“We differ,” said Samuel belligerently.
“We do indeed,” agreed Tai Haruru pleasantly. “We shall not lack subjects for argument during the long hours of our journey. Shall we walk down to the hospital and see about those medical supplies? And we’ll need to find two tough horses.”
They got up, absorbed in each other and the coming adventure, though Samuel had by this time recalled the fact that he had a wife and in passing he laid his hand gently and lovingly upon her shoulder. “I’ll not be long away from you,” he whispered to her. She covered his hand with her own, but still she said nothing, so inhibiting was the chill of foreboding that had made her ice-cold all over as though it were midwinter.
But Marianne was not so inhibited. “Mr. Haslam!” she cried out indignantly. “I never heard such crazy nonsense in all my life. The summer is already passing, and William and I cannot wait here indefinitely for you to come back from this mad expedition. If we are going to South Island at all, we must start as soon as possible.”
“Certainly, ma’am,” said Tai Haruru equably. “I agree that you and William should lose no time in starting. I’m not preventing you. My best wishes will go with you.”
“But surely—” She faltered and stopped, gazing at him in mingled distress and perplexity. “But you are William’s partner. Surely you will come with us too?”
“How little you know me, Marianne,” he said gently. “I find no value in life apart from personal independence. That you and William should join me in my lumber business—that was one thing. That I should follow along at the tail end of your Israelitish migration like your tame tabby cat—that is another, and can hardly be expected of me.”
He smiled at her and was gone after Samuel.
3
So that was why William had looked so bowed down with sorrow. He had known Tai Haruru was not going with them. Supper was over, and Marianne was out on the porch again. The wind had risen, sweeping clear the face of the moon and whipping the stars to flame, so although it was late, it was not dark. She was alone. Susanna was in the house, Nat had gone to his lodging, William had gone to see the notary about selling their land. . . . At least so he had said, but his wife suspected him of a visit to Hobson’s Saloon to drown his sorrows in whiskey. . . . Samuel and Tai Haruru had not yet returned.
She was most desperately unhappy, and amazed at her own unhappiness. Once she had hated Tai Haruru, and now here she was unable to face the fact that she and William were going to have to live without him. Looking into her soul, she realized that of late years she had come to lean very heavily upon his strength. Her dependence upon him had begun as long ago as the birth of Véronique, and now that she was not as strong physically as she had been, and not so self-confident, it was increasing daily. Her bitterness against him, when he left them at the settlement and rode to Wellington, had been because she did not feel so safe without him. When he had shot the arrow into the pa, she had believed that they were saved. She had felt confident and happy in her decision to go to South Island because Tai Haruru would be with her, and when he was with her all was well. . . . And now he would not be with her.
Should she change her mind, wait here until there was peace, and then go back to the ruined settlement and start again as they had after the earthquake? Her new weakness, that clung to Tai Haruru, wanted to do that, but her pride rebelled. She had said it was best for Véronique that they should go, and if she was to change her mind now, she would stand convicted of insincerity in advancing Véronique’s welfare as her motive for the journey. And she did really believe that a change would be best for Véronique.
A tall figure came suddenly from the house, and loomed up beside her. “And so you are hurt, Marianne, that I am not coming with you to South Island?”
“Yes,” said Marianne. “I am hurt. I thought that you loved William and Véronique, and that you liked me.”
“You thought quite rightly,” said Tai Haruru. “You are mistaken only in one thing; I love you as well as William and Véronique.”
Marianne looked up at him, but she could see little of his face in the shadow. “Then why?” she murmured.
“The reason I gave you. I love my independence more than any of you.”
“You talked nonsense when you said you would have to trail after us like a tabby cat,” she flashed. “If you came, with us, you would be what you have always been, the central figure in the picture.”
“I thought it was Marianne Ozanne who was always that, ma’am,” he said mockingly.
“No,” said Marianne somberly. “I know myself better than I used to. I lack your aristocracy. You were right when you said once that I was a vulgar woman. I am. Nor am I as strong as I thought I was. I don’t really know how I shall manage without you.”
“Marianne!” he cried with mock horror. “You don’t know what you are saying. To speak like that is to be in danger of salvation.”
“Salvation? What’s salvation?” she asked wearily.
“As far as I can make out from Kelly, it is a curious process of divine burglary. The first thing to be wrested from one by a God who said ‘Thou shalt not steal’ is one’s good opinion of one’s self. Personally, not believing in the burglar, I’m in no danger, but you—”
“We are talking of independence, not salvation,” Marianne interrupted tartly. “You will not lose it by becoming my prop and stay in South Island.”
“A man in love has no independence worth mentioning.”
She could only stare up at him, stupefied, her face dim and white in the moonlight.
“Years ago I swore never to love a human creature again,” said Tai Haruru irritably. “Then I saw the boy William sitting on the other side of the table at Hobson’s, and I loved him. Then I loved you. There’s nothing for it now but to cut myself adrift from the two of you.”
“I think you have gone quite crazy,” said Marianne. “I was not without attraction when I came here as a bride, and you did not love me then, but now that I am getting old, with any vestige of good looks I ever had completely vanished, you tell me that you love me.”
