Chapter III
1
The idealism of the new settlers submerged William almost at once in the persons of Samuel Kelly and his wife Susanna, who with warmhearted generosity flung open their hospitable door to him for as long as he liked to remain; which would not be for long, William decided almost at once, for the passionate, all-pervading piety of the Kelly household was a little oppressive to his easygoing temperament. He was inclined to resent the fact that Captain O’Hara immediately upon landing dumped him upon a parson. It was treating him like a child, he thought, a naughty child who must be forcibly kept upon the path of virtue.
“Who else am I to impose ye upon but a parson? Can ye tell me that now?” Captain O’Hara demanded, when he noted this slight resentment in William’s eyes. “Ye must be imposed upon some poor besotted fool, ye can’t sleep in the open. An’ ’tis always good policy, son, if ye have inordinate demands to make, to make ’em of a parson. He can’t refuse ye a kindness, ye see, without shamin’ his God. He mayn’t like sharin’ his vittles and his fireside with young vagabond seamen from God knows where, but if he don’t do it his Christ won’t know him at the day of judgment, as expressly stated in Matthew twenty-five. So ye can always impose on a parson, son, an’ get your vittles dirt cheap.”
But there was no shadow of unwillingness upon Samuel Kelly’s eager face when William was commended to his fraternal care. His sallow features lit up as though a light had been kindled behind thin alabaster, his deep, dark eyes blazed fiercely, the grip of his delicate hand all but made William yelp. This was pioneering Evangelical piety, white-hot in its passion for souls. William had not met it before and hoped he would not meet it again, for that hot, firm grip upon his hand felt to him almost like a grip upon his spirit, that he wished to be possessed by no one but himself and Marguerite. Later in his life he was to revise his opinion of Samuel Kelly, was to revere him as he revered no one except Marguerite, but at this first meeting he did not feel at home with him. This was not his sort of man. Nothing easygoing about Samuel, nothing of the rollicking Green Dolphin about him, and nothing either of the serenity and love of life that softened Marguerite’s austerity and made her such an adorable companion.
For Samuel, so he told William and Captain O’Hara when three days later they sat with him in the glow of the evening light in the bare little living room of his parsonage, had never in his youth had any reason to love life. He had been one of twelve children, born of poor parents in the industrial north, in those bitter days when half naked women dragged coal in the mines, and little children worked in the weaving sheds for such long hours that in winter they did not know what it was to see the sun. Samuel had been one of them. He had grown up with a shrunken, sickly body, eyes that had looked upon little beauty but yet had a questioning look in them, as though they knew they had been created for some purpose other than to be dimmed by semidarkness and foul air, a precocious and brilliant mind that had sucked up knowledge of every kind from God knew where, and because of that mind a soul embittered and infuriated by social injustice and the apparent hopelessness of pain. The battle of reform fought by organized labor had had no more bitter fighter in its ranks than he, Cobbett no more ardent disciple. It was not for himself only that he had fought, for from the very beginning his thirst for souls had been an integral part of him, it had been for the dumb and suffering poor, for his unborn children and his country’s soul. For though he had seen few of her beauties, he loved England. There was good yeoman stock in him, and somehow, somewhere, through some gleam of rare sunlight or some broken snatch of bird song in the heavens, she had stretched out a finger and touched his heart, and he could have wept that the England who had won Waterloo could be guilty of Peterloo. He had been present when that orderly concourse of working men and women, assembled at St. Peter’s Fields, Manchester, to demand parliamentary reform, had been shot down by a charge of yeomanry. He had been one among the hundreds of seriously injured and for weeks had lain in the garret of a friend’s house suffering the tortures of the damned, and likely to have lost his reason had it not been for the visits of a little old parson in a shabby black coat and an old-fashioned white wig, who climbed up the rickety attic stairs again and again to sit beside him and discourse upon the cross of Christ. The little man had been exceedingly obstinate. The rain that dripped through the roof had disconcerted him not at all, nor the stench of the neglected sickroom, nor the indifference, and sometimes the curses, of the wretched man in the bed. His had been the white-hot fanaticism of Evangelicalism at that time, that surging rebirth of faith that had swept England in reaction from the formalism of the eighteenth century. He had believed with all his heart and soul, with no shadow of doubt anywhere, that in what he had to say lay the