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Chapter Sixteen
Barbarian for Caesar

The boy next in line whispered, ‘I say, I don't half like this.’ Immediately Timothy felt better, and when a piece of coal rapped him on the cheek, he was almost his own man again. ‘They've got a hope,’ he said cheerfully.

‘But what say they turn nasty?’ Timothy laughed. Yet the hard disconcerted pose of the striking seamen, their mouths that didn't open except to spit, stuck in his mind. They were so exactly the men he had cultivated in life and in books, the men of whom he had hotly declaimed, ‘They're right, the rest of you are fools.’ And in the linesmen's camp they had taken him in and treated him, with a bit of banter, as one of themselves.

Now he was helping to break their strike; they sat on wharf-edges, or stood about, black lumber against the tin sheds where grain was sacked, and the newspapers over half a world were screaming about them, because this war had spread wherever ships jutted out their funnels and rolled their black-and-rust bellies. They made him feel, without speaking, that Martin Eden had been a pose, a sham. They looked fools and skulkers, they hadn't a word to say for themselves beyond the ‘Yah—scab!’ of the street bully, but they were bigger than Timothy, much bigger than Timothy's little adventure.

A white gob of spittle landed direct at his feet. All the way down the wharf, against red sheds, silent men stood and spat. The drooping lily to the rear of Timothy kept up his heart. When somebody's afraid, when you feel a man or an event may actually turn and strike you with a lion's paw, you can keep your head up, under its new peaked cap, keep from turning to the silent ones and saying, ‘I say, this is why I did it. I don't want your wages, if I knew where to send them I'd shove them straight back into your Union funds, and good luck to you, but it's like this. You won't go with your ships, and somebody must—a chance that may never come again. Well, I've got to be a poet and a sculptor—just as important as your being a seaman and a striker—and I've grabbed this while it was going.’

For two pins, for a single, half-baked reproachful speech from one page 178 of the seedy dock lawyers who every now and again jumped on the stanchions to rally the spirits of the men, Timothy would have dropped his adventure for their adventure, the bigger adventure of sticking things out. But nobody spoke to him, except in white gobs of spittle. He shuffled forward, wanting the newness to wear off his cheap jersey and white cap, for a little while to be part of the ship, as much as her iron rust-streaks and fishwife gulls were part of her. A banjo twanged down from the fo'c’sle, the ship's cat, indifferent and bedraggled, stalked abroad. She knew that the Ionica was sailing, and this strike broken. ‘Hurry, Sister,’ he advised the boy in front. Then his feet were on the gang-plank, touching the little irregular steps.

Only the lanky tin sheds had reality, only the faces. Perhaps things didn't swoop into change. But the change was there, straight ahead by stars’ compass: Tropic of Capricorn, Equator, Tropic of Cancer, calms, pearly nautilus, flying fish, Suez, coffee faces, harim, great torpid heat, the Bay of Biscay, the white cliffs of Dover.

He was crowded against the Ionica's lower deckrail, the banjo still mourned, and with a single bright-edged shirring of the green waters in between, the faces became impalpable: the great dream, the England dream, became solid and true. He could have laughed, and turned to anyone there. ‘Well, I've made a break.’ But he had no one to talk to, beyond the drooping lily, who seemed to find some forlorn comfort in Timothy's back.

In a south place where he had stayed, only one peak remained eternally capped by the snows. White in summer its lustre streamed, and the darker denuded foothills edged up to it, shouldering against its implacable dignity. And from his boyhood Timothy had called the white mountain Caesar, and the darker hills were the dark chieftains of Gaul, Britain and Sparta, bringing their tribute of windy odours. Caesar was London.

