Promenade
Chapter III
Chapter III
In the little lean-to which Sally had made so pretty for her with pink glazed-calico petticoats round the packing-case dressing-table and wash-stand, a pink crocheted wool comforter on the bed, and pictures cut from English illustrated magazines on the walls, Darien was pulling on the last pair of all the satin slippers Sally had brought from Home and finding them quite as much too tight as they had been last week. So thoughtless of Sally not to guess that Darien would grow the bigger of the two.
But, pinch or not, they must go on for the dinner-party. Darien smoothed down her soft creamy folds of India muslin and stood up. Sally's best gown, but she liked Darien to wear it since Darien couldn't make her own and Sally had no time with so many babies. Darien had no mind to look a fright, even if she wasn't so handsome as Sally had been … before the babies came.
The small looking-glass on the wall tossed back a pink-and-white face below auburn curls too short for ringlets and impudently tied up with a narrow blue ribbon. Darien took down the glass and studied her features carefully, since there was something in her somewhere which attracted men and she never could find out what it was. One might call her eyes green and her hair red and be done with it … but men wouldn't be done with it.
“Is it my mouth? That has a ravishing curve. Or perhaps my eyebrows?” she had once asked Nick Flower, who had laughed his quick harsh laugh and said: “You're as the devil made you, Darien. Don't meddle with his work.”
Perhaps I have a fragrance, she thought, sniffing at her slender girlish arms. Certain smells made flies and bees wild for them … as Toby and Nat Graham were wild for Darien. They were only boys, but Darien could attract men too. All but Jermyn. With interest she watched the soft lines of her face hardening in the mirror. This must be what it meant to have the grande passion, since Jermyn was the only one she cared two pins about. He was far too beautiful and too popular to be wasted on missionary daughters who taught flat-nosed little Maoris in Sunday School and couldn't possibly make him tingle all over as Darien could make the Graham boys tingle.
“When I'm with you I can't think what I'm doing, Darien,” Nat was saying all the time, his brown eyes like a dog begging. If she could just once get Jermyn where he couldn't think what he was doing she'd grab him … and then let Celia Gray or Amy Mathers get him away if they could!
“Darien!” Darien stood still. Perhaps Sally would find someone else to do whatever it was she wanted done. But a second and third call took her reluctantly though the living-room (where they had all slept on fern during those first nights long ago) and into the lean-to, where Sally was bathing the babies. No big new house yet, since Mr Lovel was going to move to Auckland some day … and how Darien wished he'd be quick about it.
Roddy and Tiffany were already in their cots, jumping about in their long nightgowns and jabbering Maori to the chiefs Jermyn had painted for them on the scrim wall. Roddy had a yellow head and brown eyes like Jermyn. Some day he too would break hearts….
In the heavy wooden tub, coopered by the Beach carpenter, Brian and Baby Jerry were still splashing, and steam had made Sally's hair limper than ever. Her ringlets had gone long ago, but even the soft side-folds were ragged on either side of the thin face under the crooked cap. No woman could attract a man when she looked like that, but since it wouldn't be right for Sally to attract anyone perhaps it was all for the best.
Some of the tiredness went out of Sally seeing Darien so lightsome and lovely in the flickering candle-light. Darien was her very own. The only thing in the world really her own, since Mr Lovel never forgot that the children belonged to him. Rules and rules and rules laid down by Mr Lovel for the children's welfare. Such a very thorough person, Mr Lovel; and so kind of a gentleman busy carving civilization out of the wilderness to occupy himself with the arithmetic of a four-year-old Roddy.
“Darien dearest … if you wouldn't mind … there are just the two now to be dried and put into bed, and if I don't go Ani is sure to mix the sauces with the gravy.”
“Well, if you don't mind your best gown getting wet,” said Darien, resignedly spreading a towel on her knees and taking up the kicking Brian … who was so absurdly like a miniature Mr Lovel that no one could resist spanking him. Darien didn't resist … and so Ani had to put them to bed after all.
