‘Good evening, Miss Beryl,’ said the voice softly.
‘Good evening.’
‘Won’t you come for a little walk?’ it drawled.
Come for a walk—at that time of night! ‘I couldn’t. Everybody’s in bed. Everybody’s asleep.’
‘Oh,’ said the voice lightly, and a whiff of sweet smoke reached her. ‘What does everybody matter? Do come! It’s such a fine night. There’s not a soul about.’
Beryl shook her head. But already something stirred in her, something reared its head.
The voice said, ‘Frightened?’ It mocked, ‘Poor little girl!’
‘Not in the least,’ said she. As she spoke that weak thing within her seemed to uncoil, to grow suddenly tremendously strong; she longed to go!
And just as if this was quite understood by the other, the voice said, gently and softly, but finally, ‘Come along!’
Beryl stepped over her low window, crossed the veranda, ran down the grass to the gate. He was there before her.
‘That’s right,’ breathed the voice, and it teased, ‘You’re not frightened, are you? You’re not frightened?’
She was; now she was here she was terrified, and it seemed to her everything was different. The moonlight stared and glittered; the shadows were like bars of iron. Her hand was taken.
‘Not in the least,’ she said lightly. ‘Why should I be?’
Her hand was pulled gently, tugged. She held back.
‘No, I’m not coming any farther,’ said Beryl.
‘Oh, rot!’ Harry Kember didn’t believe her. ‘Come along! We’ll just go as far as that fuchsia bush. Come along!’
The fuchsia bush was tall. It fell over the fence in a shower. There was a little pit of darkness beneath.
‘No, really, I don’t want to,’ said Beryl.
For a moment Harry Kember didn’t answer. Then he came close to her, turned to her, smiled and said quickly, ‘Don’t be silly! Don’t be silly!’
His smile was something she’d never seen before. Was he drunk? That bright, blind, terrifying smile froze her with horror. What was she doing? How had she got here? the stern garden asked her as the gate pushed open, and quick as a cat Harry Kember came through and snatched her to him.
‘Cold little devil! Cold little devil!’ said the hateful voice.
But Beryl was strong. She slipped, ducked, wrenched free.
‘You are vile, vile,’ said she.
‘Then why in God’s name did you come?’ stammered Harry Kember.
Nobody answered him.
XIII
A cloud, small, serene, floated across the moon. In that moment of darkness the sea sounded deep, troubled. Then the cloud sailed away, and the sound of the sea was a vague murmur, as though it waked out of a dark dream. All was still.
(1921)
Robin Hyde, ‘The Beaches’
I
Not here our sands, those salt-and-pepper sands
Mounding us to the chins: (don’t you remember?
Won’t the lost shake for any cry at all?)
Listen: our sands, so clean you didn’t care
If fine grains hit your teeth, stuck in your hair,
Were moist against the sunburn on your knees.
Everything glowed—old tar-bubble November,
Nothing around us but blue-bubbling air;
We liked being quiet then. To move or call
Crumpled the work of hands, his big red hands:
(It was he, our father, piled the mounts for us):
He sat and read, dreamed there against the wall,
Thinking perhaps how rocks are not quite lands,
Housing old barnacles and octopus;
How the wet gold soups back, strains into seas.
We closed our eyes: sunlight streamed through, in rays
Orange or green, but I liked violet most:
Black dog splashed past us, with the chewed-up ball:
Here it’s so different. Flesh looks hurt; asprawl
These crayfish people; legs like fungoid trees
Lopped off.
You’re playing safe, to stay a ghost.
II
Island Bay, Orongorongo, Day’s Bay, Miramar,
Evan’s Bay where the slips and the rust-red ships are;
You can’t lie still, pretending those are dreams
Like us …. Or watch, I’ll show you: wet and clean,
Coming past the sand-dune couples, strung out far,
Purple on brown, his shadow grows between:
Bleached logs stare up: he’s bringing us ice-creams.
III
An absent face, remote and sharp, as far
As fishers’ boats that bob across the bay
Setting their cray-pots in the island’s shadow;
Fat men are red … this one’s a different red,
Thin-faced and fair, burnt up in scarlet sun.
Ganges and Jumna, half the parrot places
With screeching feathers, soapstone lantern faces,
Were his; but he can’t talk of what he’s done.
Sometimes he hits his skull against a star,
Rages, frizzles red at everyone.
Later you hear him again: ‘Sorry, old girl.’
The lamp goes up, her face looks wringing wet,
The shadow stoops, to see that we’re asleep:
I’d like to ask them questions then: but one
Thinks you’re clean toothbrush, homework neatly done;
One dreams, says ‘A penny for a curl.’
They love you, but their thoughts tide back so deep:
Both are so very certain you’ll forget.
IV
Sands, sands of my father’s town,
Of my father’s triple sea,
(Once for the eyes and twice for dream,
Thrice for memory);
Quilled in the dusk here, grey and brown,
Cool where the silvers gleam,
Hush your singing and let me down;
We shall hear the low-voiced sea.
