Promenade
V
V
Hedges had brought the native birds to the Plains, and on this autumn afternoon the gardens at Bendemeer were full of them; little green white-eyes, flycatchers skimming along under the veranda in search of a late meal, small native robins with black glossy coats and plump saffron waistcoats hopping on the lawns all tawny with leaves of oak and sycamore fallen in last night's frost. In the shade frost was still as white as the flower-bunches in the laurustinus fence … and very emphatic in my bones, thought Tiffany, gathering a handful of the wine-red button chrysanthemums, and walking on down the frosty path, crisp as biscuits underfoot, and out through the side-gate to hot sun and the woodpile.
The woodpile of grubbed gorse-roots and driftwood and broken branches sprawled everywhere, and the station-hands got good ratting from it.
We really should clean it up, thought Tiffany, feeling that she really ought to clean up her own affairs too. She couldn't go on for ever, like the woodpile. Darien couldn't, though she always believed she could … never accepting old age, as Tiffany had accepted it. A difficult art to learn, this growing old; this giving up riding, or going out in the air without hat and shawl, this being gracious when Prue and the maids ran errands for you. Darien (her feet loose in slippers, her hands in mittens as she crouched over the fire) still talked largely of buying new prunellas, satin slippers, purple kid boots to fit a neat ankle, white kid gloves … size sixes….
“I am not what I have to be,” declared Darien, defying time and rheumatism and all the other bogies, talking of all she would do with Nick Flower's legacy yet. A strange, rather tragic liaison that had been between Nick Flower and Darien, neither bringing anything but money and money's worth to birth, and both so proud of their bastard child. Yet Darien, at least, had helped the country, and now Rick and Annot were bearing at Lovel Hall the burden she had so reluctantly laid down.
A valiant soul, Darien, according to her lights, thought Tiffany, sitting on a log of the woodpile to watch a lark tossing his spray of song into the tall dazzling blue. So many valiant souls, and all fraying off at last into loose ends, out of which God must some day make the completed pattern, since certainly no one else ever could … unless (as Roddy had believed) we went on and made it elsewhere. Oh, this mysterious fragile lovely bubble called life, which one couldn't really share with another any more than one could share a bubble. Did it break when old breath ceased to fill it, or re-form in fresher gayer patterns, like the glass bits in Sophia's kaleidoscope?
A heartening thought, that, for some of us. But what of those of us like papa, of whom Jermyn had once quoted lines written two hundred years ago … and as true then as they always will be:
Who to the world is popularly known,
And dies a stranger to himself alone.
How surprised and embarrassed most of us will be when introduced by and by to those strangers who are ourselves….
Tiffany was glad to turn from that unprofitable stranger who would be herself to a masculine stranger alighting with dignity, though rather stiffly, from the hotel car pulling up by the back-gate, coming towards her in all the splendour of homburg hat and fashionable ulster. She got up, feeling that her plain brown dress and old brown hat pulled on anyhow were so palpably below the notice of this large elegant old gentleman that he must be coming to address the woodpile.
“Tihane!” he said, dropping a silver-mounted stick, holding out both brown wrinkled hands. “It is you, Tihane?”
“Hemi … oh, my dear….” No more words possible for Tiffany, feeling all the past rising up at her like this. Holding his hands, she bent solemnly forward, solemnly gave to Hemi the old Maori salutation of pressing noses, which she had never vouchsafed to him before.
Then they sat down on the woodpile, still holding hands, still smiling foolishly at each other. He looks much more Maori now that he's so brown and wrinkled, she thought. But his nose is the real royal kaka-beak. “Oh, how did you find me, Hemi? And why did you want to after all these years? Can I do anything for you, my dear? Though I fear I'm rather past doing anything for anybody.”
She could, he said, do much by just letting him look at her, since she was still his beautiful Tihane. And it was only when he came just now to the South that he had found her. “I have come to see the Maoris of Kaiapoi and Little River. I am in Parliament now, Tihane, and you know that the Maori ministers have to look after all the Maoris.”
“Parliament? How splendid, Hemi! I'm afraid I don't read the papers as I used to. Now you can fight for your own people there. And do you stun everybody with your oratory as you used to stun me in the bushgully?”
