Tussock Land; a Romance of New Zealand and the Commonwealth/Chapter 20
XX
The phases of their acquaintance succeeded each other breathlessly. Within a month the two had grown friends that acquiesced in each other’s weaknesses and understood. They took each other’s personality as it was; the startling differences of outlook that belong to such diverse beings as men and women they were astonished at, but always they excused. He was a man, with a man’s crudenesses; she a woman, with a woman’s meannesses. That was the conclusion, the truce upon which they concluded every quarrel. For there were quarrels.
The girl continued to be surprised at the change in herself. She wondered at the metamorphosis from a light-hearted girl who laughed through life to the woman who was conscious of unhappiness, who felt herself being driven adrift on a strange sea, who began to understand that there were regions in this commonplace life into which she had never before even idly peered. She began to experience a vague sympathy for the men who had proposed to her. For the first time it occurred to her that, after all, they might have been in earnest, that all their sighs, their protestations, their appeals, might have been sincere. And she had lightly laughed at them, and sent them away with a slight contempt for their foolishness. And now suddenly it appeared to her that she had been heartless, cruel. She had not understood; she had laughed at them. How they must have hated her for it! She almost decided to write and apologise—at anyrate, to the last two or three. She could not bear to be thought callous.
But though she did not write she conceded to herself that those men had been in earnest. She began to see that it was a rather disconcerting thing to be in earnest. Life was not one long picnic. She had anticipated life as a playground, full of sunny afternoons, with a certain dark door in the distance through which she must one day enter into some vague pleasaunce beyond, leaning on an unknown man’s arm, with certain girl-friends flinging rice upon her and a hard ring hurting her finger. But that was afar and dimly seen; meantime, there was life and youth to be partaken of. And it was a goodly and a satisfying feast.
And one day the recognition came suddenly to her that life was a serious thing, a fearful thing, a thing that surrounded her, came close to her, enveloped her, plucked her by the arm, peered into her affrighted eyes, caught her up in mighty arms, and would carry her, shrieking, into the unknown.
It happened thus. King had asked her to meet him in the city one afternoon. There would have been tea and a stroll in the Gardens. But Gertrude refused; she never met men in town by appoinment. King’s entreaties were vain. Gertrude had a chin. So in anger he had left her.
It was a fortnight before they met again. During that interval Gertrude had more than once come into town with the comforting conviction that she would meet King. She would like to see him again; almost against her will—certainly against her pride—she had become interested in him. And when they did meet one afternoon in Pitt Street it was one of those pitiless, persistent rainy days that occasionally afflict Sydney. The city was washed naked, the clean wood-blocks shone as if transparent, the pavements were white beneath the spatter of heavy rain. Under verandahs stood groups of people in gleaming mackintoshes. Splashing umbrellas hurried along the almost deserted streets.
She hastening for her ferry-boat, he rushing for the cable-tram, they met.
“I’m sorry about not meeting you,” began the girl, hurriedly. “I’ve changed my mind.”
King’s heart triumphed. But all he said was, “Oh, have you?” Then he muttered a curt “Good-bye!” and left her in the rain, staring and angry.
The girl resumed her way to Circular Quay. She felt sick and miserable. He did not want her, had outgrown his liking for her. And it had begun to be pleasant for her to have him hanging on her words, to let him abase himself before her frown, to allow him to offer her perpetual incense with his eyes. It was nasty and mean of him to treat her so. And she was wet through and felt that she was getting a cold. Well, she would never, never let him see how he had hurt her. She would go on with life, would not care. Only, she wanted so much to see him again, to make it all right.
Next morning King received a letter from her. She was giving a little picnic, she wrote, next Thursday afternoon, and would he join? Only a few were coming; it was quite impromptu. If he cared to come he was to be at the Watson’s Bay boat at half-past four. He would.
At that eagerly-expected hour he was at Circular Quay. He went on to the pontoon and looked to see the familiar faces of the coterie that went to picnics. He saw no one, not even a collection of baskets and billies. He boarded the boat. Gertrude Wonder was on the upper deck.
“Well,” he said, “where is the picnic?”
Gertrude smiled.
“I’m the picnic!”
“Oh!” said King, comprehending.
They landed at Watson’s Bay and went slowly up the steep hill. She was dressed in an old print, and wore a big, black picnic hat that had seen wear. He had never seen her dressed so commonly. It seemed to admit him into a sweet companionship with her. She could afford not to dress well for him, to let her mere self suffice. She had accepted his friendship as a familiar and intimate thing. He was very happy.
They paused at the Gap, watching the great ground-swell of the Pacific thundering steadily upon the scattered rocks at the base of the cliffs. Then they turned along the road that ran between ocean and harbour, passing the white shaft of the lighthouse and entering upon the road that ran towards the city. There was bush on both sides of them, and from their elevated path they looked down, here upon the smooth inlets of the harbour, here upon the interminable levels of the Pacific. Far ahead the spires of Sydney glittered whitely.
A brilliant, flame-coloured hibiscus bush attracted their gaze. Gertrude picked a spray for her belt, and lightly gave King one of the vivid blossoms. He took it as though it were a precious thing. To the girl the bestowal of a flower was nothing; she forgot it the moment after. But King treasured it jealously. But years afterwards, in turning out an old box, he came upon an envelope with the brittle remains of a dried blossom in it, and after puzzling for a minute about it, failed to put his finger on the memory it embodied, and threw it away.
