Promenade
Chapter VIII
Chapter VIII
Although ladies intent on shopping came round to Commercial Bay by rowboat, there was no help but legs (which mustn't be mentioned, however they ached) to get one up the steep twisting little streets. Caroline made heavy weather of them with her five long fashionable petticoats and full plum-colour poplin skirts sweeping up quite a tornado of dust and refuse as she bowed right and left, just like royalty.
Here were smart officers saluting, Captain Macrae in full Highland rid, with his great brooch like a semaphore in the brilliant light; Lord Calthorpe (such an exquisite that he wore a tartan shawl in the hottest weather and looking quite brisked up since his engagement); Sir Winston in yachting costume, his straw hat floating a blue ribbon and his old green umbrella showing the spikes. Even newly-arrived immigrants in smocks and chin-whiskers, and Corny Fleete with no waistcoat beneath his tussore coat, received their share of Caroline's graciousness.
“One must be kind to all,” she said to Sophia carrying the heavy basket. Surely the world needed kindness in these terrible days, with top-hats becoming daily more napless, and elastic-side boots (the only elegant wear for gentlemen) having an unhappy habit of sagging round the ankles, and Suchong at sixteen shillings and more the pound … although one could help out considerably with leaves of the native tea-tree, which must be medicinal since they tasted so unpleasant.
She stopped to speak to Jermyn lounging outside the little Chronicle office like any other young fop. Jermyn, said Caroline's maid, had been censored or something at the Institute last night, and so one must be kind. Besides he was really very handsome although looking wilder than before he went away.
“I trust you were not seasick on your voyage, Jermyn. You look unwell,” she said, passing on to Mr Brown's, where you could buy a bright Belgian candle for a farthing, and nudging Sophia to look away because Mrs Pinshon was there. Long ago ladies had agreed not to recognize each other when shopping in the cheaper places, meeting directly after in the street as though they had not encountered for months. So gentility was kept up very convincingly, and on washing-days all blinds were drawn as a polite hint to callers.
“One must have biscuits for a dinner-party. These broken ones are cheaper. I could say you fell down with the basket, Sophia,” said Caroline.
Outside, they met Sally with Tiffany. And there was Nick Flower, looking so rough in old white ducks and short trader's jacket that Caroline didn't feel she need be kind to him. But, most surprisingly, he stopped, pulling off his old hat and asking if he might speak privately to Mrs Lovel. Sally stepped aside; came back presently, prettily flushed under her blue bonnet.
“Caroline, will you be so kind as to take Tiffany home?” she said, and walked off with Nick Flower, accepting his hand to help her over holes and tussocks.
“Well, I never did!” exclaimed Caroline with so much meaning that Tiffany said defiantly: “She'll just have gone to be good to somebody. She's always doing that.”
“My poor child, how little you know of life, and I pray you never will,” said Caroline, hurrying on the little girls in the hope of seeing where Sally was going. But she lost her on the water-front. An assignation. A liaison. And with that creature! What a mercy Caroline lived near enough to watch Sally. Probably Peregrine had put her there for that very purpose. Poor Peregrine. But she would help him all she could, and discover everything before she told him.
“Home,” she said majestically to the Maori boatman, whom she had put into livery before Peregrine thought of doing such a thing. What kind of home had poor Peregrine now? Indeed, the wickedness of the world was beyond belief….
Sally, so used to ministering at Kororareka, had not hesitated when Nick Flower told her about Kati. “I have locked her in my office … and there's the fellow waiting in his dirty little lugger in the stream. If anyone can stop her it's you, Mrs Lovel. The man's married,” said Flower, stern as ever, yet with anxious eyes. For long Sally had known that the big awkward child meant a good deal to Nick Flower.
“I'll do what I can,” she promised, and did it to some present purpose. But how can a girl like that ever keep good, she thought, pitifully; silent as the boatman rowed her home, and standing silent on the little Official Bay jetty long after he had moored the boat and gone away up the path. Of a morning ladies in second-best gloves and shawls did business here with the marketing Maoris, exchanging blankets and petticoats for so many kits of kumeras and onions, so many great yellow gourds and bundles of Indian corn and flax-kits full of ripe peaches.
