Then, after a while, she had something else to live for besides hope—a little, yellow, human thing. She nursed it: she sang to it in her own quaint, pathetic way: she fondled it: she kissed it, as she had learned to kiss from Giles; and it grew and waxed strong and became a glossy, round piece of humanity, with dancing brown eyes and a merry smile. But as Hira clothed it only in a single piece of flannel, and because there was much wet weather, accompanied by damp, penetrating mists, when the winter came it took ill and died.
Then Hira’s heart seemed to die in her, and a strong grief struck her prostrate. A stony look came into her eyes, and she would speak to none, but would wander alone outside the village, and haunt the forest glade where formerly she had spent so much time with Giles.
At length, however, a young chief came; and being attracted by Hira, though her beauty was half-gone by reason of her grief, he told her he desired to marry her if she were willing. Hira told him to go away: she was another man’s wife, she said. At that, the young Maori laughed, for he had heard of Giles’s amours; and, when his mirth had subsided, he said she might as well forget Giles, for most assuredly he had forgotten her, and would never again return. Then Hira burst into a passion, to show the young chief that she did not share his apprehensions: and then she fell a-weeping, for she felt the time was long: and, when the young fellow endeavoured to comfort her by fondling, she struck him in the face.
However, after that, he pressed his suit for many days. But Hira was hard to win.
One morning, when the kainga awoke, it was found that Hira had vanished. She was traced from kainga to kainga by her father and her suitor, but finally all trace of her was lost in a town through which the railway passed.
Now, when the camp had been broken up, Giles had gone to Auckland. From thence he had been ordered by his department to a seaport town, where he was working at plans and drawings, and things connected with his trade.
We people of New Zealand—at least, those of us who live in towns—get great pleasure out of life. Our leisure is ample; our duties not burdensome; the society is gay and almost Southern-like in character; and our amusements are multifarious. Giles liked his new sphere better than the old ‘bush’ one, and preferred the society of white women to that of brown. And he did almost his fair share of work, and indulged in more than his fair share of pleasure.
At many houses he met Miss Gertrude Henderson, a girl with a complexion that was like the pink inside a sea-shell, and who possessed a susceptible temperament, and an abundance of yellow hair, and a good store of money, left her by an aunt who was also her godmother. Giles saw his chance and took advantage of it. He rode much with Miss Henderson, picnicked with her, danced with her—and won her. And Miss Henderson was pleased that it was so.
Pretty girls rarely marry handsome men—it is a worn-out truism—and this seems to be a wise dispensation of Nature, by means of which the Race shall not run to extremes of beauty and hideousness.
The father of Giles’s betrothed was not displeased that his daughter should have her way, because, simply, she was his spoiled child; and her mother was one of those women who believe that marriages are made in Heaven, and that they must all, therefore, be desirable, a good soul who fancied that what seemed to be bringing happiness must be right. She was overjoyed at the match.
Then, as money was plentiful with the couple, by reason of the forethought of the aforesaid maiden aunt, the marriage was not delayed.
After the honeymoon, the bride and bridegroom returned to their home, a cosy, verandahed, creeper-shaded dwelling on the outskirts of the town. Life to Giles was now gilded with pleasure and ease and comfort; his work but adding to his zest for the soft luxury of his home. To his wife it was one round of pleasing household tasks; the thoughts connected therewith blending themselves sweetly, at all times, with thoughts of her husband.
Hira, though; what of her?
She found out in Auckland, after infinite trouble, by means of the little English she had learned from Giles, where the object of her love had gone. To that place she directed her way with all the speed she might—much in the manner of the Saracen woman, whom, as little boys, we read of, and who cried continually ‘London’, and then ‘Becket’, and so became the mother of the renowned and martyred Thomas.
Hira reached her goal, some two months after Giles’s marriage. She went down from Auckland steerage, and sick, and when she landed she tottered up the wharf in such a manner as to cause the ‘lumpers’ to imagine she was drunken and disreputable. However, she was taken compassion upon by some of her own race, who were from the other side of the bay in which the town lies, and were loitering along its streets as Maoris always loiter. They took her in a canoe to their Kainga, and, when she had recovered from the effects of her journey, she set about making inquiries for Giles. And if Giles had spent as much time, as he used to before marriage, at his Club, gossiping in the doorway, or gazing through the windows at the passers-by, he might many a time have observed the tattered and careworn Hira, as she walked in quest of him. But now, after his day’s work was done, he always immediately went to his home, with all the alacrity of a young husband.