God (thought Sally, who never had time to go to church) having planned so many blessings for gentlemen pioneers—such as plenty of rum, and meetings where everyone said what they liked, and pantaloons which couldn't be nearly so uncomfortable in this almost tropical climate as the three long petticoats which no lady could go without—God really could not be expected to have much time left for women. But now she prayed mechanically “Please God” as she ran about the lean-tos, gave a last glance at the dinner-table (ladies must drink wine from cups since there were only enough glasses for the gentlemen), and dressed herself with hurried trembling fingers, hoping that Jerry wouldn't get colic during the evening, and being so grateful to darling Darien for singing the children to sleep.
Darien felt irritated. Sally must know she enjoyed singing … but she was generally grateful for the wrong things. She always tried to be grateful for Mr Lovel, who was the wrongest thing Darien knew. Yet even dinnerparties with that stiff black stick at the table-top were exciting now; with governors getting into the soup and war into everything, and Lady Lovel—who was always so sure she was intellectual that strangers generally believed it for a time—struggling to lift the conversation to a higher plane.
“I always think,” said Lady Lovel, looking like a crimson full-rigged ship with lots of stays and flags and things, “that Love is the greatest power and we should love the Maoris more instead of provoking them.”
To gentlemen provoked beyond measure by Maoris and governors this had the effect of dynamite. All began talking at once, with Peregrine waiting to get in the last effective word. None, he felt, had been so provoked as he. For Hobson, after starting a Capital near the Beach, calling it Russell, and appearing to take great interest in Peregrine, had suddenly sailed away to build another Capital further south. He named it Auckland, but everyone called it Hobson's Choice, and predicted that he would be building again before long. So there was Peregrine, left vulgarly in the lurch with his high plans, and only resisting a frantic impulse to follow Hobson (who must somewhere weave a Ministry round him, as surely as a spider must weave webs) by the fear that Hobson would presently go elsewhere.
Hobson did. Abrupt and inconsiderate as ever, he went, said the ladies piously, to Heaven. Peregrine couldn't concede that. No heaven would accept a man who, after so juggling with Lovels, had left his authority to a Shortland, now succeeded by a FitzRoy who was governing much worse than the other two … if possible.
“The greatest power,” said Peregrine now, very impressive in bottle-green body-coat and high stock, “is a good government.”
“And we have apes, curse 'em,” declared Major Henry, tossing off his glass of Malaga. (Tradin'-ships did bring real wine though often monstrous short on other necessities.)
“Hobson should have joined up with the New Zealand Company,” said burly Captain Tovey decidedly. “I hear it is going ahead like the deuce.”
But gentlemen couldn't abide the New Zealand Company, which, having got out of the mud and into debt and called itself Wellington, was now reputed to be making its own laws without benefit of governors—who seemed so very far off, since it was quicker to meet them by way of Australia's distant Sydney than to go overland.
“With virgin country like the Beach,” began John, and at the word “virgin” Darien suddenly abandoned her squabble with Nat, who was trying to hold her hand under the table.
“You wouldn't call it virgin if you knew as much of it as I do,” she said. Major Henry bellowed. He always encouraged that impossible girl, thought Peregrine, overriding the chuckles round him with a broadside about the necessity for upholding governors since they were all the country had to cling to.
“Since toadying is the fashion, you mean,” said Jermyn, staring distastefully at Darien. How he did wish females would be females, keeping their place like Sally, quiet as a mouse in her plain grey gown. Sally was the perfect female; docile to her husband, bringing up a fine family, even producing a respectable dinner out of the monotonous Beach material. What more could man ask of a woman, thought Jermyn, very superior and celibate at the moment, having tired of experiments with the natives. Yet possibly he would marry Amy Mathers, who had lately embroidered him a pink text on perforated cardboard. “Oh, rest in the Lord,” said the text, and Jermyn had written her a sonnet for it. After all, thought Jermyn, sipping his wine, a man must marry, and Amy was a very good imitation of Sally.
There was singing later, for Captain Tovey must always be asked and Caroline never waited for invitations.
“‘Oh, wert thou in the cauld blast on yonder lea, on yonder lea,’” she shrilled, with a heated Jermyn chasing her on the accordion. Such a noisy shelter Caroline would make. Sally shut her eyes; then opened them to see big Nick Flower leaning on the wall beside her, and blushed because she didn't know him very well and there were such queer stories about him. But since Mr Lovel was building his first schooner for him he had to be asked to-night.
