A bell tolled. It was the recreation hour when she might, if she wished, take the air in the terraced garden below the convent.
The winter afternoon was mild and clear, and the long, level beams of a golden sun streamed with benignity over a fair landscape. Terraces of vines fell away below the old grey convent upon its hill, and down below them the small village of white-walled cottages nestled among orchards, with woods beyond that were a paradise of flowers in the spring. The peaceful valley was protected to the north by low blue hills, but over this barrier there always fled at nightfall the homing thoughts of Marguerite.
Smiling at the other nuns as she passed them, Marguerite went quickly down the path between the vines. No one followed her, for the sisters knew that she liked to be alone at this hour. They all loved her, as she loved them, and were quick to divine her needs. From above they watched her tall, graceful figure pacing up and down, appearing and disappearing among the vines, and wished they knew her history.
“To put away all hope of seeing one’s native land again is not easy, my daughter,” Reverend Mother had written at the end of her last letter. “Of all the hopes which we nuns may be called upon to lay aside it is perhaps the hardest from which to part. I am an old woman now, and I shall not see France again, but you are still only in middle life, and I pray unceasingly for you that one day God in his goodness will grant you to see again this Island of your birth. That is a prayer that you could not pray for yourself, but I can pray it for you. Adieu, my daughter. Have you still that little book I gave you? When I think of you, these words come always into my mind, ‘Those who have the gale of the Holy Spirit . . .’ You are one of those. The thought of you always brings a clean, fresh wind to my mind. I have not enjoyed good health of late, and have often and often turned with gratitude to remembrance of your health and strength, which I pray God always to preserve unto you. Adieu again, Marguerite. Let us pray for one another. I am, in Our Lord, your friend Marie Ursule.”
Marguerite was thinking of this letter as she walked up and down. “Marguerite. Marie Ursule.” It was the first time in their correspondence that Reverend Mother had used the names that had been theirs when they lived in the world. It was of a piece with the expression of her nostalgic longing to see France again; as though she were reaching back into her youth, gathering up what she had been into what she was, putting together all that she had, like one who makes preparation for a journey.
Marguerite was seeing her friend very vividly as she paced up and down; the tall, supple figure, the beautiful, humorless face, alight with holiness, yet chill and a little frightening. Shining and cold, supple and strong, she had been like a sword. And she had fought well.
Marguerite looked up sharply, a little confused by the suddenness with which the sound of hurrying footsteps had jerked her back from the Island to this vine-terraced hillside in France. It was a stout little lay sister, panting in her hurry, slipping and stumbling over the stones in the steep path. “Reverend Mother wants you, Sister,” she gasped. “In her study. Vitement! Mother of God, but I have the stitch in my side!”
Marguerite walked without haste back up the steep path, smiling at the other nuns again as she passed them. In Reverend Mother’s whitewashed study she stood very upright, hands linked behind her back, and waited for what should come. This Reverend Mother was very different from the Reverend Mother of Notre Dame du Castel. She was circular in figure, with a little round red nose like a cherry beneath her anxious, shortsighted round eyes. She was of peasant stock and always felt a little uncomfortable with Marguerite, whose tall, slim figure, looming over her like a poplar tree, made her feel like a cabbage at its foot. Yet she loved her. Marguerite’s power of enjoyment, though disconcerting at times, seemed to set such a bright polish upon life when one was with her.
“Sit down, Sister,” she said.
With the tall nun sitting on a lowly stool, Reverend Mother felt less like one of the humbler vegetables and was able to say what must be said.
“Sister, I have news for you that will cause you both grief and joy. I am sorry to inform you that the Order has suffered a great loss in the death of your old friend Reverend Mother of Notre Dame du Castel. I am happy and glad to be the one to tell you that upon her earnest recommendation the Order has appointed you Mother Superior in her place. Tonight, Sister, we will sing Te Deum in the Chapel. It is an honor for us all that you have been chosen.”
At the news of the passing of her friend Marguerite had crossed herself and bowed her head in prayer for her soul. She had known, she thought, that that last letter was the letter of a dying woman, and so she had been prepared, yet all the same a stab of pain went through her that she would not, in this world, see her friend again. Yet when she lifted her head and smiled at the round little woman on the other side of the table, her face was luminous with joy.
“With God’s help, dear Mother, I will be worthy of this honor,” she said, adding under her breath, “Au nom de Dieu soit.”
Chapter II
1
Mounted upon their horses, Samuel and Tai Haruru had seemed to Véronique to look down upon those they were leaving as though from a great distance, like two men upon a mountaintop looking down upon the dwarfed littleness of their homestead in the valley below, and hard put to it to convince themselves of its reality.
“Always so much harder for those who stay behind,” said Tai Haruru as they jogged upon their way, remembering the blank dismay that had been upon Marianne’s face as he and she had looked at each other for the last time, the appalled dismay of a woman who sees a treasure for which she had been searching given at last into her hands, only to have it withdrawn again before she has had time to do more than recognize it with that recognition of eternal values that comes only once or twice in a lifetime. “For those who journey on, the past fades away into the distance, while for those who remain behind, it is an ever-present torment. Poor Marianne. Poor girl.”
