Promenade

II

II

Where Peregrine did not find chances he made them, thought Jermyn, witnessing on one of his flying visits from Wellington and Sydney Peregrine's conquest or little blue Mechanic's Bay, already so full of shipbuilders that it couldn't abide another. But Peregrine bought out one builder, ruined a second, went partners with a third (hadn't Jermyn told the Major that our Peregrine had a Quality?) and settled down to brisk and elegant competition with Niccol, Graham, and other established kings of the sea. Soon there was a lovely clipper on his stocks, and rafts of brown kauri-logs lying offshore, while many of the thirty-foot, sharp-pointed whaling-boats, painted the same pale blue as the sea, came from the yard of Lovel & Brackley.

Auckland was far too full of laws, taxes, and Little Committees, declared Peregrine, getting on most of the committees at once to keep them in order. Now he was on the Harbour Board too, said Major Henry, marvelling; but Jermyn (who looked so much older and handsomer, with those little side-whiskers a darker golden-brown than his hair) shrugged, remarking that it was Peregrine's Jovian certainty that did it. “He could always bamboozle folk. And he is such a perfect gentleman,” said Jermyn.

Major Henry (who bragged about Peregrine now that he was providing such good pickings for all) did not care for Jermyn's tone and said so. But Jermyn laughed, going up the hill to call on Sally, whom he hadn't seen for a month of Sundays. Yet, curiously, she had hovered in his mind like an elusive fragrance ever since he had last seen her.

For all his light handling of life the unease of a rest- less boy had only developed the greater unease of the matured man in Jermyn. Sydney with its charming young ladies and its friendly newspaper offices was not enough for him. Nor was the bush enough, so lovely and so darkly terrible with its ancientry of vast trees making wizard patterns of the stars, its subtle scents and shadows turning to poetry in a man's soul. Nor camp-fire talk and ribaldry, nor the joy that comes of good stuff written under stress and sweat and acclaimed by one's fellow-men. All Dead Sea apples, thought Jermyn, luxuriating in a young man's disillusions.

Supremely self-centred as Darien, whose incarceration he had heard of with shouts of laughter, Jermyn opened Mr Peregrine Lovel's handsome gate and went up between sweetpeas and roses (the witching ladies) to sit with Sally in a dim-lit room. Witchery here too in the delicate dimness; a remoteness about Sally with her bent brown head by the candle, her pale hands busy in some dark work, the vague flower-like spread of her lavender gown. Sally might any moment rise like a spirit and float away, he felt, trying to nail her to earth with talk of things … any things. Even as a weary work-hunted little grub up at Kororareka there had been a queer stability in Sally, and now he wanted stability more than anything else. And what were women for if not to give to men what they desired?

Sally wouldn't know the Beach now, he told her. Since men had reconstructed it and called it Russell it would never be a randy girl again. And Heke, a royal rebel still, sat defeated in his pa.

“No more hakas in the north now, Sally. The English have spoiled all those wild war-dances there. You remember the hakas on the hills?” In silence she remembered that strange night of shadowy faces, riding knights, and the inchoate gods behind them all: gods who came again and again to trouble her waking dreams…. But Jermyn must tell her of himself; of his successes, and presently he was talking with a colour and flow of words so different from Mr Lovel's precise sentences that she could have laughed for joy. Yet one must not laugh at this dear eager Jermyn with the tawny reflections from his coat bringing such lights into the brown eyes, with his masculine ways (so different from Mr Lovel's) making her feel so different too.

“You've made me feel so young. Isn't it funny?” she cried, dimpling. And then, with the Major's old-fashioned gallantry, he stooped and kissed her hand. A strange troubling charm in this artless Sally, he thought, going up to the barracks, where young officers made him very welcome and told him all the scandal of the town.

Jermyn could talk scandal too, since it was la mode. They drank milk-punch by the gallon until dawn, when those who were able put those who were not under the pump. Jermyn, having been under the pump, was cursed by Major Henry when he got home. “Good God, boy! You're a Lovel and can't hold your liquor,” cried the Major, wishing he'd been there to show them.