“I love the child in you,” said Tai Haruru. “The adventurous, brave, stubborn little child. She is a changeling child, lost and lonely but passionate, vital, conscious like all the fairy folk of her superiority to the common herd. . . . Oh yes, you are, Marianne. This new humility of yours only goes skin deep, you know. You stand in no danger of conversion at present, thank God. . . . You see, I am as enslaved by the changeling’s faults as by her virtues, for they’re all part of her. I should hate to see Samuel convert her into one of those detestable little cherubs with head and wings but no body. Mercifully, I think there’s little danger at present.”
“But I tell you I’m not proud now,” protested Marianne. “Out there in the forest I was utterly humbled. It was not skin deep. It went right through to my soul.”
“Really?” he asked mockingly. “Do humble women long for the flocks and herds of Job?”
She covered her face with her hands. “You know me through and through,” she murmured.
He put his hands under her elbows and lifted her up to stand before him. “That’s why you love me,” he said. “At first you hated me because I saw too much. Then the subconscious knowledge that you could not deceive me made you find me restful company. Now when you are with me you are utterly at peace.”
“I suppose that is why the humbled are the happy,” she murmured. “Not to have to pretend any more—even to yourself—that you are nicer than you really are—it is certainly very restful.” Then she took her hands from her face and laid them on his breast. “Yet I am William’s,” she said. “Though I love you, yet I am William’s. He and I have belonged to each other since we were boy and girl.”
“That is your conviction,” he said, “and you are stubborn in it. Do you know, Marianne, I believe that the breaking of that conviction is th
e only thing that would ever break your pride.”
“But it is true,” she cried. “I have always loved him. His love is the only thing I have ever wanted. Don’t you believe me when I say that?”
He put his hands over hers and smiled down at her. “I believe you,” he said. “And it is partly because I believe you that I am not going with you to South Island. You’ll have more chance of getting what you want if he has no one to turn to but you.”
“But he does love me!” cried Marianne. “He loves me now with all his heart and soul. He loves me now as he has never loved me yet.”
“Good-by,” he said. “I’ll think of you often, and you’ll not forget me though you live to be a hundred. If I believed in souls, I’d say that yours and mine are well matched and of very long acquaintance.”
He took her in his arms and kissed her, and she did not struggle, because his embrace was cool and passionless. She stood leaning peacefully against him, and there came to her a strange, homelike sense of familiarity, as though this were not the first time that he and she had stood like this in the summer night with the warm wind burnishing the lights in the sky to flame, as though he knew her so well because he had known her under other stars. When he withdrew his arms and went away, there fell upon her an awful sense of desolation; and pain as though she’d been reft in two.
4
William did not stay long at Hobson’s. The Red Garment was in preponderance there tonight, nearly swamping by its numbers those primeval men of the earth whose company was always so congenial to him, and the sight of the Red Garment was not bearable to him just at present.
He climbed the hill and paced up and down in front of the Parsonage, as he had done on that night of deadly homesickness when he had first met Tai Haruru, and again on his wedding night when he had felt that married life with Marianne was a thing that could not be faced. He had been wretched then and he was wretched now. At Marianne’s command he was leaving Tai Haruru, whom he loved as greatly as one man can love another, and North Island, that had grown nearly as dear to him as the Island of his boyhood, and the kauri trees of his trade whose scent and shade and deep voices talking in the wind had somehow become a part of his very soul. Yet work and friendship and familiar soil, though three of the most precious possessions of man in this world, are not the final treasure; they are not that one love of a man’s life which to him is the justification of the pain of living. In spite of his wretchedness William was sacrificing home and trade and friendship to Véronique’s welfare as a mere matter of course; and deep below the surface wretchedness, with gladness.
His heavy, sagging shoulders straightened, and the sadness went out of his eyes, at the thought of his child. . . . Marguerite Véronique. . . . He had not known, until his child had been born, that a love as complete and exquisite and perfect as that which he felt for her could exist upon this earth. She was his child, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, beautiful and loving, and that fact alone surely had enough in it of felicity to justify the fact of his life. But she was more even than that. She was Marguerite as well as Véronique. In some way that he did not attempt to understand, she was not only his child but also the little blue-eyed girl who had played with him in his boyhood, and the tall, fair woman whom he had loved as a man. She was child, playmate, and lover, the perfect companion. She made everything in his life worth while; the daily toil for which she was the chief incentive, the once-hated marriage that was blessed now because it had brought her to birth, the dream life that she dominated, the hidden, scarcely considered life of the soul which it seemed she must have companioned in some way from the beginning of time; so perfect was she that she sometimes seemed to him to sum up in herself the whole of reality. He need look no farther now. He rested upon the fact of her like a man at journey’s end.