salvation not only of this man but of the whole human race. Faith such as his moves more than mountains, it moves even the hardened hearts of embittered men. It had moved, at last, even Samuel Kelly’s heart. Obsessed as he had been by the apparent uselessness of pain, this notion of a suffering God, ransoming human souls through the slow dropping of His blood, of a fraternity of His followers who as His mystical suffering body continued to bleed and to redeem, had won him utterly. Somehow, somewhere, England had touched his heart to give himself to suffer for her sake, but in the midnight darkness of his little attic, as out of the depths of his own pain he had looked with awe upon the pain of God, Christ had broken his heart and then healed it again to beat forever for His sake. When he had crawled out of bed at last, lamed for life by his injuries, without material help or prospects of any sort, it had been to look out at a world suddenly irradiated with glory, utterly transformed by the fact that for him now, at last, pain had meaning.
Incapable of physical labor, he had gone to live with the old parson and had become his secretary. He had read voraciously, his fine mind fulfilling itself most gloriously; he had studied for the ministry and become a priest; he had married Susanna, the old parson’s housekeeper, a mousy-quiet, grey-eyed, soft-voiced woman whose devotion to the gospel of Christ expressed itself in unceasing service to the men who preached it. Susanna had never been at any time a woman whom anybody noticed very much, but she could work her fingers to the bone with more to show for it and less to say about it than any woman living.
But in the new loyalty to Christ and the new fight under the banner of His cross Samuel had not forgotten the old loyalty to England and the old fight for her suffering people. He had remained a disciple of Cobbett and an ardent trade unionist. But Peterloo had destroyed something more in him than the proper functioning of his left leg; it had destroyed also his belief that social justice could ever be established on the soil of England while the bulk of the people remained so utterly blind to the vision that seemed to light the eyes of the minority only. His thoughts, like the thoughts of many of his kind, had turned westward to the new lands. If, out there, one could build the perfect community, then, perhaps, beloved England would see, take heed, and do likewise. When a number of his Manchester trade unionist friends had decided to emigrate to the new colony of New Zealand, the call had come to him to offer to go with them. The old parson was dead now, and he had no ties in England. His offer had been accepted, and he and Susanna had been among the crinolined, top-hatted company who had landed at the Bay of Islands on January the twenty-ninth, eighteen hundred and forty.
This was the story that he told to William and Captain O’Hara. Captain O’Hara was not staying at the Parsonage—not he—but he had strolled up to say a last good-by to William, for tonight he would go on board the Green Dolphin, and very early tomorrow he would sail for Auckland to pick up a cargo of sealskins for China.
Susanna, who had finished washing up the dishes used in a supper so meager that it had done no more than whet the edge of William’s colossal appetite, had glided silently into the room and sat darning by the window, straining her eyes in the fading light, but determined, for reasons of economy, not to light the lamp until she was obliged. Willia
m liked her, and had been courteous and kind to her as he was to all women, but it is to his discredit that though he returned the smile that lit up her worn, plain face whenever their eyes met, he was without the imagination to realize that he was eating her out of house and home. Susanna would have given him their last crust, and still smiled, but he would not have known that it cost her more than all Sophie’s rounds of roast beef put together. He longed for Sophie and the luxury of Le Paradis. He longed for his father and the shabby comfort of Green Dolphin Street. He longed above all for Marguerite. And he would never see them again. He could not now write that letter to Marguerite asking her to marry him. He felt that he could not even send her the carved wooden necklace that hung round his neck, for it had come from a place that could not even be thought of in connection with Marguerite. He had written a letter to Sophie telling her the bare facts of what had happened. It was spotted all over with the stupid great tears he had shed when he wrote it. It was in his pocket, and presently he would walk down to the jetty with Captain O’Hara and give it to the skipper of a schooner that was setting sail for England in the morning. They would set sail together on the ebb tide, Captain O’Hara for China and his letter for England, his last two links with home, and when they had both gone, he would be utterly alone. His wretchedness surged over him again, and he moved restlessly, kicked the cat entirely by accident, felt he could bear the gaze of Samuel’s eyes no longer, got up, knocked over Susanna’s workbasket, and went out.