Mr Flower didn't speak; but he was looking at her so gravely, so kindly that suddenly she smiled, feeling somehow that she had found in this notorious man a troubled little boy whom no one else knew of. And she knew so much about troubled little boys.
“I'm glad you came to-night,” she said simply.
“That's kind of you.” His harsh voice sounded harsher to himself, his words incredibly stupid. Yet how tell this pale sweet lady that her mere presence was a benediction, a healing …? He stammered: “Always kind … doing so much for others. Little Kat's grandmother so grateful for the soup….”
“Oh! Oh, that was nothing.” The fair tired face with its blue patient eyes had gone scarlet and he could have kicked himself. Had she heard that Kati was his child? Well, what then? She must know what men were by now. But he couldn't resist an insane desire to put himself right with her.
“You understand what this life is. A man's so much alone, and it's all so easy….”
“Oh, hush!” She put her hand on his with a little fluttering touch. “Nobody has the right to judge any- one else, Mr Flower. Never. Never,” she repeated earnestly, and he saw her looking across the room at her husband.
II
At this stage of its existence New Zealand seemed specially made for lovers; with secret scented flax-gullies full of fern and sun and blossoming cabbage-trees so sharply intoxicating to the senses that anything might happen; with blue waters and mangroves along the rivers where a boat might hide among the warm shallows, and stalking, red-legged pukeka-birds would never tell….
Darien reserved boating for the Graham boys and other amorous youths, whose passions interested her so much that she put them in her diary. “Love makes boys so peckuliar,” she wrote, “and I try to discover how peckuliar they can be.” But when Sally said they could never be so peculiar as her spelling Darien went off to the flax-gully to meet Nick Flower. The headiness of the scent there should draw out the peculiarities of gentlemen much more than any boats could do. Besides, Nick Flower had said that he might bring her some satin slippers from Sydney.
“I'll have no money to pay for them,” she had warned him. “Peregrine never gives me or Sally any, the mean fellow. My size in slippers is a small three, and I want a green pair, a blue pair, and a white.”
“You always expect to get what you want, don't you?” And certainly he was now carrying a parcel as he came pushing through the tall flax-blades and black koradisticks and found her sitting demure in her print gown and sunbonnet sprigged with green. She sprang up, glowing.
“You've got my slippers? Oh … give me!”
He held them high. “And what will you give me, Darien?”
“That's not fair. You never asked for anything.”
“I do now.”
She looked down; pouting, pinching her lip. Flower moved a step, smiling down on her. How many men had she put on that pretty pose for? A ruthless little devil, an unashamed little devil….
“Let me try if they fit. I mightn't care for them,” she said with one of her quick changes.
“Let you run away in them without payment, you mean.”
“Fool! How could I run away in three pairs?”
He laughed outright. “Here you are, then.”
Now she was slipping on the green shining daintiness, pirouetting before him with little cries of delight.
“Ravishing! Don't they make my feet ravishing? I vow they never looked so charming before. Oh … how I like them….”
How small they are, she thought. I can step just like little stitches. She pulled her sprigged gown higher over the slim ankles. I should never have to wear anything but the best. “Oh, my darling feet,” she cried rapturously.
The man was finding the entertainment quite as good as he had expected. Darien's power of self-absorption was so colossal, her joy in her pretty soulless self so naïve. He asked: “Are you ready to kiss me now?”
She spun round, the golden specks in her eyes like sparks.
“Don't you dare!”
“Oh, I could dare quite easily. The only question is whether I want to.” This brought her to earth, bewildered as a child.
“Don't you want to?”
“Not enough, I think. You're too greedy, my dear.”
“Oh! No gentleman would speak like that.”
“Quite right, Darien. I'm not a gentleman. Nor, I think, are you a lady.”
“Take your slipper!” She whipped it off and flung it at his head. He put it in his pocket, saying:
“Now the other, please. I know a Maori girl who will give me a hundred kisses for them.”
“You have no conscience,” cried Darien, bursting into furious tears. “I never saw anyone with less conscience in my life.”
