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Philiberta: A Novel

Chapter XXXVII

Chapter XXXVII.

We were none of us sorry, I think, to quit Christchurch. We had no friends there, and had proved by experience that the inhabitants of that City of the Plains did not then readily open their arms in hospitality to the stranger. I have since heard and read of Christchurch as a genial and hospitable town. I do not wish to dispute the point with anybody, but every member of the Itinerant Show is ready to declare that if geniality and friendliness did exist there in our day, the fact was kept fearfully quiet. But perhaps we had not really fair opportunities of testing the hospitality of the place; therefore our evidence may go for little. We can only aver that we went as strangers among the Christchurchians, and that they did not take us in—save in one or two instances, and then in a sense widely different from the Scriptural one.

'J. H.,' the 'Australian Abroad,' mentions Christchurch in his clever and interesting sketches as a 'Square City,' and insinuates that the descriptive adjective suits equally well the town and the general character of its inhabitants. The place is extremely level as well as square, and as far as my experience goes, the descriptive adjective again fits both land and people. Of the Canterburyites it may be said, as of Mark Twain's page 245Seven Sleepers, that 'the heads of the same were level.' Individually, I have a low taste for a little irregularity, both in scenery and character. About Canterbury country I would say, as the old Yankee said when his attention was called to the beauty of the region in which he dwelt, 'Well, if I'd a bin the Almighty, I'd a made the hull arrangement a little more peakeder, I would.'

But Christchurch has its charms, both positive and negative. Of the positive ones, note the water supply (Artesian wells), the pretty winding river and the trout therein, very handsome sunsets, mushrooms from January to July, and whitebait from September to December. Of the negative advantages, the chief is that shared by all these towns on the south-east coast, an utter absence of reptiles and unpleasant insect life. As I heard a young Australian remark not long since, he curling his lip with fine scorn as he spoke: 'They can't raise even a snake in this country, and the mosquitoes haven't learned how to sting.' Christchurch is converted into a very garden with plantations. English emigrants may gladden their eyes with all the home trees, the scarlet-berried holly being amongst the most plentiful. Australians, like Philiberta, may rejoice in the fragrance of wattle and the aromatic scent of eucalyptus, both of which favourites thrive better and grow more swiftly upon Canterbury soil than upon their own.

The only thing really regretful to us in leaving Christchurch was the having to leave at a painfully early hour in the morning. Why the pernicious practice of early rising—a practice so inducive of ill-temper and productive of profanity—should be qualified as a virtue would puzzle stronger comprehensions than any in the Itinerant Show. I remember having been voluntarily guilty of doing it on several occasions myself, but always with a special end in view, not wantonly and without motive or object. At times one wanted to catch an early train; at other times to see the fun in Paddy's Market Saturday mornings; anon one desired to waylay a friend with a view to borrowing filthy lucre; again (this during my brief and unsuccessful career as a journalist) to pick up a par. Twice I page 246remember rising at four o'clock a.m. to get a tip on the races from one of those shady characters who know all about the turf, but are never accessible save in the still small hours that follow midnight. And once or twice I even got up to see the sun rise from points of view whence it was supposed that manœuvre of the day monarch could be seen to special advantage. Perhaps it was my failure in all these aims that has so prejudiced me against early rising as a habit. I always missed the early train; I always got in the way and into a row at Paddy's Market; the friend had always left his purse at home, or had nothing on him but a £20 cheque, which, of course, could not be cashed at that ridiculous hour; always found that some confounded brother journalist had anticipated my report and got it in the opposition paper; always secured a 'tip' that caused me to put my pile on the horse that came in a bad fourth; and was always treated most scandalously and shabbily by the sun, who made a point of getting up in his blankets—the clouds—whenever I went to see him. But even if he had done his best—his rosiest, goldenest best—I question whether the sight of him would have compensated for the dazed sensation consequent on the effort to witness his early rising. Verily I say unto you, it is easier for a man to sit up all night than to arise early next morning.

I would any time rather see the moon rise than the sun. Her lunar ladyship gets up at a civilized hour—that is as long as there is anything of her worth seeing. Our Basso agreed with me in this, and said that as a matter of taste —— And just at this juncture there was a cry of 'All aboard!' a rush and a rattle, and we were off to Kaiapoi, our first town.

