Tussock Land; a Romance of New Zealand and the Commonwealth/Chapter 30
XXX
As the steamer swung into the narrow entrance of Wellington Harbour, King felt his heart go out in a great friendship for his own land. The bare, bleak, cleared steep hills that guarded that inland lake from the tumultuous currents of the Straits spoke to his flaccid heart of strength and the strenuous life. Here was energy and youth. The little, crowded city, flung recklessly down into the narrow nest of valleys amid that wide tumult of rugged hills, seemed to him to embody the splendid enthusiasm of youth. And the city, craving room for its foothold upon the flat that edged the harbour shore, had forced its way upon a wide swath of reclaimed land further and further into the deep waters of the harbour. And in every gully, on every ridge the houses climbed.
And when King stepped ashore, the clean, bitter, crisp breeze that met him in this city swept by all the winds of the Pacific, the brilliant sun in a sky of plunging, full-bellied clouds, seemed to strike new vigour into King’s enervated body. He felt the stir of an unchallengeable youth, the awakening of an almost forgotten vigour. He breathed deeply of this cool air; he looked with a keen pleasure at the warm blood in the cheeks of the passers-by, at their swift stride, at the incessant energy in every movement of their bodies, the careless youth in their unlined faces—and incidentally he lost his hat. He had forgotten for the moment the custom of the Wellingtonian of rounding every corner at an angle inclined to the wind’s direction, and he laughed happily as he chased his scudding straw. He would have laughed if he had lost it altogether. He was young again. He would do great things yet. They would see.... He would show them!...
He did not wait long in Wellington, but took that afternoon the train to Waiatua.
But on the long journey to Waiatua his mood suffered from an inevitable relapse. After getting clear from Wellington the train ran into a welter of mountains, over the ridge of which it lifted itself slowly and cautiously with great extra engines in front and behind. And coming down the other side the heavy train had to make use of a third rail that acted as a break to check the steepness of the descent. Then over plains and through tunnels, till at last it ran into the bush country. Here the heavy covering of forest was being slowly cleared, and settlers were laboriously gaining access to the rich soil beneath.
But it made dismal wreck of a once superb beauty. It was the curse of ugliness that inevitably hangs upon progress. The bush with all its splendours, all its graciousness and coolness and shelter, had to go. The land was wanted for grass; and the wealth of innumerable ages of lush growth, stored like wine in those superb, sturdy, slow-growing forest giants, had to be sacrificed for the immediate needs of a pigmy and short-lived race. And the old sturdy trees, that had seen centuries of summers undisturbed by thought of decay, felt with a vague astonishment the first insignificant strokes of the axe on their smooth flanks, and wondered in a contemptuous disdain at the diminutive pests that upon their ancient strength had made their wanton and inexplicable puny assaults. And still the tiny blows fell and fell with a growing meaning and a vague persistence that woke these old giants from their centuries of dreaming. And the gradual knife of the saw crept nearer and nearer their hearts with a pitiless menace, and suddenly the great monarchs felt through all their majestic vastness a tremor of fear; and ere that fear could take palpable meaning a last puny stroke of these busy insects sent them crashing, shuddering, groaning, shrieking, yet with a majesty still unconquerable, to their prostrate doom.
So day by day the age-old forests withered beneath the tiny strokes of these ephemera, and the corpses of the dead giants were ignominiously dragged by a team of straining bullocks through the bush-tracks to the final mutilation of the sawmill.
Then came the turn of the smaller denizens of the wondering forest, ruthlessly cut down and left to wither till dry enough for their cremation. Then one autumn day the country would swelter beneath a heavy pall of rolling smoke, and the withered trees, contemptuously given to the flames, would be “cleared” from the face of the earth they had so long sheltered with their cool, moist shade.
But even fire was powerless to effect utter ruin upon the sturdiness of these old forests. After the flames had laughed through the withered sacrifice, remained gaunt trunks, blackened and bleached, like ghosts, standing stark and grotesque amid a desolation of smouldering blackness; and for years afterwards those grim, unconquered corpses of a century-old dominion stood stiffly up with naked and tortured limbs in terrible attitudes of agony, or pointing to the skies a last uncomprehending protest.
