Tussock Land; a Romance of New Zealand and the Commonwealth/Chapter 7
VII
It was the last day of King’s stay in the country. To-morrow he would have to return to Dunedin. He had ridden over from the Hathaways’ station to Westella and asked Aroha to go a ride with him. The girl refused; she could not spare the time. The boy pleaded; it was his last day. The girl relented. But when King offered to fetch her mare from the home paddock, she announced that it was already in the stable. She had caught the mare before breakfast—in case.
So, boy and girl, they rode from the homestead. As they walked their horses down the valley they turned aside to skirt a paddock at which John and his team were already busy. The black, up-turned soil lay steaming in the morning sun; the three furrows moved in regular parallel lines over the undulating ground; the horses strained sturdily and patiently, the ploughshares slipping through the smooth soil with a quiet, sucking sound. Behind the plough strode John, his eyes fixed upon the furrows ahead, his strong arms inflexibly keeping his team on a path of mathematical straightness. Behind him a trail of seagulls swept wailing, seeking in the dark waves of this strange sea the food they had journeyed so far to find. Perhaps the sea-birds took the plough for some new vessel cutting a dark wake over this steady ocean, following the plough with the same persistence with which they tracked the steamers across the wastes of the Pacific.
John looked up at the approach of the riders. He sent them a quick, scowling glance, and then ignored them, his eyes upon his team.
“Coo-ee!” cried Aroha, as they approached within shouting distance.
But John did not appear to hear. The creak of the harness, the rattle of the chains, the sough of the ploughshares through the earth might have smothered her clear, high-pitched call. Aroha half-checked her horse, about to “coo-ee” again, but King with an impatient word restrained her. The girl felt a little chilled. The sun that this morning had been so resolutely shining in her heart was suddenly overcast. When everything else was so full of happiness it was a shame that John should not contribute to the sum.
As they left the paddock King said, “There! that is the sort of thing you would rather have me do. Tie myself down day after day to work like that, smother myself in one spot, live a monotonous life out year after year, immerse myself in uninteresting work till I became of no more value than the horse I was driving. I could not do it; I was not made for that.”
“You are made to work like the rest of us.” Her tones were short and hard. It hurt her to hear John disparaged. He was not the fairy prince, but he had once tried on the robes, and she liked him for that memory. “I hate you when you talk like that,” she said, after a silence. “John is a fine fellow. There isn’t a man on the run who is more conscientious; he is worth all the rest. He is the best ploughman in the district; he doesn’t get drunk—except once or twice a year; he doesn’t use bad language except to the dogs, and I guess they’d feel strange without it.”
“But anyone can plough,” said King.
“Not so well as John.”
“No, but I can do better things, more valuable things.”
“More useful things?”
“But I have a special gift.”
“So has John—for ploughing. He does it so well that no one could do it better. Could anyone say that of you? It is not a great gift, perhaps, but he makes the best possible use of it. Surely God can’t ask more of anyone than that he should do his best with what is given him?”
The boy laughed; it was absurd to argue with a girl—and such a pretty girl!
Indeed, as he glanced at her, she seemed a queen. Upon her richly coloured lips sat a slight scorn; her dark eyes shone with a new seriousness. She looked disdain, and did not guess how adorable anger made her. She was no divinity now; she was wonderfully and entrancingly human. Upon her head perched a little cap, like a skiff upon the great sea of her waving brown hair. The riding jacket and skirt that she wore did not conceal the sweep of her long slender limbs, the delicate outlines of her boyish breasts. As with the paces of her mare she swayed her movements seemed to the boy ebullient with magical and irresistible youth. In every curve of body and limb, in every momentary phase of her ever-varying expression, there breathed love, youth, sex. She was ripe for love, very human, very adorable, inexpressibly near. The boy could almost feel the rich warmth of her white body, the soft, moist touch of her passionate lips.
But the girl’s thoughts were not of love. Into her mind had swept a vision of King as a fairy prince clothed in fine raiment, a delicate butterfly irresponsible upon the air of life, a pretty impalpable thing of fancies. And she turned her mare aside and looked back. In the distance she could see the team of horses moving like flies along the straight edge of the ploughed soil. John, at least, took life seriously. He had his work to do, and he knew how to do it.
And as the ploughman strode in the wake of his team his heart ached with a sullen rage. Who was this thin stripling of a town-bred boy that was carrying Aroha away from him? Why, John could take that weak body of his and break it across his knee, as he would break a manuka stick. What was he? A loafer. And what was there in him that made Aroha so give way to him? This intercourse could come to no good. And if the boy harmed Aroha...!
The whip stung the off leader suddenly and venomously; the startled animal swerved, and John swore. It was the worst furrow John had ever ploughed.
