Tussock Land; a Romance of New Zealand and the Commonwealth/Chapter 1
TUSSOCK LAND
I
Nineteen, aglow with health, with a heart untroubled, from sheer gladness of living Aroha Grey sang.
Overhead was the fathomless blue of the New Zealand sky. Across this arch of turquoise scurried thin wisps of white clouds, as if the keen, persistent wind that swept down the valley had blown the waves of the sky into foam. It was a crisp, splendid autumn day in the south of New Zealand. Already there was a taste of winter in the air, and the breeze that forever roamed these solitudes of tussock land brought with it this afternoon some memory of the Antarctic that had given it birth.
The long valley sloped slowly up to the narrow saddle, or ridge, that divided two watersheds. Towards that saddle Aroha Grey was trudging. On each side of her ran a range of hills, and, as she gradually climbed the valley, in the gaps in their skylines she caught glimpses of range after range of similar hills, until the horizon curtained in the world. She stood in the centre of a wide sea of treeless land, valley and plain and hill, streaked by winding streams and noisy creeks and made green by swamp. Little patches of scrub hung in the steep gullies of the hills; the sturdy brown standards of the flax and the faint white feather of the toë drooped over the streams in the valleys, and raupo edged the swamps with a ring of brown spears and green. Here and there a ploughed paddock loomed blue and naked on the river flats, or a sown paddock shone vividly green against the golden grey of the tussocks. But these were but little scars upon the surface of the land; everywhere else the silky tussocks held sway, clothing spur and valley with a faint tinge of gold.
Just before the girl reached the top of the saddle she paused. Ever since she could remember she had halted here for a few moments before making her way to the summit. Before her the slope ran gently up to the horizon; over the edge lay—what? The line of wind-swept tussocks against the sky had in it some faint suggestion of mystery, a vague hint of the unknown. As a child she had always shrunk from going quite to the edge of visible things: before the uncertainty of the unknown she had ever stood silent, wistful, hesitant, wondering. So now, as ever, she halted beneath the edge of the ridge, a little sheltered from the steady stream of wind that poured over it, and let her fancies rove.
Yet it furnished an index to her character that never once, however deep the twilight, however haunting the fear of the invisible—and to an imaginative child how real, how vivid that terror is!—she had never turned back without climbing swiftly that diminishing space of homely security and giving one terrified glance into the uncertainty beyond. Only to find it eternally the same, a yellow sweep of valley running down into a nest of level land lost among a monotony of broad-shouldered hills, and against the horizon a jagged line of glistening snowclad peaks. On days when the rain had washed the atmosphere to a crystalline lucidity the sharp naked outline of that range of mountains, rising majestically, fifty miles away, from an adoring multitude of hills, seemed so near to Aroha that she had only to stretch out her hand and feel the cool smoothness of each dazzling peak.
This afternoon as she halted she turned back and glanced at the way she had come. Her song broke suddenly off with a little laugh at her childish fears. Far in the valley beneath her crouched the homestead, a little group of scattered, unpainted wooden buildings—woolshed, huts, stables, men’s quarters and house. The little grey buildings looked pitiably small in the midst of this welter of hills. A few ploughed paddocks surrounded the homestead; some straggling trees betokened what was still optimistically termed the orchard; a cart track wound across the paddocks from the woolshed, disappearing far down the valley behind a spur; barbed wire fences faintly pencilled stiff lines across the level ground and ran straightly up the shoulders of the hills.
Along the valley writhed a little creek, like a serpent, glinting in and out of the ragged patches of green that clung about its path. And in the west stood the splendid sun, yellowing all the spurs, touching with golden fingers the distant hill-tops. And Aroha wondered, as she had often wondered before, why, with this valley leading so entrancingly into the clear west, the builder of the house had turned his back on the only vista in this sea of crowded hills, and set his house grimly facing the bleak hillside. Perhaps the incessant winds that had the valley for their path could tell.
In that little valley the endless hills had shut in Aroha and her nineteen years of life. She had been born in that unpainted house, had played the great dramas of her childhood beneath its shade, had learnt to love and know each climbing spur, each entrancing gully, had followed the little creek up to the spring that gave it life, and down through all its wilful windings until a wire fence bridged it from bank to bank, and her father’s property went no further. Yet she followed it further in her fancy, saw it wandering slowly among the creases of the hills, finding its blindfold way to the river of which it had vaguely and incessantly dreamed, moving undeviatingly towards the unseen sea. The girl was sometimes a little envious of the creek; it could go so far, see so much, reach such undreamed-of goals. And she was shut in by those walls of hills—dead, lonely hills, untenanted save by the far-scattered, slow-browsing mobs of sheep, that looked in the distance like some strange efflorescence of grey flowers upon the tawny hillsides. So she was shut in between the earth and the low, windy sky.
She made chums of the rabbiters’ dogs, the quiet old horses that pulled the plough. To her the old shepherd who rode in for stores once a week from his wharë at the top of the run was a traveller from the ends of the earth. And out of the sheer loneliness of a solitary childhood—for to a child there is always something hopelessly incomprehensible in the outlook of her parents—she made friends with John, the young station ploughman, who used to save his wages to buy tickets for Tattersall’s racing sweeps in Australia, and who played at even-tide mightily upon the accordion. He was the only one in the station who was near her child’s mind; he was eighteen, and had not quite forgotten how to dream.
So she had grown alone, save for the people on the run and her parents. Then had come the glorious yet terrible day when she left the run for a short stay with her aunt in Dunedin. She was to see the Outside for the first time, at last to peer over the edge! And oh! how comfortable, how safe, had appeared the homestead that awful day! She felt as she rose that morning—she had lain awake, wondering, all night—that if ever she got back to the run she would never more stir from it. The hills were her own; they would never mock her.
Her eyes were wet as she climbed into the dray that was to take her and her small carpet-bag to the nearest railway station, ten miles away. To her mother, standing, outwardly calm, at the back porch, Aroha waved a frenzied farewell. Then she had to hold on tightly, as to a chorus of barking collies and a guttural “Hed-oop!” from John who was the driver, the dray creaked and jangled through the ford of the creek and climbed the other side. Aroha strained her eyes upon the diminishing group of the homestead, till at last a bluff, round which the road ran, shut it from sight. Then the tears came.
It was a long silent ride in that springless dray to the wayside flag-station. John was never a conversational youth; only on the accordion was he eloquent. And that day he seemed to the girl more taciturn than ever. To her half-terrified entreaties to be taken back he had no answer. On the station platform, as they waited for the train, he handed her ten shillings; he wanted her to get him something for a present-like for a young lady of his acquaintance. And Aroha felt a sudden jealousy of the woman unknown for whom she was to choose this gift. She had always considered John as her exclusive property.
Then the train had bustled in, and she had found herself thrust into a second-class carriage and in an agony of fear she had thrown her arms round John’s neck and kissed him. It was a kiss of fear, a clinging to the last familiar thing of her life ere she was flung out into the unknown. It was only long after the train had started that Aroha woke with a blush to the remembrance of the smile on the faces of the watching passengers at that impetuous good-bye.
It was a wonderful fortnight that the gods gave Aroha in Dunedin. To the girl the beautiful little southern city, set at the head of its long, narrow, winding water-way, lying between the placid water of its harbour and the long rollers of the Pacific, ringed about by its broad swathe of purple bush and crowned with rugged hills, was the World, the Unknown—Sydney, London, Paris, Rome!
But it was better to be home again, among the things that were hers. And since that brief visit to the city a year ago she had dwelt content within the circle of the hills. And when she had given John the lace collar she had bought for his envied love, he had handed it back to her, and gone suddenly out and chastised his dogs.