by Ngaio Marsh
We had a long wait before we left and went into the pub which, evening being now advanced, was coming to life. The reek of beer met us in the doorway. Nobody was about but a great noise issued from the bar. Presently a door opened at the end of the passage and the publican’s wife came through, a handsome, casual woman. The voices in the bar swung in and out with the door. She showed us into a parlour that looked as if it staggered under her colossal indifference, and lit a pile of brushwood in the fireplace. We sat on a broken-down horsehair sofa and two chairs. Presently the inevitable cold mutton, yellow pickles, cruet, loaf and butter were brought in with a pot of black tea. We had no idea when we would reach our destination and it seemed a long time back to Arthur’s Pass. We drew up to the table.
When we had eaten this odd meal we went to the station. Evening comes early in the Gorge and the air was cold. One or two of our fellow travellers who were going through to Greymouth sat in the little waiting room by a wonderful log fire. Perhaps the long day with its changes of landscape, its alarms and excitements had made me rather sleepy. The glow from the fire, the multiple voices of the river, and occasional cascade of song from the bush and the murmur of conversation: I remember it all vividly, and yet rather as if it were a dream.
Presently an elderly engine was backed up to the little row of carriages. We got into the train and in a casual sort of way, were pulled out of Otira.
Now, I began to see how beautiful this country was. Our train ambled through the valley between Otira and Lake Brunner at the best part of the day; the hour when its extreme darkness is briefly visited by shafts of horizontal light and by explicit colour. The mantled hills that at midday oppress one by their heaviness and uniformity, are now articulate. Their bones show through the forests which, themselves swept by wings of sunlight above translucent wells of shadow, start up in a new and emphatic brilliance. As for the sky: it would make sails for Cleopatra’s barge.
We had been told that at Te Kinga, fifteen to twenty miles down the line, there was a sawmill, a store, a pub and a number of unoccupied huts. The train would stop there but we could leave it at Moana, the next station but one along the line, spend the night there at the pub and return to Te Kinga by slow train in the morning. As the train approached Te Kinga there came a break in the trees and we saw Lake Brunner: a looking glass sunk in the mountains. Two narrow arms forming a lagoon carried ranks of delicate trees. Far out on the waters, suspended between incandescent skies, a launch towed a flotilla of logs. Behind them, like some accomplished calligraphist, they traced their progress on the surface of the lake.
Moana turned out to be less entrancing than Te Kinga and the pub looked and sounded rather forbidding.
My mother said: ‘Let’s walk. It’s not far. I’m game.’
She sometimes used schoolboy colloquialisms and they always came oddly from her. ‘Don’t kid yourself,’ she would say when she found me out in some gloss over a misdeed. She had a lovely voice quite at variance with these occasional essays in slang.
Richard Wallwork compounded for a railroad jigger whose crew he ran to earth in the bar. They would bring our luggage to Te Kinga sometime during the evening.
The sun was behind the mountains when we set out and dusk had fallen when we trudged round the last bend and made Te Kinga. Lights shone in the windows of the pub and the store.
‘You girls go up to the huts,’ Richard said. ‘Robin and I will find out if it’s all right.’
‘How?’
‘At the pub.’
The huts stood in a row on the hillside above the railway and between the sawmill and a slag heap. They were one-room shacks built of raw wood that had weathered grey. They had galvanized iron chimneys serving enormous open fireplaces. Several of them were unoccupied. We inspected one of these. It contained two bunks, a table and some benches, all made of offcuts from the mill. It smelt of old woodsmoke. We found a broom, a bucket, a shovel and a cloth like a dead rat. Two half-consumed candles had guttered over the shoulders of beer bottle containers.
In the light that remained, I fetched dry bracken from the hillside, filled the bunks and collected firewood from the slag heap. Elizabeth Wallwork and my mother swept out three of the huts.
