Tussock Land; a Romance of New Zealand and the Commonwealth/Chapter 12
XII
There was another for whom the announcement of King’s departure to Sydney had almost as much import as for Aroha. This was Charles Craven, law-student and poet. King had been at school with him, and at the university they took the same law classes. There was much in the two natures to fuse. Charles chafed at his studies as King did; Charles had ambitions as fierce as King’s. And Charles was as assured of his ultimate success as King was. The two became intimates. His friend was the son of an up-country storekeeper in the “back-blocks” of Otago, a poor man who had no money to spare for the education of his precocious son. But he had been able to give him a certain amount of schooling in the public school of his township, and there the intellectual alertness of the gaunt, awkward boy had attracted the attention of his masters.
He entered for and easily gained a government scholarship to the Otago High School. Thither he had gone in his thick, clumsy boots, his country-cut clothes, his incredible ignorance of manners. But he possessed a more valuable thing than manners—a brain; and it did not take long for this country lout to learn the value of a good appearance, to acquire the superficial graces of good manners, to appreciate the worth of athletics, to enter enthusiastically into the discipline and good fellowship of football. He finished a brilliant school course by becoming dux of his school and captain of the first fifteen. And schoolboy ambition can no further go. But what he prized above his other successes was the editorship of a certain absurdly impressive and high-toned school magazine which he kept alive with much earnestness and strenuousness for a few precarious issues. That had been his vindication to himself. In that periodical—now jealously treasured by a few “old boys”—for copies are as scarce as the first folio of Shakespeare—he had temeritously printed his first poems. It occurred to him at the time that life might hold further and greater triumphs; but his imagination was unable to conceive them. He had his fame already: a heaven seemed in the scheme of things absurdly superfluous.
Then he had carried off a scholarship to the Otago University, and there had decided to become a barrister. It was necessary to earn money—his brain saw the clear necessity of it, and law seemed the most direct path to its attainment. So he was to become a lawyer. But beneath that commonplace aim lay the real man—the poet. He was to get his living by his practice; but after ages would hail him as one of the great line of New Zealand masters of song, a worthy successor to Domett. With his brain he would earn a living; with his art he should earn immortality.
Already he had published some verses in the local papers, and he had had the unutterable joy of being accepted by the Sydney Bulletin—that strenuous, shrieking, self-appointed arbiter of all things Australian. Some day he would publish a book of verse—his first book of verse; for there were others to follow, till he had reared a reputation firm and high. Already he was dissatisfied with Tennyson.
So at the university King and Charles came together and talked of fame. Each found in the other that stimulus he sometimes felt lacking in himself. Sometimes ambition would turn traitor and insinuate its grim doubts. It was through these moods of depression that each in turn helped the other. Art was their mistress, and they stood bound in comradeship by their fealty to her. They would mount the hill together; they would march abreast.
So when Charles Craven heard of his friend’s stupendous decision, he rejoiced with a little envy of his friend. Not at his great luck in seeing Sydney, but at his splendid recklessness in putting his career to the test, in marching disdainfully in the open, toward the ramparts of the enemy. That, Craven reflected, he could never do. He had not the absolute confidence in his talent with which his friend was inspired. Craven was unable to conceive the possibility of himself ever burning his boats. He was to be a great poet, but he shrank from venturing far out into the great waters of life; for the present he would feel the earth beneath his feet. But he stood aside and admired King almost humbly. That was the splendid audacity that would win a world. King was going out a conqueror; he disdained to compromise with life. Charles sighed at his own inability so gloriously to burn his boats; but a vision of his place behind the counter in his father’s up-country store recalled him to himself with a shudder. No; he could not risk failure; the penalty would be too terrible.
And King felt just a little contempt for his friend’s caution. He wrote good poetry; but would he ever succeed in winning the applause of a world? Not if he shut himself up in such an out-of-the-way hole as New Zealand. Why could Charles not take his fate as joyously in his own hands?
But the news that Aroha was coming to stay in Dunedin with her aunt drove all thought of his friend from him. He was sincerely glad. For already he was beginning to feel the heart-sickness of youth when, for the first time, it relinquishes the familiar. He looked at the city with a keen new interest, seeing it consciously for the first time. He was beginning to take greedy farewells of his little world, to store within him, vivid and bright and sharp, this little nestling city of the South. He must remember Dunedin always.
He wondered whether Aroha had changed much. She had grown staider, more earnest, less subject to petulances and depressions—all that was apparent in her letters. But he could not conceive a staid Aroha. And now this thing, fragrant of air and the solitude and the suaveness of the hills, was coming to a city. It seemed a desecration.
He went to meet her at the railway station on the evening of her arrival. As the train came in he looked unthinkingly at the first-class carriages, and did not see her. Then as he was turning away in disappointment, he heard her name pronounced. A fussy old woman in dingy black and a nid-nodding bonnet with jet spangles shivering on long antennae of black wire—she looked like a big, malicious beetle—was lavishing embraces upon a bewildered girl. It was Aroha. She had just descended from a second-class carriage, and stood helpless amid the wreckage of her parcels. Then she slipped from the arms of her aunt and cast a swift glance of expectancy along the platform. King was on the point of stepping forward when a hand was laid on his arm. He looked impatiently round and recognised Caldecott, a third year’s man at the university—a fellow of infinite undergraduate wit.
