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Promenade

III

III

Since men (even savages) are incalculable, Flower merely shrugged his shoulders and went on weighing out oatmeal, nails, and soda when Heke again chopped down the flagstaff and was again persuaded away by the missionaries … and by Waka Nene, who most officiously insisted on answering for his brother-chief's behaviour in future.

“Now is my mana gone if you do it again,” said Nene to a very distracted Heke, who, having once absorbed page 66 the white man's Bible and found that it didn't agree with him, was not very certain about any gods just now and actually chased one of his priestly tohungas with the sharp point of his taiaha.

Nor was Governor FitzRoy very certain about anything. But he was so nervous that he rushed troops over from Sydney and up from Auckland, and rushed them away again, and took off the customs duties and tried to put them back, and generally convinced the Maoris that he was very much afraid of them. Which was perfectly true.

FitzRoy's panic would land them in war yet, thought Jermyn with all a young man's amusement for a very bewildered gentleman anxiously offering sops to a myriad-headed Cerberus. Why the devil didn't FitzRoy fight and be done with it, thought Jermyn, writing the Auckland Chronicle a letter which nearly got the paper suppressed.

There was, asserted John, something to be said for FitzRoy—only nobody wanted to hear it. FitzRoy pleaded that land-titles were too confused; and seemingly he didn't exaggerate, since all Maori land is communal, and personal rights could be claimed because a grandfather's nose had bled on it (a sacred matter) or he had had his hair cut there (more sacred still).

It was a good claim if a man's father had been killed on a certain spot, and a better if his father had been the killer … and how was FitzRoy going to settle that? Much better, said the colonists, have left it to the chiefs who never stood any hanky-panky. But London's Colonial Office (not having heard a Maori argue) blamed FitzRoy. And as for numberless immigrants living under boats tilted on their sides on the Beach because they were unable to get possession of the lands sold them by kindly English syndicates, which didn't trouble about surveys or titles—as for them, not even Jermyn could find words to express what they felt.

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So he wrote: “The Beach is at present a chapter of Gulliver's Travels and Genesis walking hand in hand, with Revelations to be expected at any moment,” and went out on the Beach to find it.

All kinds of revelations on the Beach at its strange shadow-play in the red sunset that passed so wild and soon. All breeds of men. A knot of trading-captains in thick short monkey-jackets and tall hats flinging a shadow as long as yesterday; sallow ear-ringed fellows from the Spanish Main, broad fair English and Norwegians, huge negroes eating peaches, lean Yankee boat-steerers and harpooners, nuggetty little breeds from Quebec, Maoris looking like Highlanders in the swinging flax-kilt until you saw the bulging tweed trousers below. Missionary work, that. The sign of a Christian. The Lord had surely a queer way of marking his own, thought Jermyn, going to drink rum in Corny Fleete's store, where Corny was announcing an addition to his piebald flock and trying to count how many there were now.

“You'll never know,” said Jermyn. “Come away before your sins—or your sons—find you out.” He took Corny off in search of adventure.

All the traders' lanterns were alight now in the tin sockets at their doors, belting the Beach with her scarlet girdle, making her more gaily Rabelaisian than she ever was by day. A randy girl, the Beach, like all lands in their beginnings, and doomed (like them all) to presently bear a dull civilization fathered by smug gentlemen overseas.

Corny was looking for a small trader named Robinson. “I have definite information that he is connected with the gun-running,” he told Nick Flower, who had nothing to say, having already said it down his skilled underground ways. The League was ravening for a victim, and the innocent cat's-paw Robinson would do as well as any, thought Flower dispassionately, lounging back into his store.

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“There he is,” cried Corny, dragging Jermyn along. “There's Robinson with that silly bald head of his. I'll punch it.”

The meek little trader standing below his torch didn't seem a probable gun-runner. Jermyn protested: “Are you sure?”

“I'll swear it,” said Corny, who would swear to anything after a few drinks. “Look here, you! We've had enough of that damned bald head of yours.”

“Yes, sir,” said little Robinson, cringing before the richest man on the Beach.

