As the great ship heeled over, the brightness was blotted out for Captain O’Hara by a whirling, rushing darkness; but he was not afraid as it took what he had freely offered.
If I say, Surely the darkness shall overwhelm me,
And the light about me shall be night;
Even the darkness hideth not from Thee,
But the night shineth as the day.
Chapter IV
1
It was a hateful wind. Marianne, lighting the lamp in her parlor and drawing the curtains to shut out the sight of the sickly grey evening, found no companionship in the sound of its voice in the forest, or in the voice of the creek racing along at the bottom of the garden. Surely it was flowing faster than usual tonight? It must be raining hard up in the mountains. She sighed, for if the current was too fast, William would have trouble with the barges. She wished he was safely home again. She was anxious about him, and she was lonely. A Maori woman, Kapua-Manga’s beautiful wife Hine-Moa, was sleeping with her in the house, and Tai Haruru was only a stone’s throw away, but they were not William.
She pulled her workbox toward her and took out her sewing. It was a quilt for the boy’s cot, a gay affair of birds and butterflies surrounding a nursery rhyme, worked on a pale blue ground. It reminded her of the sampler she had worked long ago, only then the embroidered border had surrounded three verses from the Forty-second Psalm. “Like as the hart desireth the water brooks, so longeth my soul after thee, O God. . . . One deep calleth another, because of the noise of the water pipes. All thy waves and storms are gone over me. . . . My soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the living God. When shall I come to appear before the presence of God?” Why put in the bit about the water pipes, Sophie had asked when she was working the sampler, why not have just the first and third verses? But the bit about the water pipes had appealed to her. . . . She dropped her work and covered her face with her hands. She had passed through so many storms already, and still she was parched and unsatisfied. Everything she wanted seemed to elude her somehow. She had not even attained to the negative sort of peace that Tai Haruru had. And yet she was a splendid wife, a good manager, an upright Christian woman. Surely God was not treating her quite right. . . . But she was going to have a son. And it was wonderful of her to be having a son at her age. . . . She picked up her sewing again, worked for a little longer, then put out her lamp and went to bed.
She kept the candles burning in her bedroom and slept only fitfully, for she felt sick and feverish and the wind and rain disturbed her. And she was more anxious than ever about William and the wood, for she could hear that the creek was in spate now, fed by swollen streams up in the mountains. The sense of coming disaster pressed heavily upon her. Truly this was at times a nightmare country. She loved its space and beauty, but dreadful things could happen in it, things that would never happen on the Island at home. She was thinking of the Island with nostalgia, when the first earthquake tremor shook the room. I’ll stay here in bed, for it’s only a little shake, she said to herself, and was ashamed of the fear that, as always, gripped her. But the second tremor was more violent, and all the crockery jangled in the kitchen as though a giant had taken the house in his two hands and was rocking it to and fro. She got out of bed that time, flung her wrapper round her and ran to stand in the doorway, calling to Hine-Moa. The Maori woman just had time to jump up from her mattress on the parlor floor and run to her and then the third tremor was upon them, the worst that Marianne had known, shaking the whole world. The house seemed tumbling about her like a pack of cards, and she heard a woman screaming and did not know it was herself.
“All is well, Ma’am, all is well,” said Hine-Moa’s gentle voice, and she found she was sitting on the floor with the Maori woman’s arms about her. The candles had gone out in her room and they were in darkness, but though she could see nothing she had the sense of dreadful desolation all about her. From somewhere or other a chill rain was beating in, and she was crying.
“What has happened, Hine-Moa?” she asked through her sobs. “Whatever has happened?”
“I think the house is hurt, Ma’am, but here in the doorway we were safe.”
“Hine-Moa, how dreadful! Was it you who screamed like that?”
“I think, Ma’am, that it was yourself,” said Hine-Moa politely.
“Disgraceful,” whispered Marianne. “I never screamed on the Green Dolphin.” And she rubbed her knuckles in her eyes like a child and tried to stop crying. It was not only disgraceful, it was humiliating to behave like this in front of a native woman. And Hine-Moa was so calm. She was, of course, used to this sort of thing in her appalling country.
“Poor lady! Poor lady!” said Hine-Moa, stroking Marianne’s wet cheek. “Do not cry, Ma’am. Soon Tai Haruru, the Sounding Sea, will be here to liberate us with his great axe.”
“If he’s not dead himself,” said Marianne.
“No, he will not be dead,” comforted Hine-Moa. “Tai Haruru will not be dead while there are those who have need of him.”
Never had Marianne longed for anyone as she longed now for the hated Tai Haruru. But her courage and control had come back to her and she longed for him silently, with no more sobs and lamentations, and she said no word to Hine-Moa of the awful feeling of illness that was growing upon her. She sat propped against the door jamb, her eyes closed, her teeth clenched against the waves of sickness that swept over her. It was bitter cold, and the roar of wind and water seemed to her deafening.