As, at last, they turned back to the Bay they saw the ferry-boat far beneath them just backing out from the wharf. They would have to wait at least two hours for the next boat. The swift twilight was coming; King suggested tea. They went into a little inn by the road, and in a little room looking out over the ocean—out of which a great yellow moon was majestically stepping—they had tea. As Gertrude sat down King saw a swift vision of her as his wife seated at the end of his table. He felt almost afraid at the temerity of the thought.
The girl was thoroughly enjoying herself; she was “having a good time,” and Gertrude’s philosophy of life was to have a good time. And to-day she was going to enjoy to the uttermost; she had resolutely put away from her the doubts and suspicions that had recently disturbed her with so strange a mistrust of herself.
And King watched her pouring out the tea, almost with a reverence, and was proud of her grace and charm, and felt an insistent desire to take all the miracle of her being into his arms and tell her he loved her.
After tea they wandered into the moonlight upon the cliffs. A narrow track led a little way under the brow of the precipice, and sheltered from the world they found a ledge and sat down. The moon stooped over the wide ocean; it was as if its robe of silver swept the waves. In the world there were only the moon and the ocean. The great Pacific lay at their feet, unrolled to the ends of the earth. A thousand miles across that dim, wide pathway lay New Zealand, the land he had for ever left, the starting-place whence he had set out on his way to fame.
Beneath them thundered the heavy ground-swell of the Pacific, great silky, silent rollers coming, mysterious and enigmatical, from some forgotten storm lost in that great immensity. There was something terrible, implacable, in the way in which those wide rollers came on and on across unimaginable spaces of the calm ocean, stirring far shores with the echoes of an unseen wrath long spent. It seemed to him that the unreasoning persistence of these crude, stupendous things was like the laws of God, moving in a grim silence undeviatingly across a universe.
They talked of themselves. What else has youth to talk of? What else does youth want to hear? And all the time the moon and the heavy sullen breakers and the solitude of the night enveloped these two in an enchanted veil. The dim stars mutely watched, aloof, incurious. They were too old to wonder.
Suddenly, in the midst of their talk, they paused. The girl looked up at King, and a faint, tired sigh came from her lips. There was a long silence, in which she felt her heart throb within her with a maddening loudness. She felt that King must hear it. She was vaguely afraid, she did not know of what. All her being called out to him; then—as never before—she craved to be loved, to be taken in arms that would crush her, wound her by the very intensity of their passion. And she would not cry out, would not struggle. He would stop her weak plaints with a kiss of mastery.
In a minute it was done. He was standing before her, stammering in uncouth words his love for her. Her hurrying heart filled in the hiatuses of his speech. She went before him in his words. Yet she was startled by the torrent of his love; it threatened her, seemed to drown her, to sweep her breathless from her feet.
“I love you, Gertrude. I shall give up my life to you. I want you—you, only, in my life. You were made for me. And, by God! Gertrude, I will have you!”
“No, no!” she cried in a sudden terror. “I do not know, I cannot tell. This is all new to me. I have not thought about it. It is too quick, too terribly certain!”
But he had her in his arms, and his lips were taking toll of her face and neck. She struggled with a divine zest in her resistance. She knew it was hopeless; yet—being a woman—she was reluctant for her joy. It was so sweet to toy thus with an assured happiness. She was sufficiently feline to taste the full flavour of her triumph before she let herself be swallowed up by passion.
And at last she lay white and helpless in his arms. But he would not let her go.
Then something in her revolted. This was too masterful, too real.
He felt the shudder that ran through the body he held. He loosed his arms. Then for the first moment since he took her in his arms he was conscious of existence. He looked up. The quiet moon, cold and aloof, stood high over the sea; the dim stars seemed swept together in one thick veil. And from beneath the cliff came sullenly up the recurrent heavy moan of the Pacific rollers, like the slow, unmoved beating of the vast pulse of time. He shrank from the inevitableness, the implacability, of those slow, silky lifts of the passive ocean. He felt himself caught in the merciless grip of unimagined forces, held helpless and puny between contending universes of might. How unutterably fragile and contemptible was a mere human life to the grand persistence of that army of the ground-swell, like destiny sweeping in widening waves from that unseen and long-dispersed centre! What were his foolish convictions, his little doubts, his puerile struggles compared to the majestic soullessness of those predestined, slowly-moving rollers of the wide Pacific?
“You had no right to kiss me!” Gertrude cried passionately.
The voice recalled him to her. He had taken her in his arms, he had told her he loved her.
“I love you,” he said. “And you love me.”
“No!” she said swiftly. It was clear to her now. This surrender of hers was a thing of a moment, a chance phase. He had no right to take advantage of her feeling for him. It was unfair of him. He had lowered her by that embrace. Her anger flashed out at him.
“No! I do not love you. You have degraded me by that kiss. How can I ever respect myself again? Oh, you have terribly changed me, King!”
He was silent. He had nothing to say.
“Come,” she said quietly, “let us be friends.” Nothing has happened. We shall forget all that, won’t we? And we will be the same friends again.”
He felt a dull anger growing within him against her. Or was it against himself? He could not say; and he was too tired to think. They turned to go up the hill cliff to the brow of the hill. The harbour lay beneath them, a constellation of dim lights. Just above their heads swung the long pencil of light from the lighthouse. It seemed to King like the flashing of a sharp sword.
As the little ferry-boat thrashed her way across the quiet waters of the harbour back to Circular Quay, the trail of white waves in the moonlight was the only thing he saw. King could recall it, a picture vivid and palpable, throughout his life. To him ever afterwards there was something hopeless, sullen, despairing in the flash of white waves under the moon.