“I never stunned you far enough. I never had you under my mat,” he said, his dark sunken eyes on her with something of their once deep burning. Then he shook his head as though putting that away. “I am many grandfathers now, Tihane, and some of my grandsons are fighting with other Maoris in this great war in Europe … where I hope they will not shame their Begats,” said Hemi sternly.
“I have a grandson there too. His father lives in England. Oh, Hemi,” said Tiffany rather forlornly, “I was just nicely getting used to being old, and now you come and mix me all up.”
“I shall never think you old. But you were right not to come under my mat, Tihane. Always it is pain to me that I am two races. Never should pakeha and Maori mix. Te Whiti knew that.”
Tiffany remembered about Te Whiti, who had been the last of the real Maori troubles in the early 'eighties. A prophet, just as there would always be Maori prophets now that the big chiefs were gone. And (for the first time) a prophet who did not want to kill.
“A good man, Tihane. He saw true. We Maoris think he saw the Christ. And the Christ said: ‘Come ye apart, my brown men, for the ways of the pakeha are not for you.’ And you know how they were not. We could not understand. And we grew bitter … and drunken … and we despaired. There was a Sir Donald McLean in the Parliament, and he did much for the Maori. But Te Whiti did more … for he and his followers were imprisoned in their hundreds and they would not lift a hand.”
“I read about that. There were not enough prisons for them—just sitting down and refusing to live with the pakeha….”
“I was one. It was funny. The pakeha were all so puzzled. They could not believe that after all they have done for us … and it has been much, the Maori did not want to live with pakeha men. Some do … but they are not the best. But now we have got reserves, and the Maori can be Maori still, and the Urewera is Maori—though it is not much, being all cold forests and mountains. And they pay us well for the land they take. And in the Parliament I and others can do something. But nothing can give us back our warriors and our chiefs and our gods. I do not think the Maori believes in anything, now. Nor is he a proud gentleman any longer.”
Hemi's careful English had still the rolling Maori gutturals. When he let himself go, grew impassioned for his race, this old man, who was a Maori gentleman, would be very effective in Parliament. Tiffany cried:
“Oh, Hemi, I feel we should ask your pardon for so much … so much….”
“Well, I do not like jellies and custards at a tangi, instead of bullocks roasted whole. Nor do I like a Maori wife to paint her cheeks, instead of having her lips tat- tooed,” said candid Hemi. “But that is civilization, and we Maoris can be civilized when we choose.” He looked at her, half shy, half imperative. “Please take off your hat, Tihane, so I may see your hair.”
“It's white now,” said Tiffany, pulling off her hat.
“Never mind.” But he was clearly disappointed. “I shall always see it bronze, like the fern in the sun. Now we shall sing ‘Red plumes of the kaka.’”
“My dear, I've not a scrap of voice left.”
“We will sing,” said Hemi, who hadn't had hundreds of imperious Begats for nothing.
They tried, breaking down in laughter that was near to tears. “Red Plumes” gone, like so much else. “The Maoris sing ‘Little Brown Jug’ instead,” said Hemi, who (it seemed) must also be gone. “There is a train to catch, and a minister must visit his constituents,” said Hemi, shaking hands like an English gentleman, stepping into the motor-car, driving away with the past sixty years in his pocket.
Tiffany sat still on the woodpile until the sun went down behind Mesopotamia—which was what Samuel Butler had chosen to call that wild region of mountains and glaciers and gullies when he lived there. Mesopotamia would never be tame, and neither would Tiffany—though she had believed she was until Hemi came stirring up the past again.
So many great things she had hoped to do … and none of them done, except the ordinary female function of carrying on the race. So many years since she had read her sheaf of verses for the last time; laughed and cried over them, and burned them. Too full of ardencies and hopes and fears for a woman who—though she might have the vote—was still expected by this country to use it only for the advancement of man. Some day (Roddy had said) men and women will realize that they are the two halves of the whole and pull together, instead of against each other. But Roddy was long dead in far-away Tibet. And Jerry was dead, and Rick was Sir Roderick now….