They overlooked a railway bridge spanning the Brunner River. Presently, in the half-light, we saw Robin sickeningly negotiating a loaded wheelbarrow over loose footplanks that lay between the rails. He was followed by Richard, heavily laden, and a tall sloping figure who, when they arrived, turned out to be the foreman at the mill. He shook hands all round and in the slow, guarded manner of the Coasters, told us we were welcome to the huts. There was a rent, he said. Five bob a week. He looked at our painting gear. ‘You’ll be taking pictures,’ he said. ‘There was another bloke done that. Paid his way at the pubs, like. Well, anything I can do.’ We thanked him effusively. ‘She’ll be right,’ he said. ‘Hooray, all. Be seeing you.’
We began to unload the barrow.
The foreman turned away and paused. Into a silence broken only by the high-pitched reiterations of tree frogs, there entered a metallic and continuous sound. A light moved on the railroad and faintly illuminated two figures that faced each other and swayed rhythmically, in the manner of oarsmen, propelling the driving bar of a jigger.
‘This’ll be your gear, I reckon,’ said the foreman.
The men went down the hill to collect it.
At about half-past ten we had set our three houses in order and gone to bed in a trance of fatigue. The bracken crackled and snapped under my blanket. I had begun to wonder if it would make, after all, an uncomfortable bed, when a road slid towards me in a cloud of dust. The driver had fallen asleep; his horses mended their pace and instead of wheeling, sped to the lip of the gorge. We leapt outwards and, after a sickening jolt, fell into oblivion.
CHAPTER 5
The Coast
At Te Kinga we were woken at dawn by timber men leaving by horse-tramway for their camp, seven miles away in the virgin bush. When we got to know them they suggested that we should spend a day in-back and this was a compliment.
The bush behind Te Kinga was heavy and very tall. It closed round and above us and shut out everything but itself and its immense indifference. The man on our truck was called Sandy: a red blond with a singing drawl in his voice. The boles of great trees moved by against a backdrop of dense, cluttered green. We passed deep through a valley and across a forester’s bridge. There was no sky.
She was lonely, all right, in-back, Sandy agreed in answer to a question from my mother. Some jokers, he said, couldn’t seem to stand it. Take him and his mate. They was sent in to prospect, like. Look out the timber: pick where the tramway’d be drove in. They took a couple of packhorses and was meant to stay in-back for three weeks. ‘You wouldn’t credit it, lady, but after four days we turned it in and come out. It was the quiet. Dead quiet it is, barring the birds. Some jokers reckon it’s haunted. Call it what you like: we was satisfied: it was no good to us. We wasn’t the only jokers got that reaction. It’s well-known.’
And easy to believe, we thought, when we reached the tramway head. Here, in the green dark were a winch, a loco-driven circular saw and, close to the ground, a steel cable that ran inconsequently into the forest. As we watched it, it quivered. From a hidden and remote distance a human voice gave a drawn-out, beautiful and incredibly desolate cry.
‘That’s the snigger,’ Sandy said. The winch started up with a falsetto blast on its whistle. Sandy told us that if we followed the cable we would come to where they were felling. We would meet the snigger and he would stop us from going in too far. His name was Jock.
The cable jerked and moved towards us. The ground was muddy but the going not too bad because on either side of the cable, undergrowth had been smashed and flattened. It was strange, though, when the bush closed behind us and stifled the sound of the winch. The cable quietly poured itself past us, an endless and incongruous interloper. Presently the call was repeated, nearer at hand now, astonishing
in its strength and purity of sound. The cable stopped until the voice started it on its way again. For a time there was no sound beyond that of our own squelching progress. Then we saw a disturbance in the forest, a shudder among tops of saplings. We heard sounds of breaking wood and a heavy drag and at last saw the log. It came lurching towards us, bleeding and chained to the end of the cable. It slowly passed us by, quivering and destructive.
It was followed by a man and a one-eyed horse. This was Jock the snigger and his snig-mare. He had evidently been told that we were coming. He described how he chained the log and escorted it to the winch. Then the mare carried the end of the unwinding chain back to the place where they were felling. When a log jammed, he and the mare cleared it. ‘That’s how she lost an eye. Sapling got it. You see a lot of that with snig-horses.’
My mother said something about his voice.
