Tussock Land; a Romance of New Zealand and the Commonwealth/Chapter 31
XXXI
Shortly after his arrival at Waiatua King had written to Aroha. It had been a difficult matter to renew an acquaintance that had so completely dropped out of sight. Yet he managed to write her a mere friendly letter, telling her of his last change, and asking her for news of herself.
She did not reply at once. After a month a letter came, brief and bald. She thanked him for his friendship, assured him that she was well and happy, was glad again to hear from him, and regretted that he had found it necessary to relinquish his thoughts of an artistic career. It had been her jealously held belief that he would win fortune and fame through art, and she was sorry. But he knew best. She admired his strength in putting his hopes and ambitions so courageously aside. For herself, she was hard at work. The run required a ceaseless supervision, but she was prospering. She wished him well.
It was a cold letter, King admitted. He had indeed anticipated a warmer letter—a letter telling him that he was not altogether forgotten, that her thoughts of him sometimes were coloured by old memories. But, with a grim laugh at his incurable egotism, he put the matter out of sight and went about his work. So she shook him off. Well, he had deserved nought else. He had half formulated a hope that there might be compensations in life, that, after all, he and Aroha....
He tore her letter slowly in pieces and dropped them into a waste-paper basket, beside the tatters of a conveyancing draft. And he did not afterwards collect the scattered fragments.
Sometimes he wrote to Barbara, but her replies were brief. She had little to tell. She was always interested in him, but she could scarcely succeed in interesting him in turn. Her life and personality were so monotonous. Gradually the sparse letters became still rarer. He could see that some day the correspondence would die of inanition. And at the end of the five years of his stay in Waiatua he recognised that it had died. He had not the capacity for a distant attachment. He was man enough, too little of a hero, to need the personal nearness of his friends. So, as he had found before—as the exiles always find—the blank leagues of sea-space that estrange the world were of more virulence than hate.
In none of her letters did she mention the letter she had placed beneath his door his last night in Sydney; and she never knew that he had not received it. It lay concealed beneath its strip of carpet for months; then a housemaid engaged in room-cleaning noticed it and took it to her mistress. She had mislaid King’s address, and Miss Barbara Smith, who was the only person who might have known, had left these lodgings shortly after King went away. So the landlady opened it. She recognised the handwriting of Miss Smith.
The landlady read it, “The sly minx!” she said, putting it in the fire with a righteous blush for the shamelessness of her sex. “I always suspected there was something between those two.”
She retailed the incident with detail at afternoon tea, and for half an hour knew that she occupied the proud position of being the centre of interest. So the letter was not altogether wasted.
One spring morning King found a telegram on his office table from his father. His eye caught the signature first, and his heart stopped in an agony of suspense. It must be something serious that would cause his father to communicate with him. It was.
His mother had suddenly become dangerously ill. He had had no hint of a gradual break-up in her strength: that she had piteously striven to hide from her husband and her son. In an agony of fear King took the first train for Wellington. There he found that the steamers did not suit, and he was kept waiting a day, fuming at the delay and telegraphing for news. Two days later he was in Dunedin. He was met at the station by his father with a black band on his arm.
Together they went to the house and into the darkened room.
And as King stood over the poor, worn, white body of his mother, the deep and unutterable love that had lain dormant in him broke from him in a great groan. All the long train and steamer journey he had had time to reproach himself with his neglect of his mother. Again and again, during those five years, he had made up his mind to take a trip to Dunedin to see his mother again, but always the dislike he felt at the thought of meeting his father again had intervened. It gave him little consolation to reflect that he had frequently urged her to come to Waiatua and visit him. She had said that she could not leave his father; he was getting old now, and liked to have her with him always. She could not leave him, even to see her son. But some day, she knew, her King would come down and visit his old home. And he had come at last!
And now it seemed to him that he had not known how deep and real had always been his love for her. Intellectually he had far out-grown her. Between their minds there was no bond. And yet, surviving all this inevitable growth and change, unperturbed by all these essential differences, between them lay, hidden and yet palpable, an ineradicable bond. He had put her out of his mental life. In his letters from Sydney he had told her little of his ideals, and when he returned to New Zealand he had not let her see what he had relinquished, fearing to give her that cause for worry. But now he wondered passionately whether he had computed at its right value the love in a mother’s heart. Dimly, in some non-mental way, she did understand. In them pulsed one common heart; the generations that severed them had been bridged by mere mother-love. He had been callous, hard. He might have made more allowances, have taken more trouble to let her see his point of view, have relinquished more of his reserve, have shown her more of his weaknesses, have been less of the man of the world, more of the son. He should have been kinder, should have shown her those little love-courtesies that mean so little to a man, that are so easy to a man, and that mean so much to a craving woman’s heart. And now it was eternally too late.
