Green Dolphin Street

  Tai Haruru went on with his story. With his plan of rescue already shaped in his mind, he had made his way into the forest to the near-by village, hoping to find Kapua-Manga and Jacky-Poto. He had found it deserted except for Old Nick, who had been perched upon the thatched roof of the chief’s house swearing horribly. With Old Nick upon his shoulder he had journeyed on. He had known the direction he must take to reach the pa, but in any case it had been easy for a woodsman to follow the trail of the Maoris and their prisoners, and as he went he had broken branches along the way to guide the Red Garment. He had almost unbelievable luck, for only a few hours’ journey from the pa he had found Kapua-Manga wandering disconsolately after game and learned from him that Maui-Potiki and his family were prisoners within the pa and still alive. With much bitter lamenting Kapua-Manga had told Tai Haruru that he and Jacky-Poto and Hine-Moa had been powerless to help their white folk. Before the attack on the settlement they had been summoned suddenly to a meeting of their tribe at the village and in duty bound had obeyed. Hine-Moa had been sent to the pa and Kapua-Manga and Jacky-Poto had been held bound in the forest until the fight at the settlement was over and the Maoris back again with their prisoners.

  “You should have told Maui-Potiki that you had been summoned to that meeting,” Tai Haruru had said severely. “To leave him without a word was discourteous.”

  And Kapua-Manga had looked sheepish and had replied that Maui-Potiki had erected a stockade against his Maori friends. Did a man who did not trust his friends deserve consideration from them? But he and Jacky-Poto and Hine-Moa were still the friends of Maui-Potiki and his wife and child, and also of the hairy one with the long arms. They had persuaded their chief not to put them to death just yet but to feed them and fatten them well in preparation for the next feast day, and they were meanwhile seeking for some means of delivering them.

  Tai Haruru had expounded his plan to Kapua-Manga, and the Maori had thought well of it. He had left Tai Haruru to sleep that night in hiding in the forest, and early next morning he had come back to him again, and had tattooed his face for him, and had helped him to change himself once more into a Maori of the northern tribe to which he had once belonged, and together they had deprived the infuriated Old Nick of his tail feathers and Tai Haruru had made the fine arrow that in good time was to be a message of hope to the prisoners in the pa. Tai Haruru had remained in hiding in the forest until his tattooed face had looked as it should, and then he had come running to the village, a Maori escaped from the fighting in the north, with the warning that the Red Garment was everywhere sniffing the air for battle and that it would be wise to put the pa into a state of defense.

  “That, at least, I could do for them,” he said. “I could not save them from young Lewis’ attack, but I could warn them. They trusted me. They sent out their scouts immediately and prepared themselves to move into the pa. They were not afraid.”

  He stopped and sighed, listening for sounds of the fighting, but they were too far away.

  3

  They slept that night in the cave above the torere, and for Marianne it was a fitful, poor sort of rest. It was not until the night was nearly past that she fell asleep, and then it was to pass not into restful unconsciousness but into one of those nightmares that are all the more terrifying because they offer no adequate explanation of the terror that one feels. She was not even aware that she was asleep, because in her dreams she was lying in the same lovely amphitheater hollowed out of the hillside where she had fallen asleep. The moon was up, turning each flower petal to a sea shell of mother-of-pearl, each blade of grass to a tiny silver sword. Infinitely high above her the great stars hung motionless in the sky; far down below she could see the tops of the forest trees lying like a shroud of silvery cloud upon the floor of the world. There was neither sound nor movement, and the unearthly, silver stillness was so benumbing that she felt as though her whole body were encased in ice. And then she found that she was quite alone. The others had all gone away and left her. She would have liked to cry aloud to them, but the cold seemed to have paralyzed her voice as well as her limbs, and she could not. Then it seemed to her that the visible world, the great stars, the moonlight, the cold, still, sworded grass, the motionless flowers and trees, were leaving her too. They did not move, but yet they were passing away, thinning into nothingness, and beyond them there was a great and appalling darkness, the kind of darkness that little children are so afraid of, that kind that dwells behind a drawn curtain in a lighted room and holds they know not what. She knew she would be in it in a moment, every familiar thing left behind on the wrong side of the curtain. Her nightmare terror rose to the peak where it could not be borne, and broke like a wave in a storm of childish tears.

