The Merry Marauders

by Arthur J. Rees

  “Poor fellow, he had some decent instincts in him after all. When I got down to the breakfast table in the morning there was a letter from him propped up on my plate. The letter said I had taught him a lesson that would last through life. He had obliterated his bills and left the town by the early boat, he added, but he hoped I would accept, as a little memento, his horse and vehicle, which he had left behind him in the stable for me. I went out to the stable, and there, sure enough, was the horse busily munching a manger-full of mouldy straw, which the landlord of this hotel palms off on his trusting customers as the best horse feed, as I have since found out to my cost. From his—the horse’s—neck hung a small placard, on which had been written, ‘BE KIND TO ME, I AM YOURS,’ and from the glance of welcome that beamed from the intelligent animal’s lustrous brown eye as he looked at me, I am convinced that the transfer of masters met with his equine approval.”

  Such was Mr. Baker’s strange story. I cannot say I entirely believed it, for, though I acquit him of any attempt to ascertain whether my legs are made of india-rubber, I have from time to time observed a certain elasticity in his own temperament from which hard facts occasionally rebound into the region of romance. I was soon, however, to receive striking proof that at least one part of his narration was true.

  The next morning, as we sat at breakfast, Miss Laurie announced her intention of walking out three miles to a Maori village, which offered a rare attraction in the shape of a Maori woman reputed to be 145 years of age. This well-preserved relic of a hardy race appeared to be quite a famous and praiseworthy character, judging from the particulars which Miss Laurie read to us from a guidebook she had found in her bedroom, which proved conclusively that the Maoris were the lineal descendants of one of the ten lost tribes of Israel. The venerable old lady, whose name, it seems, was ‘Kotuku Rerengatahi’ (which means, as near as the delightful imagery of the Maori tongue can be translated into prosaic English, ‘The Rare Old Bird of Momentous Appearance’) had anticipated the Maori-English entente-cordiale fifty years before the Maori war by sending His Majesty King George IV. a copy of the Scriptures, translated into the Maori tongue, with her assurance that the book was the secret of Maori greatness, accompanied by a snow-white feather of the sacred kotuku bird, from which she derived her name, and a much-prized conversation lolly taken from a captured missionary in 1700, which bore the legend, ‘I lyke solitude, but oh, ye girls!’ Miss Laurie, who said she had also been reading up the history of the Maori people in a book called, ‘The Pagan’s Progress, or From Cannibalism to Christianity,’ expressed the view that the Maoris were a wonderful race, and that their Christianity put white religion to shame.

  “They certainly have a mortal aversion to Jews, notwithstanding their physical resemblance to that fine people,” said Mr. Baker. “In the old days, when they caught a Jew trader trying to peddle off sham jewellery on their wahinës—their women—they used to eat him boiled with pickled pork, and added to the horror of the Jew’s last moments on earth by stewing him alive in the same water in which the unclean animal was bubbling. I do not know how they discovered that the pig was accursed in Hebraic eyes, but anything is possible with such an intelligent race as the Maoris. If you are going out to the Maori village, Miss Laurie, why not avail yourself of our recently-acquired chariot and steed? The horse, which I have named ‘The Good Gift,’ is in the stable eating his head off, and his fleetness is at your command.”

  Miss Laurie thanked Mr. Baker for his offer, but murmured something about not being able to drive.

  “I would drive you myself with pleasure,” said Mr. Baker, “but when Beauty is on board Youth must be at the helm—I forget the exact quotation, but never mind. Our estimable manager here, who has guided the ‘Merry Marauders’ ‘craft so dexterously along the track of the ‘smalls,’ which have caused many a theatrical company to leave their whitening bones by the wayside, has proved his fitness to steer such a priceless freight as yourself. He’ll be your charioteer—your Phœbus! Won’t you, Valentine? I am anxious that you should try the paces of our new steed, and, lo! here arises a most pleasurable opportunity.”

