Passport to Hell

by Hyde, Robin

  There might meet you at the gate of Starkie’s house a little girl with amber-yellow hair, very neatly combed, and the brightest of brown eyes in a face no darker than the Italian biscuit colour. This is Josie, Josephine, Flossie, or Flo, at three years old by way of being the beauty of the Stark family. Or the heir to the house of Stark, one year old and a rich cream-chocolate colour, may stagger out on his fat legs and regard you with such a sleepy smile that you will feel an astonishing desire to pick him up. His costume is like Joseph’s coat, of many colours, being composed of all the bright-coloured scraps that have ever come into the house.

  Within, a mellow voice says reproachfully, ‘Hey, Banty! Banty!’ The four little bantam hens, a rich auburn colour and with feathery trousers down their legs, quarrel bitterly for a place on Starkie’s shoulders. The outlaw sits at the table, brooding over a cup of tea. He has washed the children’s clothing, scrubbed the floor, induced the baby to take a nap, and once again successfully beguiled the formidable rent man—a wisp of a youth whom I privately believe to be terrified of the dusky enormous Starkie—into waiting one more week. But life is still complicated. The City Council is down on him for keeping fowls in a city area, and can’t or won’t believe that the four red bantams are Starkie’s brothers. The matter should be clear enough to any reasonable authority, since indirectly those bantams were the cause of one of Starkie’s prison sentences. Being badly in want of manna, he stole and devoured the chickens of a neighbour. The magistrate wanted to know why he didn’t eat his own fowls, and on being told that Starkie loved the bantams, took umbrage and refused the option of a fine. ‘Hey, Banty…. Banty…. Hey, Flo, what’ll you do if they come and take Banty away?’

  This is the house where the Maori girl, Ritahia, who was respectably baptized by the Bishop of Auckland what time her future husband was arguing with snipers on Gallipoli, took down her guitar and played her little tune for the four-and-twenty members of her tribe who had quartered themselves on her, off and on, ever since her marriage to Starkie—just five minutes before he went into the next room, to find her quiet and smiling, her lips blue with the coming of a swift death. He still has Ritahia’s thousand blue iris bulbs, which she brought with much pride from the country, but which refused to grow in Grey’s Avenue.

  This is the house which opens its doors at times, by night and by day, to curious and unexpected guests. There is an infernal creaking downstairs. This means that a man and a brother, having spent his all at the ‘Carpenter’s Arms’, has silently stolen into Starkie’s cellar and, draping ancient coal-sacks around him, prepared to sleep it off. Or in the evening a head pops round the back door, and a one-armed man solemnly proffers a large and gleaming mackerel, caught off the edge of the Auckland wharves. ‘Thought you could use it for the kids, Starkie.’ And he is gone again.

  There is a queer link—often unseen; never, I think, unreal—between men whose closest-written chapters of life centred round about Egypt, Gallipoli, Armentières, the Somme, Ypres. Mixing with the crowd who have not shared their experience, they are dumb dogs enough. Get them together, and they begin to draw sectors on the table-cloth, to the ineffectual fury of the good women who have been optimistic and married them.

  And in these storm-driven days—oh, storm-driven as much in our obscure little New Zealand as in countries that can go bankrupt with more of a splash, I assure you!—the link is stronger. The faces of the men I have seen coming and going in Starkie’s house have sometimes been pale and shadowy faces. None of the owners possesses any great margin of security. They catch their suppers off the end of the wharf, they work three days a week shovelling bits of coast in the relief gangs, for whom award wages are a bright and sweet dream from a dead generation. They cadge vegetables and coal at relief depots and welfare departments, ruled over for the most part by crisp young men and old ladies who are alike in their supreme inelasticity of mind and their surprising interest in the private affairs of their fellow creatures.