So thought William as he blundered up and down and listened to the wind with its multitude of voices, and watched as the sweep of its wings burnished the stars to flame. Increasingly with the years he had loved this wind, increasingly he had worshipped its godlike immanence of power. . . . It was Marguerite’s wind. . . . Because the woman who was now a nun had become mysteriously one with the little girl asleep in the house behind him, he had not for that reason forgotten her. The letter that she had written to him and Marianne, telling them of her decision to take the veil, was in the wallet at his belt at this moment. He had not spoken the truth to Marianne when he had said he had lost it in the forest, and he had taken very good care not to discard the belt when he threw off his clothes at the pa. The closing words of that letter, that were also his own words, were never out of his mind. “Though you are so far away, the bond between us is very strong. . . . You have my love and devotion always. I think of you day and night.” No, he would never forget her. Through the child, through the wind, through the strength of her prayer, she was always with him, and his response to her power was continuous.
A step crunched on the road, and Tai Haruru was beside him.
“Well, lad, so this is good-by, eh?”
Tai Haruru, his pipe in his mouth, his hands deep in his pockets, spoke serenely, but his rough, deep voice had in it once more that note of mourning and of angry resignation, echoed from the trumpet notes of nature, that had so caught William’s attention at their first meeting, and his face, seamed now with the lines of tattooing, had more than ever that look of being graven from hard wood. William could feel, without being told, how his whole nature, constrained for so long by the bonds of human companionship, was now straining out and away, angry and sorrowful, yet eager, too. It was with self-knowledge that he had carved his pipe in the form of a bird in flight. His body might have taken to itself the likeness of a kauri tree, but the spirit of the man was winged, and when the dawn came it would sail down the wind toward the wilds.
William groaned and swore. “On the whole, you’re glad,” he said.
“Glad? Sorry?” said Tai Haruru. “I’m both. To be sorry and glad together is to be perceptive to the richness of life.”
William grunted in agreement. Marianne had said something the same at the pa, and he saw now that it was true. Only at the very center of pain or joy was one wholly wretched, wholly joyful. There was only one hour of the night in which sunset or dawn was not present to the mind in memory or hope, only one hour of the day when the sun seemed neither rising nor declining, and the intensity of those hours dulled and blinded.
“After the pa, what next?” he asked. “Back to what’s left of the settlement?”
Tai Haruru shook his head. “Back in the old haunts I’d miss your company. After the pa, I’ve a fancy to travel toward the sunrise, traveling light, and take my chance of what comes. That’s a part of the country I don’t know yet, and I’m not too old for fresh discovery.”
William forbore to question his independence further, and he was without anxiety. Wherever Tai Haruru went, whatever he did, he’d be at home. Life, that he loved as most men love the fire upon their hearth, burned everywhere.
“I’d not have missed these years with you and Marianne,” said Tai Haruru. “My only taste of family life since my boyhood. I’d not have missed it.”
They were pacing up and down now. “Not always happy,” said William awkwardly. “In the early days—all those rows and arguments—I used to wonder how you stood it.”
“I liked you both,” said Tai Haruru. “And the maladjustments as well as the adjustments interested me. Obviously you were never in love with Marianne, and why you married her is still to me an unsolved problem. But having done it, you made a damn good job of her.”
William was startled. He knew it was the opinion of most people, including Marianne herself, that she had made a good job of him.
“I’m for the wilds tomorrow,” said Tai Haruru, “and secrets are as safe in the wilds as in the grave. . . . Why Marianne?”
William told him; the only human creature he had ever told. Tai Harur
u smiled broadly when the story was done, but showed little surprise. He had had such experience of the idiocy of men that nothing now surprised him.
“Like you,” he commented. “Only the damn fool that you are at times could have made such a blunder, and only the fine fellow that you also are at times could have given your life to saving the woman from disaster because of it. For that’s the plain truth of it, William. If you’d not turned your life into a living lie, Marianne would certainly have foundered.”
He said no more, and they walked up and down smoking in silence, for awe, touched by mockery, made him feel oddly shaken; jerked right out of the rut of his usual peaceful disillusionment. For if the young fool William had not made that idiotic mistake in a girl’s name, he himself would never have known Marianne. He would not have stood in the summer night with her in his arms—he, the skeptic, who had believed life divorced from the experience of it by the senses to be just nothingness—and known with sudden absolute conviction that it was not for the first time. Just a fancy, this conviction? If so, it was a fancy that threatened to turn his life upside down.
5
Véronique, holding tightly to her father’s hand, stood wide-eyed in the stern of the ship that was carrying them from North Island to South Island. She was dressed in the warm pelisse and bonnet of periwinkle blue that Mamma had made to protect her from the sea breeze, and her face was pink with ecstasy. The white wings of a sailing ship had carried her upon many thrilling journeys in Green Dolphin Country, but never yet in the real world. Or was this not the real world? She was not at all sure. In the forest Papa had kept pretending they were in Green Dolphin Country, but she had known all the time that it was only pretense, for even when she had been happy there had always been a shadow of fear at the back of her mind, and there was no fear in Green Dolphin Country. But she was not afraid now, there was not even the tiniest shadow of it anywhere in her thoughts, so perhaps the real world was the land that she could see disappearing into the distance, and she was leaving it behind her forever, sailing away to perfect happiness with Papa and Mamma and Nat and Old Nick.