Green Dolphin Street

by Elizabeth Goudge

  “Your health, ma’am,” he said.

  “Thank you, Mr. Haslam,” she replied stiffly. She would never call him Tai Haruru, the Sounding Sea, nor allow him to call William by the Maori name of Maui-Potiki with which the Maoris had honored him, calling him after the Hercules of their legends because he was so strong. She thought it ridiculous affectation for Englishmen to adopt these fancy names. And by doing so they put themselves on a level with the Maoris, as though the brown men were their equals. Englishmen were Englishmen, members of a superior race, and should not forget the fact. It was that they should not forget it that she made for them these little civilized feasts here in the wilderness.

  And Tai Haruru appreciated them, and for that she was grateful to him. “A Flemish interior,” he said now, looking about him. “Jordaens or Van Dyck. The color and composition are quite perfect.”

  She smiled coldly. Though she regarded him as half a savage, yet at the same time she had to acknowledge that whenever she had created one of her “interiors” he was always quite unconsciously the central figure in it, his careless aristocracy giving a distinction to her masterpiece that she would have been sorry to be without. She withdrew herself a little now and looked objectively at this present picture. The window that opened toward the forest was uncurtained, the door to the verandah open, as all doors were always open for fear of earthquake; and beyond them the illimitable blue of the deepening twilight, the voice of the wilds crying out distantly yet insistently, in wind and water, the brooding loneliness of this new world made a setting that intensified by its contrast the intimate brilliance of the scene within. It increased, too, the sophistication of the lighted dinner table with its silver and glass and elaborately cooked dishes, and the group of men and women from the old world seated about it erect and mannered, voicing the soft sentiments consonant with the occasion, and wearing the glowing, fastidious garments proper to the hour, with the ease of such long custom that their artificiality was not noticeable except to the suddenly sharpened perceptions of those whose souls for a moment or two stood back and watched. How absurd but yet how beautiful were the voluminous skirts of herself and Susanna, spreading over their crinolines in waves of heather purple and delphinium blue, how ridiculous yet how pretty their tiny waists, their great bell sleeves, their trinkets of gold and carnelian glowing like fire in the light of the candles. And how absurd was the cut of William’s mulberry coat and Samuel’s olive one, and how unnecessary the great white stocks that propped their chins. The human form was as completely disguised by these trappings of tradition as their emotions were hidden by their cultured talk. Was it the final achievement, or the final absurdity, of civilization, that she could smile so politely upon Tai Haruru while her heart swelled with dislike for him, that she could love her husband to the point of agony and yet sit there apparently oblivious of his presence, that Samuel and Susanna could discuss animatedly with William agricultural subjects that interested them not at all, and that all of them could endure the agonies of boned and padded garments on a hot night just so that their bodies should look a different shape from that intended by Almighty God? This type of question, that had never occurred to Marianne in the old world, occurred to her constantly in the new, where the natives went half naked and the voices of wind and water spoke only of what was true, and it confused her. At every turn the new life was continually testing the values of the old. She had always taken everything about her at its current valuation, and herself at her own, with absolute certainty, and she had looked forward with passionate eagerness to stamping her valuations upon the malleable material of the new life and the new land. But was she doing it? Her reforming zeal had had about as much effect upon William as this little civilized picture that she had created had made upon the vastness of the wilds beyond this lighted room; which was simply none at all. Was she not every bit as frustrated now as she had been on the Island? A momentary silence fell, and she looked at Tai Haruru touching the flower petals with the finger tips of one hand as though they were holy things. He turned and smiled at her.

  “It’s not what you expected?” he asked softly and mockingly. “Freedom? Scope? Satisfaction of love and ambition? You thought that here you’d have ’em all, eh? Life’s much the same, my dear, wherever you live it.”

  There were times when his disillusionment touched her sympathy so sharply that for a moment or two she failed to resent his subtle reading of her less reputable thoughts . . . for she was very near to a disillusionment as great as his own. . . . She looked at him attentively, seeking knowledge of him from his looks. Disillusioned though he was, yet in some way that she could not define he had found a peace that she had not found, and she envied his peace. There was no artificiality about Tai Haruru. The old olive-green coat that he kept for these festive occasions, shrunken to a tight fit by much washing, did not disguise the bony structure of his strong body, and his vigorous speech was always the perfect vehicle of his thought. Yet he was not out of the picture; he was the center of it, an aristocrat to his fingertips; but an aristocrat, not of one particular mode of life, but of life itself.

  “What is the distinguishing mark of an aristocrat?” she asked him suddenly.

  “Reverence,” he replied.

  “To have it is to have peace?” she asked.

  “Peace of a sort,” he said.

  He rocked his eye at her quizzically. It was never his habit to explain himself. She must think it out for herself, or else ask for an explanation. But she did not ask. She knew that were she to be drawn into an argument, she would get the worst of it as usual.