He shouted with laughter, flinging his head back on the thick sun-burned neck. How she despised him, hurrying into her heavy leather shoes.
“Let your Maori girls have them. Give all the nasty creatures corns. I don't care.”
“No,” he said, picking up the dropped slippers and rolling the whole package together. “I got them for you. I don't give second-hand things.”
How would she take that? Greed and pride were always playing skittles with Darien. She stood up, a doubtful little smile creeping round her soft lips, playing with the provoking dimple in her pink cheek.
“Now we're quits,” she said, half-ruefully. She put her hand against the rough blue frieze of his jacket-front. “I'll dream of those slippers. I've never had anything so enchanting before. Why are you so kind to me?” murmured Darien, looking up, looking down with her changeful eyes gone blue and innocent as Sally's.
Coquetry, confusion, all a woman's little armoury…. Flower said, smiling:
“Scratch, purr … and then scratch again. You're vastly accomplished, Darien.”
“Oh ! No one will ever love you,” she cried, snatching up her parcel, running up the slope with the bonnet bobbing off her ruddy curls, running to adore herself again in the white slippers and the blue.
Not the right sort of woman, anyway, thought Flower. But who would be the right sort for him, who had no respect for any? Mrs Lovel, he thought, presently tramp- ing into the little office behind his store, is not a woman. She's a saint….
He sighed. Perhaps the wild scent of blossoming cabbage-trees in the sun had affected him more than he guessed. But there was little time for weakness in him now, moving about the small dusky place, his fair weather-bleached head bringing a kind of light in the darkest corners, his healthy powerful body intent on the matter in hand. Any kind of a punch at Peregrine Lovel was good; but this that was about to be delivered, one of a series which were being delivered well below the belt, was specially grateful. A tall Maori knocked on the door, was admitted and given a chew of black tobacco while Flower swiftly unlocked a cupboard and laid papers on the bare little table.
This message to the great chief Hone Heke: The dealers Flower had met in Sydney would deliver two hundred cases of ammunition and one hundred tuparaguns at Lock's Bay, on the ocean side of Keri Keri, on or about the sixteenth. Heke must send the boats out a full mile, as usual. Pay in Spanish dollars. No paper money. Here were the bills …
Silently the Maori thrust the bills inside his red shirt against the brown skin. His brown eyes with the yellowish whites stared steadily at this Englishman who was selling out his own tribe. A tewara … a devil, the white man, and there were many like him. Christians were all devils, thought Pireta, and now that great Heke had given up being a Christian and was going to fight it was far better.
“Haere, haere … go, go,” said Flower.
“Enoho, enoho ne? … Stay there, won't you?” said Pireta politely.
The door shut. Flower made some notes in his pocketbook and sat thinking in the velvet upholstered chair he had brought from Sydney. Stark crudities and refinements went together in his furnishings as in his nature, and the sensuousness Darien had roused in him died down as he considered this satisfactory hoisting of Peregrine Lovel with his own petard.
Peregrine would have gone to Auckland long ago if his pride hadn't been so ruffled by the inability of his precious Lynch Law League to catch smugglers, who were making such a jest of the strict laws against supplying ammunition to the Maori. Now the schooner built in the fellow's own yard for Flower was in the trade and money was rolling in. For the Maoris had never worked so hard; growing corn, cutting flax and timber in their rage for tupara-guns—new double-barrelled weapons which especially appealed to a warrior-race keen about their fighting tools.
But the English would be armed with obsolete, single-barrelled, flint-lock muskets when the trouble presently came … Flower shrugged that off. You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, and Flower meant to make many omelettes. Even a man who has no right to a name for himself or his children can have ambitions.
III
For Sally there was no ambition, and no man's love, but only his peculiarities. Once she had read in a “Keepsake”: “She arose from her chamber in the night and fled with him across the sea. And there they loved, carousing into dawn.” Carousing in her wedding-finery (Sally had thought) might be fun. But the finery had all gone for babies' gowns and Darien's gaddings, and even the most hungry imagination could not conjure up a Mr Lovel carousing with a drunken chaplet of roses on his brow.
