At a signal from the tohunga two of the Maoris sprang, lithe as panthers, and dragged him toward the edge of the precipice. He knew now what they were going to do with him. They were going to hurl him over. Tiki had chosen for him a merciful death, as deaths go, yet from the Maori point of view full of poetic justice, for as he hurtled down his body would fall past the opening of the cave where Taketu lay buried.
“Let go!” he cried to the men who were dragging him forward. “You need not throw me over like an animal. For the glory of my God I’ll jump without your help.”
“Let go of him,” commanded Tiki. “Let’s see if he will do it.”
They let go of him and he swung round to face them, though of the many eyes that watched him he was conscious only of Tiki’s.
“The Maori people have given me hospitality, for which I thank them,” he said. “And to you, Tiki, I owe my thanks for mercy in my death. You are tino tangata, and I will not forget you.”
Then with the eagerness of a young man going to his bridal, of a hunter on the trail or a tua speeding to his first fight, commending his soul to God and his body to the keeping of earth, he ran and leaped and fell.
Chapter V
1
Tai Haruru, mounted on his own horse and leading Samuel’s, went angrily riding through the fern, facing not eastward but back toward Wellington again, back toward Susanna and the task of telling her what had happened during that hour when he had been laboring to put out the fire in the village. He had never faced a task he dreaded more, but it was a duty that could not be avoided. When it was over, then he would travel eastward; and in his fury he prayed heaven he might never set eyes on a Maori again. Eastward he would find some community of white folk, he hoped, practicing some way of life that would be new to him, and throw in his lot with them. This was the second time in his life that he had abruptly left the Maori people, sickened by their cruelty. Only this time, he thought, he was done with them for good; treacherous, cruel, without ruth; he was done with them. He turned a deaf ear to the voice that said low in his mind that only one man had been truly treacherous and cruel, that the rest had been no worse than a pack of fearful, superstitious children, and that one, Tiki, had shown pity. Nor did he pay any attention to the thought that Samuel had rushed upon his death with a fanaticism that most men would have thought sheer madness. His mind would admit of no extenuating circumstances as it sat in judgment, for it could find no relief for its pain except in contemplation of two clear-cut pictures of black and white. He had loved Samuel Kelly and was at the stage of grief that can endure to admit no blemish in the beloved.
Love. Was he never to be done with it? Apparently not. He had escaped from Marianne only to become entangled with Samuel. Independence was a mirage that forever eluded him. Marianne was in South Island by this time, Samuel was dead, yet they rode through the fern on either side of him, insistent with their claims. Marianne upon the one side claimed him for herself; he was hers, she insisted, had been, was, would be, even as she was his. Samuel upon the other claimed him for that faith in God which can admit of no finality. “You’ve won,” he said to the two riding beside him. “Your soul and mine, Marianne, have made a long journey, past many milestones of as many deaths, and the end of it is not yet even in sight. . . . Samuel, I believe in the Lord God Almighty, the Maker of heaven and earth.”
He had unconsciously spoken the last words aloud, as though making a vow, and when the words had gone from him, not to be recalled, alive forever, he swore under his breath. Now he had committed himself. Now he was done for. That much, at any rate, Samuel had accomplished by his death.
He had, as far as Tai Haruru had been able to see, captured the soul of not one single Maori. They had taken his death with indifference, and though they had cowered before the raging storm of the anger and pain of Tai Haruru the Sounding Sea, they had not been broken by it. The success of their tohunga in calling up the spirits of the dead had restored his mana. They still had a wholesome awe of Tai Haruru, and would not have molested him in any way, but he was no longer a god to them. . . . The white tohunga’s death had been a bad failure.