Jermyn had news. The barracks said gun-running was rife in the midlands. So Peregrine hadn't scotched it. Yet the little wars were valuable deterrents to an England clamouring to send convicts, although one allowed that the wars were a shocking nuisance to those who wanted to get on with developing the country….

To Nick Flower it was all grist to his mill of grinding down gentlemen who wouldn't recognize him as one, so that he never forgot his bar sinster nor the heirloom ring on Peregrine Lovel's finger. Grimly he was working for money (since money buys everything); smuggling guns from as far off as New York, taking up the I.O.U.'s of gay young rips until Auckland would have been enchanted by a peep into the locked safe in his office. Money had bought him into gentlemen's clubs, though not into their houses. But that would come, he thought, passing Mrs Williams' young Amazons on the hills with their riding- master, collecting whole bouquets of soft glances from innocent misses fluttered by so large and personable a man.

“Like a Viking. Who can he be?” sighed Emma Stokes afterward, turning her eyes romantically to the ceiling. Darien sat on a bed, contemplating her feet. It was not for these fools to know that Nick Flower had shod them thrice. She was the Symposium's model young lady now, and making as good capital out of that as she had out of the Beach. Now she rose silently, and began practising her curtsy, so innocently unconscious of the bright chattering parterre of maidens that she tricked them all. Indeed, if it hadn't been for this constant game of trickery she would have kicked the dust of the damned place from her shoes in a week.

But I am making myself flawless for Jermyn, thought Darien, who was not her father's daughter for nothing and had to have a motive to live up to. So she rose and sank like a buoyant wave; stood flushed and sweet as a daisy before the battery of admiring eyes.

“Oh, my loveliest, what would I give to curtsy like you,” gushed Sarah Wells, all emotion. “I vow the Queen isn't so graceful.”

“It's only her long legs,” said Elvira Carson, being short and fat. Darien blushed modestly at the mention of legs, and began doing such things with a fan (though only the mirror at Lovel Hall knew what she could do when no one was about) that the young ladies sighed enviously and went to practising themselves, quite unknowing that in the matrimonial race so soon to begin they would all be her enemies.

Darien knew. She would have Jermyn, and she would have all the others whom Major Henry had promised … and deserved them too after all those loathsome hours of elegant conversation, of curtsying until her legs ached, lying strapped on backboards, managing her skirts (foul work now that five petticoats were de rigueur and the flannel and the quilted satin ones so heavy), learning how to faint like a lady….

“All females faint,” said high-nosed Mrs Williams (who knew her world), intimating further that in order to touch eligible and experienced male hearts it was quite necessary not to do it like a charwoman. In spite of daily tightening of staylaces Darien found fainting difficult and quite revolting … since how could you know what gentlemen were feeling if you had to keep your eyes shut?

“I do my best,” she told Sally, coming meekly home for week-ends. “But there is a vast deal to learn and mathematics make me feel so humble.”

To Sally a humble Darien constantly vanishing from visitors was so unnatural that she fell on tears and proclaimed the matter tragic. “With all your high spirits and gaiety, to lose them so! My poor, poor darling….”

But Sally was far too simple to be trusted. It was better to say gently that she supposed she was growing wiser, and slip away like gleaming water to become wiser yet by a little quiet practice on Roddy and Brian, who fought each other daily for her smiles and received more whippings than ever.

The two boys rode over the hill to school now, which at least had the virtue of shortening morning prayers; but Tiffany still endured life in an anguish of starched sun-bonnets, lessons, and rules for every hour of the day. Daughters, although negligible in a man's scheme of values, did exist and therefore must be disciplined as much as wives, thought Peregrine, trying to do his best by them all, even though he was so occupied with a troubled world where governors never knew what would happen next and the Colonial Office was trying to make it happen all the time.