Time was rushing on; rushing this innocent and lovely young New Zealand down desperate and dangerous ways. It had rushed her into the Treaty which by now nobody loved. It was rushing competing Auckland into such prosperity that the Beach was losing trade; rushing immi- grants out from England in search of the land which the Governor, demented by the confusion of Maori land-titles, could not give them; rushing the chiefs, who would never forgive the customs duties, into longer and more secret conferences with their tohungas; even rushing Aunt Matilda—who seemed just to have waked up to it—into writing Sally reams about the Holy Immolation of Matrimony.
Mr Lovel, who always opened Sally's letters and read them to her so she shouldn't waste any time, very much approved of Aunt Matilda. “To be a wife and mother is the most jewelled crown a woman can wear,” Mr Lovel had said impressively to a Sally snatching anxiously at her cap which was always crooked. But to-night, because she would be twenty to-morrow and Mr Lovel had gone down to a League meeting, she would fling off her cap (a badge of servitude, Darien called it) and run out on the tussock and pretend she was still a girl with no ruffled shirts needing ironing and no roomful of children to be washed and sewed for.
Sally knew she didn't ask much of life. Not near so much as darling Darien, to whom God must always be kind, she thought, smiling in the bright starlight at all manner of strange shapes fitting themselves to familiar things. The flax clumps were shawled old women gossiping, low manuka-bushes were squatting elves, cabbage-trees ballet-dancers with light-spread skirts, that feathery toi-toi bush beyond the cooking-trench a fairy gathering…. Mr Lovel wouldn't allow her to tell the children of elves and fairies. They belonged to the England which he so hated. My children shall begin fresh, said Mr Lovel; but there was so little for them to begin fresh on. Only Maoris….
Being a girl to-night, she ought to dance and sing. But she was so tired. And the leather shoes which the traders supplied were very heavy. She leaned against the wall, looking at the far calm stars. A lovely world; a ghost-like magic world so full of its far-stretching silent harmonies that it would never hear the little human sounds—faint crashing of a wild pig through the flax-swamp below, fretful cry of a weka-bird jerking its stiff ridiculous feather tail at each step, the single hoot of a whaling ship calling its crew home….
Over the tussock hill began the low beating of Maori drums and the increasing rhythmic stamping of feet, such as happened each time young Maoris had a war-haka before going off to try on another tribe the double-barrelled guns, of which they seemed to have so many.
Blowing off the froth to get at the beer, Major Henry had said, declaring that the Maoris would soon be at the beer. But people had been saying that for so long, and since the missionaries had brought God to New Zealand He must surely still be here, although Sally feared she doubted that more than she should … and with Mr Lovel holding morning prayers every day too. “Please God,” murmured Sally, hoping that would get her somewhere and trembling a little as this wide silent world brimmed up with the Maoris' rolling thunder of drums, their exultant challenge to death. Satanic sublimity, Jermyn called it….
Under pressure of that tremendous sound doors seemed opening about Sally, revealing unguessed-at things. Riding knights in old forgotten cities; gallant deaths that brought no glory; pale faces of waiting women (oh, how well she knew those faces); hot-eyed striving men and behind them shadows, dim chaotic forces that had once been gods, obscure and shapeless gods fumbling clumsily with our lives, dragging them about, treading them down with vague misshapen hooves….
Sally fled to the house in terror, finding Tiffany half out of the window, going after those gods. She pulled her in, bolted the shutters. “How often am I to tell you never to open the shutters at night?” she said.
At three-and-a-bit, her small woman-child looked so tall in the long nightgown and her rosy face so grave in the close cap.
“Must,” pronounced Tiffany finally. “Maori too.” Then, as though that loosed something, she went charging round the room, shouting in shrill Maori “Red plumes, red plumes of the kaka,” until all the boys woke up and there was proper pandemonium.
“What shall I do with you?” said Sally, despairing. Was it her secret rebellion against Mr Lovel that had made this something so untamable in Tiffany?
“Make her pray, mamma. Papa always has prayers for everything,” said Roddy, who knew that to his cost.