  Some of the shadowy faces have a furtive air. More than one wanted man has had brief respite here from the assiduities of the police—I mean, ‘The Villains’—his wants ministered to by Bunny, Margaret, Norman, Josephine, and Sonny—who, ranging from the age of ten to that of one year, represent the oncoming generation of Starks. Nevertheless, once upon a time a French general kissed Starkie effusively on either cheek—to his shame—and his Colonel informed him that his V.C. recommendation had gone through—though, as he was on probation from a military prison at the time, it was highly improbable that he would ever see the colour of it. The Colonel’s doubts were well-founded. Starkie took nothing home from his war but his tattooed captaincy stars, a record of nine courts martial, a total of thirty-five years’ penal servitude in military sentences—all cancelled for gallantry in action—and a conviction that the world hereafter could not be too martial for his liking. He has only one ambition—to go to South America, where they have a war on all the time. It is his conviction that he would there have become a General, and I think he is right.

  There was once a story of a Zulu impi, trapped beyond escape, and they cried: ‘If we go forward, we die. If we go backward, we die. Let us go forward.’

  In Starkie, in the wraith-like, unwanted, and continually humiliated men who haunt his little house from cellar upwards, I have sometimes thought to see the set faces of that impi. The returned soldier is a social problem in every country today. These men lived or died, as the luck had it, without getting into war novels, talking the language of the trenches, bothering very little about their own psychology, remembering horror and fear only in the loneliness of their own sleepless nights. They were neither knights nor machine soldiers. They were that most unknown of soldiers, the ordinary man.

  In New Zealand they are scattered, and many of the best among them are too shabby and too harassed to attend R.S.A. ceremonials. Yet, potentially at least, the returned soldier’s desperate desire to fit in again, to go forward and die, is one of the most valuable things remaining in our world; as the link, the friendship between scattered and shabby men who congregate around a thousand little homes like Starkie’s, is one of the most honest.

  1 Making of an Outlaw

  WHEN the third Stark baby was born, they didn’t have to travel far to wet its head; the father, Wylde Stark, having by that time come into possession of the old Governor Grey Hotel, which stands white and square in the dusty plainlands of Avenal, near Invercargill town in the far south of New Zealand. The baby, a boy, arrived with no small inconvenience to its mother and some to itself at the hour of 1.30 in the morning. Down in the parlour, Wylde Stark’s guests and sympathizers had kept themselves awake to celebrate the event, a feat which called for a fair amount of refreshment. Technically, Invercargill may be a dry district; but there never yet was a time there when a man was ashamed by lack of good liquor for his friends. If the liquor consumed had really been bestowed on the baby’s head instead of on their own capacious gullets, James Douglas Stark would have started life with a head like a little seal’s. However, contrary to the practice of the new-born, he fell asleep almost immediately and took no interest whatever in the celebrations, which concluded only when dawn put a white finger of light to her lips and her stealthy winds said, ‘Sssh!’ very reproachfully to the company.

  Though the same could not have been said of every man among his guests, Wylde Stark at five in the morning still looked as straight as a gun. He stalked upstairs, never touching the oak banisters with their carved Tudor roses, waved the sleepy-eyed nurse out of the way, and entered his wife’s bedroom. A gas-jet still spluttered blue and sulphur-yellow above the bed, for the baby had chosen July’s black midwinter for its arrival. His wife was awake, lying with her black hair and her paleness like sea-wrack against the crumpled pillows, her dark eyes watching him sombrely. He bent over the wicker cot where his second son had been bestowed, and inspected him without any show of sentiment. The baby slept on, unwhimpering. The tall man straightened himself.

>   A faint voice came from the pillows.

  ‘What is he like?’

  ‘Black as the ace of spades,’ said Wylde Stark briefly; and as though that should satisfy both his own curiosity and his wife’s, without another word he left the room.

  Wylde Stark’s description of his third child was only correct among those who divide humanity into white men, yellow men, black men. The only things black in the composition of the small James Douglas—leaving out his later dislike of the police—were his perfectly straight hair and wide, sparkling eyes. For the rest he was a very seemly bronze colour—and this was far from being a prodigy or portent, since Wylde Stark, who fathered him, was a Delaware Indian from the regions of the Great Bear Lake. How a Delaware Indian came by the name of Wylde Stark is another matter, but the affair sounds as though possibly a Kentucky Colonel had at one time or another been following the grand old Kentucky custom of playing fast and loose among the Delawares.