There was not much to be seen at Kaiapoi beyond a fine flax-bordered river; but we consoled ourselves for any disappointment we felt in the scenery with a most gorgeous banquet of whitebait brought fresh in from the mouth of the river by a splendidly ugly old Maori. Kaiapoi, though even yet a town of small importance, will always have a marked place in history as the scene of a mighty massacre. It struck me when I was listening to the story that small places like Kaiapoi ought really page 247to be very grateful for little incidental events in the shape of massacres, floods, earthquakes, and the like, as raising them somewhat above the ordinary prosaic dead level. I mentioned this idea to our Kaiapoi host, and he thought it out gravely for a few moments and then said—yes, he was awfully glad Kaiapoi had had a massacre—before his time. The champion murderer in this particular wholesale slaughter was one Te Rauparaha, a sanguinary old savage with a fine taste for baby-flesh. Historians say that he and his followers held high festival for several weeks on the roasted bodies of their foes. Mr. Thomas Bracken, in his cleverly compiled New Zealand Tourist, says that 'even now numerous ghastly remnants of the frightful feast are to be found in the locality.' One of the residents told us the same thing, and three of us started off in haste to the pah to negotiate for some relics; but an intelligent tattooed old heathen, who himself looked a very reliable relic, told us that they were 'done out' on Maori bones, and that he had been obliged to trade off mutton shanks and sheeps' heads on people lately. He offered us a 'knuckle end' or so, and said nobody would ever know the difference; but we were too honest to palm off such imposition on our friends, or at least we decided that if we were not, we could pick up mutton bones ourselves for nothing, so we declined to trade. But we felt deeply obliged to the Maori for his straightforwardness and invited him back to the town to have a drink–an invitation he accepted with cheerful promptitude. They are a friendly and sociable crowd, these noble savages; hospitable, too, in their way, and willing with a most Christian-like willingness to drink with the pale face. They are not a handsome race—that is, according to European ideas of beauty, but they are of fine stature, with shapely powerful limbs, good teeth, and magnificent eyes, eyes wearing habitually an expression of mournfulness that seems almost prophetic.

Some of them came to Our Show that night, not on the 'deadhead' principle either, and they admired Our Leading Lady immensely, shouting 'Kapai! Kapai!' (Good! Good!) most enthusiastically.

When I looked upon their dusky animated countenances, page 248and thought how, a few brief years ago, they would have enjoyed gobbling us up, and how they were now reduced to being content to hear us sing, I fully realized their right to rebel against a progressive civilization that thus cuts down their cheerful primitive pleasures and amusements. I felt for them.

We played two nights at Kaiapoi—on the first to a good house, on the second to an empty one owing to a sudden heavy fall of rain. We spent the days rehearsing new songs and pieces and in wandering through the flax. On the second day we fell in with a Christchurch citizen who had come up to fish in the Waimakiriri. He was a Scotchman, but very communicative nevertheless, and he related to us the why and wherefore of his settlement in Canterbury. He had emigrated from the Land o' Cakes to Otago in the first instance, and would have made Dunedin his place of permanent residence undoubtedly but for its entire dearth at that time of Holloway's pills. There was but one shop in the small new city that had ever sold them up to that date, and the stock was just out, and the old woman who kept the shop was not going to renew it, for—

'There's nae call for the airticle, ye ken,' she explained. 'Naebody needs pheesic o' ony kind in this deestrict, an' it disna pay tae keep idle stock on hand, and sae I was unca pleased tae pairt wi' the last hawf-dizzen of boxies tae a puir hawker-body wha micht get rid o' them up country.'

'Eh, weel, I'm varra sorry,' said our Scotchman; and he sighed, and his heart was heavy within him, for he had gotten a theory that nothing would keep his internal machinery in order but Holloway's pills.

On the shop counter lay a tiny flimsy sheet of newspaper, an early copy of the Lyttelton Times, and the Scotchman's sorrowful eyes descried in one column the following legend: 'Blank, Blank and Company, Chemists and Druggists, Colombo Street, Christchurch, have just received a new supply of drugs and patent medicines, per Ocean Queen, from London. New stock of the renowned Hair Restorer, the famous Beauty-creating Complexion Powder, Old Brown Windsor Soap, Perry Davis's Painkiller, Holloway's Pills and Ointment, also'——

page 249

But the Scotchman did not care what 'also;' he secured the chemist's address and a passage in the next northern-bound vessel, and in a very short time was in Christchurch and on the high-road to Holloway's pills. He told us that his anguish of suspense and dread lest the chemist's stock also should have passed over to some 'puir hawker-body' were beyond human power to describe. But he was safe. The chemist had the pills, and the Scotchman at once purchased several gross of large-sized boxes of them, and went on his way rejoicing. Christchurch was but an infant settlement then, boasting but few lodging-houses, and they were all full. So, unable to obtain accommodation there, the Scotchman set off with his pills on a promiscuous tramp through the country, and, pulled up by fatigue and darkness, settled ultimately for the night beside a clump of tussocks at Kaiapoi (the white community of Kaiapoi at that time numbered one), swallowed twenty-four Holloway's pills and a draught of the Waimakiriri, and curled himself down contentedly to sleep. He showed us the very clump of tussock by which he slumbered, and he was about to relate further interesting experiences when he was interrupted by a bite, and at once forgot everything in the excitement of landing a sixteen-pound trout He said it was a sixteen-pounder, and even wrote to his wife in Christchurch that it was, and it stands to reason that a respectable married citizen would scorn to tell a lie about a little thing like that.

We bade him a friendly adieu next morning, and started for our next field with cheerfulness, having cleared enough by Our Show to enable us to quit Kaiapoi honourably.