However, Hira’s inquiries for him were successful, in spite of the fact that there were other men of his name in the town. She was shown his house: she saw the happy pair in the town, shopping together: she saw them driving together: she saw them walking arm-in-arm on their lawn in the cool of the twilight; and as the darkness fell, saw Giles kiss his wife and draw her into the house. That was enough: Hira could stay in that town no longer.
She went home by the way she had come, and appeared again in her native kainga as suddenly and as noiselessly as she had vanished from it. The young chief, her suitor, was still there, and moreover, was as much in love with her as ever. She listened to his protestations with an absent-minded air, which seemed to show that her thoughts were far off. She let the young fellow fondle her and stroke her hair, and finally she said, ‘I will take you, but, that I may not be deceived a second time also, you must first prove your love for me by doing a thing I shall ask.’ He would do anything for her. He only desired to know what feat she wished performed, and he would show his love by doing it. Then Hira told him where Giles lived—he had heard much of Giles. She told him to go there, and she told him to bring something from thence; and, after that was done, she said she would marry him. And the next day, he gave out that he was going on a journey; that he would return again shortly, when he would take Hira as his wife.
Now, Giles’s wife was greatly given to the painting of amateurish pictures—this was the manner in which she spent much of her time while Giles was away at his office—and her friends gave her a great reputation for her work, and she was much encouraged to paint for Church Bazaars and for charitable objects of various sorts; for she was a good, kind little woman, was Giles’s wife. And she was also a student of Nature—if not a very apt one, at least an industrious—and her pastime, for such it was, simply—all her life was a pastime—took her sometimes far afield.
One morning, her household arrangements being made for the day—her household arrangements always came first in her mind, for was not the comfort of her home one of the many pleasantnesses which bound her husband to her?—she set out with palette and canvas and the necessary paraphernalia. She looked business-like and happy as she walked along with all this light gear; her step quick, her eyes bright, her cheeks pink with the flush of health, and her heart joyful to think that life was so happy.
She went the way towards the sea, and, then passing along the sands of the beach and round several headlands, she took up her post to paint a view of the bay.
She had not been more than an hour at work, when she noticed a small canoe row by, in front of her, and pass along the shallows to a point of the beach some half a mile from where she sat, and where the land came sloping down to the sea. The canoe had in it a single occupant, who got out, and leaving the canoe high and dry, walked up the beach, and disappeared
in the scrub, that, just there, came down to the edge of the sand.
Giles’s wife sketched the canoe, as it lay, and was pleased with the effect which its presence lent to the picture. Soon she was startled by some earth and stones falling from the cliff on to the sand behind her. She looked up quickly, but saw nothing, and thinking that the disturbance must have been caused by a small slip of earth, she went on with her work. Then a head was thrust over the edge of the cliff, the head of a Maori who watched the Englishwoman, long and closely. Then the head was withdrawn, and if the painter had but looked, she might have seen the figure of a man rise up, and walk along the top of the cliff till he came to the place where it was possible to descend to the beach.
The next thing that happened was that Mrs Giles was aware of a Maori advancing towards her.
‘Good,’ she said to herself, as she saw him coming.
‘I’ll get him to let me make a sketch of him—that is, if he is interesting looking, and tattooed, and all that’; and as he came closer, ‘Ah, at least he hasn’t adopted proper clothes. He’s dressed in quite the aboriginal manner. Yes, I’ll paint his portrait.’
He drew nearer, and she looked up at him, and smiled. He came quite close. He was Hira’s young Maori chief, and he looked into the face of Giles’s wife with a very ghastly and evil-looking grin. However, the little woman was not in any way frightened; she was used to Maoris, and treated them with a pretty, patronising air, which made them at once her obedient servants, though they might, or might not, understand what she said to them.
‘Well?’ she said, laughingly, ‘How do you do? Te na koe! That’s rightly pronounced, I think. Good morning!’
He did not answer.