“I was under the impression that Mrs. Ozanne, by her own choice, was also about to journey on,” said Samuel with a sarcasm unusual with him. . . . For in front of him, obscuring the sun, floated the picture of a woman who was journeying nowhere, a lonely woman weeping in a house whose only unfamiliarity was its intolerable emptiness.
“Like a snail carrying his shell, she bears her normal responsibilities with her,” said Tai Haruru, still musing upon the woman he loved. “The marriage bed, the nursery, household cares, however far she may wander they are present with her in the persons of husband, child, and servant. That’s not true journeying, Kelly, that’s just moving house. The authentic journey, the adventurous cleaving of the air with wings, is made alone.”
“We are together,” said Samuel.
They looked at each other.
“Only for a short time,” said Tai Haruru.
They looked at each other again, a strange look, for they knew instinctively that for each of them this was to be an authentic journey. The end of it would be a new state of being, and from it there would be no return.
They rode for some fifteen minutes in complete silence.
“It must be alone,” repeated Tai Haruru then, still following the same train of thought. “And until now I have never even wished that any journey of mine should be other than lonely. This queer sensation of being only one half of a whole, of finding completeness only with another’s help, is mere illusion.”
There was the hint of a question in his statement, and Samuel answered it. “Migratory birds fly alone across the sea,” he said, “but on the further shore there are meetings and matings and nest building once again.”
“As though the two halves of a circle sprang apart, traveled the orbit alone, came together, parted once more, and so on forever,” mused Tai Haruru. “The circle of immortality. It is such a tiring idea that I don’t accept it.”
“Luckily the basic truths are not dependent for their validity
upon your acceptance,” said Samuel drily. “As for fatigue, it is a thing that passes, the corollary of approaching finality and good news of a fresh beginning.”
“The trouble with you, Kelly,” said Tai Haruru, “is that you will not permit finality to be final. That’s your arrogance. Only the arrogant think that they will live forever.”
“On the contrary,” retorted Samuel, “it is you who are arrogant, with your insistence upon your right to say the last word. I have now been in company with you upon many occasions, and never can I remember that you permitted a conversation to be brought to a conclusion by any except yourself. Let me now tell you, my good sir, that you will one day discover to your chagrin that in this matter of the length of life of the human spirit the right to say the last word is not yours but God’s.”
Tai Haruru laughed, and then a few moments later laughed again at the realization that in this particular conversation the last word had been not his but Samuel’s. And he let it rest so, for the experience had the freshness of novelty, that very same freshness of which Samuel had been speaking.
Indeed the whole journey had a dewy freshness about it that made the two men boys again. The faces of Marianne and Susanna soon ceased to haunt them, for these women whom they loved had companioned their manhood, and they were journeying now backward into a lost youth.
“Or forward,” said Tai Haruru, his mind still busy with that analogy of a circle that had haunted him ever since he had held Marianne in his arms and there had come to him the conviction, cutting straight across all previous belief, that their souls were long acquainted.
Samuel, riding along a forest path dappled with sunlight, answered mechanically, “Yes.” Stray, unrelated sentences were always drifting toward him from Tai Haruru like floating leaves that show which way the wind is blowing, and though he made little comment, he understood, having traveled this way himself. There’d be a great wind presently, the wind of an authentic journey that lifts a man into the air like a bird, but the time was not yet. And meanwhile he was enjoying himself as never before, with a trembling, astonished enjoyment that had come to him hitherto only in the deeps of prayer.
They rode on through the magical beauty of the forest, through murmurous sunlit days and star-hung nights of peace, through song and silence and a web of color that was like the song and the silence made visible in interwoven strands of dark and light. It was perhaps the sense of danger ahead that gave such a passionate intensity to their experience of earth’s loveliness upon this journey. At the back of both their minds was the knowledge that contact with loveliness through the medium of the physical senses was one that might soon have to be laid aside for ever; for another; or nothing.
2
It was evening when they reached the village and the pa, riding their weary horses through the sea of fern that had so frightened Marianne. The pa was a blackened ruin upon its hilltop and many of the houses in the village had been destroyed. At first sight it looked deserted, but a second glance showed a few coils of smoke rising up through chimney holes in roofs that were still intact, and a few dogs lying dejectedly in the last pools of sunlight. There was still life in the village, but like all community life when hearts are heavy, it was staying within doors. It is good news to tell that brings men and women out into the streets. The hurt and sorry are as fond of their own firesides as a sick animal of its lair.
