from Sydney while Ramsey was in Pinalba. Now, as he came down the steps, he seemed to Ramsey to frown slightly at finding an ancient university buff with Pelham, his guide. Ramsey felt his blood jolt with exhilaration. At sixty-two he could have faced kings and tycoons, dowager empresses and sirens without a change of pulse. But he still savoured the handclasps of literary figures, for he thought of them as special phenomena. He could not, and hoped he never would, accept them as mere physical dross—but only on condition that they had written something that struck his own literary chords. On that subjective level, this man was for Ramsey a greater than William Butler Yeats, whom Ramsey disrespected. So he was impatient for the man to reach them and half-expected to be able to read absolutes in that face which was, fifteen yards away, pedestrian.
    Pelham introduced them.
    The poet smiled in a way that was frankly self-congratulatory. “But I was hoping it was you, Mr Ramsey. Let me tell you, you are a hero of my retarded boyhood.”
    Ramsey smiled most unheroically, almost as if he was expecting a blow.
    The poet explained, “I’m trying something to do with Leeming.” He blushed a little, outlining his ambitions. “It’s a sort of poetic symphonic suite that deals with the realities of the expedition, but in terms of the master themes of Leeming’s personality in so far as an outsider like myself can know them. Do you want to hit me?”
    â€œWhy would I want to hit you?”
    â€œWell, I am an intruder, and everything I’ve written so far is based on my own presuppositions, which, I hope, will probably be killed by any chats I have with you.”
    â€œNo, no,” Ramsey said quickly. “I’d trust your presuppositions over anything I could say.” He grabbed for saner topics and apologized for the poor size of the lecture fee. Pelham then began to tell them with solemnity what he intended to urge the committee to do about improving the fee and paying the increase retrospectively to the poet.
    The poet demurred. “It doesn’t matter. I’m on holidays. This is my holiday, one of my little projects: meeting Mr Ramsey. And it’s no use talking to poets about adequate pay. They’ve never seen