Tussock Land; a Romance of New Zealand and the Commonwealth/Chapter 14
XIV
The red-funnelled steamer turned west from Wellington Heads, breasting the ever-rough waters of Cook’s Straits—that giant pathway of the great winds of the Pacific. The two days’ journey up the coast of New Zealand had told King much of the beauties of the country he was leaving. From the ship’s deck he had seen, far inland across plain and mountain range, Aorangi, “the cloud-piercer” as the Maori named it, standing sharply up in its mantle of everlasting snow, the queen of a galaxy of white-robed clustering rivals. He had passed the “notched Kaikouras” as they fronted the ocean edge—a seaward buttress of ice-swathed peaks, amethyst and purple with the glories of the dying day. Now the steamer ploughed into the night past the barren rocky peaked islets that strew the coasts of this rugged land. A few isolated lighthouses, perched high on steep, surf-worried cliffs, spoke but of their great loneliness amid the vast, unlighted deserts of ocean space.
The next day they had left New Zealand behind and were out in the open sea, but an officer called King’s attention to a white cone, rising faintly from the sea far to the north. It was Egmont—that most symmetrical and beautiful of volcanic mountains, majestically sweeping up, ringed with forest and crowned with cloud, from a rich and verdant plain. It is another Fujiyama, one of the lonely outposts of the superb mountain clusters of this rough country. Some day Egmont, with its crown of clouds, its throne of opulent plain and its halo of Maori legend, will be as famed as that sacred mountain of Japan.
Then Egmont sank into the haze, and followed four days of the Pacific—rough weather and misery.
During that drear experience King had time to contemplate the importance of the step he was taking. He had gone suddenly from the lives of his father and his mother; and he knew that parting was final. With the brief handshake that his father gave him, King felt that he was cast off. He had taken his way, and must fare alone. He knew as he said good-bye that he and his father would never meet again on the same footing; in the future they might make a truce, but Life would have to mould both materially before they could find a common meeting-place. He wondered whether the future had within it the possibilities that might bridge the differences between them. He did not think so; but he had forgotten the puissance of Death. What Life was unable to do her darker sister might in more majestic ways effect.
King’s good-bye to his mother had been different. But he felt as he kissed her the last time—and he kissed her more than once—that he and she had parted years before. He had moved away from the shelter of her love; and she saw him depart for a vague land into which she could not put foot. The world called, and the mother’s heart called; and the son heard but the voice of the world. He had his work to do, and he brushed aside, with the terrible practicality of youth, the yearnings of a mother’s heart that would impede that work. It was the ancient warfare between the generations. Youth must have its day though a mother weeps. So she had seen herself gradually shut out from his young life, conscious that it was but fair that she should so be shut out. The future was for him; she could only watch him set out. The mother had done her task; she could only impede him in his—even with her love. She recognised the necessity for her sacrifice; but her heart cried out at the cruelty of life.
So she knew that he must drift from her, accept other responsibilities, form other interests, lean no longer on herself. It was but part of the penalty of having a son, part of that long reparation that motherhood for its divine, special happiness must make. She had borne a son; whatever life exacted from her in payment for that great miracle, she knew that in the end she had triumphed over life. So in a vague way her heart was dimly comforted.
And at times, when she felt the handicap her desires were for him, she refrained some of her heart’s overbrimming tenderness. So sometimes she was a little hard to him, a little unsympathetic, and King dumbly wondered over her unkindness. But not for long. Youth has its own interests, and is easily absorbed in itself. And she had no longer any interest in her own generation. It seemed to her that with the birth of her son all the vague tenderness that her heart held for that strong man, her husband, had fallen from him upon the helpless figure of their child. Henceforth she began life again. As she lay on that bed of birth she had silently registered a vow that she would begin life again, in order to keep her son company. But life forbade it. She had already lived; and youth lives but once. So she saw her footsteps unwillingly fail. She had already lived her youth, and Life found out the cheat and punished her for it.
And already King, with the cruel lucidity of youth, had found out that there were realms in his life into which a mother could not hope to enter. He had mentally progressed far beyond her scope, and though the poets tell us fondly that a mother’s love can compass all things, there are regions of the brain over which its passionate yearnings cannot claim dominion. In truth, King inherited his father’s cold intellect, and it stood as a barrier to her yearnings. Her views upon art were hopelessly banal; and King, while carefully concealing from her how primitive she was in the realm of his ambitions, could not conceal from himself the same conviction. He could tell her all his dreams of art, and yet the certitude would not away from his mind that she did not comprehend. So he would kiss her and pet her; and she would be almost content.
So he said good-bye to his mother, and told her that in a few years he would come back a famous man. And she believed him, and as he got into the cab—for she could not accompany him to the railway station; she feared to disgrace her son by a scene on the platform—the thought struck her that perhaps this was the last time that she would ever see him in life, that she might die before he came back to her. And her heart passionately revolted against this ambition that was separating them.
Life was strenuously pressing the attack. She had no weapons to combat him with save her love, and King had somehow outgrown her love. She was no longer sufficient to him. And yet she had borne him.
But as King took the last look at that dear face, the only thought in his heart was, “How happy I shall make her when I make my name, and come home a famous man!”
And during that long sea trip across the Pacific—that is so seldom pacific—King had time enough to see the inevitableness of his severance from his mother and his father. He was quite alone in life.
True, there was Charles Craven and Aroha. But he had passed Craven in the race; he felt himself older than his friend. They no longer stood on the same footing. King had put his future to the test, and felt the elation that comes from decision. Charles had compromised with content. King felt a little contempt for Charles and his caution, his lack of capacity for the splendidly reckless.
