Dennis never told her how the thought of her was mixed up in his business, and how could she guess, poor child? To make matters worse, he was a little short with her sometimes. He was worried, poor man, and she, poor girl, was overstrained and suffering. He saw that she suffered, and thought that she was finding Bush life bare and rough. So he worked the harder for her, and left her more alone.
Adelaide tried to impose on herself with the consecrated cant which makes all failure in love the fault of one alone. She had been trained to rely upon her own attractions, which were partly her radiant and joyous spirit and the pleasures of her life. She tried hard to be reasonable, but she went the wrong way about it, applying good old stock maxims which did not happen to be true about her Dennis. ‘Men cannot be expected to love as women do,’ she said to herself, as she went on machining. ‘They must put outside interests first. It is only beauty and charm that men admire in a woman, and I look almost faded now, so of course he cannot love me so much.’ It is doubtful whether any woman who was deeply in love ever found much consolation in such reflections. Certainly Adelaide did not. They meant despair, pretending to be content. Unfortunately, both Dennis and she had lost their lighthearted humour. Neither of them spoke of their anxiety about her father, but it weighed heavily on both.
‘If I have not Dennis, I have nothing,’ she thought, and her tears fell over the fine monthly gowns of cambric. Lena brought in her dinner, but it seemed to choke her. She had had a salmon trout, fresh caught from the Wainoni, and a roast duck and tarts of her own making, and clotted cream. It was a damp and chilly ride, and he would need a good dinner. She ate a few morsels of the trout, and then touched the hand bell. ‘Take it away, Lena, please,’ she said, ‘and don’t bring the rest of the dinner in. I do not care about anything to-night.’
Lena looked with mingled sentiments at the duck and the vegetables and the tarts on the kitchen table. ‘Poor body!’ she said, with real sympathy for her girl-mistress. ‘I hope my bloke will come to-night, no use wasting these,’ and it struck her that if Johnnie Saunders were to call on her there might be some advantages in MacDiarmid’s absence. Johnnie, who looked after the Haeremai cattle and horses and slept in a bunk in one of the men’s whares near the yards and woolsheds, was conveniently near at hand. Lena was a buxom lass, and not quite so demure with her blokes and her chums as she was with Mrs MacDiarmid. She was more or less engaged to a storekeeper in Roslyn, but as he was such a long way off, she had taken the red-haired Saunders on as locum tenens, for, as she herself explained to Miss Borlase’s Kate, ‘a girl must have a bloke that she can see.’
Adelaide sewed Valenciennes edging on the dainty gowns until it was ten o’clock. The house grew almost deathly still. Lena and her Johnnie, having banquetted, strolled out to M’Ilvride’s. The Bush trees became more and more unfriendly and insistent, crying, ‘You hear us now! You hear us now!’ The rain went drip, drip, drip from the piping until she listened for each drop, and felt sure it was saying something cruel. ‘So many days he has been away out of four months’ marriage. So many more days he may be away before I die.’ When she lay in bed, in the silence and the solitude, the dripping rain still went on, counting and working out curious problems of arithmetic, the answers to which could never be found out. ‘If I have only six more months to live, he will have been with me only so many days—so many hours,’ and as she was falling asleep, she tried to reckon but could not, because there might be a geometrically increasing rate of absences, and there was always at least one unknown quantity somewhere. Adelaide had always had the true literary horror of mathematics, and the sum that had no conceivable answer began to haunt her nights deliriously.
The days went on drearily. There was no object in dressing nicely with no one to see; no meaning in cooking for herself or adorning a house that was no home. Yet she did go on doing these things almost mechanically. As she sat alone, she began to think of all that she had once so gladly sacrificed, friends and amusements and lovely moving scenes, all the gay opera that life had been a year ago. If she had had her husband she would not have pined for these things, but sometimes now she thought they would have been distraction and relief. It must be an immense love on both sides that can be all in all, and Dennis loved his business best. At least he was most interested in that.
