“You know a good bit of work when you see it, boy,” said the deep, rough voice. “New to the country?”
“I’ve just landed, sir,” said William. The respect in his voice was sincere and spontaneous, drawn from him by the quality of this stranger, and it gave obvious pleasure. The man smiled again and leaned across the table.
“Got work to do?” he asked.
“No, sir,” said William.
“Fond of wood?”
It was a strange question, and William pondered it. “Not that I know of,” he said at last. “I’ve been a sailor.”
“Good enough,” said the man. “The wind in the kauri trees sounds like the sea, you know. I’m a lumberman. You can join me if you like.”
“You know nothing about me, sir,” gasped William.
“All I need to know. You’ve a fine physique and will not make a nuisance of yourself by falling sick. You’ve respect for an older man and will do what you’re told; if you don’t, I’ll tan the hide off you. I’ve lost one of my best men—knifed by the Maoris—and I’m in Wellington to find another. My shack’s some way from here, going north along the coast. There’s a settlement of perhaps forty souls, all in the timber or salt pork trade, natives and white men—the old pioneering stock—not these new fellows who plow up the land with a Bible in one hand and a dictionary in the other—and no women, thank God, except the Maori women. I’ll work you like hell, but there’s plenty of drink to wet your whistle. You must be ready for any sort of trouble, for there’ll be war between the natives and the white men before we’re all much older; but if you’re a friend of mine, you’ll never lift a hand against the Maori. I’ve lived among the Maoris, as a Maori, for years. I like ’em. They call me Tai Haruru—Sounding Sea.”
“I’ll come,” said William.
“Then be here at eight tomorrow morning. I can get you a horse and a gun if you don’t possess ’em.”
“I have nothing in the world,” said William, “except a few garments, a string of carved heads, and a knife. The last coin I had paid for the stew I’ve just eaten.”
Tai Haruru laughed. “There’s many a man has started life here with less,” he said. “I’ve known of fellows, stowaways or mutineers, who’ve swum ashore and landed on the rocks stark naked. Nothing like utter loss for a fresh start. It puts you on your mettle. Good night, boy. If you’re late tomorrow morning, I’ll not wait for you.”
He supplied William with another drink and then turned from him. While they talked, his strong will had seemed to hold the two of them locked together, quiet and absorbed in the midst of the tumult about them, but now it relegated William also to the outer darkness and confusion. Withdrawn into the citadel of his endurance and his pride, Tai Haruru brooded, and absorbed rum and water as the earth the rain.
William sat for a while laughing and talking with the other men, and then found himself out in the wind again, thanking heaven for Tai Haruru and hot toddy. He was warm and comforted, and hummed a little song under his breath as he walked around in circles looking for the Parsonage; which he was unlikely to have lighted upon had not a slight, halting figure appeared out of the shadows and seized his arm. The iron grip of Samuel Kelly’s hand was once more astonishingly painful, and William swore angrily and tried to extricate himself.
But to extricate one’s self from Samuel Kelly, once he had decided to keep a firm hold, was not an easy task. The resolution of the martyrs was in the little man, the power of God and the obstinacy of the devil. With these three he prevailed over the hulking young giant in his grip, and William was haled home to the Parsonage, held over Susanna’s washtub, doused with cold water, and put to bed.
3
He awoke drenched with sunshine. With one agonized bound he was out of bed. Heaven help him, what was the time? Had he done it again? Tai Haruru, like the Orion, did not wait for drunkards. In the name of heaven, what was the time?
A cheap clock from Manchester ticked upon the window sill of the bare little attic room that Samuel and Susanna had put at his disposal. Seven o’clock. This time he was lucky, but such luck was more than he deserved. It was with utmost humility that he washed himself in the tin basin on the rickety table beside his bed, and rolled up into a bundle the few disreputable garments that he had bought on board the Green Dolphin with his pay. Susanna had washed and mended them, he noticed suddenly, and his heart smote him that he had not noticed it before.
