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- page 49 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 page 50 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 page 51 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 page 52 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.

page 53

“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.