Then for a good hour they saw nothing of Tai Haruru except a distant brown back, the muscles rippling and knotting as he worked like a maniac lashing the inner fence. Then he seemed to disappear altogether, and the minutes went by leaden-footed. The desperate activity seemed slackening now, and many warriors joined their families round the fires to rest and eat. Then Kapua-Manga appeared, carrying a couple of heavy cooking pots to a family group round a fire near the hut. As he passed William and Marianne he tripped over the root of a tree and fell. When he had picked himself up and gone on, they saw that he had forgotten to pick up one of the pots. After a few minutes William lifted the pot cautiously inside. It was filled with some thick sticky red soup that smelled disgustingly of rotten fish. “I couldn’t touch it, William,” whispered Marianne in horror when he showed it to her. William made no answer, but she saw the shadow of a smile on his face. Perhaps he thought Kapua-Manga had left the soup there on purpose. She doubted it, for the Maori had had a very ugly look on his face when he had picked himself up after his fall. Now that the activity was slackening there had been many ugly looks, and she found herself watching the faintly glimmering mountain peak anxiously. The conviction had come to her that when the dawn touched its snows to rose color, the preparations within the pa would be complete and the Maoris would have time to turn their attention to their prisoners. Dawn was the time for death. It seemed an instinct with the human race to dispose of its captives at dawn. It was very dark now. It was surely the hour before the dawn. If Tai Haruru was going to act, he had better act quickly.
Véronique was sleeping peacefully now within the curve of Nat’s arm. The slow minutes went by again, with a renewed outburst of activity as the warriors finished their meal and went back to work, and with a beating heart Marianne saw the mountain peak suddenly silhouetted against a lightening sky. And in another moment she saw Tai Haruru again, staggering as though drunk with weariness. He came past the hut, his face turned from them, wiping the sweat off his forehead with his forearm, and the bundle fell from his belt.
William acted with astonishing speed. Pulling Marianne back into the hut he seized the bundle, tore it open, looked at the contents, then hung a blanket over the entrance to the hut and began hacking at the roof with his knife. He pulled the thatch away in handfuls and let in the first grey glimmer of dawn.
Marianne bent over the contents of the bundle. “Rags!” she exclaimed in disgust. “Filthy rags!”
“Strip!” William commanded. “Daub yourself with that red paint all over. It’s not soup. It’s paint.”
“William!” gasped his outraged wife. “Take my clothes off? Are you mad?”
“Do as I tell you,” he said. “Quickly!”
He had already wakened Véronique and was fumbling clumsily with her clothes. “We are going to dress up, sweetheart,” he was whispering to her. “We’re going to dress up as Tapu Maoris and run about in the forest with red paint all over us. It’ll be grand fun. It’ll be the grandest Green Dolphin Country adventure we’ve ever had.”
But William was clumsy with the hooks and eyes, and Nat pushed him gently aside and in a moment had Véronique’s clothes off. He dipped a bit of rag in the pot, and with a shudder of revulsion Marianne saw the filthy red stuff trickling over her child’s little white back. Véronique was not too enthusiastic either. “It’s cold,” she complained. “Is Mamma going to undress and be painted too?”
“Yes, Mamma too,” said William.
“Never,” declared Marianne.
She had her back against the wall of the hut. Undress before these men and be smeared with the filthy paint of a Tapu Maori? She’d sooner die. She saw Tai Haruru’s idea now, and she thought it the most revolting idea of which in the circumstances it was possible to conceive. Tapu. Unclean. They were to disguise themselves as outcasts, untouchables, and so get away.
She knew all about these wretched outcasts. They handled the dead and were unclean. They were supposed to be possessed by devils, and anyone coming in contact with them was also bedeviled. They were not allowed to touch food and had to eat what was thrown to them from the ground like dogs. They must enter no house and speak to neither man nor woman of the clean. They were dressed in rags and daubed from head to foot with a red paint made from stinking shark oil and red ochre mixed, red being the funereal color. If they were not insane to start with, they soon became so.