Then, his bundle under his arm, he went downstairs. Samuel and Susanna had been up and doing for a good hour; the parlor was neat and tidy, and breakfast ready on the table. Susanna was already sitting behind the big brown teapot, and Samuel was cutting the bread. Standing just inside the doorway, his great bulk seeming to fill the little room, his face as red as fire with shame and embarrassment, William blurted out an account of his meeting with Tai Haruru, asked pardon for last night, thanked them stumblingly for their kindness, and bade them farewell.
But he was not to escape as easily as that from the grip of Samuel Kelly.
“Sit down,” said the little man sternly, pointing out a chair with the bread knife, that he held as imposingly as a prophet’s staff. “And come to your senses before it is too late.”
But William did not sit down. He stood mulishly where he was.
“I have not the acquaintance of this man they call Sounding Sea,” said Samuel, “but from all I’ve heard of him he’s not a man whose company should be sought after by an educated Christian gentleman such as yourself.”
William flushed redder than ever. “He’s one of the finest men I’ve ever met,” he said, his voice tending to rise to a belligerent bellow. “And what’s more, I believe he’s a gentleman, too.”
“No doubt,” Samuel agreed, his voice also tending to rise toward those thundering trumpet notes that were his when once launched upon one of his fine and resounding sermons. “That type of gentleman is quite thick upon the ground here, but Lucifer fallen from heaven is not more hopelessly cast out from the life that once he lived than is a civilized man who has reverted again to barbarism. The law of gravitation is not only a material law, it holds good in matters of behavior also. Nothing can overcome it but the power of God, which men such as you desire to live with neither acknowledge nor invoke. You may think you can keep yourself civilized in the midst of uncivilized surroundings, but I tell you that a young man such as yourself, well meaning, but, if I may say so, excessively undisciplined, is powerless against the weight of the common mind. If you desire to remain what you are, you will remain here in the company of those who live their lives on the same level as that to which you yourself are accustomed, but to which, judging by your condition last night, you cling with an extremely precarious hold.”
Samuel had got well away. His eyes flashed, and he brought his fist down on the table with a crash that set all the crockery leaping and put poor Susanna all of a tremble. “You will remain here, young man,” he shouted, “and save your soul. You will remain here, or go to hell.”
“What should I do here?” demanded William.
“I have a suggestion to make, which I should have made last night had you been in a condition to receive it,” said Samuel. “I ask you to remain here under my roof as assistant master in the school we are founding for the children. You are a man of education and should use it for the good of others. I ask you to stay here with me, and give yourself body and soul to the service of God.”
“Teach children?” asked William incredulously. “Me teach children? Good God, whatever should I teach them?”
“Their Catechism,” said Samuel. “Reading, writing and arithmetic. The use of the globe.”
William groaned. “Not my sort of work at all,” he said. “I should be bored to death.”
“At first, no doubt you would,” said Samuel. “Would that matter if with your initial boredom you bought your soul and theirs?”
William s
tared.
“Fling it down,” said Samuel with loud ardor. “Trample on it, together with all those emotions that are tinctured and stained with self. Do you know what salvation is? It is the flinging away of self that the soul set free of it may be abandoned to the saving knowledge of the love of God. He who loses his life shall save it, together with the lives of those for whom he suffers. Salvation is the right use of pain. Salvation is—”
But William, unimpressed, was rolling an apprehensive eye upon another cheap little clock from Manchester that was ticking on the parlor mantelpiece. “I thank you for your kindness, sir,” he interrupted, “I thank you with all my heart. But now I must say good-by.”
“Stay with us,” pleaded Susanna gently, raising her meek grey eyes to William’s. “All that we have we will share with you. Throw in your lot with us and be our son.”