To-night there was only old Rangitoto across the harbour, rising from the blue with the misty bloom of plums. Only a great ship going out with all its sails set, laden with ox-horns and ambergris, green hides, casks of oil and tallow, and kauri spars. The Witchcraft, perhaps, this stately ship, bearing a grim Salem witch and broomstick at her figurehead. Or the Ocean Pride. Or that fleet sailer The Chariot of Fame. Such achings they brought to exiled hearts, these bright and gallant queens of distance; racing in their whiteness against the sun, furling their sails like homing gulls for so brief a space in the purple twilight harbours of the world, growing yearly in beauty, grace, and speed since there was now so much wool to carry from Australia, so many cargoes from New Zealand. Yet, with all that beauty, men still did ugly things.
The cluck-cluck of oars sounded faint like a ghost rowing round Britomart Point. But it was no ghost rowing into the jetty through a green fragrance fanned by the wings of home-going birds. Oh, the strange lightening of the sky so that the dim West turned gold with the coming of Jermyn….
The strangeness of Jermyn stepping quietly ashore, quietly taking her hand, walking in silence with her up to the walled garden among the cherry-trees. The strangeness of walking securely as a wife with Jermyn along the rustling cabbage-tree track into the garden. Somewhat different, this, from making the virtuous promenade with Mr Lovel. Presently, thought Sally, her heart beating fit to choke her, they would begin to run and jump and sing like children waving glad hands, weaving measures….
Under the dark cherries Jermyn stopped suddenly, twisting her to him. Then with a queer roughness, which was so unlike courteous Jermyn, he took her in his arms. If she could die now, she thought with closed eyes under his kisses. If they could both die, going into Eternity without the weary years between. Darien would look after Tiffany, God, her heart pleaded, and she can darn her own stockings nicely. Tiffany wouldn't miss me much if she had Darien…. Jermyn was holding her off and the world coming back. God had not heard.
“How long is this to go on?” he demanded, harsh, abrupt.
“What, Jermyn?”
“Don't juggle with me. I can't stand it. I've come back for you, Sally. You're mine now. Not his.”
“I … I think I've been yours for ever, Jermyn. I think we must have had other lives … together. Sometimes I seem to remember…. This won't be so hard, dear, once we get used to it.”
“Used to what?”
“To … to”—oh, how difficult men always made things —“to waiting, Jermyn.”
“For what?”
“For … for the next life. I know God means us to be happy there.”
“He hasn't concerned himself much with our happiness here.” Then he took her face gently between his hands and turned it up to his long gaze. She held her breath lest the sweet enchantment of his eyes, of his strong hard palms against her skin should be gone. “Come away with me, my dear love,” he said tenderly.
She freed herself with a cry. “Jermyn! Oh, Jermyn! You don't know what you're saying.”
“Don't I? I've had time to think, haven't I? If there's any wrong in this it's yours for continuing to live with Peregrine when you love me. It is your wrong, Sally.”
“Oh, no, no. Please, Jermyn. I married him …”
“He married you before you were sixteen. And he ought to be hung for it. I've come back for you, Sally, and I don't mean to let you go again.”
“But, Jermyn … Oh, there are not the words,” cried Sally, entangled among the immensities. “Jermyn, we couldn't be happy … doing such wrong. I … I think some day we may be happy … just waiting. Don't you?”
“No, I don't. Good Lord! What a woman's idea.” He began to speak rapidly, with that same suggestion of suppressed storm that was so frightening. “Peregrine has never needed you. He's a self-contained soul rotating entirely on its own axis. He has never loved you and you'll always be outside his life.”
“I … I know,” she faltered, trembling.
“You have never loved him. You have never really lived.” Oh, what a strange terrible Jermyn staring at her like a Denunciation out of the Bible. “Lying by his side in the nights it is me you think of … long for.” Now he had his arms round her again, his cheek to hers. “My dear and only love!” he whispered. “I'll teach you what it means to be frightened with joy.”
Surely this dark weakness upon her must be death. But one doesn't die so easily. There would be fifty years … fifty. She began to cry, trying to make him understand.
“Jermyn, don't you see … this life don't really matter so much when we shall have Eternity. I always keep telling myself that. Oh,” she cried, feeling herself becoming a perfect fountain of tears, “do you think I will be able to pin a buttonhole in your coat there, Jermyn?”
“A buttonhole?” he said, frowning.
She shook her head, trying to smile. “You won't understand. I think of such silly things….”
“You have only one thing to think of now,” he said, impatiently cutting through this raffle of woman's words. “By all God's laws”—but who, he thought, was he to call thus boldly on Divinity?—“by all God's laws, you are mine, and I shall make you mine. Your heart cannot refuse me, and soon your body won't….”