  A slight sound made them all turn their heads toward the door opening upon the verandah and that deep blue twilight, where now a few stars were shining as the sky lifted up and up to the depth of night. Dark figures, shaped out of the darkness of the night, were padding silently upon bare feet up the steps from the garden. Then they seemed to disappear, the shadows of the verandah absorbing them as they squatted down. Then both within and without the house there was a deep, listening silence, broken only by the murmuring of trees and water. It was broken quite suddenly by a voice rising up into the night with sudden passionate lament.

  “It is well with thee, O moon! You return from death, spreading your light on the little waves. Men say,

  Behold, the moon reappears;

  But the dead of this world return no more.

  Grief and pain spring up in my heart as from a fountain.

  I hasten to death for relief.”

  It was the lament for a great chief killed in the Maori war, and the Maoris sang it at this time all over the island.

  “They do not forget,” whispered William.

  And Tai Haruru lifted his thrilling, rough, deep voice and cried back in the native language, “Farewell, Hauraki! Go, taking with you your kindness and hospitality, your generosity and valor, and leave none behind you who can fill your place. Your death was noble. Your life was short; but so it is with heroes. Farewell.”

  The meal was nearly finished, but in any case it was not possible to continue the old-world festivity, for the New World had broken in; the New World so called because it was new to the white man, but in reality hoary with legend, lit with primeval fires. They got up, blew out the candles, and went out onto the verandah, lit now by the first radiance of the rising moon.

  “Waipiro? Waipiro?” came a chorus of insistent voices. “Rum? Rum? Tobacco?”

  “Tobacco, but not rum,” whispered Marianne fiercely. “Do you hear me, William? And you, Mr. Haslam? No rum. It is enough that you white men should be sodden with the drink. There is no necessity to pollute these children too.”

  Her whisper was low and passionate. To William’s great surprise, though she hated Scant and Isaac, she liked the Maoris. They were to her “the poor.” She had no sense of fear when they came out of the forest at night and squatted on her verandah. If she had not disliked him so much, she would
have asked Tai Haruru to let her help him in the little surgery that was attached to his house, where he toiled evening after evening, the power that was in his hands at the service of any native man, woman, or child who liked to ask for it. She admired him for that service; and for the fact that when they were settled in their chairs, and the tobacco jars and dishes of sweetmeats were going the round, he, like William, had heeded her word and had no glass beside him. . . . Though of what it cost him to sit still of an evening, and not absorb rum and water as the thirsty earth absorbs the rain, she had not the slightest idea, nor did she guess that his obedience to her wish was the measure of his liking for her.

  The moon rose higher and a soft light flooded the garden, seeming to draw up the scent of the flowers like incense. One by one small flames blossomed around her, and she saw dark fingers curving about the bowls of strange carved pipes. Then the scent of tobacco rose to mingle with the scent of the flowers, and there was a deep, contented silence. She lay back in her chair, letting the loveliness of the scene soak through to her weariness and ease it, looking from face to face and adoring the beauty that the magic of the hour had lent to each, even the plainest. Susanna, her work-worn hands folded quietly in her lap, was so at rest that her thin, aging face had softened into a sort of fluid loveliness, like a blossom that trembles under the moon. Samuel was leaning forward, his hands clasped tightly between his knees. No relaxation ever softened Samuel’s face; the lines of it were as taut as his spirit that was ever as a bent bow in the service of his God. Yet in the moonlight his tense face shone as though it were made not of flesh and blood but of some exquisite, tempered, white-hot metal that time would never touch. His eyes were burning as they passed from one Maori face to another, and his thin lips moved. She knew that he was praying for these children of God, his soul thirsting to gather them into the fold. Tai Haruru, pulling at his long pipe shaped like a bird, was looking at Samuel with a deep and thoughtful attention. His face, too, was beautiful, eagle-keen, carved out of dark wood, his eyes gentle as she had never seen them. . . . Reverence. . . . There was something in Samuel that he reverenced. His thought, whatever it was, must have been as the brushing of delicate wingtips upon the other man’s soul, for Samuel stirred, withdrew his eyes from the Maoris, looked at Tai Haruru and smiled. The comradeship of their meeting glances astonished Marianne, for surely Samuel with his passionate belief in God, and Tai Haruru who denied God and worshipped only life, could have little in common. And William? She could not see his face, for he sat slumped in his chair, his head bent, as though he sat there bowed down by heavy sorrow. She felt a slight stirring of resentment (for what in the world had William to be sorrowful about?), but it was quickly lost in her wonderment at the sense of power, mighty to save, that his heavy figure gave her. For William was a weak man. Yet the power was there, and it was not only physical; what the moonlight was bringing out was a spiritual quality. Yes, they were all beautiful in this unearthly moonlight, folded in this silence. She could not see herself, but her ballooning purple skirt made a glorious pool of color about her, and her folded hands were at peace.

  And then there were the children, the Maoris. A few of them she knew well: Jacky-Poto, and Kapua-Manga, the Black Cloud, William’s faithful friends and lumbermen, and Wi Rapa and Ngati-Pou, each of the four a rangatira with the light brown skin, the long head, aquiline nose and white-soled feet of perfect breeding, princes wherever they went, chivalrous and brave, kindly souls who had never in all their lives cut up a man for eating unless they had killed him quickly and painlessly first. The other Maoris who squatted contentedly puffing at their pipes were dark-skinned, the tattooing on their faces and bodies less exquisitely designed than that of the four high-caste gentlemen. But they had the same charming manners and cheerful inconsequence, the same love for the interminable telling of tales.