  Another fact which remains obscure is Wylde Stark’s reason for leaving the Great Bear Lake. All that is clear is that he arrived in Australia by cattle-boat, aged somewhere about thirty, and made straight as a homing-pigeon for the gold-fields. Here he enjoyed some considerable measure of success, both financial and personal. The latter rested mainly on his shooting of Higgins the outlaw, who made an ill-advised attempt to relieve the diggers of their dust. Wylde Stark’s bullet bored through his stomach, and there was no more Higgins the outlaw, but only an occasion for celebration—which, although it not merely wetted but flooded the whistles of his admirers, never made the stern Red-Indian face look any the less like carved mahogany.

  When Wylde Stark came to New Zealand—not, this time, by cattle-boat—he had money and prestige. He settled down in the Governor Grey Hotel, and ruled his customers with a rod of iron, while the private comforts of his establishment rested in the slender hands of his wife—a tall girl born in Madrid, and of Spanish blood. How she came to marry her husband is not to be explained. But their life in Invercargill was a queer compromise between traditions. There was no Spanish background in her children’s early days except the occasional plaintive and broken spinning-thread of a song in the language that they never understood. New Zealand society having no gift of tongues, the Starks settled on English and stuck to it.

  Wylde Stark was a dignified, almost an austere, figure, and physically superb. He stood six feet four-and-a-half inches high, and his wife was only six inches below him in stature—nothing at all below him in dignity. Whether their two racial prides ever fretted each other, their children had no inkling. They made common cause together in a society which could understand them very little. The colour line was much less rigid in New Zealand than it would have been in any other British dominion, but Wylde Stark was not to be satisfied with the good-humoured tolerance bestowed by the white New Zealander on his Maori brother. The Maori population in the South Island was scanty, and largely made up of slave tribes. The Maori who drifted into South Island towns smiled and lounged in the easy background of life. Wylde Stark, his straight-backed, pale-faced wife at his elbow, stalked through the psychological fences like some mahogany Moses.

  Had James Douglas Stark at the age of one hour been able to appreciate the world at large, he must have admitted that his audience was worth notice. First, his enormously tall father, whose thin copper face was rendered amazing by its growth of white whiskers. Then, as the lovely moon-stone blue of dawn deepened and faded outside the windows of the Governor Grey Hotel, and the birds, awakening, showered down their many-coloured raindrop voices from the pines, two very singular figures crept into the room and stood over him like fairies at a christening. His brother, George, at the age of nine, was perhaps not very fairylike. He showed signs already of becoming the prodigy in height that a few years would make him. Trouser-legs, cuffs, collars, suffered wretched fates on an anatomy which grew and grew. George Stark’s complexion was considerably lighter than the new baby’s, but his thin lips and chiselled features were his father’s.

  The second figure really was a fairy … a cousin to Rima herself, escaped from Green Mansions and tiptoeing here with her pointed, bronze-tinted face, her great eyes, her hair falling softly in ringlets upon narrow shoulders. Rose Stark won out of the grudging hands of destiny that loveliness which, when sometimes we see it in its lazy, unconscious moments, seems to us incredible. She was four years old and a sprite, neither Spaniard nor Indian, but a fusing of those two strange metals. Of the two hanging over the baby’s cot, Rose had the lively and laughing disposition; her brother, George, was a sober gentleman who even then resolved, from his superior height and age, to take the youngster in hand.

  An astrologer might tell clearly how the stars stood at 1.30 a.m. on July 4th, 1898. But this much is certain. Mars the ruby-coloured, must have been pointing his brilliant stave straight down the chimney of that room where Anita Stark lay, her hair sombre against the white pillows. And what a Mars! … Sometimes with the face of a giant, sometimes a large and yet inordinately active policeman, sometimes a grinning sergeant, once a slim English officer with a slimmer yet wicked cane. The shapes of war, one after another, formed and dissolved round the sleeping child’s head. From under the pines, Wylde Stark’s Indian game-cocks crew their insolent and brassy challenge. The morning arrived pale and repentant. But the thing was done.