And Aroha? But he must put her for ever out of his life. She stood for happiness and home, for all the soft, slothful impediments to fame. Love was a thing that he must put out of his life. He had no room for it in his strenuous fight. Ambition would have no companion in the traces. It did not occur to him that in this decision he was selfish. If it had, he would have decided that a reasonable selfishness was part of the necessary equipment of an ambition. And it is unneccessary to mention that not once did he consider the point of view of Aroha.
At dawn, the fourth day out, the gaunt headlands of Port Jackson leapt from the sea. It was King’s first sight of Sydney, and that to a New Zealander is like a first glimpse of heaven. Australia lay at his feet, this vaste, inchoate, unknown continent of his dreams, stretching away into what vague wilds, what mysterious, untrodden desert wastes! What would be the future of this wide, secretive solitude— a Europe unpeopled, a blank map bare of history? He felt a great pride swell in his breast as he realised that this virgin continent, this gigantic island of the South, had been given into the hands of a sister race, that its only frontier was the inviolable sea, that from east to west, from tropic to Tasmania, was spoken one language—unsullied yet by dialect or accent, save the not unmusical drawl of this new people—and from sea coast to sea coast was but one ideal of government, one common tradition of liberty, one nascent nationhood.
And behind those grey headlands lay Sydney, the Mother City of the South, the Paris of Australia, the Venice of these Italian skies.
The steamer swept through the narrow entrance into the harbour. Sombre scrub thinly clothed the grey rocks of the headlands that ran like long narrow fingers into the quiet waters. In his ignorance of Australia King named this array of ragged gum-trees with their thin, metallic sheen of sombre-glistening foliage “scrub.” It was so different to the thick, impenetrable, moist “bush” of his own land that he could not here dignify it with the name.
And the harbour, whose fame has reached across a world? A great quiet expanse of water, flecked with little white sails. It was Saturday afternoon, and the yachts and the “mosquito fleet” were out. Narrow bays ran everywhere audaciously into the land, and the ridges that rimmed the harbour’s cup glittered brilliantly with the red roofs of thickly clustering villas, of wide verandahed bungalows. Beneath that cloudless Australian sky it seemed as if the hills were on fire.
In front of the steamer snorted fussy little ferryboats, dodging with a terrier-like temerity beneath the big vessel’s bows. The ferries were a blaze of colour flecked by a still more vivid white. The people that made their decks like great bouquets of flowers were evidently an outdoor race, combating the stare of the sun with a garish brilliance of costume. The air sparkled; colours struck the eye almost with the force of a blow.
Then the city rose up, spire after spire, out of its heavy pall of haze. Gaunt blocks of buildings rose from the water like the walls of a medieval fortress. Green gardens, splashed with tropical colours, reached to the harbour’s edge. Terrace upon terrace, like long rows of stiff flowers in a formal garden, the houses rippled over the hills. About the narrow harbour, from little black wharf to little black wharf, the ferry steamers fussed, leaving a pattern of interlacing white wakes upon the deep blue of the waters. Slipping silently past the steamer came a tall, graceful schooner in the charge of a snub-nosed, worrying little tug. The grand sweep of Circular Quay was tenanted by a rank of gigantic liners, towering high over the wharves, seeming ludicrously stranded in the midst of that nest of buildings. And over all, deadening the horizon, lay the heavy blue pall of Australian heat.
The steamer crept up the harbour to the back door of the city, where the dirty, black, short wharves were that bred the plague. They seemed to the boy like the blackened, discoloured, broken teeth of a grim old hag. As the steamer made fast he noticed with a shock the pallor of the faces of even the lumpers on the wharf. Instead of the healthy bronze of the New Zealander, there was here a frailty of hue, a blanched pallor that seemed to belong rather to the scholar than to the navvy. But the Australian sun blazed overhead in a cloudless sky.
It was a new world into which King had so swiftly come—and oh, such a paintable world! Till now he had never understood the meaning of a city. To an inhabitant of age-old Europe this city of the South, scarcely more than a century old, must appear appallingly new and crude; but to King, who came from a country not half its age, Sydney was indeed the grey old city of his dreams.
The streets, the people, were familiar to him. He had seen the types so often pictured in the Bulletin that he recognised them as they passed. A larrikin, his trousers spreading over his high-heeled boots, his flat hat crushed over a long, ferret face, a black oiled tress hanging low over a weak, furrowed forehead, the mouth long, cruel, loose with frequent expectorations, the gaunt figure, slouching and inert, leaning against a post under a wide verandah, was engaged in a monotonous, toneless conversation with his “donah.”
She, too, was already known to King. She was pretty with the bold prettiness that knows all things and wants to know more. Her cheeks were of a pallid beauty that suggested the delicate bloom of a peach. From her clear, pale skin, dark eyes, sunk in the cheek, looked boldly out, hard with the knowledge of life. Her lips were vivid in the colourless face. She was only sixteen, but looked twenty-one. In this land youth matures quickly. She was dressed in white, and on her head blossomed a garden of roses.
He contrasted this type with the girls of his own land. He recalled their stalwart charm, the healthy red of lips and cheek, the freedom and spring of their stride, the robust grace of their bosoms. He wondered at the difference in type. If climate and environment had done so much in a century, what might they not effect in another hundred years? He looked at this too swift efflorescence of sex, and like a breath of coolness came the sudden memory of Aroha.