  The moistness of Mr. Baker’s eye and the odour of malt that seemed to environ him had previously suggested to me that he had been again practising his food reform theory that beer was the proper substitute for the morning meal, and the extravagance of his language removed all doubt on the point. Of course, I assented to his proposal, if only to save Miss Laurie from the unpleasantness of a public refusal before the other members of the company, and she, poor girl, accepted my offer to drive her to the Maori village, with a blushing confusion which no doubt arose from the awkwardness of the situation. It is my intention to take an early opportunity of putting an end to Mr. Baker’s intolerable assumption that there is a secret understanding between Miss Laurie and myself. His belief has no better foundation than having seen me press Miss Laurie’s hand as the merest token of acknowledgment of her kindness in voluntarily taking the part of leading lady that night at Ngati when Miss Bendalind fell suddenly ill, yet, on that slight groundwork, he has built a romance between us, and is prodigal of his nods, significant smiles, and arch glances whenever the girl and I happen to be near one another, to our mutual embarrassment and the alert attention of the other lady members of the company, That was not the time or place, however, to administer a rebuke to our advance agent for his doubtless well-meant intentions, so I sat chafing in silence while he hurried out to get the horse and trap ready for the journey, wishing with all my heart that Miss Bendalind would keep her most supercilious stage stare for the theatre. Miss Laurie escaped under pretext of getting together a few little gifts she had prepared for Kotuku Rerengatahi.

  I was heartily glad when Mr. Baker’s cheery call announced that the horse and vehicle were outside, and Miss Laurie came tripping downstairs with quite a large parcel. The members of the company came to the door to see us depart. Mr. Baker held the horse’s head till I had helped Miss Laurie into the jinrikisha and climbed up myself, with considerable difficulty, to the seat, which was so immensely high that the horse I was to drive seemed as far away as the bow of a battle-ship is from its conning-tower, and then he handed the reins up to me with some wretched allusion to Gretna Green that caused Miss Laurie to blush brightly and the members of the company to laugh loudly.

  It was a beautiful morning. The Good Gift, to give Mr. Baker’s gaunt, hairless steed the preposterous name with which he had endowed it, showed quite an aptitude for gentle ambling speed. He appeared easy to handle and amenable to voice and rein. The air was fresh and scented, the roadside scenery was better than the guidebook’s description of it. I had a truly charming girl as companion, so I settled down to enjoy a delightful morning. I turned with a smile to Miss Laurie; she smiled back. The horse had reached the foot of a long hill, and, taking my permission for granted, slackened his pace to a slow walk. I allowed the reins to droop on his back, and asked my companion what she was taking to the venerable Maori woman.

  She prettily displayed the little gifts which her warm girlish heart and unerring feminine instinct had suggested as suitable for an old woman who had to totter along the edge of the grave in this vale of tears seventy or eighty years after most people were comfortably inside it—the grave, that is. They consisted of a warm woollen shawl, a tin of meat extract, a bag of chocolate creams, a packet of picture postcards of places where the Merry Marauders had played, and three books entitled, ‘Sister Suffragettes in Arms and Out of Arms,’ ‘The Memoirs of a Christian Family,’ and ‘What a Woman of Forty-five Ought to Know.’ I ventured to suggest that if Maori legend about the old lady’s age was correct, the gift of the last-named work was made just a hundred years too late.

  “How horrid of you to say that!” exclaimed Miss Laurie, reproachfully. “If she didn’t know then how to settle down for old age, which is what the book tells her, how much more necessary for her to know now!”

  I had not looked at the matter in this exceedingly se
nsible light, and I said so. Miss Laurie has a sweet disposition, for she was instantly mollified.

  “But why give this book to a Maori woman?” I asked, opening ‘Sister Suffragettes in Arms and Out ot Arms’ at a picture of a hard-faced female, who flowingly signed herself as ‘The Author.’ “Surely you are not a solitary suffragette in a land where all the women have votes?”

  “No, indeed,” she replied. Then she impulsively added: “To tell you the real truth, that book was given me as a present, and I wanted to do something useful with it instead of throwing it away. It occurred to me that as it is full of pictures of women fighting with policemen, and breaking windows, and stabbing men with hatpins, the old Maori woman might like to have it, because the Maoris are such a warlike race, you know.”

  I was about to ask her if she had contemplated the possibility of the book sowing dissension among the Maori women and bringing about a brown suffragette movement, but Mr. Baker’s horse unexpectedly interrupted the conversation by darting off the road on to a small way-side clearing, where he quietly started to graze.