A barbarian I come to you, O Caesar, smelling of gorse and the rank fleece of sheep, able to tell you of a red-flowering tree in my own land, of winds stalking in the flax like the great lost bird, the moa, and of a green weapon-stone whose cold touch is more beautiful than the kiss of a woman. Like the plumes of black impis, the six-foot toi-toi feathers dip and skim beneath the wind. With my own hands I have rounded out the belly of a boat, clinker-built, and straightened her keel so that she rode like a tern on the waves. I have broken sharp oysters from the rocks, and burned strange woods in my campfire. Yet thin grass stooping among the starlight was more than all these. I have picked up ambergris washed from the mighty feeding-grounds of the sperm whale, south of Solander Islands, and found minute rubies in page 179 the far north; and I know the story of the lost cinnabar mine, and the sulphur island where men are afraid. I have left the prints of my bare feet on a beach of glittering iron-sand. If I come before you now, Caesar, and roll these discoloured pearls out of the piece of beaten flax in which they are wrapped, will you not look up, satiate though you are? I have been afraid, and made others afraid, and I know the beach of azure blue shells. I have seen strange things, and I am not yet twenty-three. I have been told, Caesar, that you have a shortage of young barbarians lately.…

A taxi-driver who had dropped his fare at the passengers’ gang-way looked up at the strike-breakers. Timothy beckoned him.

‘Take a wire to the Post Office for a bob?’

‘Righto.’

Timothy scribbled: ‘Off on the great adventure. Will come back to you. Aroha nui,’ and signed it. Very carefully he wrote Eliza's name and address on the back, and handed it down to the driver.

‘You won't forget to send it? It's important.’

‘Naw. The Post Office is along me way.’

The man drove off. Suddenly and quite desperately, Timothy wanted to get off this lumbering ship; not only the strikers, he thought, but Eliza, Damaris Gayte, poor little old Lucy, that green-eyed girl who was Eliza's prickly friend. Once he had written her a poem, and if he hadn't got out of town that might have gone further.

Of late Eliza had been stowed away in the back of his mind. She was ill, in hospital, writing letters of thin cheerfulness, out of his reach unless he had gone down to Wellington and played district visitor—and that he wouldn't want to do. He was sorry, he wrote that he was sorry; but pain, sickness, were a kind of separate little Hell, inaccessible unless one pretended. Something in Augusta Hannay's face cut into him like a knife. Best to pretend things were right, unless suddenly they were right, and you all sat back, with the picnic-cloth spread white in the centre of the group, and laughed and laughed.

At a dozen places in the assembling group he could see Eliza's face, beneath the little brown hat with the orange feather. Her frocks were always clumsy, and he said, ‘Why can't you wear things that show you as you are?’ Then she looked at him. She was at an uncomfortable stage; neither child nor woman, neither go-as-you-please insouciant, or cool little rectory piece. She would find her feet, and follow… limping. Impossibly melodramatic: in six months he'd be back, crowned and bronzed with adventure. A woman, aiming wildly, threw a bob of paper ribbon at his chest. He caught it, and the slim pink unrolled between them. Then a heavy-moustached man impatiently page 180 elbowed it aside, and walked hunched along the wharf, a taggle of pink against his coat.

Water churned white around the tail of the ship, her voice became an eager, throbbing, monotone. The gang-planks seesawed gracefully into the air. Somebody pushed Timothy's shoulder.

‘Get below, you. Had enough of an airing, ain't you?’

He went down to the stokehold, clinging like a monkey to little iron ladders. Below dwelt roar, burst and clang; the door of a furnace swung open, and with a searing crackle white-hot flame rushed out. Timothy saw lifted up a seamed devil's face; the flames made a phœnix nest of its tattered hair.

‘And ’oo the ’ell's this pup? Oh, Christ, with a cargo of scabbies and infants wet from their muvver's milk, what I'm going to ’ave to put up with, and grin, and look as if I liked it. Oh, Christ, get that shovel, carn't yer?’

Timothy laughed. For a moment he held with his crooked fingers to the rungs of the last little iron ladder, then dropped down into Hell's teeth. He was going to like this voyage, this little dandy, Martin Eden voyage. ‘I've made the break,’ rang the final coin of his thought, triumphantly, ‘I've made the big break.’

Kitch, bare-footed in spite of his awful cold, came running along the sands to the rock where Eliza sat, shouting at the top of his voice, ‘You've got a tely-gram. You've got a tely-gram.’ Little Mr Dill, her office chief, had lent Augusta a cottage for Eliza's convalescence, which was kind of him, but Kitch had to come too: and his cold, combined with his adenoids, made him snore so loudly across the passage at night that she cried hysterically, saying she hated Kitch, she couldn't bear him.