So deafening that though she longed for Tai Haruru, it seemed that she did not hear him coming. When next she opened her eyes it was to find herself lying in a pool of lantern light with Tai Haruru kneeling beside her. She had never seen such kindness in any man’s eyes, not even William’s, as there was in Tai Haruru’s as he looked at her, and when his hands touched the heavy lump of feverish pain and misery that was her body she was suddenly so strengthened that she looked up and smiled at him.
“You’re a brave woman,” he said as he lifted her. “Take the lantern, Hine-Moa. We will carry Mrs. Ozanne to my house.”
As her sickness increased, her surroundings seemed strangely to withdraw themselves, so that her consciousness seemed only to operate within the small world of her agonized body. She vaguely noticed, as Tai Haruru carried her out of it, that her home was in ruins, but the sight seemed to have nothing to do with her, and the scene of desolation out of doors, only half revealed in the pouring rain and the sickly struggling dawn, seemed as far away from her as though it were upon another planet. “My son,” she heard a voice saying. “I shall lose my son. I thought at least I should have had my son.”
“You will have your son,” Tai Haruru assured her.
“But it is too early,” she said.
“Seven months,” said Tai Haruru. “Not too early to bear a living child.”
Tai Haruru’s small house had not been so badly shaken as others in the settlement, and his austere little bedroom was still habitable. In no time at all he and Hine-Moa had established Marianne on his hard camp bed and had lit a fire and done all they could to ease her. But she was oblivious of her surroundings, drowned in pain more dreadful than anything she had ever conceived of. “The doctor,” she commanded. “Get the doctor quickly,” and did not remember that this was not a country in which the doctor lived in the next street but one in which he lived some days’ journey away.
“I am your doctor,” said Tai Haruru gently. “And Hine-Moa is your nurse.”
For a moment then she realized her situation, and cried out almost hysterically in shame and fear.
Tai Haruru stood beside her and held her hand. “Listen, Marianne,” he said, when there came to her an interval of peace from pain. “I have skill as a doctor. When I lived in the bush, Maori women would often accept my help in their extremity. I have brought many babies into the world, and so has Hine-Moa. Put yourself in our hands trustfully, be brave and
obedient, and you will bear your son alive.”
Beautiful Hine-Moa was upon her other side, smiling at her, plunging a bunch of some strange aromatic herb into a bowl of hot water. “What will they do to me?” wondered poor Marianne. “They’re just savages, both of them. What awful pagan sort of thing will they do to me? I wish Mamma was here. . . . But Mamma is dead. . . . What have I done that this awful thing should happen to me when Mamma is dead?”
Tai Haruru was still holding her hand in a firm, reassuring grip. “Forget that you dislike me, Marianne,” he said. “Remember that I like you and love William, and that I have skill as a doctor. This is the sort of thing that happens to women in a pioneer life, my dear. You chose it.”
That steadied her somehow. Yes, she had chosen it. Sophie, weeping in the parlor at Le Paradis, had warned her. But still she had chosen.
“I trust you,” she said to Tai Haruru. “And I will give as little trouble as I can.” And then the rhythmic pain swept over her again, and, scarcely aware of what she was doing, she clung to his hand as though it were all she had in the world.
Mamma. Mamma. As the dreadful leaden hours went by she thought of her mother constantly. Had her mother endured this same torture for her, and had she rewarded her with so little love? But it was too late to love Sophie now. She was dead. Did all women go through this agony whenever a child was born? Then women were greater than she had thought. Hine-Moa had had six children and was still beautiful and serene. And Charlotte had many children. She must not scream. She was sure that neither Charlotte nor Hine-Moa had ever screamed. No, she must not scream, for this was what she had wanted. This was what she had desired when she had first seen Charlotte in Dr. Ozanne’s waiting room. She had wanted the pride and dignity of motherhood. She had known then that there were things one was more afraid of being without with ease than possessing with pain. But such pain! If it went on much longer, she was sure she would die.
Tai Haruru allowed no such fears to weaken his determination that she and her child should live. She was having a very bad time, she was not young, but she was tough. And he had faith in his own gift of healing. What, exactly, this power was that was in him he did not know, but he reverenced it almost as though it were something outside himself that took possession of him by no virtue of his own, and he had hardly ever known it to fail. Suffering men and women, children, animals, birds, if he could only hold their bodies between his hands, that were the most vital part of his vital body, and empty from his spirit to theirs his passionate love of life, then he could generally save them. In the last agony, confused though she was by some herbal drink that he had given her to dull the pain, Marianne was aware of the strength of his hands, of the reiteration of his soul upon life, life, life, of Hine-Moa’s voice crying aloud some mystic words of Maori exhortation. Then her groaning body obeyed the command of his hands, her soul clung to his, anchored to his against the pull of death, and the child was born.
The room was full of sunset when she returned to possession of herself. Her body was weak and bruised and feverish, but the child had left it. Tai Haruru’s hands no longer commanded it, she alone possessed it again; it was bathed and slim and clean and no longer a thing that repulsed and horrified her. Her soul, too, was her own again. She was no longer anchored to another. She was escaping from the depths of her humiliation. It was not the pain that had been the worst of it for her, it was the shame.
