Tussock Land; a Romance of New Zealand and the Commonwealth/Chapter 9
IX
Aroha Grey stood at the beginning of a new race; in King Southern an old race had almost reached its end. But for its transplanting it might, unnoticed, have trailed out of existence. He had been born in England, was seven years old when his parents brought him to New Zealand, and he grew up in this southern land with the blue haze of England yet about him. To him the bleak, bare, half-finished townships, set in the grim silence of the sombre, half-cleared bush, had in them no charm of the unknown future. He could not look ahead and see the sturdy cities rising swiftly up. The crude nakedness of the unstoried land appalled him. He missed the drowsy peace of the little village wherein he had played and wandered in his early childhood; he missed the little meadows set sparsely about with far-spreading trees; the winding, deep, narrow lanes, the banked hedges, the bare, delicately-etched trees against a grey, wintry sky, the wild flowers of spring that splashed the green sward with rainbow hues; most of all he missed the faint haze that hangs over England, the fairy haze that makes a dreamy distance out of a few meagre little paddocks and invests with a looming mystery a little spinney against the sky. He felt vaguely ill at ease—as if he was being spied on—in the illimitable, clear atmosphere of New Zealand, where nothing is ever far away.
It took him many years to make friends with the sombre, silent, impenetrable bush; within its velvet darkness he looked to see the shadow-checkered glades of England, the old gnarled, crooked boles standing staunch and ancient in wide vistas of green-filtered sunlight. He sullenly hated the post-and-rail fences, the mathematical lines of the barbed wire. He wanted the wild, four-footed things of his remembered youth, that this strange land never knew. He could not learn to look for his flowers on the trees; and most of all he craved for the changes in the year, the unceasing miracles of the moving seasons.
When he first came to New Zealand he was but a weak, sickly boy; but the brisk air of Otago filled his lungs, the ozone of this wind-swept sea-land roused his blood. The keen, bracing climate of Dunedin, the sunny splendour of its winter of sharp frosts and snow, its nights of sparkling stars, even its days of persistent rain swept from the Antarctic on bitter winds, gave life a new meaning, a deeper colour, a vigour, an enthusiasm, a youth.
In that great pile of blue stone, faced with clean white Oamaru stone that fronts the city, high on the hills of Roslyn, King passed his schooldays. To a boy of this make school is not the happiest time. For his shy, self-contained temperament school held much that was unjust, tyrannical, terrible. He shrank from the healthy schoolboy confidences; he dreamed dreams. And at school there is football and cricket to play; it is the privilege and consolation of the old to dream dreams. King had the modern man’s burden of a vivid imagination.
And the boy wondered over his aloofness from his fellows. He seemed to see himself set apart; he was of a different fibre. He began early to analyse himself. He found the work strangely interesting. You must understand that he was no psychologist, no prodigy; he was merely a boy whose temperament had led him into the habit of brooding much upon himself.
For the rest, he was a likable, clever lad, a winner of prizes and a favourite with his masters.
During his school life a day came that was for him for ever memorable. On that day he made two discoveries. He found that he could love, and he found that he could paint.
He was walking home by himself from school. It was a crisp, bright, sparkling, winter day. The sun was brilliant and hard in a blue sky. The boy’s way lay along “the Belt”—that broad band of native bush which encircles Dunedin like a ribbon of dark green and, with its swathe of cool shade and rich, sober-hued foliage, severs from the city the suburbs on the hills. Through the Belt broad curving carriage-drives wind, giving, through tall trees and giant tree-fern fronds, glimpses of the city on the flat beneath and the blue Pacific beyond.
As King turned from the road into one of these long-curving drives he was suddenly conscious of his utter solitude. He was shut in by high banks of red hematite, above which the dark green of the bush foliage towered hugely up. No human being was in sight. The city lay silent, unseen, far below. The road before him ran away under an avenue of trees. He might have been the only person in the world, the denizen of one of those drear ages of the past, before man emerged from the black night of the pre-historic. In all the universe there was no other soul.