The two rode on in silence, the loneliness of the hills and the quiet of the morning about them. At the end of the valley they turned to follow the creek down the gully. As they went deeper into the gully rabbits indolently moved from their path, scampering a few paces and pausing impudently in the open, too sure of their security to dip into that honeycomb of burrows. On the spurs a few gaunt cabbage-trees stood grotesquely against the sky, their ragged tufts of chattering leaves and thin graceful palm stems giving a strangely tropical look to this bleak solitude of the South. About the creek crowded luxuriant flax-bushes, with green blades glittering and stiff brown sticks withered and dry. Here and there the white pennons of the toë grass fluttered faintly. Upon the flats great bushes of snow grass, like gigantic tussocks, half hid the horses as they passed. Under the hillside slept a little swamp, one waving expanse of raupo, whose array of green reeds seemed like a field of tall corn.
They turned aside from their path to pull a sheep from the swamp. It lay helpless and patient upon its side, sunk in the oozy ground, doomed to a lingering death by the weight of its fleece. But the girl showed the boy how to lift the poor passive thing to its feet, and with a few unsteady steps it made its slow way up the sun-warmed, golden hillside, seeking the flock that two days before had so calmly left it to its fate.
In a sheltering patch of scrub a few miles further on they tethered their horses and had lunch. Aroha boiled the billy. It was a happy meal. Then they mounted to return.
All that day a thought had been tugging at the boy’s heart. Was it all to end like this? Were they to separate now on different paths, end it all inconclusively here?
And the girl’s contentment was tinged with a faint apprehension. It was all so perfect, so complete, this quiet, sun-laved day among the silence of the hills. Why could not life go on like this for ever?
As the shadows of the spurs crept down the valley the two rode homewards side by side in silence. Then suddenly the boy turned to her, a new insistent note in his voice.
“Aroha!”
It thrilled the girl unwillingly. She felt a little hint of fear. This love to which they had so wondrously awakened was very beautiful, but it seemed to be coming too near; it might be terrible. In King’s voice she felt a sense of manhood. The boy had gone, and in his place, strange and unfamiliar, stood a being older, infinitely more masterful.
She edged her mare away and, unseen by King, touched her with her whip.
“I want so much to speak to you, Aroha,” he began, tremulous in his excitement. Then his words came with a rush. “I want to tell you how much I... like you, Aroha.” He was afraid of the word. It seemed too great a word to be spoken yet.
The girl listened in a thrill of happiness. The insistence of his tones cheated her into a great gladness. No one had ever said “love” to her before; and she knew that in his heart he whispered the word. It was a great and a sweet thing to be loved.
“You know how much I... like you,” he went on. “I never dreamed that there was anyone like you in the world. I have thought of women, of course—a boy is always imagining the wonder of women—but I dreamed that they were all ethereal things, to be adored afar, to be worshipped with a great humility. But you—you!” and there swept through him a sense of the closeness of her presence, the wonder of her youth, the warm splendour of her white body, the unprotected tenderness of her face, the wealth of her full lips.
“You are so near and close and familiar and accessible!” he cried.
He leant from his saddle and attempted to take her hand. Her mare swerved in sudden alarm.
The girl laughed a little nervously. This was too impetuous a wooing. She felt unsafe, too easily assailable, and she could not depend on herself. She recognised with a sudden stopping of her breath that this was a new Aroha with which she had now to deal, that within her bosom had awakened a traitor that to the enemy would joyously unbar the door.
“You see,” she laughed, “Judy does not like you at all.”
“But you?” he insisted.
“I—I don’t know.” She had broken from her dream with a great reluctance, and was alertly awake, suddenly critical. He was saying that he loved her. But did he mean it? Did he know the meaning of the love he so lightly asked? For of this she felt sure, that he could not love her as her heart loved him. Only, her heart was waiting for something. What was it? A tone in his voice that was lacking? Something there was that chilled her—what, she could not divine. Had she irrevocably throned him in her fairy princedom?
She moved her mare close to him. “Come,” she laughed audaciously, “you’ll have to catch me first!”
Then she was off, full gallop, along the winding gully. He saw her mare disappear among the great tussocks of snow grass. Then he gave his horse the rein and followed. There was no semblance of a track; the way was over the tussocks, through boggy patches, round rocky bluffs, crossing again and again the little winding creek. The snow grass switched his face, stung his hands.
Suddenly he felt his horse give way beneath him, and knew himself falling, as once before when his horse had put its foot in a rabbit hole. He crashed to the ground, rolled free from the animal, and sat up. He was bruised sorely, but the horse seemed no worse for its fall. He quickly picked himself up, caught his horse and remounted. Then, somewhat dazed, he started once more in the chase. The girl was, of course, out of sight. It was a lonely ride, cheered only by the thought that round the next bluff the girl would be waiting for him, wondering at his lateness. But he traversed the whole length of the gully and turned into the wide valley without seeing her. At last he came in sight of the homestead. The sun had gone early down behind that wall of hills, and the twilight lay like a thin mist in the valley, though the snow-clad mountain peaks gleamed afar like waning beacon-fires.
He steadied his excited horse, and rode slowly up to the homestead. Aroha was standing at the kitchen door. She had changed her riding dress for a house one.
“Tea is ready,” she said, as he wearily swung from the saddle. “You know you’re rather late!”
A dumb hatred of the girl who could so mock him stirred in the boy’s brain. It had all ended so differently!