What is it quickens the blood?
Smell of the sun-soaked, salt-white wood.
What is the tameless thing?
Gull’s shafted wing.
What is it lads deserve?
White boat’s arrowy glimpsing curve.
What is silk to my foot?
Tide on the turn, when spongy trees uproot.
What makes the sweethearts quarrel?
Third mouth, pink as coral.
What shall a maiden do,
Stay true or be untrue?
What says the Mother Sea?
On a glittering day, go free, go free.
What do fishermen keep in their pot?
Cod, garlic and crab they’ve got.
What makes the wanton’s bed?
Sand while she’s living, deep sea dead.
How about her that’s nice?
Granite shone smooth as ice.
What must I do, my sea?
(With empty hands, quiet heart, little else, O Sea)
Still be my child—my child to me.
Sands, sands of my mother’s town,
Of my mother’s secret sea,
(For the head borne high, for the lagging heart,
At last for memory)
Feathered in dusk here, grey and black,
White where the moon’s on foam,
Hush your singing and hand me back
For a bed and a lamp at home.
‘White bed,’
sea said,
rocking,
‘White bed,
but not
a home.’
V
This is my secret, this is the chord most perfectly strung:
There lay the dunes: I cleared them in one white stride,
Feet flying, arms flying, seagull-swift, hair and heart flying,
Smiting my feet on sand, I was into the tide:
Catching striking and streaming the harp-chords: for I wa
s young.
This in a sea-cleft bony with old spars staring out
From the rocks and the swaying livid anemones:
But the tide broke in, and with one magnificent shout
Caught me, carried me, balanced me, held by the knees:
Curled to me, high by the wrecked and foaming trees.
But the sparkling Sabine love three moments over
Ran I and laughed, from the greenbeard’s following wrath:
Whirling in winds and taunted, my hollow retreating lover
Snarled at the cliffs, as his spray-drenched hands reached forth:
And in many a sucking cavern, the convex eyes peered forth.
Turned I, and shaken, a child and a woman, blindly
Shook off the weed from my breasts, and knelt upon stone:
And climbed in the yellow steeps of a hill that held me kindly,
And lay in the yellow flowers: and lay alone:
I parted the white-tressed flowers: I lay alone.
VI
Close under here, I watched two lovers once,
Which should have been a sin, from what you say:
I’d come to look for prawns, small pale-green ghosts,
Sea-coloured bodies tickling round the pool.
But tide was out then; so I strolled away
And climbed the dunes, to lie here warm, face down,
Watching the swimmers by the jetty-posts
And wrinkling like the bright blue wrinkling bay.
It wasn’t long before they came; a fool
Could see they had to kiss; but your pet dunce
Didn’t quite know men count on more than that;
And so just lay, patterning sand.
And they
Were pale thin people, not often clear of town:
Elastic snapped, when he jerked off her hat:
I heard her arguing, ‘Dick, my frock!’ But he
Thought she was bread.
I wished her legs were brown,
And mostly, then, stared at the dawdling sea,
Hoping Perry would row me some day in his boat.
Not all the time; and when they’d gone, I went
Down to the hollow place where they had been,
Trickling bed through fingers. But I never meant
To tell the rest, or you, what I had seen:
Though that night, when I came in late for tea,
I hoped you’d see the sandgrains on my coat.
VII
Cool and certain, their oars will be lifted in dusk, light-feathered
As wings of terns, that dip into dream, coming back blue; but the motionless gull
With his bold head hooked beak black-slit humped harsh back
Freezing in icy air gleams crystal and beautiful.
No longer the dark corks bobbing bay-wide, are seen:
Dogs bark, mothers hail back their children from ripple’s danger:
People dipped in the dusk-vats smile back, each stranger
Than time: each has a face of crystal and blue.
In the jettisoned boat, the child who peered at her book
Cannot lift her glance from the running silk of the creek:
It is time to run to her mother, to call and look ….
The sea-pulse beats in her wrist: she will not speak.
But the boats, in salt tide and smarting sunrise weathered,
Swing by an island’s shadow: silver trickles and wets
The widening branch of their wake, the swart Italian faces,
Fishermen’s silver fingers, fumbling the nets:
And the island lies behind them, lifting its glassy cone
In one strange motionless gesture, light on stone:
Only the gulls, the guards of the water-lapping places,
Scream at the fishermen lifting the water-lipping nets.
Far and away, the shore people hear a singing:
Love-toned Italian voices fondle the night: the hue
Of the quietly waiting people is velvet blue.
(1937–38; 2003)
Eileen Duggan, ‘The Tides Run Up the Wairau’
The tides run up the Wairau
That fights against their flow.
My heart and it together
Are running salt and snow.
For though I cannot love you,
Yet, heavy, deep, and far,
Your tide of love comes swinging,
Too swift for me to bar.