So many ghosts, though Roddy had stoutly scouted ghosts. “Good Lord,” Roddy had said, his brown eyes all gay and shining, “if you imagine we're going to peter out into that kind of thing you have a big bump coming, my dear. Swarms of lives … all the little mammy's Eternities ahead of us yet,” said Roddy, prepared to march on them with his flute playing a merry music. So he would find his dear love there. And mamma would find Jermyn, coming back with eager feet from his long straying. And poor anxious Sophy would find something better than her curios—which Darien had sold for quite a sum after Sophy's death, although the money hadn't gone to missions….
A fine creed, Roddy's, though Tiffany wasn't always certain of it yet, what with Buddha and Osiris and the others all pointing different ways. But (said Roddy, who seemed so much nearer than dear old solid Brant, now that Tiffany was less occupied by fleshly things) they all point to the future … which is an Eternity big enough to settle our problems for us….
The winter sun had sunk behind the great snowy ramparts and shadows of tall trees lay across the woodpile. Tiffany tried to jump up; felt the twinges in her limbs, and laughed, going in to Darien, who would never be occupied with other than fleshly things and who was very cross with Tiffany for not bringing the gentleman in to see her.
“So few of them on the Plains now. All these damned little farmers crowding in with their little patches. He looked quite a beau, and it was vastly mean of you to keep him to yourself, Tiffy. Who was he?”
“Hemi Fleete,” said Tiffany, smiling as she put one button chrysanthemum in a vase. Hemi had taken all the rest.
“Fleete? Don't remember. We've had so many beaux, haven't we?” said Darien, cheering up at the memory, and battering the fire with the poker. Few things she had the strength to batter now, this old Darien … who had returned to the elegancies with a silk gown and a scarlet shawl dangling silken fringes. I've always wanted to wear scarlet, but I couldn't till my hair turned, she had once told a shocked Clara. Mind you bury me in scarlet. I've never had enough of it.
Prue brought Darien's egg-nog and arranged the cushions in the big chair. “If you'd had more spunk you'd not be doing this,” said Darien viciously. “Why the devil wouldn't you be a sensible girl and marry all the men I found for you?”
Prue stood smiling with her long lips—which were still that wonderful dark red, though her smooth hair had streaks of grey.
“I'd have preferred going into Parliament. But I hadn't the education or the money.”
“Nobody has any education now. But I'd have lent you the money. I could afford it … though we're not so rich as we were, and Rick hasn't my eye for a sheep. Of course one couldn't expect that. It is genius,” said Darien, complacently, sipping the egg-nog, while Prue returned to the kitchen and her imaginings. Open the gate wide, said Darien to St Peter. Here's a genius and I bet you don't see many. And give me a gold halo and sprinkle some star-dust on my wings. I can afford to pay for it.
Dear Darien. As though any of us could afford to pay for all we want.
“Prue always puts a little more brandy in this than you do, Tiffy,” said Darien, sipping with relish. “The only one of John's bunch with sense. Do you remember Linda and Caroline going into black when Queen Victoria died? You don't catch me doing it, I told them. She didn't know how to govern New Zealand. Your father didn't either … messing everything up. I didn't go into black when they died. And I'm to be buried in scarlet. Don't forget.”
“I won't,” promised Tiffany, smiling as Prue came in with the lamp.
“And you can publish my diary then. It'll tell posterity the truth. It'll tell all that women do in making a new country … though Janet is damn slow about getting her grand-daughters married. If it hadn't been for me she'd never have been married herself. How old is Sybil? Eighteen? Eighteen, and not married? Good God, I must see to it at one. Prue, draw me up a list of all the eligibles in the district and I'll give a party … though heaven knows men are not what they used to be. No manners now….”
“I think Sybil wants to go to England and study art,” said Tiffany.
“Bah! She don't know what's good for her. There's no art greater than knowing how to manage men … though one mustn't take them seriously. I never did, and see where I've got to. Tiffy,” cried Darien, sitting up, her eyes glowing again, “look up a date at once. My rheumatism will be all right by next month, and I bet I can dance Sir Roger with any of you. I'll give a party….”