“Do' want to pray,” yelled Tiffany, caught by the tail of her nightgown. But pray she must, since mamma said so. “Please God make me always 'bey dear papa,” gabbled Tiffany with eyes tight shut. “And gimme a goat soon,” she added in a hurry.
Sally had to laugh. At birth the boys had been given calves and lambs, meant to be the nucleus of valuable herds, but Mr Lovel had forbidden Tiffany to pray for even a goat since such things were not proper for females. The naughty imp, to disobey in the very act of praying for obedience. What could be the future of a woman-child whose cradle-songs had been Maori hakas and her nursery wild tussock, earth floors, and Major Henry's hut among Maoris and wolfhounds? “Now, go to sleep or papa will come home and whip you,” said Sally, thankful for once to Mr Lovel.
Tiffany lay watching black moon-shadows on the walls through a favourite hole in the roof. The shadows moved like dogs. No … like goats. Oh, not that kind of goat. Didn't God know any better than that? whimpered Tiffany.
Mr Lovel (returning to find Sally darning and watching the bread rising on the hob under a grey blanket) was so rigidly polite that she knew well it would not be wise to speak. Something was coming, and before he had even got into his calfskin chair with the wooden frame it came.
“Some henchmen of Hone Heke's have cut down the flagstaff on Maiki Hill,” he announced, snuffing the candle so decidedly that it nearly went out.
“Oh! Why?”
“Why? Impudence, of course. Insolent defiance of English rule. The missionaries persuaded them away, but they will certainly come again,” said Peregrine, almost beside himself because it was not wise to curse England even to wives.
“The Maoris have so many guns now,” murmured Sally, instantly aware that, as usual, she had said the wrong thing. Mr Lovel grew portentous, standing before the fire on one of the red and white bullock-skin mats covering the earth floor.
“Those miscreants who are smuggling guns to the Maoris will have a fearful reckoning, and probably we shall now have to fight for a colonization which is, I consider, as important as that of the patriarchs going into the wilderness.” (The patriarchs had had many wives, but that wasn't allowable now, and Sally was really doing very well in that state of life to which it had pleased Mr Lovel—and God—to call her.) Remembering his three fine boys in the next room, Mr Lovel softened slightly. “Some day, my dear, our children will rise up and call us blessed … is that Tiffany crying? Give her castor oil.”
“Oh, I don't think….”
“Pray allow me to know what is best for my own children. Give her castor oil. I suppose she has been eating horrors over at Corny Fleete's again.”
Sally bent over Tiffany in the dark, poked a peppermint lolly into her mouth. Those gods out in the night had joined with Mr Lovel to arouse most unnatural rebellions in her. “Hush, sweetheart,” she whispered, “Do you want anything?”
“I want a goat,” said Tiffany promptly.
“Not to-night, darling. They've all gone bye-bye.” She went back to the living room where Mr Lovel was waiting with his hand under his olive-green coat-tails … always a bad sign.
“I must beg of you, my dear,” he began at once, “never to be weak with the children. Firmness is a duty we owe to their characters. You see how quiet Tiffany is now. Pioneer children must never be pampered.”
“Yes, Mr Lovel,” said Sally meekly. Oh, this Holy Immolation of Matrimony, making of decent women liars and deceivers. Of course Mr Lovel must be right…. But she wished she had given Tiffany two lollies, since there was never any pampering anyway. Nor butter, nor dolls, a proper bread-and-milk nursery, shoes that fitted. For boys it didn't so much matter, but her heart quailed thinking of a Tiffany growing up with no props to gentility whatever.
“I consider,” said Mr Lovel, to whom a hand under the coat-tails was apparently as urgent as though it wound a musical-box, “that this country has a more magnificent future than any other of England's possessions….”
Like a distant bee the musical-box droned on, for wives had their uses when a gentleman wished to practise speeches. The ormolu clock—incongruous wedding-present, against a scrim wall—ticked sedately. The bread rose under the blanket. Sally's brown head (with the cap gone crooked again) drooped over darning Mr Lovel's socks with the red worsted, which was all she could buy from the traders.
To-morrow, thought Sally, I shall be twenty.