It did not console him that all sons were the same—that no son could return at its full value the inexhaustible store of love for her offspring that suffuses a mother’s heart. He blamed himself that he had not been able to give back to his mother that terribly passionate, self-sacrificing love of motherhood. It did not console him that perhaps the stream of love, like the stream of life, flows for ever only one way—down, from generation to generation. Nor did it heal the great grief of his spirit to reflect that the large, self-effacing love of motherhood asks no recompense, craves no reward, is dimly satisfied with itself, pours itself unpremeditated out and is gratefully content for its superb privileges. Nor did he glean any comfort out of the thought that probably his mother had never guessed how alien to her thought he had grown. Life had taken him in hand, and life was a ruthless taskmaster. But perhaps she guessed that, too, and made allowances for life and for him. Dimly he conceived the great splendour of a mother’s love.
And now, in his supreme agony of regret, he would have given life for one moment in which he could tell that dead white thing, dressed in his mother’s semblance, that he loved her, that she held a place apart and sacred in his heart, and that his love for her was of the deep and unspoken kind that proved its sincerity. And yet one little fondness, one foolish word of boyish love, would have been more worth to her than all the deep reserve of his heart! That lesson he had learnt too late.
He turned to his father—the hard, narrow-minded man of God. And between them a sudden stream of sympathy revived. King saw how worn, how old he looked. He had never imagined that a man could look so broken, and his father had always been so reserved, so strenuous, so aloof, so self-assured! King seemed to understand something of the agony and the irremediable loneliness of that stern man’s unrelenting heart. He gropingly put his hand in his, and together, like little children, father and son stood looking down upon the one memory that life held in common for them. The old man pressed his son’s hand. King felt the shrinking from his loneliness that that grasp involuntarily expressed. His father was growing old—and the loneliness of age.... Perhaps King could help him to grew reconciled with life—on his part a little patience, a little forbearance, a little tolerance....
The day after the funeral King escaped from the desolate home. Almost with a feeling of guilt he slipped out of the house for a walk by himself. For during these two days his father had come to depend upon him with a pathetic humbleness. It was King who had to lead him away from the grave, and the old man had come with the docility of a little child. And now his father would hardly let him from his sight, for he followed him about as though doubting whether he—this new-found son—might not, too, be taken from him by treacherous death.
But King felt the urgent need to be alone. He had seen too closely the terrible brutality of life. He had brooded too long over the grim callousness and the bitter mockery of this existence. Life had given so little to his mother. He wondered if she had ever been very happy, if she had once reached the heights of happiness of which her nature was capable, for which her nature was meant....
No, he must escape from that house yet haunted by the memories of malignant death. He was young yet; his heart was stifled in those bleak rooms; he must get out to the air. So he slipped, almost sneaked, away.
The sun was brilliant in a blue, white-flecked sky. The bush, that was never bare of foliage, with the coming of the spring had taken on a newer, fresher shade of green. Here and there English trees—willows and poplars and hawthorns—had put out little eager, grasping hands of green.
He turned instinctively to the Belt—that broad ribbon of bush that rimmed the nestling city in its arena between the mountains and the harbour. He walked swiftly, feeling the blood leap in his veins. The splendour of the world, the pageantry of Nature, called to his slumbering youth. His soul answered with a thrill of joy. A great, indefinite, glowing rose of hope blossomed within him. Life was a superb thing!
He took little heed of his direction, and at length, after climbing a steep track between the solemn ranks of heavy bush, he paused to gain breath. He looked round. At once a memory came to him. He knew where he was—on the track that once he had taken with Aroha!
Why, there, not twenty yards off, was the very spot where, boy and girl, they had separated—for ever—in such mutual bewilderment and pain! How vividly the scene brought the memory of Aroha back to him!
Instinctively his eyes sought for the actual presence of Aroha. And he experienced a real shock of disappointment when he realised that she was not there. But at the corner, curiously enough, there was a woman, leaning on the slip-rails of the fence with her back to him. And suddenly the vague hope crept to being again. It might be!—
He walked quickly toward the figure. The woman did not stir, did not turn, No; it was not Aroha. It was some older woman. He noted in the pose a hinted weariness, a maturity, a sedateness that were not in his memories of Aroha. Yet there was a vague resemblance in her figure to some woman he had known. His mind went swiftly back to the women of his memory. Gertrude—Barbara—Effie? No; it was none of these.
By this time he was very close to her. She had half turned at the sound of his steps, as if idly to see whom it was, but had abandoned the impulse. All he could see was a mass of brown hair, a glimpse of a thin cheek. No; it was not Aroha.