“No, William,” she said hoarsely to her husband, who was advancing with intent to unhook her down the back. “I refuse utterly to be put to this humiliation.”
He took her roughly by the shoulders. “It is this or the most horrible death of which you can conceive,” he told her. “You may prefer death, but I do not—neither for myself nor Nat, and least of all for my wife and child. Never in all our married life have I commanded you. I command you now. Do as I tell you.”
This was the first time she had encountered William in this mood. That hidden depth of strength in his weakness, revealed to her hitherto only by a chance attitude, had now taken possession of his whole personality. She had not seen him when he had fought for the life of Captain O’Hara and Nat. She had not the slightest suspicion that it was his heroic striving for her happiness, and not her own efforts, that had brought about his moral redemption. She did not understand at all that in the saving of life this man fulfilled the purpose of his birth; she only knew that in William at this moment she had more than met her match, and she gave in. With flaming cheeks and bent head she suffered him to unhook her down the back.
Never was so complete a transformation wrought in so short a time. William and Nat worked fast, and Marianne, once she had yielded her will, worked faster than either of them. They covered their bodies with the filthy-smelling red paint and draped their nakedness with the rags. They sheared off Véronique’s curls with the knife and bound rags round William’s head and hers to hide their bright hair. Then Nat flung Véronique’s curls and their clothes in disorderly fashion upon the ground, and cut his arm and let the blood run out upon them, so that to any entering Maoris it would seem that without doubt other murderers had got there first. And all the while, as they worked, they were conscious of a steady, gentle rasping sound at the back of the hut, as though someone were sawing at the wall from the outside, and once Marianne, and William looked at each other and smiled. It did not surprise them when the frail raupo wall gave way and Tai Haruru’s tattooed face looked serenely in upon them. He looked at the bloodstained clothes upon the floor and nodded in appreciation of Nat’s inspiration. “Bring the paint pot,” he said briefly.
They climbed through the hole in the wall and found themselves in the thicket behind, where Tai Haruru hacked a hole in the ground and buried the pot. “Now I leave you,” he said. “Push your way straight through the thicket to the other side and crouch down there. When you’re seen, you’ll be hounded from the pa. The rest is with the gods. Good-by.”
He left them, struggling through the bushes to the right, while they obediently pushed their way forward. The bushes were so thick that the thorns tore their skin and Marianne’s black hair was pulled over her eyes in wild disorder. Véronique, though her father carried her in his arms, was nevertheless considerably scratched and had hard work not to cry. But she didn’t, because William was whispering to her that she was not to be frightened, whatever happened. Didn’t all their Green Dolphin Country adventures come out all right in the end?
They had come to the further side of the thicket and crouched down in its shadows. The Maoris were all about them now. To right and left of them family parties were squatting round cooking pots hanging over fires, and just in front of them several warriors, of whom one was Tai Haruru, were at work cleaning out the inner ditch. The dawn had come now, and the flames of the fires, and of the torches that had not yet been extinguished, were only the ghosts of themselves against its light.
Tai Haruru straightened himself in the ditch, rubbed an achin
g back and turned toward them. For a moment his gaze was fixed in speechless horror, then he let out a yell and pointed a shaking finger at them. “Tapu! Tapu!” he screeched. “Unclean! Unclean! Devils in the pa. Devils in the midst of the pa bringing bad luck. Hound them out! Hound them out! Tapu! Tapu!”
Pandemonium suddenly broke loose. Men and women and children came running, looked and screamed. Tai Haruru, Kapua-Manga and Jacky-Poto, shrieking out imprecations and curses, leaping up and down and brandishing their tomahawks, gave no Maori any chance to exercise any wits he might possess. Distracted with superstitious fear, not a single man or woman connected these terrible devils in their midst, who must have crept into the pa for protection under cover of darkness, with the prisoners in the hut. Their one idea was to get them out before they brought terrible evil upon them. They might not touch them with their hands, and to kill them would be to have their dead bodies in the pa, but they could be driven out with spears and stones.