But about their bared feet, whence the green, moist loveliness of creeper and fern had withdrawn, leaving those gaunt, outstretched white roots like a mouth set in a wide snarl, the green grass was slowly rising, and over their fallen and slowly-rotting trunks the venturing sheep were already daintily picking their way. The land was beginning to repair the ravages of man; the great, matted forest of the ages was being replaced by the trim, insignificant, shrunken forest of the grass or the taller, tawny-serried splendour of the wheat, And over some of those gaunt, naked trunks the kindly creepers were once more slowly climbing.
It was land yet in the dismal half-cleared state that the train ran through for thirty miles before it reached Waiatua, and the eternal succession of bleached or blackened corpses of trees, the sodden trunks lying where they had fallen, the sparse green that was but beginning to assert its healing kindness, the ugly little wharës of the struggling settlers, the bleakness of the railway-track through this avenue of newly-slain trees, the muddy road along which the carters laboured behind their teams of five—in front three horses pulling abreast—the unkempt selector’s children that stood on the barbed-wire fences of the sections and waved at and cheered the passing of the train—all this gradually sent a feeling of depression over King. He was coming to a country where life did not go so easily, so recklessly as in that fairy city of the sea. Here he touched the beginnings of life; here the struggle was undisguised and bitterly strenuous. There was no trifling with the imperturbable strength of Nature; there was no repose, no sloth in the wrestle with that unwounded foe. Work was the word this country said—Work!
The train drew up at the station and King looked vainly for the scattered houses of the township. But the railway was only pushing its way through this almost impenetrable forest, and, creeping along the valley, it had almost ignored the presence of the township. Waiatua lay two miles away, on the coach road to Wellington.
Charles Craven was on the platform. King stepped out upon the muddy surface of the station with a little feeling of disgust. Rain had fallen heavily, and the road that ran away into the bush looked a sea of slush. The first thing he noticed about his old friend was his boots. They were heavy and clumsy and coated thick with half-dried mud. King glanced dismally at his own foot-gear, thin-soled, dainty, smart. Life had not reached refinements here; he must come to grips with it on the lowest plane, accommodate himself to its crudities. Well, it was all what he had to pay for his failure. He had done with illusions now. And he began to feel a grim respect of himself growing within him at the thought.
There was a difference, too, in his old friend’s face. He had grown—what was the word?—commonplace. How much of this first impression was due to his closely-cropped hair and his drooping moustache—both being the evidences of a country barber’s fancy—King could not fairly determine. But his first impression of Craven was one of chilling disappointment He remembered Charles’s look of invincible youth, the splendid arrogance of his glance, the fire that, when he declaimed his verse, made his face a glory, the unconquerable belief in himself that made his every speech a prophecy.
And it had all faded out of him. Charles Craven, the country lawyer, stood before him eagerly grasping his hand. The other Charles, the poet Charles, was dead, buried somewhere, forgotten, perhaps, beneath this shrewd, contented, moderately prosperous exterior.
It seemed to King that he heard, faint and far, a thin trickle of mocking laughter....
Craven was indeed glad to see him again. “That’s right!” he exclaimed as the two shook hands. “Glad to see you at last. You must have come up first train from Wellington. Hardly expected you so soon; only got your wire a couple of hours ago. Thought you’d like to stay a few days in Wellington. Big town always has its attractions. Not that there aren’t attractions in the back-blocks. Good shooting over on the range, and there are pigs up in the Whakaroa Valley. We must fix up a hunt. You’ll stay at my place, of course. We’ve just built a new room. We’re getting on, you know, and the wife believes in us having a little comfort now. There’s the Royal Hotel, of course, if you’d like to go there, but you know what country hotels are like. No, there aren’t any other hotels in the town yet. But the town’s bound to grow. All through the district dairy factories are springing up; why, there are nine factories within five miles of Waiatua—all prosperous, We’re bound to progress. Now that the railway is getting along we mean to keep pace with it. It is opening up a great tract of bush country, and we mean to get our share of the good times coming. Two new buildings are going up in High Street—not counting the new room I’ve just had built on to my place—and I heard yesterday from our member that the Government intend to put a new culvert over the Onawe creek.”