He passed on reluctantly. Life seemed suddenly to have gone grey. He paced on with lingering steps.
Then an impulse made him turn his head. The woman was looking at him. It might be—it was!
He hesitated and returned. The woman stared, faintly interested. He came up to her.
“Aroha!” he said tremulously, and held out his hand.
The woman looked at him in a scornful surprise. “I—beg your—That is my name—but I don’t know who—”
“You don’t remember me?” King said with a sudden sense of humiliation. It was Aroha—and she had forgotten him utterly!
“No, I seem to remember—”
"I’m King,”
The woman flushed rosy.
"You, King! I did not recognise. I never thought to see you here. I did not think that I would ever see you again.”
She put her hand in his. They looked keenly and long in each other’s faces.
She had changed, King saw with a sudden pang. She had grown older. There were lines about her eyes. Time and trouble had blurred the exquisite youth of her face; the mouth drooped a little. And in the thick, brown hair he saw insidious lines of grey. Her figure was no longer the figure of a girl. Ten years had wrought their will upon her youth. He recalled her lithe aerial suppleness as she stood alone in that wide waste of tussock land, poised delicately on the ridge, balancing herself against the audacious wind.
He noticed then a quiet taste in her dress that seemed to harmonise with her gentle sedateness. And yet she was not anything but beautiful. Her upright presence, her grace of movement, her superb eyes and her well-moulded features, gave an impression of beauty that no years could reach. He saw in her face the suave calm, the quiet strength of the tussock land. Only, she was no longer young.
A great restraint fell upon them. They had drifted so far apart; their memories of each other were so faint, so ethereal, so irreducible to the level of mere earth. It was so difficult to tether so fair a dream with words. Each to the other seemed a thing of impalpable fancy, a vague vision from the wonderland of dream. And real and living, man, woman, they stood confused and uncertain before each other.
He was eager to know what had brought her to this spot. She explained that she had came to the city on business about Westella. The run had been unusually prosperous of late; but the strain of managing it and a leasehold of an adjoining seven thousand acres that she had acquired six years ago had become too heavy for her unaided strength. So she was thinking of getting a manager for it. Her health had broken down under the ceaseless work and worry; she had taken upon herself too heavy a task for a woman. There had been money worries, losses of stock in the last big snow-storm, a disastrous legal dispute with the Government rabbit-inspector.... She felt the need of someone who could relieve her of some of her responsibility. If she could get a good manager she would go away for a bit, perhaps come to Dunedin to live; she wanted to take some classes at the university—she had missed so much in life, shut away up there in the back-blocks. And perhaps she would go for a trip to Australia. John, who was back at his work again at the run, though not as ploughman, but as manager of the new leasehold, had told her the glories of Sydney. Or perhaps she might go to England. She was not quite so strong as she once was, and she had never spared herself. The life was a hard one—perhaps too hard for a woman. And she was so utterly cut off from everyone. She felt herself no longer so independent; she was becoming accustomed to lean a little on the world. She was tired of work. And she had shut the door for ever on the past—and the future was so lonely. She had heard of his great bereavement. She was very sorry for him, It must have been a great shock. She hoped he had arrived in time to see her before she died. Ah! then, that must have been very bitter! Her voice showed her sympathy, her eyes—
He noticed with a sudden gladness that her eyes were the eyes of his memories of her. They were Aroha’s eyes. Strange how well he remembered that upward ripple of the brows above them! There were no eyes in all the world like them, so frank, so sympathetic, so sincere.
“This is my last day in Dunedin,” she went on. “I’ve got a manager to take the billet for a year, and I’m going back with him and his wife to-morrow to explain my methods of working to him. He signed the agreement this morning, and as I had an afternoon off to myself, and love the bush—you know we’ve hardly got any bush on the run, but in the leasehold there are some glorious gullies of bushes—I came out here for a stroll. It is such a glorious day.”
“That tempted me, too,” he said. “It is strange that a mere spring day—-mere sunlight, that is the ultimate cause of life upon earth, should have brought us together again!”
He laughed with an irresponsible gladness. She smiled a little, hardly knowing why. Youth and spring and sunlight—they were unconquerable.
Aroha had been struck by the change in him: but his laugh recalled—she strove hard to remember what it recalled. Some vague, yet, she was sure, beautiful thing.