Tai Haruru was standing beside the bed, smiling down upon her, this man whom she had so hated, and who had performed this tremendous office for her and seen the fearful humiliation of her body. “I am ashamed,” she whispered.
“You should be proud,” he said. “We’ve done a good day’s work, you and I. There’s a new life in the world.”
Suddenly she remembered her son, her precious son who had been fighting for his life even as she had been fighting for hers. “Let me see him,” she said. “Is all well with him?”
Tai Haruru’s smile broadened and became just very faintly tinged with mockery. “All is well with him,” he said. “Except that he’s a girl.”
2
Marianne’s physical toughness showed itself in the rapidity of her recovery. For a few days she fretted desperately over William, but a little note from him, brought back by the Maori boy, Hine-Moa and Kapua-Manga’s eldest son, who at the risk of his life had gone down the swollen creek in a canoe with the news of their safety and of the birth of the child, set her mind at rest. William’s scribbled note said that he was overjoyed to hear of her safety and that of the child, that he was safe himself and would soon be home, but the Maori village at the coast had been devastated and there had been a wreck, and there was much to do before he could start back.
“I hope no damage has been done to the barges, or to the jetty and the sheds at the coast,” Marianne said to Tai Haruru.
“They were all of stout workmanship,” he told her with a smile. She had not realized yet the extent of the damage wrought by the earthquake, and until she was stronger he did not want her to realize it. He guessed that their prosperity, for which she had worked so ambitiously, had received a serious setback. That would not disturb himself and William, but it would seriously disturb her and she had already received one very severe disappointment in the sex of her child.
With a mind at rest and a body at last at ease, Marianne was able to concentrate upon her appearance. Little had been done about it during the first few days, for the wreckage of her house had lain on top of her wardrobe, and though she had issued urgent instructions that the rescue of the box containing her nightgowns and wrappers and lace caps and the baby’s layette should be the first bit of salvage work undertaken by the settlement, the settlement had disobeyed her commands and had thought there were other things more important to do first. But at last the box was found and brought to her, and upon an afternoon of sunshine and warm peace she set about making herself presentable. Tai Haruru’s bare little bedroom, where she still had her bed because it was the only habitable room left in the settlement, had been made tidy and filled with autumn flowers, and a large cracked looking glass had been propped at the foot of the bed. “Now go,” she said a little sharply to Hine-Moa, “and take Baby with you. I know it is good for her to exercise her lungs as much as possible, but the noise she makes is not good for the tympanums of my ears, which are exceptionally delicate.”
Hine-Moa departed in some dudgeon, the baby cradled in her arms with passionate affection. Certainly the little thing made a noise out of all proportion to her size, but she was a lovely child, white-skinned and blue-eyed, and Hine-Moa deeply resented Marianne’s indifference to her. Though naturally the bearing of a male warrior to the tribe, a true tua, is the goal of every woman’s ambition, yet girl babies also must be born to be the mothers of the tuas of the future, and they should be borne with as good a grace as possible and not sent out of the room when they roar. . . . Hine-Moa closed the door with the slightest suspicion of a bang, and the baby’s yells died away in the distance.
Marianne gazed into the glass with concern. She looked absolutely frightful, and Tai Haruru had been seeing her looking absolutely frightful. Never, she thought, until she died, would she get over the humiliation of having had Tai Haruru, of all people, as her doctor during her confinement. . . . Yet if he had not been here, probably she would have died. . . . What was that Susanna had said about the tiresome man being God’s gift in her life, part of the plan of it? Well, if he had saved her and the child, she supposed that that was exactly what he was, and to continue to dislike him would be simply silly. I suppose it’s always a mistake to hate, she said to herself, because when the people you hate suddenly turn round and do great things for you, it puts you at such a ridiculous disadvantage.
She did her hair in elaborate curls and put on an elegant lace-trimmed wrapper and a cap with lavender ribbons. Then she looked at herself critically in the glass, pinching her lips and cheeks to bring the
color into them. It occurred to her that it was a great comfort not to have that wretched parrot squawking at her derisively while she did it. Old Nick was presumably dead beneath the ruins of the house, and it was not a bit of good saying his demise was not a relief to her, because it was. When there was no more that she could do for her appearance, she clapped her hands for Hine-Moa and sent her to fetch Tai Haruru. He must see her looking elegant. She must do her best, now, to make him forget what she had looked like. She must try to get their relationship back on the right footing again. Her need of his skill had made of her a little child clinging to the strength of a superior being. But the phase was past. They must be once more lady and lumberman.
“A most exquisite toilette, ma’am,” said Tai Haruru, when he had knocked and entered. “I congratulate you.” And he bowed very courteously and remained standing.
“Do sit down, Mr. Haslam,” she said with dignity.
“How very kind of you, ma’am,” he said, and sat. “What a very comfortable chair this is.”
Green Dolphin Street Page 39