IV
John expressed no opinions about the flagstaff because you never knew who might be listening-in these days. But he secretly felt that the Governor should be able to manage better with all the help sent him by England—Chief Justice Sir William Martin, a bishop, and no end of other big pots down in Auckland, where John meant to go as soon as he could get the land fenced for his new Herefords … if Caroline would let him wait so long. Caroline (who had now added Sophia and Maria to Belinda) was always wanting to know if Sir John intended his daughters to grow up like savages.
To Jermyn the cutting down of the flagstaff was the most promising thing yet. Now, thank the Lord, there would be something to lift a young man out of the doldrums. “Yoicks! Up, Guards, and at 'em,” he shouted, smacking Major Henry between the shoulders and rollicking up the bracken-covered hill to borrow Sally's children for a while. The boys, dragooned by Peregrine into saying Yes, sir and No, sir, were such jolly little ruffians behind his back, and Tiffany (praise be) was already shaping like a lady.
But on this sunny July afternoon Tiffany was no lady. Sharing the Maori dislike to clothes, she was leaping, smooth and naked and pagan as a nymph, round the cooking-trench, while little Belinda and Sophia (already taught to think the human body sinful) wailed with shame, and the boys, including two of Corny Fleete's, stood bunched together, admiring yet abashed.
“I must draw you some day, you little beauty,” said Jermyn, huddling her into her clothes. “Come, boys … no, I won't take you, Linda. Damn snobs—” Then he apologized charmingly to Sally and went down the hill, aware that Darien was watching behind the blind. Shocked at a baby's nakedness and yet the things she'd do herself, thought Jermyn, well knowing where Darien's satin slippers had come from. Flower, who could skin an eel with any man, wasn't the kind to give something for nothing.
In Major Henry's hut Tiffany immediately set herself to disrobing again, quite indifferent to the gentlemen, who were much occupied by his hounds.
“When I'm a man I'll have a thousand wolfhounds and hunt the English with 'em all,” boasted little Hemi Fleete, straddling.
“The doose you will,” said Major Henry, “What will your father say to that? Tiffany, you can't take off anything more. Stop her, Jermyn.”
“I'll hunt him too,” said Hemi, darkening. Gad, Corny was preparing a rod for that fat back of his, since half-castes had already proved uncertain. “I'll kill all the English till there's not one pakeha left,” said Hemi.
“Boy!” said Tiffany, stately as a duchess in bare legs and a red petticoat, “I don't like you.” This seemed a signal for young Lovels to fall on Hemi who, supported valiantly by his brother, rolled with them on the earth floor among the wolfhounds; while Tiffany climbed on the Major's knee, and Jermyn sprawled over the table to continue a letter calculated to make the Colonial Office wish that it had left New Zealand to stew in the juice of its own cooking-pots. He read aloud as he wrote.
“The Treaty of Waitangi stinks in the Nostrils of every true Pioneer. Missionary Williams, who had been a Naval Officer before he apparently decided that converting the Maoris was easier work, made it in conjunction with Captain Hobson and Mr Busby, and it was signed on Mr B's lawn by the Waitangi River. The accompanying Sketches will convey the scene.”
“Blast it all, Jermyn. They'll take it as an insult,” objected the Major on first seeing the neat little uniformed pen-and-ink hens and the colour-splashed kaka parrots screeching with their bright crests up. Jermyn prayed that they would, since that was his intention … and he hoped England would recognize Hobson as her own emissary among the hens.
There could be no doubt that the kakas meant the Maoris, for Jermyn told how they screeched when the Queen of England (through Captain Hobson) offered to give them New Zealand if they would become her subjects…. “We wish to protect you,” said Victoria, nurse-like to these enormous nurslings who would make any nursery fit for coroners and inquests if allowed to enjoy themselves, “and in return we ask for nothing but Loyalty.”
Jermyn went on outlining the argument of his letter. “The Chiefs, whose notion of Loyalty is killing an enemy, were puzzled and said so with perfect courtesy, being still aristocrats in spite of all us English. The Chiefs explained that the country was already theirs, and asked Capt. H. to tell the Queen, with their compliments, that they did not require a woman's protection. In any case, a female who did not have her thumb turned outward at birth so that she could plait flax could not be considered. Nor were they sure that she had had her legs straightened….”