So spoke Susanna, lovingly, though knowing full well that William’s appetite would be to her the last straw that broke the camel’s back. But she was a humble woman at all times, most matter-of-factly prepared for any sort of martyrdom. She was saved, perhaps, for she had long ago passed the point where she thought her own feelings of the slightest consequence. She did not win William’s company, but she won his love by that speech. He went to her and took her hand. “I can’t stay, but I’ll often come to see you,” he said thickly. “Thank you for mending my clothes. I’ll be your friend always.”
And then he went, no more deflected from his purpose by her gentle pleading than by Samuel’s thunder. Sighing bitterly, Samuel cast aside the knife and speared a piece of bread upon the toasting fork. He knew it was useless to pursue William with further arguments. Not the strongest soul that ever lived can drive a weak one along a path for which it is not yet ready. “He has far to go, yet, wife,” he said sadly. “He has very far to go.” And then he groaned, and took the bread off the fork again and could not eat, because William had gone from him and he feared for his soul.
But Susanna poured her tea and buttered her bread with good appetite.
“Maybe our way was not the way for him, Samuel,” she said. “Our sort of life is not his sort, perhaps. It is out of one’s own sort of life that the gate of salvation opens.”
“Yes, wife,” said Samuel. “Yes, that’s true.”
Susanna did not speak often, but when she did it was usually good sense. He was cheered and took a sausage.
4
They had been riding for days, mostly in silence, and now it was evening and still they rode. The sky was lit with such a depth of limitless light that when one looked up into it, one was afraid. Yet if one looked from the sky to the mighty flanks of the hills, the blond grass that clothed them was illumined too, and the headlands running out into the sea were all on fire. The forests were without this terrifying light, but the depth of their primeval darkness was also not without its fear. The sea was cold and clear and green. The wind had dropped, and in the silence the rhythm of its slow boom and surge upon the rocks was the rhythm of life itself. This is an awful country, thought William. It may be free and clean and beautiful, but it’s stark and terrible too. Anything might happen in it. Anything. I wish Tai Haruru would say something.
And as if in answer to his thought, Tai Haruru drew rein on the crest of a hill and dismounted. “We’ll sit down here,” he said. “Have a rest and smoke a pipe. New Zealand sunsets are worth watching. I’ve watched ’em for twenty years, and still they search my soul.”
The horses cropped the grass, and it was as though they sucked up light. William stretched his cramped limbs beside Tai Haruru and watched his brown hands curving about the bowl of his pipe; it was curiously carved in the likeness of a bird in flight, and the flame that sprang up from the flint and tinder shone through Tai Haruru’s fingers as though it were the living light of their own vitality. It was pleasant to watch them, and to take one’s aching eyes from the terrible splendor of the world.
But Tai Haruru was not in the mood to allow him the comfort of small things. “Do you see that creek?” he said, pointing to a silver streak far down in the darkening valley, to which their flaming hilltop fell precipitately. “The settlement clings to its banks. You can see it there. That’s where you’ll live, boy, perhaps for years to come, perhaps for a short while only. Who knows? For this is a country of storms and earthquakes, cannibal country, pioneer country. You have to be on the alert always to preserve your life. For remember, boy, we’re of value only while the clay that we are holds together; after that, nothingness.”
William eyed Tai Haruru with a certain apprehension. It struck him that in this country the men, as well as the landscape, ran to extremes. Samuel, now, was almost tedious in his insistence upon the fact of the immortal soul; Tai Haruru on the contrary seemed likely to harp unnecessarily upon its absence. Somewhere between the two of them was what he considered the happy medium, that free, friendly place, Green Dolphin country. When, as a boy, he had thought of the landscape of New Zealand as the landscape of this country, he had not imagined that it would arouse in him this awe and fear. His adolescent mind, that had still regarded his own being as the center of the universe, had dared to tinge a whole great territory with his own especial colors. That had been farcical. There was room here for the countries of many men, and the great stage was finely set for many other dramas besides his own. What had Marguerite said about one’s special country? “Where we find liberation . . . where our souls find it easiest to escape from self . . . where what is about us echoes the best that we are.” Perhaps it was to find just those very conditions that some two thousand white folk had within this last year come to this country. It would not fail them, thought William. The very best that was in the very finest man that ever lived would not fail to find resounding echo in the perfection of the beauty of this land.