Then a sudden sympathy with the bush crept upon him. The moist, pungent scent of decaying leaves, the perfume of dank moss and dripping ferns, took hold of him. The wall of foliage that shut him in, the ice-hard, frosty road beneath him, the splendour of the perfect sky, the sense of buoyancy, of youth, of life pervading the day, gave to his heart a strange uplifting. He glimpsed some hint of a design, some meaning in life. It seemed to him that he understood. Nature, in a rare, unguarded moment, had lifted the veil, and shown him a picture of herself. And the revelation Nature had made was for himself alone. To no one else on earth had that revelation come. To him alone it had been given for one brief moment to penetrate behind, to see the deep heart of things. He had come suddenly into the sanctuary, and stood afraid.
Ah! if he could only show to the world what had been shown to him, if he could only put before the eyes of others the mysterious spirit of beauty that hovered over that scene, that hovered ever wistfully over life! And then he felt the artist in him stir. He could! He knew that he was the man. He had been shown this vision because by him the vision would be triumphantly given to the world. He could paint! He would work hard, work for a lifetime, but he knew that at the last he would put Nature upon canvas as it had never been shown before. He would.... And his thoughts roved vague and wonderful through the future. And his soul grew reverent. He was greatly blessed. Much had been given to him. It would be his ceaseless care to use his talent to the uttermost, to do all things to the glory of God.
And at that moment he saw that he was not alone. Round the sweep of the fern-edged drive came a schoolgirl walking. She was a demure little girl, with downcast eyes and a schoolbag which she loosely and carelessly swung. Reluctantly the boy resumed his walk.
They met at the dip of the road where a little trickle of water oozed across the path, making it a little ice-edged, muddy swamp where one had to go warily. King stood aside to let the girl pass. She did it daintily, but as she passed she lifted her head and looked shyly at him. The boy noticed, almost with a shock, the rich, undreamed-of grey of those demure eyes.
He felt vaguely annoyed. Girls had no right to intrude into these solitudes. They belonged to artists and their great stately thoughts. Girls were out of place in the bush—especially little schoolgirls with grey eyes. He walked quickly on. Before he turned the corner he looked back. The girl was standing squarely in the middle of the road, contemplating him with a steady, impassive scrutiny.
That evening he set to work in earnest to draw. He had always drawn; but this was to be serious. He would draw live things—no more dead white plaster casts and curved scrolls in books. To-night he was to do something greater, he would draw the bush, put for ever on paper the sense of solitude, the mystery of its purple shadows, as it had been given to him alone to see. The ecstasy of the artist was upon him; he felt the keen joy of expressing himself.
But he could effect nothing that night. Evidently there were rules, things that needed to be practised. Well, he would learn. He gave up the attempt, and almost without a conscious effort drew a picture of that little girl’s demure face. It was the first time that he had been in love; he was thirteen.
It is easy to mock at calf-love. Yet to many natures it is a serious thing. Which man of us does not remember keenly his calf-love, the sudden terrible intensity of it, the glory, the miracle, the wonder and the despair? What wife, happily married, does not sometimes recall, with a half smile—ah, yes, but with a dear foolish tenderness that makes the eyes suddenly smart—the first fatuous, impossible, stupendous romance of her schooldays? It is given to every man and woman in this existence to love utterly, only once. That is the first love of all—the sudden, absurd, divine wonder of calf-love. We get over our calf-loves, and afterwards we grow up and love again. But the love of the man and the woman is a calmer and a saner love. The calculating mind unwillingly intrudes into the emotions; the divine foolishness, the exquisite abandon of calf-love is no longer attainable. We are no more content with the impossible: we deliberately demand the possible with all its limitations, all its inevitable commonplace. It is only the boy and the girl who in their loves are abjectly impersonal.