Craven bristled with pride. His trap was waiting them at the station, hitched behind the building. King’s boxes were soon piled in it, and they started for the township along the muddy bush road.
During the drive the conviction came to King that he must relinquish much. He must sink out of sight, must merge his individuality in that of this aggressively strenuous, rising township. Craven seemed to have no individual existence apart from the fortunes of Waiatua. And once again King felt a glow of happiness within him as he contemplated the possibility that soon he, too, would live only for the progress of Waiatua.
He was a little shaken in his self-respect when they arrived at Waiatua. It was merely a scattered collection of new buildings straggling along the straight length of High Street—an absurdly wide High Street, built with a lavish provision for the bustle of traffic that was to come with the future. At present High Street was untenanted by vehicle and its expanse was chiefly mud.
“You should see High Street on Saturday mornings,” said Craven, enthusiastically. “Why, the place is full of vehicles. The whole countryside comes into town then.”
King could scarcely resist the infection of this wholesome belief in the future.
“You’ve changed a good deal, old chap,” he said, glancing curiously at him.
“Grown old—grown commonplace and old. Married a wife and all that, you know. Well, we all come to it, don’t we? No, by Gad! you’ve not came to it yet. How’s that, now? Must be some explanation. Well, you wait till you see some of our beauties. Waiatua’s famous for its beauties and its butter, Ha! ha!”
He rattled on, brisk and confident, serenely satisfied.
Then they turned into the yard of the largest house in the town—as Craven pointed out with arrogance—and King was made welcome by his friend’s wife. Mrs Craven turned out to be a nice, little, commonplace, homely woman, of an indistinguished beauty and an implacable belief in her husband’s brains. She helped him in his practice, shrewdly made friends with possible clients, and cemented his business with a carefully-calculated hospitality, beneath which a natural generosity could not be altogether concealed. She was liked throughout the district; the highest encomium of the back-blocks was unanimously passed upon her—she was not “stuck-up.” King immediately divined that much of Charles’s new briskness was due to the influence of this clever little wife. Her quiet, practical spirit had brought Charles to look with a faint contempt upon the unprofitable days of his early ideals. He had made no money out of them. It was permissible for boys to dream, but dreams led to nothing and boys grew up.
And as King looked round on the cosy house, the lavish supply of the latest magazines, the generous provision made for the classical novelists, the comfort and the rational luxuries of a prosperous household, he reflected that the present state of Craven’s fortunes contrasted favourably with the meagre and precarious past. Craven had no cause to be dissatisfied with life. He had come through. He had won his way from the counter in his father’s up-country store to this satisfactory and increasing practice. He could look life fairly in the face with the confidence at his heart that he had not misused its chances.
After dinner—during which King learnt that there were two more members of the Craven family, who now occupied their respective cradles—Craven led King into his diminutive study, and the two took out their pipes.
The talk went gradually back to their early days at the university, when life lay before them like a gorgeous carpet spread out to the ends of the world.
“And you, too,” said Craven, after a pause. “You’ve given up art. Well, we all come to it sooner or later, and we’re all the happier because we do. Art, poetry, music, romance, ambition, ideals—they’re all great things—perhaps the greatest things in the world—but they are all only different names for the same thing; they are only diverse manifestations of the greatest factor in life.”
Tie paused, looking with puckered, vaguely-dissatisfied brow after the smoke ring he had just sent swimming slowly across the room.
“You mean?” said King, interested. “The one factor is?”
Craven came suddenly back to reality.