“Good God, man,” exploded the Major, “they never said that.”
“They would have if they'd thought of it…. Boys, will you kindly make a little less noise.”
“Ka mate, Ka mate, Ka ora, Ka ora,” shouted the boys, slapping their thighs in the Maori war-haka, Tiffany with shining eyes beating time with her slender little hands.
“Sing if you must, then,” said Jermyn resignedly, “but for the Lord's sake stop war-dancing.” The shrill sweet English voices and the guttural melody of the Maori lilted up in “Red plumes, red plumes of the kaka,” and Jermyn continued, feeling very pleased with his handling of the Colonial Office.
“The white settlers deeply resented having Maori landlords, and the Maoris (naturally fearing a Catch somewhere) raised such a dust that Busby's lawn was spoiled which is the only satisfaction we have got out of the treaty in over Four years. Then Chief Tamati Waka Nene took the floor in a very fine feather mat and everyone stopped shouting to see which way he would Jump since he and Hone Heke are Heads of the great Ngapuhi tribe. Nene jumped for England (though he must be whipping the cat now), so many Chiefs put their Tattoo mark to the Treaty and the Flagstaff on Maiki Hill flew the Jack—which has now been chopped down by Heke's orders. And we English gentlemen wish courteously to remark that such a blackguard Colonization was never perpetrated before, with all the land deeded over our heads to natives who can't sell it to us since their land-laws are in such a devil of a mess and any Governors you send us quite incapable of straightening them out. We protest that the whole business is a mean Scandal and no good to anybody.”
The Major guffawed. Then grew serious. “You'll have them on their ear, boy.”
“Please the Lord,” said Jermyn, feeling much better. The pen was mightier than the sword … though that would come presently. Waka Nene looked in at the door and the children flung themselves on him with shouts of joy. He picked Tiffany up, smoothing her bronze curls.
“So you sing ‘Red plumes,’ little wahine? A song for battling men, my blossom, not for babes.”
“What does Heke mean to do, Nene?” asked Jermyn, getting off the table. Curious how one instinctively showed respect to these chiefs, so like the finest type of the Egyptian Pharaohs even in their ugly English clothes. Nene in his feather mats at Busby's party had been tremendous. Where did they come from, this noble race bearing a shadow of remote ages, strange passionate generations secret in the mist of the ancient days; with every man a warrior, every girl showing the classic grace of Syrian maids? In war-canoes from Hawaiki, the Maoris themselves said. But where was Hawaiki? Not on any map. Egypt, perhaps, Assyria, India? It was all so long ago….
“Who can tell what Heke will do?” said Nene gently.
Your true Maori—full of courtesy and evasions. But Jermyn knew Nene had been talking to Heke like a Dutch uncle.
“Will Heke fight?” asked Jermyn.
“Should the tide turn, what hand may prevent it, my brother?” Seeing a plug of the Major's best tobacco on the table, Nene suddenly descended from his dignity. “A chew, now, Mahore, and I will take the tamariki home.”
The Major handed over the plug with the necessary compliments, for a chief (even when begging) knows what is proper between gentlemen. With a great lump in his scarred cheek and having said the correct number of haere's and enoho's, Nene went off with the children, and the Major said: “With tobacco and no Hobson, we'd soon have them all eating out of our hand.”
“Instead,” said Jermyn, feeling enormously excited, “we'll have war and Nene knows it.” This, he thought, is what I have been really waiting for. What was dangling about with women and making marks with pen and brush to this man's game out on the wild hills, with danger behind every bush and glory waiting on every shot? Life had been too easy for a young man so filled, so brimming over with primitive urges; so conscious of power in him that he didn't know how to handle. War would show the way…. He brought up suddenly before Amy Mathers's text (slightly fly-blown now). “Oh, rest in the Lord,” eh? Well, he didn't want to rest in the Lord (or otherwise) with Amy Mathers. He wanted to measure his strength against men.
“Think I'll go along the Beach for a while,” he said, and went off whistling: “The French are on the sea, says the Shan Van Vocht.” Gad! There was a tune for a man——