“Yes, sir,” shouted Corny, rapidly becoming quarrelsome. “The League is going to tar and feather you and run you out of town on a rail. Smuggling for the chiefs, are you, you bloody traitor?”

With a squeak of terror the small man darted like a rabbit past Corny, knocking him off his legs, zigzagging down the Beach to disappear among the dark huddle of stores.

“By God! I'll paste the swine for this,” stuttered Corny, picking himself up and looking more than usually like an English squire after a night out. “I'll lay he's gone to the skippers now. I always said the skippers were behind this trouble with their cursed raisin' of prices and stickin' together. Come on, Jermyn. We'll go to the skippers.”

Reluctantly Jermyn followed through Lambert's store, in which a couple of supercargoes were arguing with the clerk, and those dark bulks in corners might be bags and barrels or dead men. It was always dangerous to meddle with the skippers, and Corny, felt Jermyn, was not the best man to do it.

Traders' back-parlours were sacred to the gentlemen of the seas, and at Lambert's, pickled in the smoke of thick-oil lamps and long churchwardens, the most influential trading and whaling captains were used to gather. A mort of queer things were done in back-parlours wherein these tough scriptural sailors out of Cape Cod and Nantuckst page 69 and Stockholm sat like Assyrian kings with their grey goat-beards and expressionless faces, making (said the Beach) bargains not at all scriptural with the traders and—through them—with the chiefs. Powers of life and death they had, these skippers, who showed so many scruples on Sundays but always had the manhood to get the better of 'em by Mondays. To-night, Jermyn swiftly discovered, was not Sunday.

Better keep out of this, he thought, hearing the skippers agreeing with Corny that gun-running sure was a dangerous game and liable to turn the Beach into Sodom and Gomorrah at any minute. This, the skippers said, was the business of the English Governor.

“It's your business too, damn it,” stormed Corny, getting purple. “You're men of substance, ain't you? We colonists confidently count on you to help put down this damned treason … unless you want us to think you're backing it.”

The colonists, felt Jermyn, were unfortunate in their spokesman. Skippers liked to be courted, not confidently counted on. Captain Ephraim Cobb of the brig Osawanka caressed his grizzled beard with a slow hand.

“Sir, the Queen o' England has elected to make this I'il island a noo feather in her crown an' I reckon she'll hev to wear it as best she can. I don't reck'lect that she ast for our help when she chose to annext a country that was gettin' on very well without her. Maybe the chiefs are troubled at the way she's been clappin' on taxes an' interferin' wi' liberties. Maybe we air, too.”

Back in the reek other skippers expressed approval of Captain Cobb's statement.

Corny, full of clumsy bluff and bribery, could not move skippers, mulcted by customs on everything from flenching-spades to soap and sarsaparilla, nor trading-captains who sold less goods now that customs took heavy toll. They answered him unemotionally that it was for the League to deal with Robinson if they thought necessary page 70 but that for them to assist settlers in a foreign country might bring on international complications. This damning of New Zealand as a foreign country, whereas once they had tenderly felt it their own, so proved their depth of bitterness that even Corny gave up, promising to send Peregrine to them.

“He'll put some sense into you,” he declared, marching out. “There goes Hone Heke! Good Lord!”

Like a majestic Highlander the chief strode by, shoulder and loin mats swinging, the greenstone mere of royalty in his hand, a bodyguard of marching warriors behind. “Chucked his trousers too,” cried Corny, almost plaintive in his dismay. “And now he's goin' to the skippers….”

“Here's Peregrine,” said Jermyn, relieved. Thank God for Peregrine who always knew what to do. Peregrine, it appeared, decided to settle Robinson first as an example.

“These meek little men are always the most danger-out,” he said, walking up the Beach like a stork with a long shadow. “You say he knocked you down, Corny? That's enough to begin with. The League will attend to him.”

The cold Peregrine was almost excited, thought Jermyn. And no wonder, seeing how this long scandal over the gun-running had galled him. Now he had his scapegoat, though Jermyn didn't believe that poor scared little Robinson had anything to do with it. Yet maybe it would send the Lovels to Auckland before the explosion came and quite time, with ladies keeping carpet-bags packed and bundles of clothes by their children's beds these six months past in preparation for sudden flight.