MacDiarmid stayed in town for nearly a fortnight. He was bent on starting refrigerating works near Roslyn, and instead of putting the business into the hands of the city company, he determined to break through their monopoly of the freezing industry in the province and to start a farmers’ company. For two years the foreign trade had been depressed, partly owing to the fact that the breeders’ interests were not immediately identical with those of the exporters of frozen meat, and that they held back supplies to raise the prices, or supplied inferior qualities indifferently if they could get a good price from the city company. This policy might be profitable for the moment, but it was suicidal in the long run, and MacDiarmid thought the time was ripe for a company in which the breeders themselves should be involved in the profit or loss of the London market. When he went to Roslyn, it was to hold a public meeting in the Town Hall of the chief farmers and runholders in the district, but except Major Brandon, they were all too canny and too cautious, and they threw the whole burden of the enterprise on him. The district was a poor one, and as there was not enough capital forthcoming, he was obliged to apply to the wealthy men of Dunedin. Already he had a high business reputation in town, not only for integrity, but what was more important, for success, and the old proverb about success succeeding proved true in this case, for he got the capital subscribed, came back to Roslyn, and there held the first meeting of the Farmers’ Refrigerating Company. It was a big thing for a farmer in the backblocks to undertake, but he was a big man in some ways, and he meant to see it through.
When the joy of his return had almost died away, like a hunger too long unsatisfied, he came home unexpectedly. Adelaide was lying on the couch, tired and weak, and knowing that she did not look her charming self, when she heard his step on the gravel path. Though her face flushed as she went to meet him, it was almost as much with pain as with pleasure. She was immediately enveloped in his embrace, but he saw at the first glance that she had been fretting, and he was not pleased. ‘O Dennis, I did not expect you to-day,’ she said.
‘Well, you’re glad to see me, aren’t you, Aidie?’
‘Oh yes. Of course. But I have nothing in the house good enough for you—for your dinner, I mean.’
‘Nonsense, child. Some cold meat and some tea will do, and I suppose you’ve got that. Let’s have it soon, that’s all. I’m hungry. Wait—what’s the matter, Aidie?’
‘I haven’t been quite well to-day, that is all. It is really nothing, Dennis.’
‘Aidie, I’m sure there’s something wrong. I won’t let you go till you tell me. Is it about my staying away?’
‘You have been rather a long time,’ she said slowly and with some effort.
‘I must attend to my business. Do be reasonable.’
‘I try to be, Dennis.’ She spoke with an appealing accent.
‘Let Lena get the dinner and you stay with me, darling.’
‘I really can’t.’ And then with just the phantom of her enchanting smile, ‘I have a few duties too, dear.’
Adelaide stood in her clean, new kitchen in domestic despair. There was absolutely nothing but cold ham and a very small piece of cold mutton. She had told M’Ilvride not to send up any meat until Mr MacDiarmid came back, and that suited M’Ilvride particularly well just then. He always expected a spell in the autumn before the ploughing began, and he was busy cultivating his own ground when Lena, hot and red with haste, rushed up to the fence to say Mr MacDiarmid had come home and would he get her some meat or would he kill a fowl. M’Ilvride was completely scandalised at both suggestions. He looked at Lena in silence a few moments, inexpressibly outraged, and then went on digging:—
‘Mr MacDiarmid will no be
asking me to start work at five o’clock. I wull no believe it, Lena Thomson.’ Mrs MacDiarmid he chose to ignore.
Lena, abashed, stammered out an enquiry as to whether Allan would run over to Haeremai and get something from Miss Borlase. M’Ilvride gave her another expressive look. ‘Ye’re no blate, Lena Thomson,’ he remarked with sarcastic admiration, and drove his spade into the ground, but finding that his feelings were too much for him, he raised his head and his voice too, ‘And is it Allan ye would be sending over to Haeremai the nicht? Canna ye see for yoursell the puir bairn’s lame in both feet with the chilblains?’
The poor bairn, who with red, chilblained feet bare on the steaming earth, was grubbing up his kind parent’s potatoes, had looked up eagerly at the prospect of a little excitement, with a cake at one end from Miss Borlase and another cake at the other end from Mrs MacDiarmid, but now he subsided into hopeless gloom, and went on grubbing up potatoes, as Lena slunk away, ashamed of herself and of her mistress.