‘Some jokers carry a whistle,’ Jock said. ‘I don’t seem to fancy it.’
He had halted the felled tree in order to talk to us and now said he must be getting on. His ribs expanded under his singlet and the great sound, ‘Oh-hoy’, was released again. The chain quivered and took up and the log began to move.
Guided by the chunk-chunk of axe-blows, we went as far as Jock had said we might and, at a distance, saw two men, stripped to the waist, poised on either end of a plank that was set in a wound across the bole of a giant tree whose top, far above the tangle of undergrowth, trembled under their blows. They changed to a two-handed saw, swaying in a superb rhythm. We saw the death of the tree. The plumed top swept down with a great whiffling sound, a crescendo of splitting timber and a thud that jolted the ground under our feet.
In the late afternoon we rode back to Te Kinga on chained logs, still bleeding sap. The next morning we saw them thunder down skids to a breaking-down bench in the mill. I did a painting of this and would have liked to call it ‘Too Bloody Big’, for that was what the millhands said repeatedly of the giant we had seen felled. They defeated it in the end. It passed on to the sawyer’s screaming bench and finally in planks, to a rail truck and so down to the coast or up to Otira.
We made great friends with the people at the little farm. The family consisted of the farmer and his wife and four sons between the ages of eight and seventeen. They were all very fair with clear skins and the luxuriant glossy hair that one sees so often on the Coast. Their physique was magnificent. They were splendid young men and their mother was very proud of them. She confided in my mother that she had dreaded the time when the eldest would be old enough to enlist and was thankful when the Armistice came. Richard persuaded the youngest, Ernie, to sit for him. He was apple-cheeked and blue-eyed. Renoir would have liked to paint him. It was Ernie who told us that his eldest brother was to fight another joker. Fights took place in the evening outside the pub and were, it seemed, formal affairs. Richard and Robin would have liked to see it but decided that they might not be welcome. The next day Ernie said his brother had laid the other joker out cold. They were all very gentle in their manner and used to arrive, speechless and grinning, with offerings of vegetables from their farm.
On a return visit to Te Kinga we met again as old friends and spent New Year’s Eve at the farm playing round games. There were three girls in our party on this occasion and the boys paid us decorous attention. Several days later, the elder brothers went wild-goat shooting on a mountain across Lake Brunner. We saw them go down to their boat. That afternoon one of the local storms, called – I don’t know why – Brucers, got up over the lake. For a time it was very rough but it soon died out and the evening was beautiful. The boys were to have returned at five. At seven their father and some of the millhands crossed the lake in launches. My mother went down to the farm and watched with the boys’ mother. We could see the flares and hear the gunshots fired by the searchers. At dawn they found the three boys quite close in-shore under a few feet of clear water. They were brought back and we saw a railway truck being pushed up the line to the farm with a tarpaulin covering its load.
They were taken by train to Greymouth and their mother remained there for some time after the funeral. Their father came back to the farm and Ernie helped him.
II
During my Art School days we returned three times to Westland. These were all painting holidays: mornings and evenings of immense concentration, afternoons when we explored the country or merely glowered at our work. We learned about the behaviour of trees, about the anatomy of mountains, how to lay out the ghost of a subject and then, at the fleeting hour of sunset, seize upon it as if, in fact, one was making another kind of time-study. In the afternoons there were expeditions and from these a patchwork memory recalls disjointed incidents.
In some ways the most vivid recollection is of the first Easter holidays after the war ended.
Here we are, my great friend and fellow student, Phyllis, and I. Our skirts are down to our shins and our hair is coiled about our heads. We are far from being hard-boiled and would, I think, seem singularly vulnerable to our modern contemporaries. We are setting out for Westland and neither of us has ever before taken so considerable an excursion unaccompanied by elders. We are, therefore, elevated and feel hardy and independent. Our journey is enlivened by a hoard of repatriated and demobilized soldiers returning to the Coast. They roar, sing and brandish beer bottles but mysteriously maintain a state of suspended inebriety. When we leave the train at Jackson’s, the first stop down the Otira line, they cheer and wish us luck.