Some thought of you must linger,
A salt of pain in me,
For oh what running river
Can stand against the sea?
(1937)
Len Lye, ‘Dazing Daylight’, from the sequence ‘Song Time Stuff’
Out of the dim paleface past a continual daylight mind has given us an alibi for reality. The age old eye check double check on surroundings to ease our doubts. So now reality you don’t bogey us we bogey you with a ten out of ten tag everytime. All’s set in the world with a visual chamber in broad dazing daylight.
(1938)
In the Garden
H. Guthrie-Smith, from Tutira: The Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station
Tansy (Tanacetum vulgare), not even now to be found as a pot-herb in the station garden, grows but on one spot on Tutira. As its arrival illustrates what must occur in the way of combination of favourable chances before a new species can appear in a new locality, as also the plant is one about whose manner of travel there can be almost no doubt whatever, it deserves the distinction of a paragraph.
I found it in occupation of ground directly beneath an angle-post in the TutiraArapawanui boundary fence. The upkeep of a mutual march, renewal of wire, replacement of broken and rotting posts, is usually shared by adjoining run-holders; it is alternately kept by one or the other. It was a season or two after such an overhaul by Arapawanui that I first noticed tansy. As in the case of another alien (Bartsia viscosa), its story is particularly easy to piece together. To begin with, in the Arapawanui garden I knew amongst the pot-herbs that there existed a substantial tansy plot. With this fact in mind, it was not difficult to imagine the order issued as to repair of the boundary fence; to note the man shoulder his spade; to observe the soil adhering to the tool; to visualise the tiny seed wrapt in its coatings of clay. So far quite conceivably all may have happened as on former occasions—the order given as before, the spade as before taken from the garden, with also, as before, earth and seed adhering to it. Now, however, under more fortunate circumstances, the earth might not, during the strapping on to the saddle, during the brushing through scrub, during preliminary repair work, have become detached along a section of the fence-traversing bush where the seed would perish for want of light; it might not, as before, have been choked on dense sward or rotted by exposure, or bitten below the crown by stock, or perished by too deep burial, or been annihilated by slugs, or washed out by torrential rains, or crushed under foot, or mildewed by blight, or baked by drought. Yet in these ways, and a score besides, the appearance of tansy on Tutira may have been for years postponed; seed may have again and again been brought up on claggy spades from Arapawanui, only to perish. On former occasions there may have been an excellent tilth provided, but invalidated by too deep burial; the season of the year may have been propitious, but spoilt by abnormal weather. At last there had occurred a combination of favourable factors, resulting in the acclimatisation of a new alien. Probably, of seeds that reach New Zealand, not one in ten thousand succeeds in establishing itself. My tansy patch is in itself an example of the particularity of certain species as to conditions facilitating germination. Though every year tens of thousands of winged tansy seeds are launched into the air, not a single one has taken root. The original patch increases exclusively by spread of roots.
As remnants of conquered races take refuge in the mountains, so amongst rocks do persecuted plants longest survive. Cape-gooseberry (Physalis peruviana) still manages to hold out precariously in the crannies of certain limestone cliffs. The
only plant of tobacco (Nicotiana tabaccum) got by me on Tutira was procured as far back as ’83, also beyond the reach of stock, on one of the huge limestone quadrilaterals of the Racecourse Paddock. Each of these plants had doubtless escaped from native cultivations in very early times.
Of the species included in this chapter, few have spread beyond a couple of miles, whilst several survive only by suckering or the carriage of broken branchlets in floods and landslips. Six years ago it would have been correct to say that asparagus, elderberry, box-thorn, barberry, gooseberry, raspberry, red-currant, and honeysuckle had strayed but a score or so yards from garden and orchard. That is no longer the case. Alien birds are year by year proving more active agents in the dissemination of alien vegetation. The blackbird, thrush, and minah especially are becoming more and more parasitic to garden and orchard; by them seeds are being carried season by season further afield.
(1921)
Ursula Bethell, ‘Time’
‘Established’ is a good word, much used in garden books,
‘The plant, when established’…
Oh, become established quickly, quickly, garden
For I am fugitive, I am very fugitive – – –
Those that come after me will gather these roses,
And watch, as I do now, the white wistaria
Burst, in the sunshine, from its pale green sheath.
Planned. Planted. Established. Then neglected,
Till at last the loiterer by the gate will wonder
At the old, old cottage, the old wooden cottage,
And say ‘One might build here, the view is glorious;
This must have been a pretty garden once.’
(1929)
Ursula Bethell, ‘Pause’
When I am very earnestly digging
I lift my head sometimes, and look at the mountains,
And muse upon them, muscles relaxing.
I think how freely the wild grasses flower there,
How grandly the storm-shaped trees are massed in their gorges,
And the rain-worn rocks strewn in magnificent heaps.
Pioneer plants on those uplands find their own footing,
No vigorous growth, there, is an evil weed;
All weathers are salutary.
It is only a little while since this hillside
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 42