Then she found herself comparing him with Will—the one man she had loved, the man whose love had been to her a reality before which the dream-meeting with King upon the hills had vanished as the frail delicacy of a morning mist melts into the superb radiance of the day. This stranger who now stood before her had not the strength of personality, the splendid arrogance of purpose that in Will had taken her heart captive. Will dared all things, superbly indifferent to the world. He over-rode her woman’s hesitancy with a conquering recklessness. She loved him. But he had given her up, had gone away silently, as if ashamed. She had never been able to think of Will as ashamed, and yet he had gone away, left her. She looked again at King. How he had changed!
“And your painting?” she asked.
He laughed easily, “Ah! that was a dream. The reality was not for me. Yet it was something to have had the dream. I have given all that up now; I do not seem to have the time. There is so much to do.”
Her eyes saddened. An impulse of sympathy made her lift her hand to his shoulder.
But he laughed again. “Ah? that’s all done with. I have had my try. It was not in me to succeed. There were other things for me to do.”
“But don’t—don’t you ever—try now?”
His face brightened in the way she remembered so well.
“Ah! there are pictures that I feel it in me to paint. Some day... perhaps—”
Then he broke off with a laugh at himself. “I’m incurable, I believe. I can’t crush down that hope; and yet I know it is only a hope. I shall never paint now.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. To her this candid admission of inability seemed like a death. She was surprised to find that he looked so well, seemed so contented, so healthy. There was even a suspicion that he might be getting—well, stout. The lean, pallid youth she recalled had for ever gone. He had grown older. Yet the present man was good to look upon. The brown face, the steady eyes, the firm mouth, the strong chin, the robust strength of body, the expression of ability, of self-confidence, marked him out a man. She knew she could trust him. Ah! if only she could give it all up, lean on him....
But she knew that that was forever impossible. He did not know.
And suddenly it came to her that his was a stronger personality than hers. He was a man, sure of himself, acquitting himself in this struggle of life with a serene certitude within him of his worth. He had outgrown his weaknesses.
And gradually, as they spoke together, King saw the Aroha of his remembrance struggle confusedly out of the personality before him. Little flashes of her old self revealed themselves. He recognised that Time is powerless to shift the basis of the most insignificant soul. The foundations that mean individuality are immovably laid before birth, and all Time can do is to mould and coalesce. The years make their pertinacious assaults, and the ego serenely repulses the idea of change. One makes resolutions, good and bad, and sins the same sins and repents the same repentance from youth to age. All that the years can do is to hammer at the loosely-hung desires and repulsions within the soul and make of those diverse and warring characteristics one soul. Life is the anvil upon which a soul is hammered into shape. Sometimes the blows are badly aimed and the soul is spoiled. That is Life’s fault.
The dusk had now come about the man and the woman upon the lonely heights of that hill-path. The night was already at rest within the sombre foliage of the line of sentinel gums that watched the sea. The sunset had quickly faded; the world had gone grey. A stealthy dreariness crept upon the hour. An infinite longing for companionship in the wide loneliness of life held them both within a common grasp.
An impulse brought him to her. They were alone in life, forgotten by the world. They had been singled out from the first for each other, and Fate had not quite forgotten. Only now were they beginning to glimpse its far-seeing secret. By bringing these two together at this remembered spot Life had relinquished into their hands its jealously-guarded gift of the future. The supreme responsibility of their existence had come upon them. Would they be worthy of that great trust?
It came to King that he must speak. But did he love her? He did not know. He remembered the great thrill of happiness that had left him almost breathless when his eyes first saw Aroha, He recalled the mature passion of his love for Gertrude, the brief frenzy of his love for Effie. This love was not so splendid as those. No; he could not tell himself that he loved Aroha as he had once loved. And yet were not those fierce loves doomed to as fierce an ending? This might endure. Nay, it must endure. He was not blinded now. He was no foolish boy.
He had learnt much from life: but the greatest truth he had learnt was humility. Who was he, what surpassing gift had he, that he should deserve much of life? What was there in him that could lift him above the penalties of his fellows? No; he had seen the glories of a great love, but those splendours were not for him. He did not deserve much from life. He would be gratefully content with what life spared him. And if that was Aroha’s love, it was a gift surpassing what he had deserved—a miracle-gift undreamed of! But something told him that it was not for him; and he acquiesced in that judgement of life. He did not deserve that great gift. And yet if, after all, Life had this in her firm-clenched hand? If he might win this woman for his wife!
He dared: with a great humility he dared. He took her hand.
“No, no, no, no!” she whispered, divining the words that were upon his lips. “Don’t let us spoil it all. King, are you incurable? Must sentiment always intervene? Let us be friends. Don’t say anything that would not let us always be friends. Ah! King, my dear friend, I want your friendship so much! I am almost alone in life. You know I have no people now. I am at the beginning of another race. So few friends, and I had thought of you as the chief of them. Let us make a truce to love. We do not want it now. We have passed all that. I feel that I have come out on to the other side—into a region of happy calm. Believe me, King—I do not want to pain you—but I have done with love.”