Adelaide, with anxious thoughts for the morrow, was obliged to tell everything to Dennis, but he only laughed as he consumed the cold mutton till nothing but bones was left.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I did promise him this week to himself, and it’s against his principles to oblige his master. I’ll see about it to-morrow, Aidie dear.’
MacDiarmid knew M’Ilvride well and got what he wanted out of him. He could break people if he liked, but he did not like.
Adelaide tried so heroically to be bright and lively in the evening that she overdid it and was not natural. Dennis always resented this manner of hers more than any other; it was throwing to him the mere garment of Adelaide when he wanted the living body.
Early in the following afternoon he came into the house by the back way, as he often did when he had been doing rough work, and would not soil her pretty curtained passage of French-polished rimu. Adelaide, who was directing Lena in the kitchen, came into the porch to meet him and suddenly turned faint. ‘Dennis? What is it? You have blood on you.’
He laughed. ‘Oh, you’re not as bold as Alice Brand, Aidie. “’Tis but the blood of deer,” or rather of the sheep. I washed myself as well as I could, and I’ll change in a minute.’
She had forgotten a good many things in her ten years’ absence.
‘The blood of the sheep?’ she said, ‘I don’t understand.’
‘I’ve been killing, that’s all,’ he answered shortly.
‘Killing?’ she repeated slowly.
‘Yes, killing—cutting a sheep’s throat,’ he said impatiently. ‘Aidie, don’t stand there looking at my moleskins, if you don’t like them. Go into the sitting-room and I’ll be in presently.’
Aidie went in and took up some mending. Her baby’s gowns she could not touch in her present mood. She was almost afraid of her husband’s coming in, and yet the incident fascinated her morbidly.
‘I wish you were not obliged to do such things,’ she answered, when he kissed her and asked her if she were still lamenting the mutton.
‘Well, you didn’t think I sat on a hill with a crook all day, or carried lambs about in my arms, did you? It wouldn’t pay to keep sheep that way in New Zealand. I think there ought to be a Colonial version of the New Testament, it’s misleading about shepherds,’ he said irreverently; but to Adelaide’s mood the remark seemed in bad taste.
‘It seems—unpleasant,’ she said, choosing her epithet carefully. The poetry of labour began to resemble tussock hills a little too near in the hard light of noon. Adelaide loved nature, but she loved it poetised, not plain.
‘I am sorry for the sheep, poor brutes, but it’s no use getting soft over it. There are a lot of things beside the killing I shouldn’t like my little girl to see. I don’t generally think about them when they’ve got to be done, and I don’t want you to make me. Killing sheep for food is not half so cruel as hunting foxes and hares for fun, and you’ve done that yourself, my darling.’
Adelaide saw no resemblance between the two, and her mind went back with almost a pang of longing to the aristocratic and sportive torture and slaughter. It was so historic, time-honoured, and so suggestive of immemorial ages of poetry and romance; it was such an exclusive perquisite and mark of rank and breeding. All the attendant pomp and circumstances were so charming, and now they seemed so far away from her present life as she sat and silently recalled them—the early breakfast in some ancient hall, the start in the dewy October morning, the joyous race over the gentle downs and vales of England, the pleasant ride home, the eyes that smiled on her, the flatteries and gallantries and the light jests over the day’s adventures. The hunted, slaughtered animal was such an insignificant feature in the whole entertainment, and she had learned to accept its fate with aristocratic serenity. But this killing of sheep was sheer unadorned butchery, it reeked of Smithfield market and the slaughter-yard, and her husband was the butcher. She began to feel as if there was something unknown, something potential about him that fascinated and terrified her.
‘Why don’t we have a butcher?’ she asked.