Youth,” he said, almost sadly. “Yes; we thought that we were heaven-sent poets, we dreamed that we were musicians and artists, we imagined and yearned and wondered and made sturdy resolutions to climb to the stars, we bravely buffeted the world in the face and were surprised that it did not wince, we trampled all the centuries beneath our feet, we puffed away the future as I break this smoke-ring, and all this was only that we were young. We had the terrible, beautiful, superb gift of youth, and straightway were poets and artists and heroes. And then—and then—suddenly, in a moment, or with an insidious slowness that was more horrible, youth left us, was gone, for ever gone. Life, which had stood aside grimly and silently watching us dally and divinely dream, stepped out of the shadow and curtly said, ‘Playtime is over. Time to work; time to live’ And reluctantly we put aside our toys and buckled to our work. Sullenly or smilingly we took up the burden of life. And here we are—you that might have been a Corot, I that was to have been a Browning—here we are, two ordinary, insignificant lawyers, fairly successful, fairly contented, fairly happy. Once we arrogantly demanded more from life than it had for us—more than we deserved, we see now. And now that life has opened her hands for us—ah! but we had to pull at the close-shut fingers!—we see that it was but an insignificant little that she had for us, after all. And yet we are not ungrateful. We have what we deserve. Yes, we are grateful.”
“Don’t you ever write poetry now?” asked King. Life was a sordid thing. How terribly it degraded and debased men! And yet it seemed to his real self that Craven was speaking the truth. He, King Southern, was not ungrateful to life. Yet he could not resist the question—“Don’t you ever write poetry now?”
Craven looked up quickly. “Now, how did you guess that?” he said. “Yes, I do write sometimes. Seems to me that I’ll always write poetry.”
“Ah!” King laughed happily. “The youth hasn’t quite gone, after all.”
“No; sometimes it surges up. It seems invincible. I’m sure that the oldest man wakes up some mornings at the age of twenty-one. Only probably he doesn’t remain twenty-one longer than to realise than he is ninety. Yes, I write sometimes—but there is a difference. I don’t show it to my wife. I used to show her all I wrote, used to think that she was interested in all I wrote, but that was before I married her. Now, after I’ve thoroughly revised and finished my poems, I usually burn them. There seems to be such an extraordinary amount of good poetry in the world already. Come to think of it, it’s wonderful how little actual poetry there is in this life, and what an extraordinary lot of poems are written about it. Poets make the most of things, it seems to me.”
“I see,” said King, slowly, “you write poetry, but you don’t show it to your wife.”
“Well, you see,” began Craven, with a little uneasy laugh, “my wife doesn’t quite like that sort of thing. Not that she doesn’t appreciate poetry and all that sort of thing—very cultured woman, my wife, well educated, B.A. at Canterbury College—all that sort of thing; but she thinks—and, I think rightly—that a man cannot give his whole attention to conveyancing when he’s writing epics. But you, now—don’t you ever want to paint now?”
King detected a note of anxiety in his friend’s voice, despite the ease with which the question was put.
“No,” he said, “you needn’t worry about my painting, I’ve given all that up—for a time, at least. I guess this work will take up all the spare time I’m likely to have. No; I’ve put it all away from me. Perhaps in the future—who knows...? Youth, you know, seems invincible.”
A silence fell and the two looked back and ahead. So they had both come to this! It did not seem a glorious end to either of them. Yet it was an honest end, not ta be despised. It was life that had used them so. And they had not been specially picked out for Fate to wreak her spite upon. They were merely part of the mass, atoms of the ruck. Once they had pictured for themselves a glorious destiny—and glorious destinies were only for the elect. It was enough if life let them slip unobserved and unseen among the ranks of the happy indistinguished. They had achieved a certain comfort, a certain happiness. Would a wide fame have benefited them more? Was not this acquiescence in their smallness as dignified as a perpetual useless revolt? Was it not braver to recognise their capacity and abide within its limits than blindly to refuse assent to their littleness, persistently and hopelessly to strive for a star beyond their puny reach? It was a superb thing to be endowed with the divine discontent of ambition, but it was only the finer souls that could bear so great a burden. And they had found themselves out. Life had tamed them to a recognition of its facts. Who were they to shrink from the penalties of the indistinguished? It was worthier to do their duty in the spheres allotted to them. Therein they—albeit to an insignificant degree—helped on the generations, contributed their minute store to the cairn of progress. Better—unless you were a hero—to move along the easy grooves of the commonplace than uselessly and eternally to strive to escape their comfortable smoothness and shelter. At least they would be doing their duty. Ambition needs a hero’s soul, and they were but sorry heroes.
