II

This blazing midsummer day of January 30, 1840, had uncomfortably betrayed Peregrine Lovel into the consciousness that he was not omnipotent, and it was (he felt distressedly) going to take him some time to get over that. For hours he had been walking in the moonlight on the little hill behind the raupo-hut, and he knew that he vulgarly needed to go down on Kororareka Beach and get drunk. Yet since everybody else was doing it, that would have placed him on a level with the herd, which he chose to stand above, besides being a secret confession of weakness which he could not afford.

Anger against Sally was mixed with his distress. He needed sons—battalions of sons—for the work before him which had become so threatened, so almost dislocated since H.M.S. Herald arrived yesterday in the Bay, bringing Captain Hobson to annex New Zealand to the Empire. With a bleak steady acquisitiveness Peregrine had seen himself king of this wild lovely country, sending out his sons to represent him far and near. Now England had taken the country, and Sally might not bring him even one living son.

Incredible, unpardonable treatment of a gentleman who had done so much for everybody. Staring down into the page 22 smooth dark harbour where the Herald showed a red riding-light, lying apart from the bluff whaling-ships, and the tall trading brigantine out by an island, he realized almost tearfully how very much he had done. Cleaned out that foul old boat-yard round in Matauhi Bay; set John to conscientiously shepherding the Maori workmen, who so much preferred smoking in the shade of the great glossy pohutukawa trees; put Jermyn to draughtsmanship and Major Henry to casting-up the charge-sheets; given Sally a child which she hadn't the wit to know what to do with…. All of them fed by his bounty, and everything going so excellently well. Until now….

Since the Herald had arrived yesterday morning (with Captain Hobson, R.N., and without warning) the Beach had done no business. Since Hobson had landed on the Beach this morning, reading England's Proclamation of Annexation in the little wooden church (with any number of Ordinances to follow), the Beach's principal business had been to get drunk. Those who were pleased got drunk but, it seemed, those who were not got drunker. Certainly there were more of these latter, yet Peregrine still kept his bitter Lent. He was afraid of what he might say or do if he broke it.

“God save the Queen!” John had shouted on the edge of blubbing with joy. Major Henry had begun his old braggadocio about Waterloo, and Jermyn said in his cool amused way: “Wants another dumping-ground for her convicts. How will that run with all your mighty schemes, my buck?” But Peregrine had said nothing. In this land of rag-tag-and-bobtail he knew himself the one real stability, the one man with a mind above drink, trade, and prayers. Gifted people (he was aware) live under a special dispensation of grace, making laws instead of obeying them; and soon Mr Peregrine Lovel would have been making laws for Kororareka Beach—the only part of New Zealand yet on the map, and nobody in England would even demean themselves by trying to pronounce page 23 it. Now England had spoiled part of that, and Sally might spoil the rest….

“Mr Lovel! Mr Lovel!”

That squawking female voice, so badly matching her bulk, was certainly Caroline. Peregrine ran towards the hut, his heart most surprisingly impeding his breath. “Oh, la,” cried Caroline in the shadow by the door, “I'm that tired! But Mrs Grant is so taken up with the baby.”

Peregrine stopped. “Boy or girl?” he jerked out.

“Oh, a bouncing boy. I never did see such a bouncer. La! I must kiss you——” A certain Mrs Inchbald having once explained her own countenance as Voluptuous without Indelicacy, Caroline had annexed the description as peculiarly appropriate to herself, and had, in the opinion of Lovels, been indelicate ever since. Peregrine backed away.

“He is—normal? Sane and sound?”

“Oh, excessively. Can't you hear him? I'll tell you when to come in.”

Caroline shut the door, and Peregrine stood suddenly limp. In easy and superior fashion gentlefolk refer to hell as something liable to be experienced by others. Now, suddenly aware that he had been experiencing it himself, Peregrine felt quite unequal to encountering Darien, rising up out of the moonlight in a preposterous bonnet with a still more preposterous feather. Despite the bonnet and a hearty meal in Nick Flower's store, Darien's wrongs had been steadily growing, but now she was in a position to patronize Peregrine.