‘You have not much to say for yourself,’ she continued. ‘But come, I’ll paint your picture’; and she pointed to her work. ‘But perhaps you don’t understand even what that is,’ and she stooped to pick from the ground a piece of cardboard stuff upon which to sketch him.
The Maori still grinned at her, showing his teeth, and appearing very evil-looking, the while.
‘You Missis Giles?’ he asked, with the peculiar accent which dealt strangely upon the sibilants.
‘Yes, I’m Mrs Giles,’ the little woman answered, brightly. ‘Now, stand a little further back, if you please, and let me draw you. Can’t you see I’m going to do you the honour of painting your picture?’ And she motioned him back with her hand.
But he came forward.
‘No,’ she cried, ‘further back I want you,’ and she added to herself, ‘I verily believe the creature’s deaf, or perhaps it’s only because he doesn’t understand.’
But he came still nearer.
Then she rose.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘how can I draw you, if you don’t do as I tell you, and stand where I place you?’
By this time the two were quite close together.
Suddenly the man made a clutch at her, and pinned her by her arms, and threw her to the ground. She screamed, as a hare screams that has been caught in a trap.
*
Giles wondered, that day, why his wife was not at home when he arrived in the afternoon, tired from his work. He wondered still more when dinner time came and she did not appear.
‘Martha,’ he said to the maid, ‘where did you say Mrs Giles was gone to?’
‘I don’t know where she went,’ answered Martha. ‘She went sketching, for certain. She took her painting things with her.’
Giles wondered more than ever, when his wife did not come home, at dark. Then, after Martha had lighted the lamp and drawn the curtains, his loneliness became unbearable. So he took his hat, and set off to his wife’s old home; thinking to find her with her parents, and fancying that she must have looked in upon them on her way home, and perhaps had stayed to dinner.
He was alarmed, when he got there, to find that none of her family had seen her that day. Then, he and her father went round to several friends, thinking that these might tell them of her. Then they went to the police, and searched the town and its vicinity till dawn.
*
A fortnight later, Hira had taken the young chief for her husband.
And the headless body of a woman, swollen, and half-eaten by the denizens of the sea, was washed ashore and left high and dry on the sands in front of the town where Giles lived. The body was unrecognisable, either by feature, or by clothing; but the local coroner did his duty, and the jury declared death to have been caused by drowning to some woman unknown, through some accident unaccountable. But, nevertheless, Giles was allowed to take the body and to bury it in the prescribed manner as that of his wife, and to place a tombstone, over what was, in reality, its second grave.
*
In after time, Hira, when the thought of the faithless Giles came upon her, would lift from a box, sunk in the floor of her hut, a woman’s head with long yellow hair, embalmed with all the horrors of the Maori art, and she would chuckle over it, and hold it out at arm’s length, and laugh into its poor shrunken eyes and at its poor pinched face, and then would put it back in its place, and go and suckle her new baby.
And Giles, what of him? Hira’s revenge, like all revenge, fell heaviest on the innocent. Giles married again. This time it was to a beautiful brunette; and he quickly found forgetfulness and bliss.
That is why it is written, ‘Vengeance is Mine …. I will repay.’
(1895)
Henry Lawson, ‘A Daughter of Maoriland’
A Sketch of Poor-class Maoris
The new native-school teacher, who was ‘green’, ‘soft’, and poetical, and had a literary ambition, called her ‘August’, and fondly hoped to build a romance on her character. She was down in the school registers as Sarah Moses, Maori, sixteen years and three months. She looked twenty; but this was nothing, insomuch as the mother of the youngest child in the school—a dear little half-caste lady of two or three summers—had not herself the vaguest idea of the child’s age, nor anybody else’s, nor of ages in the abstract. The church register was lost some six years before, when ‘Granny’, who was a hundred, if a day, was supposed to be about twenty-five. The teacher had to guess the ages of all the new pupils.