So these two smoked and dreamed and sadly acquiesced, and felt a sturdy happiness rise within them at their acquiescence. They were doing their work—not the glorious work they had wanted and had been too weak to grapple with, but a less interesting, yet still satisfying work. It called forth the best of their energies; it kept them busy; it carried them on through life. And they were not unhappy, scarcely disappointed.
And once again it seemed to King that be heard, far off and faint, a tiny trill of mocking laughter.
Then he roused himself and broke the silence by a question about the character of the legal work, and the rest of the evening was spent in the discussion of technical details.
It was not an uninteresting life. The practice extended from Waiatua as a centre to half-a-dozen scattered townships around, and ran as far south as Wellington, whither one of the partners had to go almost every week to plead some case in the city court. The work involved much travel, much riding into unfrequented parts of the district, much interesting experience. On the whole it was pleasant work, set in a frame of incessant activity. The district was indeed prospering. Every individual in it was filled to the full with a great enthusiasm for it. The townships were growing rapidly. The axes rang with the steady and the remorseless iteration of the ticking of a great clock through the silence of immemorial, time-forgetting forests; and, like the steady striking of the hours, the groaning fall of the forest giants struck through the drowsy peace of the sombre and motionless bush. And like great white mushrooms springing up in a night the surveyors’ tents appeared beside the cleared side of some half-hidden creek; and across this rugged welter of hills a narrow, mathematically-straight swath was imperturbably cut to where a square gap appeared in the distant sky-line of some bush-crowned mountain ridge. New roads were being pushed into the heavy, moist solitude of the valleys, or, bending and retreating, carried by wooden bridges across the ends of the steep gullies, ran slowly—a thin, straight, zig-zagging line—up the side of the mountains to some high pass.
And the saw-mills hummed ceaselessly, and day by day the bullock teams or the steam tramways carried the corpses of the slain trees to fill their yawning maws. Day by day grew the great heaps of sawdust, brown and pungent-scented, like gigantic ant-hills raised by some pertinacious insect, till the low buildings were almost smothered beneath the detritus of the carcases they had so greedily devoured. And in the autumns the burnings enveloped the township for weeks with heavy smoke, through which the ineffective sun looked like a bronze platter, ruddy and portentous and unreal. And almost to the sight the forests withered away: the settlers felled their acres, and bare, rude, diminutive wharës, roofed with sheets of blue galvanised iron and surrounded with barbed-wire fences, took feeble possession of the cleared areas. The cattle pushed their way into the undergrowth, making tracks through the impenetrable, and the light and air let into the forest struck death into the heart of those creeper-swathed and moss-hung forest trees. And they withered slowly as if the breath of the fire had caught them. And slowly the settlers gathered the useless, rotting trunks of the fallen giants into heaps and set them on fire. These smouldered for weeks, great funeral pyres of a doomed race. And the stump-extractors were set at work, with creaking chains and tugging horses, and slowly the roots that had sucked centuries of life from the moist, rich, virgin soil were drawn shrieking up and cast upon the funeral pyres. And the plough precariously shore the new-cleared land, and soon the rough, uneven paddock was sprouting with a new and wonderful green.
And the townships slowly grew. Round a distant accommodation house, sect at the junction of two roads, clustered a few buildings—stores, blacksmiths’ shops, bakers’ shops, public-houses, farms, roadmen’s shanties—and the little aggregation—known till then as “Robinson’s,” or “Half-way House” to somewhere—took unto itself a dignified Maori or English name and began to think of establishing a weekly paper. And the scattered settlers combined to establish dairy factories: a tall, placid Swede arrived one morning from somewhere with his laboratory and his test-tubes and took charge of the roomy, airy, iron-roofed factory buildings; and soon the carts loaded with the huge cans of milk were converging from the distant settlers’ farms and disgorging their white streams into the wide tanks of the factory; the great steam-churns began to ponderously revolve, and the sweet-smelling butter was sealed in its square boxes and sent down to the Government grading-stores at Wellington, to wait for the steamers that carried them to the other end of the world.