  I dismounted from the lofty seat, and begging Miss Laurie not to be alarmed, jerked the Good Gift’s head up to lead him back to the road he had just left. This was not so easily accomplished as it is to write, for the brute hung back most doggedly till he saw I was more determined than he, and then he pretended to be frightened to recross the watercourse at the side of the road which he had just previously cleared at a bound. But I got him back to the road at last, and climbed back to my seat.

  “I wonder what made him do that?” I remarked, as the animal, as though to atone for his misconduct, broke into a run which was a sort of convulsive compromise between a trot and a canter. “He must have shied at something.”

  “Perhaps a fly or some insect stung his poor dear ear,” suggested Miss Laurie. “I noticed several buzzing about him.”

  This seemed probable, so I looked keenly for these mischievous insects, but while I was carefully scanning his bare hide, the beast dashed off the road on to another clearing with such impetuosity that I was precipitated into my companion’s lap.

  I blushingly recovered myself, apologised, and descended to the horse’s head again. It was some moments before I was able to persuade him to return to the road, and I was strongly tempted to accelerate his sluggish progress by a blow in his gaunt ribs, but I knew how sensitive girls are about the treatment of dumb animals, so I coaxed him instead. He nearly dragged my arm out of its socket before he would budge, but I was successful at last, and got back to my seat.

  It was of no avail. A little further along another settler had hewed his little clearing out of the bush, as they call the forest in the colonies, and the horse fairly bolted on to it in spite of my efforts to guide him in the straight track. When I had pulled him once more back to the road I was dismayed to observe that more settlers had been at work further along the road clearing spaces in the wilderness for their future homes. These dotted the level track on both sides at intervals, as far as I could see—little green oases in a desert of thick grey manuka scrub. Being now, unfortunately, aware that these bare spots contained some irresistible attraction for Mr. Baker’s horrible horse, I determined to lead the beast past the next one, by way of experiment. We approached it. He made towards it. I endeavoured to hold him back. A horse is stronger than a man, and the end of a brief tug-of-war found me in an undignified attitude on my back in the dust, and the horse quietly grazing on the green as usual.

  Miss Laurie was most solicitous about my welfare, and begged me to turn the horse’s head home before I ‘got hurt.’ But my spirit of determination had been aroused by the miserable animal’s contumacy, and I resolved to have another vigorous struggle for supremacy.

  As we neared the next clear space I rose to my feet, and, indifferent in my anger to what Miss Laurie thought of my conduct, I flogged the brute till the dust rose in clouds from his flea-bitten hide, and endeavoured to urge him past the danger spot with menacing shouts. These tactics were almost successful, but when we were nearly past he wheeled round so suddenly as almost to overturn us, and rushed on to the green.

  The impetus of the rush carried us some yards from the road. Then the horse plunged, floundered, and began to sink through the emerald-bright grass. I looked down, and was quick to realise what had happened. This clearing was one of nature’s own, a pitfall of the thermal zone, a space where warm subterranean springs had turned an apparently firm surface into a bog almost as dangerous as a quicksand. The horse wallowed deeper with a sucking splash. He sank right up to his girth, and looked dolefully around for assistance. Miss Laurie clung to me in alarm, but I assured her we were in no actual danger. It was a rather unpleasant predicament, but all we had to do, I explained, was to leave the horse to a temporary imprisonment he richly deserved while we walked back to the hotel.

  I attempted to descend in order to lift her out, but the treacherous surface would not even bear the weight of a man. My leg went through, and the viscous mud clutched it with the holding force of an octopus. Fortunately I had kept one foot on the step in dismounting, and after several frantic efforts I was able to dislodge myself from the glue-like mud. I got back into the vehicle, and using the long whip-handle as a sounding-rod, I sounded all round as far as I could reach for a surface firm enough to walk on. In vain. Everywhere I touched, the whip-handle sank through the grass and water and mud oozed up. The beast of a horse had evidently rushed into the middle of the morass. There was no doubt we were temporarily marooned, cast away, within thirty feet of a public road, as completely as if thousands of miles of ocean rolled between us and assistance.

