Tussock Land; a Romance of New Zealand and the Commonwealth/Chapter 5
V
Aroha was the offspring of a new country, the child of a virgin soil. Between her generation and that of her father there was a great barrier. For she had been born in New Zealand. He looked back with a fond pride and an inherent satisfaction to the old land that had borne him. In England he had left half himself. His memories were of that little island of the North; he was the child of the past, the inheritor of history. England’s traditions had so wrapped themselves about his personality that in this new land he could not shake them off. Nay; he was incapable of wishing to disencumber himself of his traditions. His early training, his inherited outlook coloured all his life. At times he felt a dumb rage that this strange far-south colony, in which he was ever an exile, should so resemble England. The very likenesses that sometimes showed themselves mocked him with their inherent dissimilarity. He had been transplanted merely—not uprooted. He was the product of generations of his race; in him their characteristics, rudely flung to the other side of the globe, heroically persisted. Under these new skies in which glittered a chaos of unfamiliar stars, he continued to grow, to develop; but the fruits were not the fruits of the new soil—merely a sickly maturing of the process begun under different auspices a hemisphere away.
He looked yearningly back across the wide stretch of sea that lay between his own land and this: his heart had never crossed the tropics. To him England was the “Home” that so many colonists unthinkingly name a land they have never seen, probably never will see. Here he was decentred, set upon the outer fringe of the world. At night he looked apprehensively out upon the other side of the universe. His heart sickened when he realised how far he was from Charing Cross, how impossible it was that he would ever stroll down the Strand.
Distance stood at the gate like an implacable angel of the flaming sword. He was outlawed from civilisation, set in a land that was not even finished.
But Aroha knew England not even in memories. Here was her birthplace, here her home. To her father’s stories of his home she listened almost as to a traveller’s tale. It was all very interesting, very quaint and strange; but what had it to do with her? Maoriland was hers—a land familiar and affine. She was born here; here she would live and die. To her the little fenced grave on the wind-swept hillside seemed sadly incongruous. Her father at last lay in a land strange and hostile to him. She wondered sometimes whether he was really at rest. She pictured herself buried in some far land, perhaps in that unknown England, and knew she would not be content.
But this wide, wild tussock land was hers. It knew and accepted her. She was part of this wide sweep of hill and valley, she belonged to this great domain of creek and flat and gully and swamp. The scour of the ever-hurrying winds, the outpour of the ever-brilliant sun had made her what she was; something of the wind and the sun and the keen, quick air was in her soul.
She did not look back. It was interesting, as books of history were interesting, to hear her father speak of his ancestors, to picture the long, unchanging, continuous life of his ancient family. But they belonged to another race. They were all dead, buried in a land she had never seen, scarcely desired to see. That story has come to its last chapter; those ancestors of hers had finished their great drama. She knew that if they were able to learn of her they would not approve of her, would not even recognise her as a descendant of their greatness. Their story belonged to England. In that little fenced grave on the alien hillside all the long accumulations of history, all those glorious legends and high ideals were ignominiously buried. That was where that long-hoarded greatness had come at last to rest.
She had the present about her, she looked ahead. In this new land history had hardly begun to take tangible form. Her mother’s people, the Maoris, had their legends, their mythology; but they had not impressed them upon the land. The brown conquerors of this world-forgotten island group had built only in wood, and already their mark upon the land was beginning to fade. Their wonderfully-carved wharës could not long survive destruction, and already the art of carving was dying out. And though the race was not dying out, its impress upon history was destined to become fainter. Its destiny was intermarriage with the pakeha—and though thus it would bestow upon the New Zealand race of the future a physique and a vitality that belong to primitive things, a gift that would carry the new race far—as a people the brown Maori must cease—submerged beneath the greater number of the whites.
But in that most impalpable thing, language, the Maori had builded better than in his carven wood. He had made his inalienable impress upon the land by the great store of names with which he had dowered these islands. Every hill, every gully, every spur, every creek, every fishing-ground, every tribal limit, had its musical Maori name—to the untrained eye a little terrifying, but very liquid, very soft and sweet upon the tongue. The Italian skies of this southern land seemed to have given an Italian wealth of vowels to the speech of its people. And every name was a poem, the rude nature-poems of a primitive people, that reached in one swift word to the utter heart of things.
So over this new country history brooded but vaguely, a haunting sense of the things that had been, of stories past and irrevocable.
To Aroha it was yet a land of newness. To the girl’s sight a cemetery was a rare thing; the little scattered burial-places of the settlers were few and far-hidden. In this unstoried place a tombstone was an anachronism. It seemed as if the people of this new land were almost ashamed of their dead.
Aroha had never seen an old building. In her districts the churches were but wooden erections that, during the week-days, served their main use as schoolrooms or entertainment halls. Even the stone churches in Dunedin were new. Time had not ventured to lay his transfiguring hand on them. The ivy was just beginning to climb their walls. It was difficult to be religious in a land that knew not Antiquity with her finger on her lips.
So Aroha looked forward to the vague promise of the future. She began another race, she belonged to a newer people, a nation that had no past.
In her veins was the blood of the English; but she was thrilled by the ichor of that other race. Hers were those brown warriors of the past, adventuring in their great canoes thousands of leagues over unknown waters, a Columbus race ever questing for lands unseen, a nation of Alexanders tired of the long unchanging tropic peace of Hawaiki, stirred by the thought of new worlds to conquer. For, leaving the known and the familiar behind, they had set out in their great canoes and plunged deeply into the mysterious South, seeking vague lands in the forgotten regions of the earth, drawn irresistibly onwards by legends dimly whispered and rumours borne upon the strenuous winds of the Pacific. So they had ventured and voyaged deeper and deeper into the unknown, till at last their keels came to rest in the white sand of the beaches of New Zealand. But the island group was not untenanted. A weak and peaceful race they found already in possession, but before the onslaught of this fierce race of conquerors the ranks of the primitive Moriori melted away.
It was surely a deep instinct for racial preservation that had prompted this tropical race to leave the lotus islands of the Pacific and dive into the colder waters of the South, sternly seeking a ruder, healthier home. It was only by that spartan plunge that the race could regain its strength and hardiness after too long a sojourn in the soft ease of the tropics.
They had voyaged far, that race of brown Ulysses, and they had found their Fortunate Isles. From India, cradle of nations, they were said to have come in the days when the Himalaya tableland sent forth its nations to people the world; and, drifting gradually out into the Pacific and leaving behind as they slowly wended from island to island the cooler and less adventurous spirits of their race, they had pressed ever onwards, eastwards and southwards, conquering and colonizing as they drove, until the drifting icebergs of the Antarctic fixed the barrier to their quest.
The blood of this people was in Aroha’s veins, their story in her heart. She knew the tale of her mother’s tribe: back and back the generations went, name after name famous in Maori history she could recite, until at last she reached the founder of her tribe, the famous chief who had commanded one of the five great canoes that had headed the first migration of the Maoris to these dimly-divined shores. She knew that great chief’s name, the name of the canoe in which he came, of the very beach upon which its double keel stranded. But beyond that history said nothing and legends but dimly whispered. And beyond that Aroha did not care to go. She was a New Zealander. This land and she were kin. The Maori had made it his own by the might of his arm, and after him had come a stronger race, and to this pallid, strange people, though not till after a worthy fight, in his turn the Maori had given way.
In Aroha these two long lines of conquerors fused and blended. She stood at the beginning of a new race, alert for the possibilities of the ever-widening future. A hemisphere separated her from her father, a dying history cut her off from her mother. She began another race, she belonged to a newer people, a nation that had no past.