  It was over, and she was awake, and Tai Haruru was bending over her, holding her cold hands tightly in his. That terrible moonlight had gone, leaving the first sweet grey dimness of the dawn. The silence had gone, and there were bird rustlings in the trees and a few clear notes of song. And, best of all, the others were lying peacefully asleep as she had last seen them. They had not left her, after all. And Tai Haruru was bending over her, soothing her as though she were a frightened little girl. . . . And like a frightened little girl she clung to him and was not ashamed.

  “A nightmare?” he asked. “Tell me.”

  “There’s nothing to tell,” she said, half laughing, half crying. “I just dreamed that I was alone here at night and everything went away. It was dreadful; like dying.” She paused, fighting the last of her terror, still holding his hands. “I felt like it once before, on the Island, after William’s father died. I wondered if he’d felt that way. Is it very terrible to die?”

  “I think there is just one moment when it is terrible,” said Tai Haruru judicially, as to a child of eight. “But it is a moment that is soon gone.”

  “Why did I dream of death in this place?” she asked.

  “How can I tell you?” he said, smiling. “Perhaps because there is a torere just below.”

  But she shook her head, unsatisfied by his explanation. The dead Maoris in the torere had none of them died here, and she believed that she had once again shared in the experience, past or to come, of a dying man.

  “Go to sleep again,” said Tai Haruru. “It’s the best sleep, the dawn sleep. You’re not alone.”

  She lay down again, and he tucked her blanket round her. Then he fetched his own blanket and lay down near her. She did not mind, she was glad to have him so close; closer even than William was. As she drifted again toward sleep, she found herself saying his names over and over again. . . . Timothy Haslam. Timothy. Tai Haruru. The Sounding Sea. . . . They none of them seemed quite right, somehow. He had had another name once, but she had forgotten it. She had known it long ago, but now she had forgotten it. Once again came the feeling that things were slipping away, but there was no terror in it now, only joy; because they were leaving her, not alone by herself, but alone with—with—the man whose name she had forgotten. . . . And that was what she wanted. . . . She slept deeply and happily.

  She woke up in broad daylight, and she had almost forgotten both the terror of her dream and the utter content that Tai Haruru’s comfort had brought her. Yet enough memory remained to make her sit up quickly and count the sleeping forms about her. And there was one missing; Hine-Moa was no longer with them. She must have slipped away in that hour of the dawn when Marianne had slept so deeply. Her cry of consternation awoke the others, and brought them crowding round to look at the tokens of love that the Maori woman had left behind her. Upon the blanket that covered Véronique she had laid a little amulet that she had always worn round her neck, and upon Marianne’s blanket lay a beautiful carved bracelet that her mistress knew had been her most precious possession. She had gone back to her own people and what now remained of the pa and the village, careless of what might happen to her if the Red Garment had conquered. Tears were pricking fiercely in Marianne’s eyes as she
slipped the bracelet onto her arm, for instinct told her that she would not see Hine-Moa again.

  After they had eaten, and had turned Tai Haruru also into a Tapu Maori with the contents of a second pot of paint that Hine-Moa had left with them, they set out again upon the journey back to civilization. They traveled slowly and painfully, hampered by Nat’s lame leg and Marianne’s exhaustion. She had a pair of skin shoes to wear now that Hine-Moa had brought for her, but they did not seem to ease the pain of her swollen feet very much, and the vertigo and nausea that were continually overwhelming her made her afraid lest she should collapse altogether and have to be carried. . . . And William was already burdened with Véronique, and Tai Haruru with the blankets, and Nat with the cooking pot and Old Nick. . . .