In the clear, cold light he could easily see the creek and the village of small houses beside it, set about with a patchwork of harvest fields. The tiny settlement looked alarmingly fragile, held there between the sea and the forest, like a toy between the two hands of some mighty giant. It looked as though it might be crushed to pieces at any moment. Of the two inimical forces, it was the forest that struck William as the more threatening of the two.
“We fell the kauri trees only upon its fringes,” said Tai Haruru, reading his thought. “Only the fringes are ours. The interior of the forest is a Maori stronghold—a country within a country. It has its entrances and its frontiers that a white man dare not pass—yet I lived in that country for perhaps ten years—maybe longer I don’t know—I lost all count of time.”
He puffed silently for a moment or two at his curiously carved pipe. When he spoke again, it was jerkily, unwillingly, as though he dragged forgotten lumber from some hated room.
“Though we don’t ask questions in this country, yet you’d better know a bit about the chap you’re to work for. If I don’t tell you the truth about myself, another chap will tell you lies. They all tell tales about me—God knows why. I was born in Cumberland, of fine stock, in a grand old house. My family have always been staunch Catholics—ancestors of mine have been martyred for the faith—but though as a boy I was dragged to hear Mass every Sunday in an old grey church among the hills, it never took hold of me at all—I always knew the whole thing was a fairy tale. But I loved those hills, and my home, and a woman there whom I’d known as child and girl. I’d have lived a life like other men, the good life, had I not had wild blood in me, and a foul temper. One day I struck a man in fury, and he died. I struck him because he ill-treated a wild thing up in the woods, but I did not mean to kill. I never kill if I can help it. They brought it in as manslaughter. I served my sentence, and when I came out, my woman had married another fellow and my people were ashamed of me. So I went to Australia. I never stay in any place where I’m treated as my people treated me. Nothing living should ever be treated with contempt. Whatever it is that lives, a man, a tree or a bird, should be touch
ed gently, because the time is short.”
William understood now why Tai Haruru’s hands were not as the hands of other men. They touched gently.
“No need to expatiate on my first few years in Australia,” said Tai Haruru. “It would have been easier to reconcile one’s self to an eternity of hell, I used to think in those days, if one had not been flung into it by a flash of madness that had lasted only for a moment. Such a stupid action, so hastily done. That was the worst of it.” William shivered suddenly, and not with the chill of the twilight. Tai Haruru looked at him kindly but asked no questions. The moment he had set eyes on the lad, he had felt between them the union of a common experience. “But in this world, lad, you’re not really damned if you can make something, save something, burnish up something. From a boy I’d always loved wood—there were woods about my home—and I’d always been good with my hands. In Australia I became a cabinetmaker and wood carver, and I was happy for a while. I did some good work. The best thing I did, I remember, was a chair carved with sea creatures—the captain of a clipper bought it off me. But there were not many in a pioneering community who could afford to give the price he did just for a bit of carving. I couldn’t make a living that way, so I turned lumberman as well. I came to New Zealand to fell kauri trees, and the Maoris got me.”
“Is your name Timothy Haslam?” asked William quietly.
“It was,” said Tai Haruru.
“Captain O’Hara still has your chair,” said William. “It’s in his cabin on board the Green Dolphin. It was the Green Dolphin that brought me to New Zealand. It was just a chance that you did not see Captain O’Hara in Wellington two days ago, before he set sail again for China.”
“We were friends once,” said Tai Haruru. “But he’d not know me now if he passed me in the street. A white man can’t live alone among natives for years and be the same man he was before. No. O’Hara would not have known me if he’d passed me in the street two days ago.”