2
The spring wind caught him as he left the fragile little house, that New Zealand wind, speaking with its multitude of voices, that was to be his companion for so many years and come in the end to feel like a living and godlike immanence of power. The perpetual sweep of its wings seemed to burnish the stars to a greater brilliance, and on the earth the tread of its feet passed like a cleansing fire. The house stood high, and he could look down on a jumble of wooden roofs to the ruffled waters of the harbor with the mountains rising beyond. So clear was the air from the sweeping of the wind that the mountains looked as though carved out of crystal, and very near. He could have put out his hand and touched them. Suddenly he seemed to hear Marguerite’s voice describing her own country. “The light is clear and the wind cold, and there aren’t any lies or subterfuges.”
Moving restlessly, he paced up and down until Captain O’Hara joined him, then silently they made their way down through the swaying shadows and the dappled moonlight to the harbor where the ships rocked at anchor with the wind singing in their shrouds. Two dinghies lay beside the jetty, one loaded with stores for the schooner that would sail for England, the other waiting for Captain O’Hara. William delivered his letter to the man in the schooner’s dinghy and then turned dumbly to the man at his ride.
“Well, keep a good heart, son,” said Captain O’Hara, his great hand descending like a sledge hammer upon William’s shoulder. “I’m not much of a hand with a pen, unless I’ve taken a drop, but I’ll make shift to drop ye a line now an’ again. An’ as trade develops, maybe the Green Dolphin will be often back an’ forth between the old country an’ the new, an’ I’ll be able to keep an eye on ye. But remember, son, that there’s always as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it. It’s hard to part with the old friends, but the new ones are jolly good fellows who’ll be needin’ ye as you’ll be needin’ them. There’s stuff in that little parson, son. I’ve never been one for religion, but yet I’ve never been what ye could call an unbeliever. What I say is, nothin’ don’t seem impossible once you’ve clapped eyes on a whale. Well God bless ye, son. Don’t fret over past mistakes. Better keep away from the bottle today than waste time countin’ yesterday’s empties.”
Captain O’Hara exhaled the last breath of his homily with relief, crushed William’s shoulder almost to pulp, and climbed into the dinghy. The two men in her, one of whom was Nat, looked at William kindly, but he stood with head bent, hearing the soft dip of the oars in the water, the creak of the rowlocks, the sound of the wind, but not able to watch the going from him of all that was left of the past, or to look out over the harbor to where the raking masts of the Green Dolphin were etched against the background of the crystal mountains. Even when minutes had passed he could not bear to look at her, or at Captain O’Hara climbing aboard her. He looked once, listlessly, at the schooner that was to carry his letter, a poor little craft that did not look very seaworthy, and then he turned and stumbled away into the cold wind that blew down the alleyways between the houses.
It was a desire for warmth more than anything else that made him pause outside the half open doorway of Hobson’s Saloon. There was a fire inside. He could hear the crackle of the flames, and a bar of light lay across his path as though to stop him from going farther. Then he heard a great roar of laughter from inside, and smelled a most appetizing smell. His empty heart, longing for comfortable companionship, and his empty stomach, completely unsatisfied by Susanna’s dainty supper, then rose up and took charge. He pushed the door wide and went in.