“Run!” commanded William, leaping to his feet and leading the way, with Véronique in his arms.
They were not far from the opening in the first fence and it was a short run, but even so, Marianne was to repeat it in her nightmares for the rest of her life. The shrieks and curses seemed like a suffocating evil smoke through which one had to fight one’s way out of this terrible chimney. Stones whizzed in the air, and once a spearpoint pricked her body. Bent low to the ground to avoid the stones, she fixed her eyes upon William’s back and ran. She could hear Nat stumbling and panting behind her. She saw William leap the first ditch with Véronique. There were three ditches. Could she possibly jump them? Could Nat, old as he was, with his wounded leg not yet healed? Yet before she realized it, her desperation had carried her across the first ditch with ease, and then the second. At the third leap she missed her footing and would have fallen, but William swung round and grabbed her wrist and pulled her to safety. Then they were through the opening in the last fence, the peke-rangi, and running down the hill toward the deserted village. Nat had managed the ditches. He was running beside her, grinning at her, looking like a great, red, hairy ape, the most hideous spectacle she had ever seen. Stones were still whizzing through the air about them, and one grazed her shoulder and cut it, but the dreadful sound of the curses was dying away. . . . Only one Maori was still following them. She could hear his padding bare feet and his insults shouted in the Maori language, that changed quite suddenly to injunctions in English. “Straight on. Through the village and into the forest. Don’t stop till I say.”
The village was left behind, and they were stumbling along a rough track through the ferns and great trees. Their unaccustomed bare feet were soon bruised and painful, but Tai Haruru, driving them on from behind, gave them no respite. “Go on,” he said. “Right away out of this as far as you can. Go on. Go on.”
Presently, when they were out of sight of the pa and he had satisfied himself that there were no pursuers, he sped on ahead of them and led the way. The going was fast and hard, but the mad impetus of their escape kept them at it; and presently the track began to wind uphill, and Tai Haruru’s loping run slackened to a swinging walk. How at home in the woods he was, thought Marianne confusedly. In spite of his years he moved as easily as a wild deer, and his tattooed brown body was scarcely distinguishable from the tree trunks about him. But he still had his air of careless aristocracy, that made him as always the center of the picture. Watching his quiet movements, peace came to her, that special emanation of peace that comes from the aristocrats of life, making an oiled patch in the troubled waters. Now that she no longer hated him, she was able to share his peace.
A harsh, rattling sound broke the stillness of the woods and Tai Haruru stopped and swung around. His face was suddenly contorted, then became immobile as a mask. “No need to hurry now,” he said in an expressionless voice. “They’ll have their hands full at the pa. The Red Garment has attacked.”
He turned round and went on again, but very slowly this time; and while he had moved before with the grace of a wild creature, he moved now like an old man. None of the others dared speak to him. It seemed that in saving them he had not been able to stave off death from the Maoris after all.
They climbed on and on and up and up, and the sun rose high and it was abominably hot, yet with Tai Haruru in his present mood they dared not ask him to let them stop and rest. Nat was now so lame that he could scarcely drag himself along, yet whenever Marianne looked back at him anxiously over her shoulder, he grinned cheerfully. His appearance was indescribable and so was William’s. As for her own, Marianne dared not let her mind’s eye contemplate it for a moment, or she would have dropped down dead in her tracks with shame. A huge cliff loomed up above them, and the fern fell away like waves foiled by an obstinate island thrusting its grey head up through the sea. They entered a cleft in the rock and had to climb, now, clinging with hands as well as feet. William, who had had Véronique riding upon his back, had to put her down and let her climb by herself.
The gully brought them out abruptly upon a narrow ledge of rock before the entrance to a large cave, and Tai Haruru spoke at last. “Turn your heads away and pass it quickly,” he commanded them. “It is a torere.”
