II

Jermyn heard with no more than a flicker of interest that Darien was coming back. Wine, women, cards (and he was trying them all), were only flickers of varying interest, like marsh-fires in the night. This love that turned to lust, this prayer that darkened to curses, these gods that presently wagged a goatish scut … where in all that leering mad phantasmagoria was the answer to the riddle of life? Youth light-foot in the grasses with dulcimers and virginals; passionate men calling down the heavens in fires; old age peering with filmy eyes towards page 216 the still-denied raptures … what echoes did they hear from those gone before?

Sally might think she heard; but Jermyn, chilled to his bones by an Eternity which seemed to have claimed her before her time, would accept no chimeras. So he dipped his pen in a new gall and went wandering again, while Sally endured blank days and shopped with Tiffany in Commercial Bay, buying tall hard cones of the precious white sugar which had to be broken up with axes, and chines of sawdust-cured bacon for Mr Lovel's breakfasts.

Would she ever find her way back to the heart of her tall woman-child, so shut in on herself since Roddy went away? I did try, darling, she wanted to whisper. But wives must uphold their husbands, and Tiffany couldn't hear, stepping so straight and free in her spread skirts and pantalettes.

The town, so full of top-hats, Paisley shawls, smocks, blue reefer coats and bullock-drays, had little for Tiffany, but it had a good deal for Nick Flower, who had heard of Peregrine's inquiries regarding the gun-running among his captains and had returned to examine possible leaks. He saw Sally walking with her daughter, and looked after them with a grim smile. There went a clever woman who for a time had tricked even him. Was her passage still fair down her underground ways?

He turned abruptly into a tavern dusky and foul with smoke, with fumes of drink and men, with dregs of beer, dark stains of ejected quids on the sanded floor, and thrust through the crowd to a corner, where he sat waiting for his tools to come to him.

Sheepishly they came, putting the rum-noggin from their fists, the girl from their knee, answering his questions. Surely old Barney had talked. He allers did when liquored, and Lovels had put him through the mill praper. But he took it all back when sober, and the captains had stood together.

“You've got us in too deep for anythin' else, sir,” page 217 they said, more admiring than complaining. No harm in smuggling, with the Guv'ner eggin' on the Maoris to break their word and the papers eggin' on the country to defy the Guv'ner. Puzzled by the confused ethics of this new land trying so desperately to reconcile matters that wouldn't and couldn't be reconciled, sailor-men thought it wiser just to trust in Flower.

Other taverns Flower visited, inviting the complaints of immigrants crying for land. Young brawny men for the most part, with the hard red of the English weather still in their faces, the soft blue of English skies in their bewildered resentful eyes.

“Brungin's us out 'ere … stuffed wi' lying promises … an' wunna latten us tu the land we bought. Na-ay, that's no way tu trate a mon,” said a burly north-countryman with an infant family living in tents.

“You shouldn't have bought from the syndicates. They have no Government authority. Sharks, all of them,” said Flower. But that was no help. He explained the Waitangi Treaty—that deadly Magna Carta of the Maori. “It was made in all good faith … to stop whites from exploiting ignorant savages. No one foresaw that we couldn't disentangle the land-titles without the chiefs, and now that we have destroyed their mana they can't—and won't—help us. You're in a cleft stick, my man … like everyone else.”

“Then guv the chiefs back their mana. They kin make laws. I 'eard tell they made a law agin lettin' drink hinter the country.”

“You'd like that law, wouldn't you?” Flower looked at the flushed little cockney with his hair standing up like dried stubble—all the stubble he'd have the chance to handle out here. Where was the use of talking? And there were the women hanging round the necks of their despairing men, crying: “Look 'ere, cully, you gotter do somethin'. We ain't left the Old Country to clem out 'ere. We come fur a 'ome an' nippers of our own.”

page 218

“In the South Island—” began Flower. But they couldn't get there except by the roundabout and expensive way of distant Sydney, and already they were penniless. A pretty mess all round.