  Bewildered, reeling with fatigue, she rebuilt her shattered existence upon the fact of Nat. Had she ever thought of him as the poor? Now she watched Nat as a small child watches a teacher from whom it must at all costs learn. He took to himself each day as it came with childlike trustfulness, and so did she. He never complained, and neither did she. He took every misfortune with a grin, and so did she. He took upon himself all the hardest and most unpleasant duties as a matter of mere routine, and she tried to do the same, only William would not let her. She noticed that her husband seemed a trifle bewildered by this sudden transformation of his self-willed wife into a very fair imitation of a saint; one of those dirty medieval saints who lived in caves in the desert or sat upon the tops of pillars and never washed in a lifetime. Yet in spite of her appalling appearance, never had he behaved more lovingly toward her. His protecting, enveloping tenderness had a quality of intensity that it had never had before. . . . He even seemed to be more concerned for her than for Véronique. . . . So I have not lost everything after all, she said to herself. Out of all the world he chose me to be his wife, and now I am not only his choice but his best beloved. Better beloved even than Véronique.

  Tai Haruru seemed less astonished by her virtue than was William. “It is wonderful to what heights one can momentarily reach when put to it,” he said drily one day. But he did not withhold his admiration. “Marianne,” he said to her upon the last evening of their journey, “I don’t believe there is another woman of your upbringing and your generation who could have borne herself with the fortitude that you have done. You will not lose your reward, my dear. I know where we are now. By this time tomorrow you will once more be able to lay your hands upon a pair of corsets.”

  Marianne, lying by their campfire, feverish and almost lightheaded, smiled faintly. The distance they had covered had actually been shorter than the distance from the settlement to the pa, but because they had traveled so slowly it had taken three days longer, days that had seemed like years. The food Hine-Moa had brought for them had soon given out and Tai Haruru had had to shoot game for them, and they had cooked it as best they could over their campfire. There had been no definite trail to follow. Often they had been confronted by a bog, or by a cliff too steep to climb, and had had to retrace their steps and try again. For a whole day they had found no water and had been nearly frantic with thirst. Twice they had met bands of Maoris, fully armed and in ugly mood, and had thanked heaven for the hateful disguise that kept these warriors at a distance. Véronique had been very good all the way, riding upon her father’s back, listening to his enthralling tales. She had not grumbled at the tummy-aches caused by the queer diet of smoked meat and berries, and she had seemed quite fearless when they met the Maoris. Yet during the nights that had followed those meetings she had cried out in nightmare and wakened sobbing and trembling. It was obvious that the day at the settlement, and their terrifying escape from the pa, had left their mark upon her. Lying beside the campfire that last night, Marianne came to a sudden decision. They would not go back to the ruined settlement. They would leave North Island and go south, where there were hardly any Maoris and no fighting to frighten little girls half out of their wits, and where there was no excessive heat to burn the roses out of their cheeks. . . . Only last night, Marianne vividly remembered, she had had a queer dream in which she had been standing in the center of a flock of sheep in a green pasture, and beside her, staff in hand, had stood her husband Job.

  The decision taken, Marianne stretched herself more comfortably beside Véronique in their nest of blankets, looking up at the great stars that she could see glimmering faintly through the treetops over her head. “The stars at night so big and silver bright they might every one of ’em have been a moon,” had said Captain O’Hara. She had felt very near to him all through this journey, that had been so like the one he had described on board the Green Dolphin, and once or twice she had fancied she had seen his great figure striding on ahead of them leading the way, his head tilted back to catch the gleam of mountains above the swaying treetops, listening to the chime of bird song and the wind in the trees. . . . Doubtless she had been as feverish then as she was now. The faces of William and Tai Haruru and Nat, sitting smoking by the fire, discussing their plans for the resuscitation of the timber business, and blissfully unaware that she had already decided it should not be resuscitated, kept appearing and disappearing in a very odd way, seeming now very near to her and now very far away. To shut out the unpleasant phenomenon she closed her eyes and tried to send herself to sleep by counting sheep—Job’s sheep—jumping over a gate.