  “Yes, Kapua-Manga,” said Marianne, seeing his bright eyes beseechingly upon her. “Tell us how you came to Aotearoa.”

  And Kapua-Manga, who was bilingual, lifted up his voice and told his tale in an admixture of pidgin English and his own language that was queerly intriguing and effective. For each race among his listeners some single beautiful phrase would leap up suddenly in the surrounding mystery. They clung to it, treasured it, waiting for the next, linking them together, not altogether understanding the recitation, yet aware of its beauty and mysticism, its deep and reverent sense of the glory of the gods and the grandeur of man’s soul.

  Keeping the setting sun upon their left hand, said Kapua-Manga, steering by the stars, the great war canoes of the Maori people came to Aotearoa in the dawn of the world. They had migrated from the Pacific, “from the great distance,” said Black Cloud, “from the faraway places, the gathering place of souls, from Hawaiki,” drawn to the Long White Cloud by the tales that the sea rovers told of its beauty, its fine climate and fertile soil. Great and glorious were those war canoes, and Kapua-Manga sang their praises as he rocked to the rhythm of his tale on William’s verandah. He must have got a little rum from somewhere before he came, William thought, for his narration was wonderfully mellifluous. Each canoe was hollowed from a great tree, Kapua-Manga told them, so great a tree that a hundred rowers could seat themselves within it, and was exquisitely carved, painted, and inlaid, with the head of a majestic Taniwha, a magic sea monster, carved at the prow to see which way they were going. These mighty men of valor had with them their shields and spears, war trumpets, tomahawks and clubs, food, calabashes of water, and seeds to plant in the new land. Also they had their parrots (yes, even such fine parrots as the fine parrot Maui-Potiki had within his house), and their carved flutes made from the thighbones of their enemies, to which they sang sweet songs when they rested, and told old tales. And so after many weeks of journeying, guided by the setting sun upon their left hand and the great stars overhead, they came to Aotearoa the Long White Cloud and saw the great forests, and the snow upon the mountains, and the white flowers and the red flowers, the raupo and the pohutakawa, and heard the small birds singing like chiming bells, and saw the great bird, the moa, hopping this way and that, but not able to fly because he was too large, and the wild ducks and the wild pigeons, and the merry little lizards with jewels in their heads. And when they saw this beautiful country they shouted with a great shout of joy, and they pulled up their great canoes upon the white beaches, and they slung their tomahawks from their wrists, and took their spears and clubs and war trumpets in their hands, and, girded with the bell of scarlet feathers of the war god Tu, they went forth to do battle for this land, to conquer or to die. And they conquered, for each Maori was a tino tangata, a great warrior, and the few folk who lived in the land were a poor folk, and afraid, and were soon no more, their bodies eaten and their souls dispatched to Reinga to dwell with their ancestors. Then the Maori people made themselves fine villages in the forests and along the seashore, with strong pas built upon the hilltops to protect them, and sowed their seed and reaped their crops, and for centuries they grew and multiplied, and formed themselves into tribes, and fought, each tribe with the other tribe, just for the joy of the fighting. And they had their priests, their tohungas, who could speak for them with their dead and beseech the gods for them, and each village had its house set apart where the wise men taught the young boys to repeat by heart the names of their ancestors, the dying messages left by the heroes of old, and all the songs, proverbs, funeral chants, and incantations that were as precious to the Maori people as their very souls.

  But now, said Kapua-Manga sadly, the fame of Aotearoa had reached the white man also, and he had come journeying out of the great distance in his canoes with the great white sails, and he too had landed on the white beaches and had taken his musket in his hand and gone forth to conquer; and when the Maori people had withstood him, he had called to himself great warriors from across the sea who were not only girded with scarlet but coated with it also, and the Red Garment had prevailed, and the white man had cried to the Maori, “Fly aw
ay on the wings of the wood pigeon, and feed on the berries of the wood, for I have taken your land.”

  “That is not true, Kapua-Manga,” insisted William. “It is only a part of your land that we have taken. Much land is still left you. The fight is over, and now the white man and the Maori live here side by side in friendship and affection.”

  Kapua-Manga, refusing to argue, changed the subject with much courtesy and tact, took up his thighbone flute and sang the song of Reinga, the spirit land. Far to the north, upon the seashore where Tangaroa the great ocean and Tawhiri-Matea the wind strive always together, there is a cavern within a rocky hillside, and through this cavern the spirits enter Reinga. Very sacred is this cavern, so sacred that the waterfalls cease to roar as they pass by, and Tangaroa is still when he stands upon the threshold, and Tawhiri-Matea falls silent with a great gentleness. The tohungas can see the spirits of the dead flying northward, flying like the wild geese, sighing and lamenting because they must leave the sunshine of the sweet earth and pass from day to night.