She gave an inarticulate cry at that, running from him up the garden like a pale moth in the gloaming. So the moon coming radiant up the sky saw only a young man in mulberry-colour coat treading angrily among the dropped cherries.
Sally ran into the house where everything seemed to look at her with alien eyes. She ran into her bedroom, past the great dark four-poster where she slept each night with Mr Lovel, and dragged the heavy curtains away from the window. Air. I must have air, she thought, forgetting that she had just come from it and sinking on her knees since legs were so suddenly weak.
The Holy Immolation of Matrimony seemed so near and Eternity so very far. And, for all her brave words, how did she really know that Mr Lovel would not re- quire her to make the virtuous promenade with him there also? If he did … and the Bible saying that wives must always be in subjection to their husbands…. Why did I ever love at all? she cried in common with all her pale sisters who have loved to their sorrow.
In the dimness those worndown old volcanoes round Auckland were not spouting flames as they should have been. The flames (she felt, terrified) must be in herself, burning her up with love for Jermyn. Dizzily she felt her spirit going up and up with Jermyn … the man who had evoked for her this imperishable magic, this glad pain; who had swept away that vague Eternity where one did things for ever with harps and given her instead bright surety of large serene comforting Eternities—trampling, glorious Eternities with the star of joy upon their fore-heads.
“I can teach you what it is to be frightened with joy….” Oh, cruel Jermyn, to use words which conjured up such sublimity of fear. A splendid fear which she had never known, which (it seemed) women could know, hearing love as a silver trumpet in the night bidding them wake to rapture, hearing the bridegroom's call: Oh, come, my beloved, my Rose of Sharon….
Sally huddled down on the floor. What was commerce with far-off Eternities to that?
A smell of burning cloth drifted through the house. Reality, having no patience with the vapourings of women, was reasserting itself. Sally got up and went out to the kitchen, where Tiffany was ironing furiously by the light of a tallow dip.
“Oh, mamma, I wanted to get done as a surprise,” she cried. “I'm afraid I've scorched something….”
Her tawny curls stood out like a halo. Her sun-browned little face with the wide eyes was wistfully eager. Sally put the curls back from the hot forehead with a gentle hand.
“Never mind, my woman-child. It is so easy to scorch things,” she said.
II
Caroline's dinner-parties, one felt, were seldom a success, and because she had the impertinence to give one in celebration of Darien's engagement before Peregrine even thought of it this one promised to be less succssful than usual. Yet Lord Calthorpe, having once let himself go, had so heartily succumbed to the sensation that Darien felt more like Lady Hamilton than ever, wearing her diamond engagement ring and her lover's diamond locket to the dinner and using her fan to such purpose that surely Jermyn could not help being jealous.
Jermyn had come with inner rebellions. Up and down the dark harbour he had rowed himself into exhaustion last night; cursing the day that he was born, the strange fierce powers that drive a man against his conscience; determined to leave Sally for ever and yet knowing that he must come again like a moth to the light.
A thing denied has ever the greater value, and to-night Sally in her old blue gown rich with embossed flowers, withdrawn into that sweet remote enchantment which was part of her, undoubtedly had more value than any man's bright honour. An inscrutable idol, Sally, sitting beyond that hideous epergne piled with glowing peaches; a cruel idol to whom the earth itself brought flowery offerings which she flung on her gown and forgot … as she would soon forget Jermyn.
Jermyn, writhing with his misery, looked round in hatred on white shoulders and gay scarves, on all the badly-cleaned silver with which Caroline disguised the sparseness of her food, on Caroline making more than usual efforts to keep conversation on a high and ethical plane because she always found so much everywhere that needed bettering. Let her try her ethics on me, by Gad, Jermyn thought, cutting his meat fiercely.
What with the silver and the ancestors on the walls and her puce braided satin—one could do so much to freshen shabby gowns with a little more braiding—Caroline felt herself justified in the remark that she always thought the English the most civilized of all races.
“Well, don't y'know, I wish you'd define civilization, Lady Lovel,” said Calthorpe, blinking over his high stock.
“Delicacy forbids,” said Jermyn, determined to be difficult.
“I should just think it did,” said Darien, remembering what civilized people could say and do.
“I always think,” declared Caroline, who was so quickly out of her depths that one wondered if she ever was in them, “that one should say what one thinks.”
“Even if one thinks what one shouldn't say?” asked Darien, glancing at Calthorpe, who looked so insignificant beside beautiful haughty Jermyn that if it wasn't for the diamonds and the envy of all her friends one simply couldn't bear him.