Yet an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; and once they felt even with him over Taketu’s death, they had not been averse to co-operating pleasantly in his funeral. Tiki, in particular, had been definitely helpful. He had himself dug Samuel’s grave in the spot chosen by Tai Haruru, the beautiful dell where the old woman’s kid had been found, and, breaking right away from the Maori tradition, he had even touched the body and helped Tai Haruru carry it on a bier to the grave. The other Maoris had followed at a distance, and had not come farther than the edge of the dell, but Tiki had stood beside Tai Haruru with bent head while he recited in his deep voice a queer form of burial service of his own concoction. He had found no prayer book among Samuel’s possessions, only a worn Bible, and from this he had repeated the Ninety-first Psalm, directed to it by his remembrance of Samuel with the kid on his shoulder and by the stream running through the flowers and grasses. Then he had repeated the Maori words of dismissal:
“Be one with the wide light, the Sun!
With Night and Darkness, O be one, be one.”
followed by other words that he had repeated haltingly from memory, “Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.” Even as he had repeated the two dismissals he had been startled by their likeness. . . . The soul drawn upward to the Father of Light, the body folded within the dark robe of earth the mother. . . . Then, with the Maoris still watching, he and Tiki had filled in the grave, and at the head of it he had planted the wooden cross that he had rescued from Samuel’s burning church.
Then, turning to the Maoris, he had delivered the customary speech in praise of the dead. The white tohunga had been a great and good man, he had told them, a man who had served his God and his fellow men to the death with love and passion. He had not killed Taketu. In a few weeks, when all the excitement had died away and they were once more able to put to use what little intelligence they possessed, they would know quite well who had killed Taketu. He himself would name no names, for the white tohunga had never in life desired vengeance for the ill done to him, and in death as in life he had desired only to love and serve his enemies. This totem of the white tohunga’s, these two sticks crossed that had kept guard over his church and now kept guard over his body, was the symbol of love, and it must remain here marking the place of his grave for always. If any Maori dared remove it—and here Tai Haruru’s eyes had flashed fire and he had bellowed at them even as he had bellowed on the night when he had snatched the cross from the flames—the spirit of the white tohunga would do them no harm, for his spirit was compounded of love only, but he, Tai Haruru, would know wherever he was what they had done and curse them with all the curses at his command—and the curses at his command were very many.
After this somewhat fiery conclusion he had marched angrily back to the village, the funeral procession trailing meekly at his heels, and next morning had saddled his horse and Samuel’s and ridden away. He’d done with the Maori people. He’d never have any dealings with a single one of them again.
There was a low call behind him, and he stopped and turned round in the saddle. It was the boy Tiki, running toward him through the fern, with his musket and mere poumanu slung over one shoulder and a blanket over the other. His tomahawk and cartridge box were fastened to his belt, and there were many feathers in his head. He was, in fact, wearing all his earthly possessions. He was moving house. He ran up to Tai Haruru and laid his hand on his horse’s neck. “I come with you,” he said.
“No,” said Tai Haruru sternly. “The Maori people have killed my friend. I ride with no Maori again.”
“I come with you,” said Tiki.
“No,” said Tai Haruru. “Take your hand from my horse’s neck.”
Tiki removed his hand, ran round to the other side of Tai
Haruru and vaulted lightly into the saddle of Samuel’s horse. “I come with you,” he said, and grinned.
“Get down off that horse!” thundered Tai Haruru.
“No,” said Tiki. “The horse is my horse.”
“That is the horse of my friend the white tohunga, whom you killed,” said Tai Haruru. “Get down.”
Tiki grinned again. His face had not been tattooed yet. It was smooth and brown as an acorn, with childish contours, and his eyes were bright like a squirrel’s. On his bare arm Tai Haruru could see the scar of the wound he had himself made when he extracted the poison, and his doctor’s heart softened suddenly toward the life that he had saved. “Tiki! Tiki!” he cried in pain. “Why did you kill my friend?”
Tiki’s bright eyes were hooded and he hung his head. “I thought Taketu commanded it,” he said. “But if Taketu commanded, it was without understanding. The white tohunga did not kill him. Not so would the white tohunga have died had he killed Taketu.”