The sun was very hot. While she sat with her back pressed against the sugarloaf rock, she felt no pain at all, only a supreme disinclination to move. It seemed interesting to shuffle the fine gold grains of sand through her fingers, then to lie back and stare at them. Seagulls bobbed and shone about the waves. Kitch was building a moat round his sand-castle, which had a seaweed flag on top. He was very painstaking, but the sea ran into his moat, frizzed, and was mysteriously swallowed up. His nose was pink, his naked legs scarlet.

Eliza read the telegram, and lay back watching the seagulls. Bob… flash… scream. It didn't make so much difference. Timothy had grown dim, anyway, in that place where you died and suffered, begged and prayed for morphine. No, you can't have any more, you've had far too much morphine already. Morphine was inestimably more than Timothy. Timothy hadn't been there on the first day when she walked: page 181 and all the blood rushed down into her leg, and she screamed, and a little pink nurse, who didn't understand, laughed out loud. Timothy hadn't said ‘Steady as she goes’ when she first moved her crutches, like two long dead branches, over an endless slippery floor, and wondered why, why people insist of having nice polished floors in hospitals. Timothy never sat beside her in tramcars, when rather deaf old ladies said in piercing voices that everyone could hear, ‘Have you hurt your foot, my dear? I ask because a cousin of mine had a bad leg, and she got the most wonderful results from rubbing in Goanna Oil.’

She wished she could feel quite light again. She'd go dancing with Simone, who loved her, in spite of having leopard eyes. They'd dance in the funny little hall at Black Valley, and the sweating farm-boys would like Eliza best because Simone scared them (‘That apricot does suit you. Being ill has done your complexion the best turn of its life.’ Never a word, never an indication, that seen sideways on she looked queerly stiff). Afterwards they'd compare notes and laugh and laugh, sitting in willow arms jagged through with black and silver moonlight. And if they bathed naked, the water would be very cold, dirty brown, full of prickles and laughter and eels.

Only he mustn't ever come back again, that would be unbearable. The race is to the swift, the battle to the strong, and Timothy has gone to England. Let them have it, but keep what else you've got. The Kingdom of the Defeated: you can't get in there on a reporter's ticket.

Kitch whirred his model aeroplane along the sands. It actually rose three inches, rose and hovered; but then a black root of seaweed caught it.

‘Timothy, darling… oh, Timothy, the godwits.’

Kitch came up and dug his spade into the sand. ‘Did you see by bodel blane fly?’ he asked, through his pink nose. ‘She went grand, Elize. You're grying. You're a silly chump for grying. What're you grying for, Eliza?’

‘Everybody goes away but us. The godwits.’

‘Look, a bosquito's stung me sobthing awful. I shouldn't wonder if I got boisoned. Stop grying, Elize. Eliza, look ad by bachine.’

‘Eliza, didn't I tell you not to let Kitch get his trousers wet? Just look at him. He'll have pneumonia. Really, you can't be left to do the simplest little thing. You may have been ill, but that's no reason you shouldn't treat other people with ordinary, decent consideration. You know what Kitch is when he gets cold properly.’

‘Leave me alone. Leave me alone. I don't want to talk to any of you.’

‘Something in that telegram, I suppose. Or else you're making a fuss page 182 again. I should think you'd have more pride. Plenty have to put up with worse.’

‘Leave me alone. Leave me alone.’

Kitch felt slightly embarrassed, slightly injured. He thought of his model aeroplane; it was a beauty, its wings gauzy blue as a dragonfly's, and he had made it at least partly to amuse Eliza, because she had been ill. Now she wouldn't notice. He took it in one hand, and skimmed it along in short, grazing flights to the sugarloaf rock. There its aquiline nose jagged on pebbles, and he found that he had damaged it. He climbed up the sugarloaf, a short black-shadowed figure silhouetted against the pale sky, and returning with his injured feelings and broken aeroplane into his little boy's kingdom called hoarsely, ‘Mad old Eliza—mad old Elize. Mad old Eliza, grying ’cos she got a tely-gram.’