“Oh, my dear! I hope I never think such things!” said Caroline.
“What things?” demanded Jermyn. “The perspicacity of ladies in knowing what they shouldn't think before they think it commands my constant admiration.”
For the first time Caroline wished the gentlemen wouldn't leave the whole burden of conversation on her since it was impossible just yet to say what she really thought about Sally. She struggled back to the ethical plane. “The thing I always think is how proud we should be of our religion because every part of this country has been first colonized by churches.”
“Oh, quite,” agreed Jermyn. “I have noticed that people are always prouder of their limitations than of their achievements.” (That drew a look from Sally, soft, reproachful. Are you proud of your limitations? it seemed to say. Gad! If she provoked him like that! What had Flower said? A woman always despises a man if….)
“England should have left us alone,” said Corny, who unfortunately had to be asked since he was one of the few rich men in the town.
“Oh, but,” cried Caroline, really scandalized, “England can never let anyone alone. She must colonize. It is her Destiny.”
“She thinks it is,” amended Jermyn.
“If Grey—” began Major Henry, rather troubled by Jermyn.
Everybody sat up. Grey seemed a queer pet for the gods to have made; but it was surely through their intervention that England had not only sent him five hundred time-expired soldiers to settle with their families round Auckland so that he could sleep safe of nights and allowed him to use hundreds of Her Majesty's forces to build walls and make streets—not only that but England had lately clapped a knighthood on his stiff head. So Governor Sir George Grey walked with Vulcan and Zeus (not even the Chronicle dared associate him with Venus), and once he was safely in the conversation he could be trusted to choke out everything else.
“‘Hail, mighty monarch!’ “began Sir Winston who had just remembered something he had been trying to think of for weeks:
Hail, mighty monarch whom desert alone
Would without birthright raise thee to the throne.
Thy virtues shine particularly nice
Ungloomed with a confinity to vice …
“That was said of George the Fourth, I believe.”
“You find our Governor's virtues particularly nice, don't you, Peregrine?” inquired Jermyn, peering past a candelabra upheld by Cupids round whose plump middles Caroline had tied chaste bows of pink ribbon.
Jermyn at a dinner-table, considered Peregrine, was apt to make people feel that they had been taking violent exercise unduly prolonged. Possibly he was drunk again, though who could get drunk on this wine…. Peregrine said with dignity, ignoring the fact that Grey had publicly snubbed him over the gold reward business: “It is under Governor Grey that Auckland district has arisen to the astonishing record of four thousand houses and over a million sheep—”
This was the way Caroline's parties always went, thought Sally, very thankful when Caroline began gathering up eyes round the table, gathering gloves, handkerchief, and feather-fan.
“Oh, la,” she cried, being as voluptuous as she could without indelicacy, “I think we will leave politics to the gentlemen.”
“Yes,” said Darien, flinging a mocking glance at Jermyn who would not accept it. “Let us leave them to the gentlemen who always know what to do.”
Jermyn, at any rate, didn't know what to do, and so Darien must teach him since if his temper to-night didn't mean jealousy she would like to know what did. So she peeped at her radiant self in all Caroline's mirrors, and sat down presently to sing for the delectation of Jermyn, whiskered officers, and other lesser fowl.
Busk ye, busk ye, my bonny bonny bride,
Busk ye, my winsome marrow.
Busk ye, busk ye, my bonny bonny bride,
And let us leave the Braes of Yarrow….
So sang Darien, ready to leave them to-morrow with Jermyn—taking Calthorpe's diamonds with her of course, since she certainly needed some recompense for what she was undergoing there. Being engaged was not all the fun it should be, and perhaps Jermyn wouldn't be either. But probably nothing was, thought Darien, feeling the necessity for philosophy in any dealings with gentlemen.
In the dining-room with its florid flock paper gentlemen (soon almost as florid with argument) were unbuttoning waistcoats and tempers, with old Barnes declaring that this would be a better world if only men kept their brains in their bellies, like the animals.
Sir Winston suddenly rediscovered Kororareka. “Our sacred fane, sirs. There the rude forefathers of our colony began … building the first boat, the first church, the first plough. The first white child born there; the first sermon, cricket-match…. Paths of glory leading not to the grave, but to….”
“Penury and Grey,” said the Major, brushing snuff from the orange velvet of his waistcoat—though who could be a dandy in these days?