“I have not asked if the white tohunga died with courage,” said Tai Haruru. “I had no need to ask.”
“Also with joy,” said Tiki, “and for love of his God. Just so should I wish to die. Therefore from this day forward I serve the white man’s God, and I will follow Tai Haruru the Sounding Sea because he is the friend of the white tohunga.”
“You will do nothing of the sort, Tiki,” said Tai Haruru. “I am riding far away to a part of the country that is not your part of the country. Go back to your father’s house. Return to your own people and your own gods.”
“Entreat me not to leave you,” said Tiki, his bright eyes lifted now to the older man’s face. “Nor to return from following after you.”
Tai Haruru looked into the boy’s eyes, startled. Where had this conversation, or one like it, taken place before? Where had he heard it, or read it?
“I cleave to Tai Haruru, who healed my sickness,” persisted Tiki. “Where he goes, I will go. His people shall be my people and his God mine.”
Tai Haruru lifted his hands and let them fall again on his horse’s neck in a gesture of resignation. Though he could not place the strangely familiar words, yet he recognized in them the authentic cry of love that could not be gainsaid. . . . So Samuel had captured the soul of a Maori after all. . . . Just one.
The boy and the man rode forward together through the fern.
2
It was drawing toward evening when they reached their journey’s end. After leaving Wellington they had ridden eastward for days and nights and weeks. Tai Haruru was incredibly weary, and the horses were almost foundering. Only Tiki was still fresh, bright-eyed as ever, the feathers in his head lighting up gaily where shafts of sunlight came like arrows through the great trees overhead and fell about them in showers of gold.
Yet though he was weary, Tai Haruru was content, for at last he was among kauri trees again. They had traversed strange country on this journey, bare hills and swampy, reed-fringed flats, brooded over by immense and lonely mountains. “The wilderness, a land that was not sown, a land that no man passed through and where no man dwelt.” He was glad that he had seen it, glad of the vast, star-filled skies that he had seen, stretching from horizon to horizon, their terrible splendor unsoftened by the tender veiling of the trees, glad of the strange blue lights of evening and the cold dawns stepping down from the mountain passes, glad of the hot midday silences when no bird sang, above all glad of the new meaning these things had for him now that there was no finality. Once, when Tiki had twisted his ankle and the power that was in his hands had healed the pain, he remembered that he had always felt that it was some power outside himself that took possession of his hands. He had looked up then at the sunlit snowdrifts that streaked a fabulous mountain upon the horizon, and smiled in comradeship. The mountain could no more take credit to itself for the glory that filled each hollow and crevice on its storm-riven side than he for his healing power.
But it was good to have the kauri trees about him again. He had taken an immense journey, that authentic journey that lands spirit as well as body in a new country, and to see the kauri trees gave him a shock of enraptured yet almost incredulous surprise, as who should see the faces of familiar friends smiling from an unfamiliar shore. This, then, surely, must be journey’s end. There thrilled all through his weary body that sense of relief that comes to a man when he hears the rattling of the hawser before the anchor drops.
But there was nothing to be seen yet except the dark ranks of the kauri trees and the falling arrows of sunlight lighting up Tiki’s feathered head. Yet Tiki too was aware of the music of the hawser. He raised his head and sniffed.
“Smoke,” he said, “wood smoke.” He sniffed again. “Smoke . . . and . . .” His eyes were suddenly bright with excitement. “Tai Haruru, there is that other smell, that great smell that was at Wellington, like all the winds of heaven sweeping the rain from the sky. And there is a sound like thunder, only not angry like thunder. Tai Haruru, it is the sea again!”
Tai Haruru’s woodsman’s senses were quick, but Tiki’s were yet quicker. It was not until they had been riding for another ten minutes that he, too, smelled the wood smoke and the salt smell of the sea, and heard through the murmuring of the branches overhead the thunder of surf on the shore. “You’re right, Tiki,” he said.
They rode on, Tiki’s nostrils quivering like a rabbit’s, for a whole medley of attractive smells, including roast pig, was now reaching him. “It is a kainga,” he said.