For it matters not to the calf whether the loved one is hideous or beautiful. Frequently a difference of sex is not demanded. To the calf the momentous fact is its capacity for adoration, and, after all, that is the finest capacity that life has given us. The only people who retain it through life are poets—poets who do not marry, poets who die young. The grown lover demands too much; he takes things like age and beauty and attraction into consideration, sorts and sifts them, presumes to allow his heart to sit in judgment upon the one adored. The lover has his eye even for the absurd; cynics state that an incipient sense of humour, insufficiently curbed, disastrously affects the human birth-rate. But the young calf frolics in the region of the utterly impossible, and is wantonly joyous.
At church next Sunday, King, looking through his fingers when he was believed to be engaged in silent prayer, saw a pair of grey eyes fixed benignly upon him. The church whirled dizzily before him. That was the greatest moment in his life. When he dared to look again in her direction he found the grey eyes eclipsed by slim fingers. She was immersed in her devotions, and King was adequately abashed. But as he ventured to glance at her again he saw the fingers slowly part, and felt those great eyes upon him. The rest of the service was tumult.
He found out whom she was. He used to wait for her on her way to school, and follow her casually at a discreet distance. Sometimes she rather deliberately loitered. But King had his careful eye on her, and cannily accommodated his pace to hers. No matter how she loitered, she never decreased the twenty-five yards that King judged sufficient to keep between them. It must have been somewhat worrying for her. Once audaciously she smiled at him. King’s heart stopped with the tremulous glory of that moment. But he never ventured to speak to her, not even to smile in return. She was too sacred a thing to desecrate by good humour. He wanted nothing in this life but to go on loving her—at the usual discreet distance of twenty-five yards. When he passed her in the street—and the chances were given by the gods with such frequency that I suspect there was some surreptitious feminine stage-management somewhere—the shock of her presence to the boy was like a physical blow. He lived for months in a delicious ecstasy of hopes and fears, extravagant terrors, passionate dreams.
Her name was always in his thoughts. He was always forming it on his lips. It was a pretty name. Sometimes it came to his lips unconsciously. Years afterwards, when he was a grown man, in a moment of great stress his lips pronounced that forgotten little girl’s name. He wondered then whose name it was. His subliminal self was a more faithful lover than he.
At night he would make his way to her house for the perilous delight of haunting her neighbourhood, the deep joy of speculating which of all the windows of the house indicated the room in which she—though it seemed a sacrilege to suppose it—slept. For nights he would worship one window, tremble when a shadow swept across the blind, die when the light went out. Then a harassing doubt would assail him and he would transfer his worship to another window, his allegiance unshaken.
At last he met her at a children’s party. They were blushingly introduced. King could not help a smile in his heart at the absolute unconsciousness of the hostess introducing them. She did not know the bond that united them. She did not guess at what a momentous epoch she was so calmly assisting.
“You’re the little boy that stares so,” his adored deigned to say with a delightful candour.
All the stupendous things he meant to say to her came in a jostling tumult through his brain. At last the realisation of his dreams! He stood helpless, unstrung by the vastness of his opportunity. Now he should tell her; and she would take his hand in hers—who knows?— perhaps put her arms round him and kiss him! Such things had been done; he had read of them, dreamed of them, and he knew.
Suddenly he became conscious that her eyes—cool, quiet eyes of grey—were calmly questioning his face. In her expression he fancied he discerned a tinge of displeasure. The world fell in ruins.
“Yes,” he stammered, “I’m the little boy who—”
A little pout had ventured to nestle upon the little girl’s lips. They were nice red lips—and lips are good to kiss!
“Well?” she said imperiously, “Well?”
What could he say? He had so much to say, so much that was vital. He said nothing. She turned away in displeasure. He had seemed such a nice boy, with such a pretty face; and she had so wanted to know what made him stare so and follow her. But he must be a very stupid boy not to talk to her, not even to put his arm round her waist!
She turned away. Her great eyes of grey drooped upon another boy’s face.
The stars rained from the skies. The universe sank into blank nothingness. King drearily wondered why he was still alive.
Then he looked up.
“Oh!” he said, “she’s only a girl!”
Then he went and had supper. But there was a cold hand at his heart; his calf-love was dead.