‘Oh, that’s mean. If it’s got to be done, I may as well do it.’ Then he went on, ‘As a matter of fact, it’s not my work. I’ve got other things to look after, but there happened to be no one else handy except that boy from Eton—St Aubyn, the cadet your grandmother sent to Haeremai. M’Ilvride had set him on to the job. It’s their idea of a joke with a new chum, but it’s a bit too rough on an English lad. Are you interested, Aidie?’
‘St Aubyn? Yes. I’m sure his people did not expect him to do that sort of work. They’re one of the first families in England, and if there weren’t so many elder sons, he wouldn’t be here.’
‘No, I guess his Honourable Papa and his Lady Mamma didn’t know what they were sending him into. I’ll wean him as gently as I can. But,’ he concluded with heavy force, ‘he’s got to do that and other things too before long.’
Adelaide sat looking at him and thinking that he was somehow different from the St Aubyns and the people she had been accustomed to for ten years.
‘Have you ever killed other things?’ she asked lightly and yet tremulously.
‘Yes, bullocks now and then.’
‘You don’t mind my asking? You see, it’s strange to me and—so interesting.’
‘Oh no, ask away. I’ll tell you all my crimes.’
They had never since the hour under the tree-ferns stood so far apart as now, and Adelaide shivered inwardly with a spiritual loneliness and chill.
‘You certainly have not killed anything else?’ she said, but felt a curious instinct of not having got to the end yet. The sense of his potentialities was overmastering her imagination.
Dennis sat still for some minutes, and then said, as if he were awakening out of a dream, ‘Yes, I have.’
‘Oh—what?’ she asked still lightly, but unable to keep her eyes from him.
‘I killed my sheep-dog, Rangi, the collie that we used to play with when we were children.’
‘You killed my dear old Rangi?’ It was a little cry, and her face was very white. Rangi was the dearest pet and plaything of her childhood, almost a rival then to her sweetheart Dennis.
‘Yes. I shot him one night.’
‘Tell me all about it, Dennis,’ she demanded, piteous and yet imperative, dropping the society manner altogether.
He told her with a rugged and savage sincerity that crushed the girl’s flower-like grace beneath it.
‘You want to hear all about it?’ he said, and forgot what he should have remembered, but she was driving him too hard. ‘Well, he got to worrying Willoughby’s sheep. It was my fault. I spoiled him, petting him too much. He was all right under my eye, but directly he had a chance he was off and away to Te Puhi. Willoughby came over to us as mad as he could be—swore he’d cut Rangi up, and shoot him and disembowel him; I don’t know what he wasn’t going to do to him. Quite right too, and I’ll shoot his dogs if they come worrying my sheep. But I would rather Rangi died by my hand. So
I went to the kennels and let him off the chain, and he fawned on me and licked my hands and feet. Then he followed me down the valley, and I tied him to the rimu tree, and all the time he went on licking my hands. And I shot him. I made a pretty clean job of it, but he tried to crawl to me, and he howled just once. That night when I was sleeping, I dreamt I heard him howl again, and I felt as if I had killed a child.—What did you make me tell you that for?’
‘I wonder,’ she dropped her fair head lifelessly on her hand, and gave a shuddering laugh, ‘I wonder if you could ever kill me, Dennis.’
‘Adelaide!’ he called out stormily, and faced her, with all his soul torn up. ‘Don’t you ever say such a thing to me again.’ He paused, then went on, still with crushing force, too hard for such a delicate child, ‘I’ve got to do my work, whether it pleases you or not.’
(1910)
From The ‘Sure to Rise’ Cookery Book
Cooking Hints
Cakes should be baked as soon as they are mixed.
Raisins should always be stoned.
Candied peel should always be thinly sliced.
For nice pastry, always sift the flour.
For scones and rolls, always use a very quick oven.
For buns and small cakes, a moderate quick oven.
For large cakes, not quite so quick.
For sponge cakes, a moderate oven.
Test the oven before baking—don’t guess.
Before baking, have everything ready, and suitable fire.
Never slam the oven door when cooking, it spoils cakes, pastry, and puddings.
Two breakfastcups of flour piled up equal lb.
Wooden spoons are better than metal for all cooking.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 22