“Funny, isn’t it?” he said. “She’s prime dairy-fed, all right!”
For a moment King tried to blind his intuition. But he knew of whom Caldecott was speaking. Almost without knowing it, he muttered a “Yes,” and looked at the girl again. It was Aroha but such a different Aroha! First he noticed her dress; his eye could not escape noticing it. Her rough skirt did not hang, it flopped; her boots were thick-soled and squat, her blouse of varied hues and antique fashion, her hat polychromatically impossible. It was no spirit of the hills; it was merely an atrociously-dressed, rough country girl come to town.
Close by stood a girl who had just leisurely descended from a first-class compartment. In her dainty, cool, fashionable attire there lurked no evidences of travel; in her smooth face there was no sign of haste or flurry. She recognised King and Caldecott, and bowed. His mind leapt with damning swiftness to the contrast made by the fragrant neatness of this girl and the uncouth rusticity of Aroha.
“Just consigned from the back-blocks,” remarked Caldecott, genially. “She ought to have come in the frozen meat trucks. But I say, King, she’s not at all a bad-looking girl—good figure, too, if she only knew how to dress herself. Look at those eyes, man!”
There was one missing package that was not forthcoming, and the little tremulous woman in shiny black flourished her spangled antennae incessantly in the countenance of the porter. The girl stood miserably by, helpless, awkward, abjectly conscious that she looked awkward.
King felt her flush of dismay within himself. His cheeks burned. He was ashamed of her helplessness, her rusticity, her lack of adaptation. Why had he made such a goddess of her? What a fool he had been! Was this the Aroha he had once deified?
He shrank back into the crowd. “Oh, come along!” he said miserably.
They moved away together. How could he meet Aroha with Caldecott’s eyes upon him, how claim acquaintance with that foolishly flushing, rustic girl? Oh, how all his dreams had tumbled in on him! He felt infinitely sorry for himself. It would have been the joke of the university if Caldecott had observed his recognition of Aroha. He knew Caldecott’s powers of making the most of an incident of that sort. He would be the most laughed-at man in the university.
Besides, he could easily see her to-morrow—if he wanted to—when no one would overlook them. No, he had been very wise not to divulge his acquaintance with the girl before Caldecott. And it would not have been fair to Aroha to expose her name to the possibility of banter. He could meet her to-morrow, and at the thought of her so close to him, her face recurred to his mind with a sudden vividness of perception. In spite of that awful dress, that impossible hat, she had grown wonderfully beautiful. It was not the beauty of a spirit; but the wondrous beauty of a woman who is loved.
As soon as he got home he wrote Aroha a letter, telling her he would meet her the following afternoon. She was staying at Caversham, and he appointed the end of the tram line as the meeting place.
After he had posted the letter an inconvenient doubt intruded. Had he not been a coward to disown her at the station? Was it fair to Aroha to turn away, to listen without a protest to Caldecott’s sneers? He grew angry with himself, ashamed of his weakness. It would have been so easy at the station to shut his friend up with a word, step forward and claim the right to protect Aroha. Why had he not done it? He was sure that if the opportunity came again he would do it. But he reflected that opportunities do not come again. But who could have foreseen such a situation, or the necessity for such a decision? It was not fair of Fate. He felt himself miserably mean, a shuffling coward. And then insensibly his rage at himself transferred itself to the cause of his rage. It had all been Aroha’s fault. Why could she not have had a little sense and dressed herself a little less outrageously? Why had she forced upon him the necessity for such a difficult decision? It was not fair of her. He felt dumbly enraged.
And then a new and more terrible doubt assailed him. Suppose she had noticed him at the station—suppose she had seen that he had been ashamed to recognise her? Would she not be hurt? It was meanly cruel of him to so affront her. And she was a girl that was sensitive to the least suggestion, a girl that craved with every nerve to be loved. It was cruel of him.
And if she had recognised him at the railway, she might refuse to see him to-morrow. She might be so wounded by his denial of her that she would not want to see him again, ever! That thought struck like a cold knife into his vanity. Had he fatally alienated her? At that suspicion he believed that nothing on earth would ever compensate him. He must see her again. And then that kind, soothing, sweet friend of youth—vanity—came to his aid, and he felt assured that nothing so trivial as this little default of his would ever stand in the way of their friendship. She loved him too much to judge him so rudely. She must see him. And to-morrow he would explain, and she would forgive. He would tell her the whole truth to-morrow, and say how ashamed he was of his momentary cowardice, and their friendship would be cemented by his frankness and her inevitable forgiveness.
But no, there was no necessity for him to so affront her. She couldn’t have seen him at the railway; he had kept well in the background. He would not worry her by mentioning it at all.
You see, he was very young—and it is so easy for youth to shirk things.