The drear truth in her voice appalled him. His fingers let her quiet hand drop. Yes, surely it was time for both to be done with love. Love was only a dawn that flaunted fleeting rainbow colours on a world that too soon would grow pitiless and white. The day was clear, but the dawn was too splendid a beacon to burn long. Let them be content with the comfortable clearness of the prosaic day.
“Yes,” she continued, after a silence, “I finished with love when Will went away. I could not love you as I loved him, King. No; not if I lived for an eternity. For when he went he took, it seems to me, nearly all my soul with him. All he left me of myself was memory—and that was the most terrible thing of all! Ah! If he had but dragged my heart from me and left me dead! But he took from me all I had—love and self-respect and pride and hope and dreams—and when I gave him all, when I did not cry out nor move, he laughed and handed me back—memory! A woman who loved as I loved cannot forget, cannot efface her love from her heart, for it fills her heart, and as long as she lives her heart is only memory. I know now—I have learned, King—that Will was not worth very much, that he was not worth loving, perhaps: and yet my love for him was the greatest thing in this life. I would think it a desecration to allow anybody else to speak words of love to me. For I loved him—and though... King, in spite of all, in spite of myself even, I know that every part of my being is in love with him still!”
So King felt himself thrust into the outer darkness. Upon his breast he felt the shadowy hand of a memory in which he held no part. Yet he rebelled.
“But, Aroha, have you altogether forgotten?” he said. “The days at Westella, the days in the open, the rides together! And the last time we met here, beneath this very gum-tree!”
“No, no! I remember, King. It was the only dream I ever dreamed. But it was not life. After you went away I lived. You never dreamed how deeply I could live. And life has obliterated so much of the dream. Ah, no! If I ever cared for you it would be only as a friend. If I married you I would not cease to remember that part of my life in which you had no share. Oh! King, King, why did you go away? Why did you go away?”
The man was not so easily beaten. The sturdy fibre of his new being fought defeat.
“Aroha, I want you to be my wife. I cannot bring you much that is of worth. Life seems to have stripped me bare of all its mystery. I am a common man, managing to pull through life without any ideals but the common ideal of earning an honest living. But I feel that we two must not part here. I made one terrible mistake upon this very spot, I am not going to make another. I know myself now. I need not fear that I am deceiving myself. Perhaps my going away, my meeting with other women, was solely in order that I might be sure. I am not offering you mere passion, as I see my first love for you was, My love now is a saner, surer thing, For I did not know haw much I loved you till now. Yet all these years it has been growing, growing unconsciously in my soul. And now I am sure—terribly sure! I have been in love, Aroha, once, twice; but that passionate love makes me frightened now to think of. I would not offer you that, but a sane and sturdy friendship, a steady and sober love. I think I have learnt to be tolerant, to make allowances, to forgive. I come to you not demanding your love. I come humbly, glad if you could grant me this great gift, thankful indeed and victorious if this thing is for me. It seems to me now, Aroha, that I have been preparing myself to be in some way worthy of your love. Life has had me in hand. Let us come together now. We are both left lonely here. I, the end of an old race, you, the promise of a new. Let us face the future together in a union that will shield us both from hurt. Dearest, I can protect you, shield you; I can put my arms round you and keep the years at bay. And, perhaps—though I would not if you did not wish it—I could help you to forget. Will you come into my arms, my dear one? Will you give me at last yourself, your love?”
And as King spoke it seemed to the woman that impalpable arms were slowly drawing her toward his breast. A great weariness had come upon her. She was so tired of her steadfastness, so sick of her aloof courage. He was so strong. How terribly she stood alone! It would be so good to give it all up, to trust everything to the sincerity of that strong man!
But she restrained herself sharply. It was right that he should know. Here, at last, was the haven opening to her, here the long-sought rest. And now she must tell him! That was her punishment—her terrible punishment. It was his right to know. She revered his friendship too much, she was too humbly grateful for his love.
“Stop!” she said, lowering her eyes and speaking low. “I must tell you something—something that will put an end to all this talk, I am not bitter, King, really—save at life. And it is my own fault. I was in love with Will. I loved him utterly. And I trusted him, I trusted him as no woman should ever trust a man—as since time began women have trusted men! And he—he—I do not blame him more than I blame myself—he—he took advantage of my great trust—I was only a girl—and he left me! That is all. And, ah! God, I love him still!”
He stood horror-struck. And with a great despair in her eyes she turned to go.
He let her go.