  The position, though embarrassing enough, did not cause me anything more than annoyance at first, for I thought we were sure to be rescued during the morning by some passing settler. Miss Laurie, who sympathetically divined that my annoyance was largely due to self-reproach at having involved her in a ridiculous situation through my obstinacy in not turning back when she asked me, was good enough to pretend to treat our strange captivity as a joke, and was quite girlishly merry at the outset. But as the hours drifted by without the sound of approaching wheels breaking the solemn brooding stillness of the lonely bush, she became silent and I grew anxious. The morning had gone, the sun had passed its meridian, and was already beginning to cast afternoon shadows.

  My anxiety was increased by a peculiar incident. Shortly after our misguided horse had settled down up to his middle in the swamp, a large blue-bottle fly with a red head—quite the most corpulent insect of its species that I had ever seen,—came and settled down on him—just above the brute’s Plimsoll mark, as it were. Having nothing else to do, I fell to watching this fly, which was very noticeable on the animal’s vast sunlit expanse of bare hide. The horse, in his early struggles to free himself, had churned up a lot of water from the swamp, and in his now quiescent state he resembled a kind of island, being entirely surrounded by a dirty pool. After I had watched the fly for some time it seemed to me that it was closer to the water than when it first alighted on the horse’s back. As I was quite sure the insect had not moved, I concentrated my closest attention on it. Presently my fears were verified. The distance between the fly and the pool lessened and lessened, till the water reached the blue-bottle’s hind legs, or tentacles. The touch of the water aroused the insect. It shook its red head, crawled an inch higher up the horse, and settled down again. I watched with sickening anxiety to see if the same process would be repeated. It was. In fifteen minutes by my watch the water was lapping at the blue-bottle’s legs again, and again the law of self-preservation aroused the insect to crawl higher up.

  The fly, with its monstrous glossy blue body and vivid scarlet head, obsessed me, as Mr. Henry James would say. Nature had aggravated the screaming outrage in contrasts by fitting it with a pair of bright green wings. Whether the whole dreadful colour scheme set up sufficient tone biliousness in the artistic portion of my temperament to disturb temporarily the balance of my mind,
I cannot pretend to say, but before long I was crediting that wretched fly with qualities possessed only by the crown of creation, even believing it to be taking a malicious delight in our misfortune. I imagined it laughing up its sleeve, if I may use the expression, and thought I could detect a cynical twinkle in the horny eyes that seemed to have been affixed as an afterthought to each side of its violently red head, which latter member in its colour and shape, and a tendency to wag from side to side, reminded me of the shaggy red poll of an Irish Home Rule orator I had once heard in Hyde Park denouncing the Tories. I dared not flick away the fly with my whip in order to be freed from its horrible obsession, for its periodical upward crawls were to me what sounding the well is to the captain of a sinking ship; they revealed to me the rate at which the Good Gift was foundering into the unknown depths beneath us. The fly shifted an inch higher every time the water touched it, as nearly as my eye could guage the distance, and in fifteen minutes the water would be wetting its back legs again. It was, therefore, obvious that we were sinking at the rate of four inches an hour. One did not require the brain of a mathematician to deduce that our downward progress, or, rather, retrogression, was at the rate of a foot every three hours, which meant that (allowing our heads to be ten feet above the level of the swamp at that moment) in thirty hours we should be entirely submerged, with the red-headed blue-bottle fly buzzing a mocking requiem over our muddy sepulchre.

  Happily, such a catastrophe was not to overtake us, for, when the fly had just made his fourteenth shift, and the sun had commenced to cast long shadows as dark as my thoughts, I heard the welcome sound of wheels in the distance. I removed the arm with which I had been supporting the drooping form of Miss Laurie during the last hour of our trying vigil in order to guard against the contingency of her falling out of the trap, and putting my hands to my mouth, gave a ringing Colonial ‘coo-ee’. Then I listened intently. There was no doubt that the wheels were coming our way. Presently our deliverer appeared to our eager gaze as a distant black speck on the dusty whiteness of the road where it wound up into the hills far ahead, and a long while elapsed before we were able to make out the speck to be a bullock wagon drawn by sixteen plodding bullocks. Indeed, the fly had time to make three more shifts before the caravan drew abreast of us, and the driver stopped amazed at the spectacle which met his eye. He, like the fly, was red-headed, to say nothing of red whiskers, but his was an honest florid colour pleasing to the eye, and not a burning, flaming red like the fly’s. That insect, by the way, easily escaped my effort to destroy him when I saw deliverance was nigh, and buzzed airily off.