Marianne shuddered as he led them quickly past the cavern’s mouth. A torere was a cave where the bones of the dead were flung by the Tapu Maoris, and it was a haunted spot, seldom visited by the living, and for that reason a good hiding place. To the right of the cave they climbed again, and here there was no gully and they had to scramble up the sheer rock face. It was lucky, Marianne thought, that as a child she had learned to climb cliffs, and that Véronique had the Island heritage in her blood; she was climbing like a little monkey, as bravely and cleverly as Marguerite had long ago climbed the cliff above La Baie des Petits Fleurs.
Panting and exhausted, they came out at last upon the summit of the torere and found a small and beautiful amphitheater in the rocky hillside, carpeted with grass and flowers, a place so lovely that it might have been the anteroom of Paradise. Wind-tossed mountain larches, bending over from the serried ranks of them that covered the hill above, gave shade, and far up above the larches, nearer to them than it had been in the pa, was that glorious snow-covered mountain peak lit with the sun. The little amphitheater was backed by a wide, shallow cave. Blankets were spread upon its floor, and in front of the entrance a pot hung over a fire. Hine-Moa was cooking something in the pot, while swinging on a branch over her head was a truncated green object which upon closer inspection proved to be Old Nick without his tail. He gazed in dumbfounded astonishment, not untinged with mockery, at the spectacle presented by his family, opened his beak wide, but for once found himself deprived by shock of the appropriate comment. Yet he showed undoubted pleasure in the reunion and flew at once to the little red-limbed creature with the filthy rags bound around her head who cried out with such joy at the sight of him. Véronique’s delight was sweet to see. Now she was happy. Rags and dirt and fatigue and hunger meant nothing to her now that all the people she loved were once more gathered together in one place.
2
Sweeter even than the safety, more full of comfort than food and drink, was the knowledge that Hine-Moa’s friendship had never wavered. She was too full of lamentations over their pitiable condition to have any coherent explanation to offer, but when they had eaten and rested and she had bathed their sore feet, Tai Haruru sat cross-legged with his pipe in his mouth and filled up the gaps in their knowledge of what had happened.
At Wellington he had asked for a small detachment of redcoats to ride with him to the settlement and bring back a white woman and her child to safety. But the officer in command of the garrison had thought the plea unnecessary; much valuable time had been spent in argument and a whole day wasted before Tai Haruru got his own way and rode off again with a young officer named Lewis and four men, and when they got to the settlement it was only a heap of smoking ruins.
“Nothing le
ft?” asked William.
“Nothing at all,” said Tai Haruru somberly. “Every man dead. Every building reduced to ashes. Every barge destroyed. Our situation is far worse than after the earthquake.”
William and Marianne said nothing. There was nothing to say. Houses can be built again, but nothing brings back murdered men.
The young officer, who had ridden with Tai Haruru in tolerant amusement, unconvinced by the older man’s misgivings, had blazed out into furious anger at the sight of the devastation, and when he had helped Tai Haruru to bury the dead, and to satisfy himself that William and Marianne, Véronique and Nat, were not among them, had immediately ridden off to Wellington again to arrange for a punitive expedition.
“I asked him not to do that,” said Tai Haruru heavily. “I knew of this pa in the forest and I said that if, as I imagined, you had been captured and taken to it, to attack it would probably be to seal your death warrant. I asked him, in order to save unnecessary bloodshed, to let the matter rest and to let me go alone to the pa and see what I could do. He would not agree to that. He said, with reason, that if it was possible for me to get you out singlehanded, I would have time to do it before he and his men arrived, and that the destruction of the settlement must not go unpunished, though he would be as merciful as it was possible to be. Then he rode back to Wellington, taking with him a letter to Samuel Kelly, telling him and Susanna that you were not among the dead at the settlement and to expect us soon. We are making now for a settlement I know of northeast of Wellington, at the edge of the forest. There we’ll borrow clothes and food, and a wagon for the rest of the journey.”
Marianne thought with nostalgia of Samuel and Susanna, and a wagon and clothes and English cooking. Had she once, in another life, declared that she did not want ever again to stay with Samuel and Susanna? She must have been mad.
Green Dolphin Street Page 49