But the gentlemen, who had quite enough of penury, could never have enough of Grey who, abetted by the Colonial Office, had lately crowned his infamy by setting aside the sub-governors of New Ulster and New Munster and all the infant legislative administrations. Conditions, he declared, were too complicated for separate controls. So he made himself complete lord of New Zealand, while gentlemen, who had not yet had the chance to administer anything, daily imperilled their immortal souls with blasphemy, especially after dinner.
Peregrine never blasphemed. He had had a bigger fight than he expected to get on the Common Council (welcomed with a salute of twelve guns from Fort Britomart, to say nothing of flourishes with bugles) but he still hoped for a seat on Grey's little pocket Council. For all Grey's wry political grimaces and stiffneckedness he must look round presently for men of worth.
“It ain't right that all hay for regimental horses should have to be imported,” growled old Barnes. “I cud grow tons on that land o' mine … if I cud get it surveyed an' use it.”
“You will never get it surveyed, sir,” said a stout gentleman with convictions. “Busby has been fighting for his surveys from the beginning, and so have we all. No Maori will allow surveys on land unless we can prove a clear title; and how can there be clear titles when a fellow can upset a sale because of a fire lit under a tree where his grandmother was buried forty years ago?”
“That blasted Waitangi Treaty!”
“‘The venom still remains, And the poxed nation feels it in their brains’—Dryden,” said Sir Winston, very pleased that he could recall the author of those venomous lines.
“Hay from abroad is often musty too,” said Captain O'Reilly, grimly.
“What,” demanded Major Henry, who had unlocked John's cellar some time before, “do that infernal C'lonial Office … Downin' Street duffers … know of us? Ain't we the country … body, blood, and bones. Were we not … did we not get on damned well with the Maoris before Annexation? Gentlemen,” he cried, fired with the notion and splashing brandy in all directions, “I give you No Annexation.”
It was a magnificent idea, only more than twelve years too late. Someone pointed this out, reducing the Major to tears, so that he laid his grey head down among the broken meats.
“Bloody country's goin' to the perishin' bitches,” he mourned. And here no one contradicted him.
III
Undisturbed by distracted colonists the seasons continued their stately procession; whipping warm blood into fair cheeks with the winter wind, attacking susceptible hearts with a gay onslaught of colour, of scent, of tinkling goat-bells, cattle-bells on the ferny hills of a warm evening when it was quite la mode to walk out in parties—which had a curious habit of dissolving into couples. Bishop Selwyn's palace grew some towers, and in Sally's garden scarlet verbena was impudent among tall white arum lilies. Caroline was the first to have her photograph taken by the new daguerreotype method (which prevented so many ladies from following her example), and in response to the gold reward Charles Ring discovered a few nuggets on Coromandel Peninsula, down the harbour. But the Maoris chased him off the land with no more than a handful.
Up at the barracks morose officers, always starting off on some wild-goose chase after the Maoris, became outspoken over breakfasts of rump-steak washed down by gallons of beer.
“We're always damned and drowned and starved in this foul country. Why don't Grey build us roads if he must send us into it?” (In the seclusion of the mess a man could air his mind.) “Why don't Grey get us the convicts the Colonel is always begging for? They could make us roads…. Why don't Grey import Chinese, as that Canterbury fellow Fitzgerald suggests? Why don't England….”
“Bah,” said O'Reilly, flicking dust off his Wellingtons, “England would give the country legislation to-morrow, but you don't catch our Lord High Panjandrum yielding an inch of his powers.”
“Pass the beer,” said Lord Calthorpe, sourly. “We'll be dry enough to-morrow.”
“We're never dry in the bush,” said a lieutenant, inviting curses since surely everyone must know that on the morrow Calthorpe would leave his fair lady for months of unmentionable hardship … although he certainly did his best to mention them to Darien when she presented him with a pair of carpet-slippers worked patiently by Tiffany, who would do anything for her.
“Give us a kiss, my charmer,” said Calthorpe, taking more from those full red lips than Darien could easily bear. So she pushed him off, straightening her white neck-ruffle. Men did maul so.
“Good-bye, and don't get your feet wet,” she said, feeling that now she could concentrate on Jermyn, who was being so peculiar that he must be mad in love with her and didn't dare say so. I suppose I shall have to say it myself. Men always leave the hard things for women, she thought.
And now there was this chatter about Haini Fleete. Auckland ladies did not call on stately Haini, who was a wealthy chieftainess in her own right. But the proprieties must be observed. “Let him marry her properly, my dear,” said the ladies, handsomely, “and we would have little objection. But it would not be right otherwise. We must keep up the standard at all costs.” So they said, heroically shutting their eyes to Maori wives in all directions and inviting the gentlemen to dinner. But Corny, said Jermyn, knew what he was about, since the chiefs would certainly confiscate Haini's land if he married her.