Jackson’s consists, simply, of a pub on the edge of the bush. It is a one-storeyed wooden building, patronized by tunnel-workers, prospectors, swaggers and bushmen, and is run by Mr and Mrs Clancy and their extremely pretty daughter. The other resident guests are two railwaymen and a foreman from the tunnel. We think they are a little nonplussed by our arrival but seem friendly and pleasant. When Mrs Clancy hears that we are painters she asks us, on an afternoon when we are housebound by rain, if we would touch up a screen which is very dear to her and which has become a little tashed with wear. It turns out to be the most remarkable meuble we have ever seen. Handpainted by a cousin in a convent, it presents to our incredulous gaze, pink flamingoes wading in a bog infested by floating kidneys. A lolly-pink-and-chrome sunset is repeated in these waters. Lilies, there are, amidst emerald green reeds and, over all, an oleaginous lustre. We tinker gingerly with scratches and abrasions and at last satisfy Mrs Clancy. It is the screen which she displays to her guests, not our paintings.
Easter Saturday. We have been ‘down the line’ all day, painting, and have caught The Night Train From Grey, back to Jackson’s. With Miss Clancy and one or two weary ladies who have spent the day in Greymouth, we are the only sober passengers in the train, this being the night for revelry on the Coast. Through the carriage stagger at intervals a company of gentlemen paying tribute to Miss Clancy. They chant in chorus that she is ‘the pr’eest girl from Greymouth to Otira BAR NONE.’ Miss Clancy tosses her head and they break into song:
Have you ever seen the devil with his little pick and shovel,
Digging of pertaters with his tail cocked up?
We hear them as they progress through the train to the leading carriage. They live at Inchbonnie and when we stop there are ejected with difficulty by the guard. This takes some time as he also hangs sacks of meat along the fence for householders who have ordered them from down the line. When the last reveller has been detrained the guard blows his whistle and we move on. Presently, from the rear carriage but drawing nearer, comes another verse of their song.
Have you ever seen his son with his daddy’s gun
Shooting little bunnies with their tails cocked up?
The procession re-enters. Miss Clancy bridles.
– pr’eest girl from Greymouth to Otira BAA-AR NONE
They do not pause by, or even look at, Miss Clancy but continue on their way. The guard appears.
‘They got in at the bloody rear,’ he says distractedly, ‘while I was hanging up the bloody meat.’
At Jackson’s they leave the train voluntarily and follow Miss Clancy and Phyllis and me up the hill.
Have you ever seen his wife with a carving knife
Cutting up pertaters with her tail cocked up?
They effect an entry into the pub and we are now enthusiastically included in their tributes. Phyllis comes into my room and we lock the door and sit on the bed. The noise in the bar is formidable. After a time Mr Clancy’s voice and boots are heard in the passage and a chucking out process begins, accompanied by fearful language and a great deal of thumping and scuffling. A door bangs and Mr Clancy returns.
Outside our window in the moonlight they are quarrelling among themselves. A dominant voice says smugly: ‘You oughter be ashamed of yerselves cursing and swearing in front of them two bloody girls.’ There is a general gloomy assent and they retire down the hill.
…ever seen his daughter with a bucket gettin’ water
From the well that’s in the garden with her tail cocked up?
The voices fade. The last thing we hear is a prolonged ‘BAA-AR NONE’ followed by a howl of vague approbation.
When I returned to Christchurch I wrote an account of this experience. It was accepted by the Sun. ‘The Night Train From Grey’, was my first venture in professional writing.
III
When I think about the Coast, many pictures return, some of them with great clarity, others a little blurred and elusive.
Here are my mother, a fellow painter called Bill and I in a farm cart drawn by Tim, an elderly white horse, and hung about with camping and painting impedimenta. We are embarked on a ten-days’ journey along the coast itself from Hokitika to the Franz Josef Glacier. In 1920, Hokitika, founded in the days of the big gold rush, still carries some rags of its former raffishness: deserted dance halls, derelict pubs and, at dawn, a few beachcombers panning the black sand at low tide for gold dust.