The trees thinned out and the light strengthened. They drew rein and looked through the pillars of the pines at so fair a prospect that Tai Haruru smiled and Tiki caught his breath upon a cry of wonder. This was no longer “the land that was not sown.” Here, at what seemed like the world’s end, a small oasis of human cultivation had settled itself comfortably between the two wildernesses of earth and sea. Well-cared-for harvest fields were spread like a patchwork quilt upon the slope of the gentle hill whose crest was their halting place. At the foot of the hill, and fringing a rocky bay, a good-sized, prosperous-looking little village nestled within a luxuriant sea of fern and a few gay little flower gardens, the smoke of its hearth fires coiling lazily up from the thatched roofs. And beyond was the sea, immense, majestic, still and smooth as a dancing floor where its sapphire met the lighter turquoise blue of the sky, breaking in a thunder of foam along the beach. At this hour, with the sun making haste to leave them, the whole landscape was an earthly sequence of misty blues; the sea, the sky, the violet haze of the wood smoke, the indigo of the pine branches, the long dark shadows of evening, the blue-grey rocks on the shore cupping pools the color of bluebells, piling themselves up on one side of the bay to form a causeway running out into the sea. What looked like an old Maori stronghold was built at the end of this causeway, where it widened out to form what was almost an island in the sea. It was built of stone, ancient as the rock to which it clung, and above its weathered roof was a belfry, with a bell hanging in it. Tiki’s eyes were fixed upon the sea, but Tai Haruru looked from the belfry to those flower gardens in the village, and then back again to the belfry. . . . He had never yet encountered Maoris who indulged in flower pots and belfries. . . . The bell began to ring, tolling out the hour. It was sweet-toned, and the word it spoke to the ear was the same as that of the evening star that stabs through the eyes to the soul with a name unutterable. The sea took up the word, rolling it in thunder along the shore, and the hearts of the two men answered as though with a roll of muffled drums.
They rode carefully down the hill, along the winding path that led between the harvest fields, and then, silently yet by mutual consent, they dismounted and parted company, Tiki leading their horses toward the center of the village and his people, Tai Haruru making his way on foot along the shore toward the headland and the belfry, and whoever it was of his people who had rung that bell.
3
The old stronghold was more like a cairn of piled s
tones than anything else, so ancient was it, so primitively built. It contrasted oddly with the small lancet windows let into its walls, that might have come from the church in Cumberland where Tai Haruru had yawned his way through Mass when he was a boy, and with the modern belfry and bell and the wooden bench beside the door of kauri wood. The door was ajar, hanging loosely upon broken hinges, and Tai Haruru went inside. Yes, it was a church. There was a rough stone altar with a cross upon it, flanked by candlesticks, and wooden benches, and matting on the floor. And it might have been that church in Cumberland. There was the same smell of candle grease and damp, the same murmur outside the walls, that in Cumberland had been the rush of a stream down a ravine, and here was the sea.
A fantastic figure of a man stood praying before the altar. He was tall, and the tattered remnants of what might once have been a cassock draped his powerful limbs with the utmost incongruity above the breeches and leggings of a woodsman. But for the evidence of his speech he might have been taken for a Maori, so dark was the skin of his withered neck and of the bald head surrounded by a fringe of grey hair, but he was speaking aloud, as the lonely do, and speaking Latin with the intonation of a cultured Irishman.
Tai Haruru discovered to his surprise that he had not forgotten all his Latin, for he easily recognized the psalm as one he had often yawned through as a boy. “All thy waves and storms are gone over me.” For some unknown reason the words reminded him of Marianne, sending a stab of pain through him; and as though he, too, had felt it, the man looked over his shoulder and saw him. He showed no surprise at all. He did not even leave off speaking. “My soul is athirst for God,” he said, and turned back to the altar. “Yea, even for the living God. When shall I come to appear before the presence of God.”