Meanwhile, down in the flax-gully, Hemi asked a thirteen-year-old Tiffany to marry him, and Tiffany told Roddy about it on a dusky evening in the attic.
“A Maori marriage is so easy. Just four feet under a mat. But I didn't want to, Roddy, and mamma wouldn't like it.”
“I should say not,” cried Roddy, getting quite hot in a new consciousness of his white blood. “Monstrous wrong of Hemi to ask you. Of course,” he mumbled, getting hotter with the thought of slender tawny little Eriti Fleete, “it's different for a man.”
“Of course,” said Tiffany, wondering why. But everything was different for a man. She sighed, knitting her straight dark brows. Poor Hemi had been so splendid in the bush-gully, letting himself go with the fiery eloquence of the Maori. “… Listen, Tihane, to the call of aroha … of love. Soon I shall go from here to learn to be a chief and wear the mat and huia feather. Soon I shall sing ‘Red plumes of the kaka’ while I go with my warriors to the battle. But always will remain my deep love for you, Tihane. Ina koia tera….”
It was quite hard to resist dear Hemi being so melodi- ously dominant. But he went very well in verses, even if she didn't want him under a mat. Indeed, he went so surprisingly well that Roddy only had to alter a few words before he took the result to Jermyn. “It's meant for poetry though it don't rhyme,” said Roddy, blushing. “Tiffy made most of it. Do you think it is poetry, sir?”
Since Bible quotations, Maori waiatas, and translations from old Chinese songs found in Major Henry's books were so finely mixed in the children by now, Jermyn need not have been so nonplussed.
“Where the devil did you infants learn all this, Roddy?”
Roddy looked bewildered. From earliest Kororareka days he and Tiffany, along with the little Fleetes, had assisted at births, deaths, and tangis, since every important Maori event takes place among interested spectators in the open, and no Maori has ever been taught that the natural is immodest. Tiffany and Roddy, though submitting perforce to English notions, were still iconoclasts at heart.
“All what? It is quite true, sir.”
“It reads like it. Good Lord …” said Jermyn, frowning.
Elegant verse was the order of the day and all papers had given much space to Mr James Fitzgerald's “Night Watch of the Charlotte Jane,” written while the Canterbury Pilgrims were still at sea and having a kind of homesick courage:
Here's a health to the land we are leaving,
And the land we're going to.
Everyone could understand that. To every exile the land they were leaving would be for ever the first, the dearer land. But here (so far as Jermyn knew) was the first voice of those who were no exiles, to whom New Zealand was the only land they knew. They knew the Maori too, egad, thought Jermyn, reading:
Why did you bear me under the dark totaras, my mother,
With sad warriors leaning on their taiahas and the white men drinking in the town?
We are losing our land and we cannot marry the white girls, my mother.
The wind came out of the bush and through the tussock, saying:
What is the use? You were better in the womb, Maori warrior.
“Devil take it! You have no right to know all this, Roddy,” said Jermyn, reading through to the end.
“But it is quite true,” persisted Roddy. “Is it poetry, sir?”
“I should call it so.” Jermyn stared at Roddy, feeling that he had never realized Sally's children before. Yet there was in these verses much of that Sally who was always peering through wistful enchanted mists. Much of her in Roddy, although he had already that sapling height which the English stock seems to breed in a new country—probably maturing too quickly for tough fibre. Nothing in Roddy with his flute, his poetry, the dreams in his brown eyes to march with practical Peregrine and his founding of families.
These verses would plague Peregrine like the deuce. Jermyn said:
“I'll print these, Roddy, though they'll need some editing. We English are prudes, though you and Tiffany don't condescend to notice it. And I will put your name to it.”
“Oh, Uncle Jermyn! Oh, will you really?” Roddy was glowing like a sunrise. “But it's mostly Tiffy's, you know. Could you put her name on them too?”
“Certainly. And don't tell anyone. It will be a surprise, you see.”
But even Jermyn was unprepared for the surprise of a Peregrine who considered any publicity of women nothing short of profanation. Almost speechless under a shower of amused and somewhat unpleasant congratulations, he carried the Chromcle home and shook it in Sally's face.