  4

  It was the evening of the next day, and long spears of golden light had been flung down by the sun across the path they followed. Marianne found herself stepping over them, so that they should not hurt her feet. Throughout this day she had found herself doing the oddest things; stumbling over the dead body of the Maori whom she had shot in the settlement garden, only it wasn’t him at all but a log of wood; gathering her strength for just one more leap over the last of the ditches in the pa, only it was just a stream that crossed the path; running down the hill with screams and curses still sounding in her ears, only she wasn’t running but crawling at a foot’s pace with William’s arm round her. He had no idea, of course, of the odd things that she kept doing, though he realized that she was very tired. “Nearly there, my girl,” he kept saying. “Nearly there.”

  He and she were at the tail end of the procession wandering in single file along the path, and Nat was just ahead with Old Nick perched upon his shoulder. She would not have been able to get along at all had it not been for Nat. She fixed her eyes upon him, and when he put a foot forward she put a foot forward, when he stopped to rest she stopped to rest, when he grinned back at her over his shoulder she grinned too, and when he cracked a joke with Tai Haruru, on ahead of him, she made a raucous noise in her throat which frightened poor William nearly out of his wits.

  And ahead of them all, recently set down after a long, refreshing ride on her father’s back, pranced Véronique. She was the only one of the party whom a costume of rags, fish oil, and red ochre had not rendered an object of terror and repulsion. She looked like a red-brown forest elf dancing effortlessly over the golden spears that so impeded her mother, her body now mysteriously shadowed, now shining like a flower. They were all following her now, even the men so weary that they were scarcely conscious of where they were going. She knew, it seemed. She danced on and on, and suddenly there was a blaze of golden light and she had danced right away into it and vanished.

  For a moment the grownups halted, appalled at her disappearance. Then Tai Haruru laughed. “We’ve come to the edge of the forest and the sun’s in our eyes,” he explained.

  Huddled under the last of the trees, the forest with its darkness and dangers behind them, they stood and looked out at the fair prospect as Christian and Hopeful, worn by their travels, must have looked out over that valley where ran the river of the water of life. From their feet a green meadow sprinkled with flowers sloped down to a stream crossed by a wooden bridge, and on the farther side of the stream the thatched roofs and wooden walls of a prosperous-looking settlement showed among the fruit trees of pretty
gardens. Beyond the settlement was a patchwork of harvest fields backed by low green hills that curved protectingly about this enchanted valley, shielding it from the mountain winds and the storms from the sea. The whole lovely scene was bathed in a golden sunset haze that softened every outline to grace, and muted sounds as well as colors to a gentleness that was of the essence of peace. There was music even in the distant sound of a cock crowing and the scraping of a saw, as well as in the chime of bird song and the ripple of water and the gentle sound that two old horses made as they cropped the grass of the green meadow beside the stream. Beside them a wagon rested with shafts tilted skyward, with a woman in a grey gown sitting in the shade of it reading a book, unconscious as yet of Véronique running toward her through the grass and flowers and sunshine. Into Marianne’s bewildered mind drifted words from The Pilgrim’s Progress learned long ago in the schoolroom at Le Paradis. “The water of the river was pleasant and enlivening to their weary spirits. Besides, on the banks of this river, on either side, were green trees with all manner of fruit, and the leaves they eat to prevent surfeits and other diseases that are incident to those that heat their blood by travels. On either side of the river was also a meadow, curiously beautiful with lilies, and it was green all the year long. In this meadow they lay down and slept, for there they might lie down safely.”

  Véronique’s clear voice added its note of beauty to the cadence that rose from the valley as though the earth itself were singing. “We’ve come,” she called, as though they were the rightful owners of this enchanted place. “It’s us.”

  The woman in the grey dress dropped her book, looked up, stared for a moment in astonishment, then jumped up and held out her arms; for she was Susanna.