Tai Haruru did not hesitate. After they had dismounted and tied their horses to a tree, he made his way straight to the heart of the village and cried aloud, and there was a note in his voice that reminded Samuel of some wild old lioness roaring to her young. There was a brooding, savage pity in Tai Haruru’s face, as he called aloud to his dusky children, that was as elemental as the deep undertones of his voice. Samuel had scarcely noticed the peculiar quality of Tai Haruru’s voice before, but he understood now why they called him Sounding Sea. Straightening himself in an instinctive bodily reaction to a tremor of fear that went through him in this last moment of peace before the storm, Samuel looked upward and saw towering above the trees a snow-capped mountain peak flushed with the fires of sunset. It was like a beneficent Presence in the sky. At the same moment Tai Haruru took hold of his arm and a tide of strength mounted steadily both in his body and his soul, so that when a moment later he found himself the center of a storm of almost devilish hatred he knew no fear.
They had come pouring out of their houses at the first sound of Tai Haruru’s voice, old men, children, women with their bodies lacerated by the savage rites with which they had mourned their dead, wounded men with dirty bandages bound round their limbs, unkempt, half naked, maddened with pain, yelling aloud in a frenzy of mingled hatred and delight. They had been hurt almost beyond enduring, but here at last was vengeance within their power. Two white men, unarmed and at their mercy, one of them easily recognizable as the very same pakeha with a tattooed face who had passed himself off as a Maori and whom they suspected of spiriting away their white prisoners and betraying them to the Red Garment. Samuel had once seen hounds closing in upon a hare and had sickened at the sight. Now he and his friend were as defenseless. More defenseless, because the hunters were human and to the blood lust of an animal body was added the demoniac madness of the spirit’s hatred.
No, he was wrong. Not more defenseless, but less, because the hunted also were human, and the man beside him had a reserve of spiritual force immeasurably stronger than the squandered frenzy all about him. Samuel found himself trembling, not with fear but with astonishment at what had happened. For with the inhuman distorted faces as close to his own as faces in a nightmare, with the stench of unwashed bodies and foul wounds nearly choking him and the gleam of weapons a brightness of death in the air, there was a sudden pause. A way had been made into the core of quiet at the heart of the cyclone by the sheer power of a man’s good will. Tai Haruru was speaking now, slowly and persuasively, swinging his pack off his back and showing the Maoris the bandages and salves he had within it. Though he could not always follow the words, Samuel could sense the passion of pity that ached in them, could see how it ate its way into the surrounding filth of hatred; cathartic, inexorable, destroying to create. But this was not pity only, that smacks of contempt, nor kindness only, that looks no further than the passing moment, it was good will, love stripped of mawkishness and sentiment and lust down to the bare, naked steel of action that sticks at nothing and pays any price. He doubted if he had ever seen this weapon put to quite such powerful use before. If he could wield it so perfectly, himself, just once before he died, he thought that he would die happy.
The crowd was suddenly in movement and they were being carried along toward the far end of the village, led by a tall Maori with many feathers stuck in the hair above the bandage tied round his head, and fine weapons strung about him. He was the war chief, Samuel guessed, and it came to him that they were to be put to the test. If they won the first round they would be permitted to live; if not, no.
They came to a house a little larger than the others and went in, as many of the Maoris as possible pressing in after them. On a bed of rushes lay a young boy of fifteen or sixteen, the chief’s son. A wound in his arm had become infected. The arm was swollen to three times its normal size and was of a terrible greenish hue. The boy was unconscious, lying with eyes half closed and lips drawn back from his teeth. After one glance at him Samuel’s heart sank. He glanced at Tai Haruru’s face for confirmation of his hopelessness, but that weather-beaten, tattooed countenance was now as hard and expressionless as wood.
It was evident that the Maori people had themselves given up hope, for the scene was set for a spectacular dying. The boy was covered with a fine blanket, and at his right side lay his spear, musket, and tomahawk. At his left side lay his red war belt, and over his head hung his greenstone mere. Young though he was, he would pass to Reinga as a true tua, killed in battle, bearing his weapons with him. Around the bed, upon the rush-strewn floor, sat sobbing wom
en, and at the foot of it stood an emaciated savage with fanatical, deep-set eyes that blazed with hatred at sight of Tai Haruru. He was the tohunga, the village priest, whose prayers and incantations had not availed to heal the boy’s wound.
Tai Haruru issued his orders. Part of the roof must be removed to give more light and air. A fire must be lit and a cauldron of water set to boil over it. The wailing women must cease their noise instantly, go away to another house and prepare nourishing soup to be given to young Tiki upon his awaking. All must go away, yes, even the tohunga; he and his friend must be alone while they called back the spirit of Tiki, already nearly departed, to inhabit his body again. The words were repeated by the boy’s father and obeyed by all but the tohunga, who lingered till the last moment, muttering under his breath. Urged toward the door by Tai Haruru he swung around, threw up his arms and screamed aloud, “Kai kotahi ki te ao! Kai kotahi ki te po!” while all the people outside broke into a hopeless wailing; for these were the words always cried aloud by the priest at the approach of death.