“Is this … this indecency your doing?” he gobbled. “Where is your sense of modesty, of … of all that you owe to my name? Roddy shall have a good thrashing, the maundering young idiot, but as for my daughter … Good God, it is too much!” cried Peregrine.
Frightened Sally read with awe. An unexpected something leapt up in her rejoicing. Her own children had the words she never had for that lovely ghost-like haunting in her life. “They wrote it?” she cried.
“They have written the most outrageous and impudent indecency,” declared Peregrine, getting his breath back. He raged about the room like a judgment, shaking the paper. “My daughter! The first time a female Lovel has ever been so abandoned as to get herself into print. Even in death-notices she should be merely ‘the wife of.’ 'Pon my soul…. Where is the girl? Tiffany!”
Tiffany came running. A particularly buoyant and charming Tiffany, thought Sally, her bright hair snooded back with a lilac ribbon, her lissom young body (growing so tall) very slim above the spread skirts of lilac cambric.
“What have you to say to this, miss?” demanded Peregrine, thrusting the paper at her. Tiffany's clear glance flashed over the page. Sally saw her colour rising as the ecstasy of creation approved descended on her. She clasped her hands, shining like a star.
“Oh. It's ours,” she breathed.
Then Peregrine became so frantic that Sally wept like a river. Did not Tiffany realize what she had done? Was she really ignorant of the fact that even the most abandoned of women rarely had their names in the papers, and when they did get them there other women were not supposed to know it. Did she not realize that she was now branded for ever?
“Branded!” he cried, shaking her by the shoulder. “Never imagine, miss, that there is any worth in this … this indecent rubbish. Why, the two of you can't cook up a rhyme between you. Your uncle Jermyn has merely used you as a means to insult me….”
“Oh, no, no,” cried Sally before she could stop.
He turned, staring down on her with those black close-set eyes.
“And may I ask what you know about it? Are you in the plot too?”
“No, Mr Lovel,” murmured Sally, feeling how white she must be looking.
“Then kindly do not interfere. Verses! Dragging the Lovel name into vulgar publicity for verses! My daughter! And you cannot even rhyme! Get the cane.”
“Oh, please, Mr Lovel …” cried Sally.
“By heaven,” cried Peregrine, forgetting his gentility for once, “I've a good mind to whip you too. Tiffany! Get the cane.”
The Holy Immolation of Matrimony was hard to swallow during the next days while Tiffany consumed bread-and-water behind locked doors, and Roddy had three thrashings “to knock the nonsense out of him,” and Caroline openly hinted that she had expected something of the sort now, and Mr Lovel went about looking like the whole Book of Martyrs.
Indeed, Jermyn had done much mischief, the harem instinct being still strong among the English gentry, who said continually, “How terrible for the poor girl to get herself so talked of,” and then talked the more. Urged by Caroline, John came in to be quite sententious about the sanctity of womanhood to Jermyn, who laughed in his face.
“My eye and Betty Martin! What a storm in a tea-cup. If Peregrine will produce children he must take the consequences.”
“But … a girl …” protested John, tugging unhappily at his beard, and wishing Caroline would talk to Jermyn herself. But she had been so mysterious, saying that poor Tiffany needed such care.
“A girl is merely a soul which has had the ill-luck to be confined in a female body,” said Jermyn lightly. Through these days Peregrine was doing Jermyn's wooing for him more effectively than he could do it himself, and so Jermyn felt quite merciless. This would teach Sally what sort of husband she had chosen for her children and (since Peregrine had temporarily forbidden Jermyn the house) she would have plenty of time to think of it.
“What is the matter with you all,” he demanded of puzzled John, “that you don't realize the value of a definite new voice in a new land? Poets make a country, not politicians. Do you think all the politicians in the world could keep alive Ireland's hate of England if it wasn't for ‘The Wearing of the Green’? ‘An' if the colour we must wear is England's cruel Red—’ I'll warrant you, John, the word ‘cruel’ has never been used so effectively before or since….”
IV
When the first whippings were over Roddy had gone upstairs through the warm brown shadows to ask how Tiffany did. For himself he was very sore, and uncertain if it had been worth while. But the answering little voice, though weary, was surprisingly happy. A strange mounting sense of escape into freer air was round Tiffany kneeling at the keyhole on the other side of the locked door in the dark attic.
“But we've done it, Roddy. Don't you see? We've got the splendidness of knowing we've done something worth printing. He can't take that away ever. We—” she struggled for the right words, “we're people now, Roddy dear. We're us.”
“He says we're never to do it again,” murmured Roddy, unable to rise to that height.