  . . .

  There were two moments in his life—one of sheer delight, one tinged with fear and a curious satisfaction. The delightful moment arrived when his father daily commanded him to let the horses out of the stable for their morning drink at the dam. The mornings, hazy over wide yellow fields, broken only by silhouetted pines and a blue circle of the inevitable New Zealand hills far away, smelt sharply of frosty soil; little puddles in the stable-yard frozen over with ice that tasted cold and slippery like glass; horse-dung trodden into the mire and yet gentled with the smell of warm straw. He let the big working horses out first, their breath wreathing blue as tobacco-smoke around their snorting velvet nostrils. Then he attended to the racehorses, of whom he particularly worshipped Avenal Lady. She was a chestnut girl, and his first love. He took the greatest pains in sleeking her beautiful long body, with the haughty arches of her ribs and the taper of her legs into satiny white stockings. The chestnut mare, recognizing perhaps a colour as temperamental as her own, blew frosty breath into the little boy’s face and beamed on him with her arch amber eye.

  Avenal Lady’s lines of speed and grace were all the beauty the little boy could understand. He knew a good deal about races already, his father being known as one of the lucky owners of the Canterbury Plains, and the use to which her taut muscles in their wary satin sheath could be put was perfectly plain to his five years. But there was something more about her when she stood poised, reared up like a plume of fire, like a sheaf of tawny grain. She was triumphant in her beauty, and that was what the little boy very badly wanted to be himself.

  He wasn’t supposed to be present at the cock-fighting, but the very thought of it made a salt taste like blood come on his tongue, and his small body could wriggle between the legs of the Invercargill men—some of them the toughest old sports in town. Cock-fighting, which was of course illegal, was not to be had outside the stable-yards of the Governor Grey Hotel. Wylde Stark had imported the Indian game-cocks, and a wizened little silversmith went to great trouble manufacturing and engraving their inch-long spurs of chased silver. Nothing was too good for the Stark gamecocks, and they flaunted their magnificence, strutting three feet high, great arrogant fowls, their plumage ruby and black, their feathered trousers sprayed out, absurdly like cowboy pants, around those deadly striking feet. The cock-fights were duels, usually to the death; and the little boy never found anything but excitement and joy in them until one day a cock with its eye torn out refused to die, but flapped round and round the ring, helpless among the legs of the black-trousered, red-faced males. Then he ran away.*

  It should be possible for the son of a Delaware Indian to
live from day to day, stolidly forgetting all except the needs and resources of the instincts. Did it come from Madrid, the shadowy faculty of being able to see again, to remember with a sometimes terrible distinctness, the strange things and the cruel ones just as they happened?

  . . .

  His father’s face was set like a rock. He said: ‘You’re going to put them on, don’t worry.’ And James Douglas Stark—his name now contracted to the popular version, Doug—squirmed again, but didn’t weep. Neither tears nor argument was the faintest use against his father. The rebel had two choices, to be trodden underfoot or to give battle. From the time when he could walk he had preferred to give battle.

  Then a rope flicked out like a black snake and pulled him shrieking away from the fence to which he clung. His feet slithered, the rope scorching his waist; and yelling defiance, he was hauled to his father’s feet. His brother George was then commanded to sit on his head; and the world was thus darkened while Wylde Stark put on the feet of his lassoed son his first pair of boots. When it was finished, the boy felt that the last humiliation had befallen his brown toes. He scowled, looking like an overgrown Oliver Twist, was cuffed on the head and ordered off.

  On the way to school he met George Bennett, and sold his new boots for twelve marbles. They were expensive boots—but, on the other hand, George Bennett’s marbles were worth talking about, being composed in equal parts of alley tors and glimmers. He was thrashed when he went home; but as he explained only that he had thrown the boots away—nothing about the trade with George Bennett—he retained possession of the marbles, and the beautiful little sparkly lights in the hearts of the glimmers when he held them up one by one to the gas-jet atoned for all else.