August was apparently the oldest in the school—a big, ungainly, awkward girl, with a heavy negro type of Maori countenance, and about as much animation, mentally or physically, as a cow. She was given to brooding; in fact, she brooded all the time. She brooded all day over her school work, but did it fairly well. How the previous teachers had taught her all she knew was a mystery to the new one. There had been a tragedy in August’s family when she was a child, and the affair seemed to have cast a gloom over the lives of the entire family, for the lowering brooding cloud was on all their faces. August would take to the bush when things went wrong at home, and climb a tree and brood till she was found and coaxed home. Things, according to pa-gossip, had gone wrong with her from the date of the tragedy, when she, a bright little girl, was taken—a homeless orphan—to live with a sister, and, afterwards, with an aunt-by-marriage. They treated her, ’twas said, with a brutality which must have been greatly exaggerated by pa-gossip, seeing that unkindness of this description is, according to all the best authorities, altogether foreign to Maori nature.
Pa-gossip—which is less reliable than the ordinary washerwoman kind, because of a deeper and more vicious ignorance—had it that one time when August was punished by a teacher (or beaten by her sister or aunt-by-marriage) she ‘took to the bush’ for three days, at the expiration of which time she was found on the ground in an exhausted condition. She was evidently a true Maori or savage, and this was one of the reasons why the teacher with the literary ambition took an interest in her. She had a print of a portrait of a man in soldier’s uniform, taken from a copy of the Illustrated London News, pasted over the fireplace in the whare where she lived, and neatly bordered by vandyked strips of silvered tea-paper. She had pasted it in the place of honour, or as near as she could get to it. The place of honour was sacred to framed r
epresentations of the Nativity and Catholic subjects, half-modelled, half-pictured. The print was a portrait of the last Czar of Russia, of all the men in the world; and August was reported to have said that she loved that man. His father had been murdered, so had her mother. This was one of the reasons why the teacher with the literary ambition thought he could get a romance out of her.
After the first week she hung round the new schoolmistress, dog-like—with ‘dog-like affection’, thought the teacher. She came down often during the holidays, and hung about the verandah and back door for an hour or so; then, by-and-by, she’d be gone. Her brooding seemed less aggressive on such occasions. The teacher reckoned that she had something on her mind, and wanted to open her heart to ‘the wife’, but was too ignorant or too shy, poor girl; and he reckoned, from his theory of Maori character, that it might take her weeks, or months, to come to the point. One day, after a great deal of encouragement, she explained that she felt ‘so awfully lonely, Mrs Lorrens’. All the other girls were away, and she wished it was school-time.
She was happy and cheerful again, in her brooding way, in the playground. There was something sadly ludicrous about her great, ungainly figure slopping round above the children at play. The schoolmistress took her into the parlour, gave her tea and cake, and was kind to her; and she took it all with broody cheerfulness.
One Sunday morning she came down to the cottage and sat on the edge of the verandah, looking as wretchedly miserable as a girl could. She was in rags—at least, she had a rag of a dress on—and was barefooted and bareheaded. She said that her aunt had turned her out, and she was going to walk down the coast to Whale Bay to her grandmother—a long day’s ride. The teacher was troubled, because he was undecided what to do. He had to be careful to avoid any unpleasantness arising out of Maori cliquism. As the teacher he couldn’t let her go in the state she was in; from the depths of his greenness he trusted her, from the depths of his softness he pitied her; his poetic nature was fiercely indignant on account of the poor girl’s wrongs, and the wife spoke for her. Then he thought of his unwritten romance, and regarded August in the light of copy, and that settled it. While he talked the matter over with his wife, August ‘hid in the dark of her hair’, awaiting her doom. The teacher put his hat on, walked up to the pa, and saw her aunt. She denied that she had turned August out, but the teacher believed the girl. He explained his position, in words simplified for Maori comprehension, and the aunt and relations said they understood, and that he was ‘perfectly right, Mr Lorrens’. They were very respectful. The teacher said that if August would not return home, he was willing to let her stay at the cottage until such time as her uncle, who was absent, returned, and he (the teacher) could talk the matter over with him. The relations thought that that was the very best thing that could be done, and thanked him. The aunt, two sisters, and as many of the others, including the children, as were within sight or hail at the time—most of them could not by any possible means have had the slightest connection with the business in hand—accompanied the teacher to the cottage. August took to the flax directly she caught sight of her relations, and was with difficulty induced to return. There was a lot of talk in Maori, during which the girl and her aunt shuffled and swung round at the back of each other, and each talked over her shoulder, and laughed foolishly and awkwardly once or twice; but in the end the girl was sullenly determined not to return home, so it was decided that she should stay. The schoolmistress made tea.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 27