“I knew God was sending Sally a baby. Ani told me. It's for me to play with.”

“By the Lord! I'll not have you meddling with my child,” exploded Peregrine, still the worse for his emotions and afflicted by far too many memories of Darien. Darien stood stunned. His child?

“You—you imperant bric-a-brac! What's it to do with you? Sally will give it to me if I want it.”

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Peregrine caught her arm. “Now, listen to me, you little devil….”

Darien set her teeth in his hand and jumped free. “Phew! How nasty you taste. God will kill you now for cursing me. I'll tell him to. God! God….”

Peregrine fled. He told himself on recovery that he couldn't allow noise outside Sally's door, but he knew that he had been fairly routed. Darien (who would never have come if he hadn't considered her as a future unpaid help) was very far from realizing her dependent position.

Darien let herself down with her back to the door. Her leg hurt and the bonnet was heavy, but she felt it as a moral support. “Over my corp,” she said, “only over my corp shall he get at that baby.”

But when she saw it in the packing-case she discarded all notion of fighting for it. “Let him have the thing. We don't want it,” she told Sally. “It's too ugly and young. My leg still hurts, Sal-volatile.”

Sally smiled faintly at the little firm-chinned face under the big bonnet, and went drifting off again among fields of daffodils where an English lark was singing. But the lark wouldn't stay because it was so hot; and between her and the shadowy wall she had so carefully pasted with newspapers to keep out draughts other pictures floated up, all blazing with this strange bright sun that tired her so. Twists of hills like green shining silk, with the harbour between them like cut sapphires. Great bright parrots with cruel beaks fighting round the cooking-trench, where the black three-legged pots must be fed with wood or Mr Lovel's dinner wouldn't be cooked. Sally moved and fell back, forgetting Mr Lovel among the pictures.

Now it was a long war-canoe full of tattooed warriors and she was trying not to scream. Scarred whaling-ships, smelling of their trade, came crowding with their smell into the room. Even a whaling-ship should know better than to incommode a lady…. There was a tall trading-brig spreading its white wings, flying back to England. page 25 Oh, take me, cried Sally soundlessly. I'm so afraid of this place and there will be cowslips in the meadows….

Jermyn said Kororareka Beach was something you couldn't believe, especially when you saw it. Sally saw it, burning with colour, its little huts at all angles, like drunken witches clinging to their broomsticks, its noisy crowds weaving dizzily, Maori girls spinning their poi-balls…. How the gulls screaming over the piles of refuse along the sand made one's head ache…. Caroline was coming ashore from the Claribel on old fat Miri's brown shoulders, then standing on the Beach with her skirts rucked up like a flustered hen. Sally shook weakly with laughter. There had never been anything funnier than Caroline, spellbound at the naked Maoris and apparently thinking (like Miranda), “Oh, brave new world that has such people in it,” until suddenly she gave a kind of bellow and dropped in a faint…. Now Sir John was dragging the purple feather from her bonnet to burn it under her nose, and Caroline was coming to in a hurry and slapping him….

So hot … She must be under the heavy blazing weight of the doldrums again. But there were the grey seas mounting, and Sir John drying Belinda's napkins under his shirt because there were no fires, and she was so cold, and the wind was blowing out of Tilbury, and England for ever fading…. So cold her brief honeymoon in the Isle of Wight, with ghostly faces, ghostly voices coming round her in the night, telling her this is what it means to be a woman, Sally; with no soul or body of your own…. She struggled to get past them, back to the dear chintz room and the dolls and Darien in the big bed. But there was no going back.

“Somebody left some tea on the doorstep. I've made you a cup,” said Caroline, breaking like all the red and black queens in the pack into the pictures.

“Oh, thank you,” murmured Sally, always grateful. “You are so very kind….”