“He can't stop us,” cried Tiffany, shocked when the words were out but instinctively knowing that she and Roddy had arrived at something that must be held on to. “I mean … he can stop the printing, but he can't stop us making poetry in our minds. He can't, Roddy … and I'm making one now.”
Tiffany being a pioneer to this extent was rather terrifying but comforting. Roddy knew just how she looked behind the locked door, with her eyes lit like candles and her russet hair standing out and her soft chin up, and he couldn't be beaten by her.
“Then I will too. But he'll try to stop us, Tiffy.” Incalculable persons, fathers; begetting you and then disliking what you did for ever after. Roddy, so fresh from an example of Peregrine disliking him, wondered why parents had children. “He's not starving you, Tiffy?”
“Only bread-and-water for indecency. But Aunt Darien brought a custard. If you could throw me up some peaches through the window….”
Roddy threw them up and went to spread lesson-books on his bed, winking away a few tears lest Brian, perched on the iron end of it, should see. Brian had such ways of making a fellow feel a fool, and his talk was always far more grown-up than Roddy's.
“Lord, what a fantique women make over catching a man,” said Brian, swinging back and forth like a little black monkey. “Madam Darien is proud as Punch over that stale little fish of hers.”
“Ladies don't catch men,” said Roddy, very certain that mamma had never tried to catch papa.
“That's all you know! Wait a few years, my boy, and they'll all be after you, as they're after Uncle Jermyn— he's too fly for the lot of 'em. Not that I ain't fond of the dear creatures,” declared Brian, remembering good fun with Uncle Lovel's girls, who squeaked so when you squeezed 'em. But the only girl Roddy liked was that Eriti Fleete. A nigger, thought Brian, who had already absorbed Auckland's notion of Maoris.
Roddy went on silently with his lessons. Never, he thought, had he felt so mixed up. He was still disorganized, going next day to float in the harbour between blue sky and blue milk-warm water, with a few white clouds like small ships sailing high. How wonderful it would be to float there for ever. To know for ever Beauty towering about him like celestial castles; to hear for ever wild birds making fleet sweet music across the water; to see for ever flying violet lights on old shaggy Rangitoto, feel for ever silver ripples running along his flanks until he lay in a bath of silken silver. To unripe, romantically-developing Roddy, Beauty was still a continual summer in the heart, although papa made ugliness everywhere.
“Curse Lovels,” said Roddy suddenly; then swam out and flung on his clothes in a hurry, running along the cliffs towards Orakei pa. As with Tiffany, the publishing of that poem had done something to him, and if he was not yet ready for fight at least he was rebellious. Always, declared Major Henry, something faintly wild in that brown gaze of Roddy's. Eyes of a Galahad, a Villon … who could tell? Life—and Peregrine—would discover that for him.
On the low cliff above Orakei pa a crowd of brown youngsters were at the moari—that monstrous Giant Stride whereon Maori warriors practise swinging themselves over ramparts into an enemy pa. But there were only children to-day on the moari; going round in huge leaps on the long flax-ropes; dropping over the cliff into the warm sea. All natives dive feet-first and all whites head-first because, said Uncle Jermyn, civilization allows nothing to be done in the natural way.
A bunch of ponies tied to flax-bushes told that all the Fleetes were here. Roddy stood watching the young naked bodies fly out against blue sky. There was Hemi, his muscles rippling, the cage of his ribs showing. Hemi was fast shooting up into a big man; but little Peto still kept his round child-belly, and Hori was thick-shouldered and black and hairy like an ape. There was chubby Rona, sleek as a seal. And there Eriti with her slim tawny limbs and her big soft tawny eyes, like a Syrian maid out of the Bible. Swift small-breasted Eriti, a yellow clout about her middle, the narrow hips and shoulders of her flowing like a song, like a sweet music. Roddy flung off his clothes, caught at a flying rope and followed her.
Eriti looked back, her long black hair streaming like a banner, and Roddy was gaining on her with great strides. Round and round they went, leaving the ground like birds, touching at longer intervals, and now her black hair blew in Roddy's face. Wonder filled him; tenderness, and a strange new desire. For the first time, he wanted to put his arms about this flying miracle and hold it close. Perhaps down in the water she would let him….
Now she was gone, dropping in a straight clear line through the gentle blueness. Now he was going, with the wind in his hair blowing it up as though he were going up to heaven, not down. Now the warm gay water had him, and there was she, smiling….
“Eriti …”