Instantly he felt at home. In spite of the heat, the noise, the atmosphere that could be cut with a knife, this was his sort of place. The wood fire on the hearth sent clouds of smoke into the room with every gust of wind, but it gave forth a glorious heat, and a kettle hung over its flames was whistling cheerfully and belching forth clouds of jolly steam. The lamp hanging from the blackened rafters was smoking a little, but it burned brightly enough to illumine the rough wooden counter at the far end of the long room with its rows of bottles and twinkling, well-polished glasses. Two trestle tables ran the length of the room, and sitting round them on long benches were some twenty men, eating, drinking, smoking, playing cards, talking, laughing, cursing, quarreling, with Hobson with his broken nose and merry eyes and wooden leg stumping about them ministering to their needs. Mrs. Hobson, red-faced, jolly, broader than she was long, bustled back and forth from the kitchen with plates of steaming stew and hunks of bread and cheese. Before he knew what had happened to him William was seated at the extreme end of one of the tables devouring stew, a glass of hot toddy beside him, gazing with delight through a blue haze of tobacco smoke at the men about him and returning their rough jests with vigor and good humor. They accepted him instantly, and asked no questions. That, William soon found, was the chief point of etiquette in this society. The convict settlements of Australia were not far away, and the daring could find means to break away from them, and mutinies at sea were of common occurrence, and sometimes it was necessary to swim for it or die. In this society you did not ask a man where he had come from, and he did not ask you.
Yet there was one man who seemed to be not quite of this company, though utterly at home in it. He sat opposite William, looking at him with interest. He was silent, yet without movement or speech he dominated the whole room. He was tall and thin, with bent shoulders. Hard labor and the passing of the years had contorted and hardened his limbs to queer, crooked shapes, but he gave no impression of deformity, as Nat did. So of the earth was he that he looked more like a tree than a man, one of those tough old pine trees that nothing in the way of weather except a thunderbolt will ever get the better of. He was immensely strong and vigorous. His eyes were dark and somber but as full of vitality as the curly, grizzled hair at his temples. His skin was the color of old oak, so roughened and seamed by exposure to weather that the scar of an old wound that cut across his head and ran down one side of his face was scarcely noticeable. He wore a pair of homespun trousers girt about his lean middle with a leather belt, and an old coat tinted every conceivable color by sun and rain. He wore neither cravat nor waistcoat, and his shirt was open at the neck showing a strong column of a throat with veins like whipcord, and an immensely powerful chest from which issued a rough, deep voice with a sad and thrilling quality about it, an echoing quality, as though from the great sounds of nature it had caught the mourning and the angry resignation of the trumpet notes but missed the murmuring undertones of hope. No, there was no h
ope about him, only a somber endurance and an iron pride. He ate nothing, but absorbed hot rum and water equably, relentlessly, without cessation, like the parched earth sucking in the rain. Yet it seemed to have no effect on him. The hand that held his glass remained as steady as a rock, and the hand that lay on the table, the crooked fingers curved about his gun, looked as though carved out of dark stone; until with a disconcerting suddenness he stretched it across the table and reached for William’s throat, when those dark talons of fingers looked more alarmingly alive than anything that William had ever seen.
But he intended no harm. William’s shirt also was open at the throat, and he had seen the carved necklace that William was wearing round his neck; for the stupid, sentimental, childish reason that Lung-mu reminded him of Marie-Tape-Tout at home. He lifted it over William’s head, moved his gun and glass to stand within the protecting circle of his arms laid upon the table, and took the necklace into his two hands. William, dumbfounded, watched his hands. They held the necklace as though they loved it, the fingers curved questioningly, the balls of the thumbs moving lightly over the exquisite little carvings; just so had William seen Nat holding the spokes when he stood his trick at the wheel. His grim mouth relaxed with a slight smile, and his eyes softened. Then he tossed the necklace back to William and repossessed himself of his drink and his gun.
But a quick flash of liking had sprung up between the two of them. William, his drink finished, found that with the jerk of an eyebrow and the flash of a coin his new friend had stood him another.
Green Dolphin Street Page 24