And the railway trucks were packed with sweltering sheep ready for the freezer, and day by day they poured into the slaughtering houses a hundred miles away, to emerge frozen stiff as boards, neatly clothed in fine linen for their last long journey to Smithfield Markets.
And the roaring streams and creeks of this mountainous district, that yet hid within its recesses wide open valleys of fatness, were being harnessed too, brought in line with that sweep of advancement that seemed in the air. Already the turbines were humming at the base of the tumbling waterfalls of this rainy land; and here and there a traveller making his muddy way through half-formed bush roads would come at night to a blaze of light where some insignificant township had taken advantage of its situation near a rocky gorge to turn that riotous torrent into electric light.
And there was ever the clamour for new schools from the distant settlers; and here and there on the roadside brand-new, brown-painted public schools were planted—little two-roomed erections behind the bleak shelter of a post and-rail fence. And the country school master or mistress—a smooth-faced, awkward city youth, or a bright, lonely town girl—would stand at the door on the mornings and watch the few straggling children slowly coming along the heavy roads. Some were walking, most riding; sometimes two sisters a-straddle on the same quiet old cart-horse, sometimes, in the summer, a smart young settler’s son on his bicycle. And the little wooden churches and chapels were being bravely erected side by side, each a visible and comforting sign to Wesleyan or Anglican of the permanence and absolute pre-eminence of his faith.
The district was prospering, waking to a strenuous life. And over all throbbed a sense of personal responsibility for the progress of the district, of personal participation in the growing prosperity. Each person, man and woman, in the district had his vote, and felt a thrill of the common energy that urged the district on. Their Parliamentary member was a pushing democrat—a publican in one of the smaller townships at the other end of the constituency, a notorious “battler” for the district’s rights—a "roads and culverts member.” The great, sturdy form of the Premier of the colony was known by sight to every school child in the district. He made flying visits to Waiatua to open the new culvert, to perorate at a party meeting, to take the chair at a dinner given to celebrate the opening of a new length of the railway line, to keep in personal touch with the settlers, to conciliate and pledge. Each person felt himself, herself, the focus of an incessant activity, the central figure of a national drama.
And during the five years that King lived that strenuous life in the township of Waiatua he grew to understand and to share this feeling of personal responsibility. He identified himself with the fortunes of the district. It seemed to him that here was no unworthy ambition—to join in the common responsibility, the local pride. It seemed to him that he received a new dignity in sinking that aggressive personality of his in the wider interests of his district. He felt for the people of the district a broader and more satisfying sympathy, He recognised their sturdy endeavours; like them he was a worker. It seemed to him, too, that, kept as busy as he was, he did not miss the loss of his art. There was no room for art in this sturdy, materialistic progress; life, here, was crude, sane, simple—above all, healthy. It bred strong, strenuous, brave men, with immediate ambitions, intensely local views. And yet there was nothing to repine over, little to regret. He was working hard—and enjoying it. His appetite was splendid, his outlook optimistic. Now he looked back on the life he had led in Sydney as little more than the preliminary training of the runner before the start of the race. He had found his level and he was content. With this life of incessant change, these visits to every part of the district, this sense of intimate concern in the fortunes of every individual of his acquaintance, he felt an uplifting of the heart that sometimes led to a vague desire for closer intercourse with some other soul. His bronzed, clean-shaven face, with its firm-set mouth and its steady eyes, seemed to typify the sturdy peace that filled his being. He walked with the arrogance of perfect health. He believed almost passionately in the great future of his district. He knew everybody in his town, from the railway porter to the latest settler across the range, and he called many of them by their first name, or the local name that afforded them, in the estimation of the settlers, a sufficient identification. And to many of them he was King.
He wore thick-soled boots now.