Green Dolphin Street

by Elizabeth Goudge

  Chapter IV

  1

  In the bare little guest room of the Parsonage at Wellington Marianne was making a leisurely toilette, and sniffing appreciatively yet critically the scents of roast mutton and mint sauce that floated up from below. But the appreciation outweighed the criticism; which had not been the case upon her previous visits to Susanna. She had been ill, and now she was convalescent and excessively hungry, and not disposed to cavil at good food, even though it had not been prepared according to her own methods. Moreover, she was not the Marianne she had been. Although with returning health and strength sufficient of her old self-will had reappeared to assuage any anxiety her husband and friends might have been feeling upon her behalf, yet it was self-will with a difference. Before taking her own way, she now subjected it to a very strong scrutiny. The shocking discovery that her way was not necessarily good because it was hers had been epoch-making in her life, and now she did her best to put all her wishes to the touchstone of objective excellence before imposing them on her family.

  She doubted if her decision to leave North Island and the timber trade and start their life afresh in South Island as sheep farmers would be popular with that family; William had never been to South Island, he knew little or nothing about sheep, and he was intensely conservative; Tai Haruru would hate leaving his Maoris, and Nat now hated journeys of any sort or kind; but she was quite convinced that to put her child’s welfare before everything else was what every mother ought to do. Her decision was therefore the right one, and she would break it to them all at dinnertime.

  She looked at the cheap clock on the mantelpiece. Another ten minutes. Shocking to think that she had only left her bed in time to dress for dinner. Tomorrow she would get up for breakfast, for she was well now, and there must be an end of this laziness. She had been doing nothing for a week, first at the settlement at the edge of the forest where Susanna, guessing that this was the spot Tai Haruru would make for, had come to meet them, and where kind folk had taken them all in for three days because she was too ill to travel, and then for three more days at the Parsonage, and that was far too long a period of idleness in a life that materially as well as spiritually had to be rebuilt from the foundations.

  For they had just nothing now, she and William, except a small sum in the bank that might, or might not, suffice to start them in the new life. Even their clothes had gone this time. The hideous dun-colored gown she was wearing was Susanna’s. Nothing that she had on was hers except the greenstone earrings which had hung fantastically in her ears all through their adventures, even when she had been disguised as a Tapu Maori. She looked at herself in the glass with a shudder of distaste when her toilette was finished. Her hair was grey, now, and her sallow face lined. She looked an old woman. Impossible to imagine that she was the same Marianne as the girl who had dressed herself in green and cherry red and painted her cheeks with geranium petals on the day of the Review. And Marguerite, who had gone whirling round the room on that far-off day in white frills and blue ribbons—what did she look, now, dressed in black serge? She did not think of her sister very often nowadays, and with the passing of the years found the duty letters that she wrote to her more and more difficult to compose, so great was the separation between them now that Marguerite was both a Catholic and a nun. Yet though the news that Marguerite had taken the habit of religion had caused her to express herself to William in terms of outrage and horror, she had not in her heart been sorry about it. She had not stopped to search for the reason for this content, she had just felt vaguely that now William was more completely hers than he had been. William himself had taken the news in silent stupefaction, though he had read Marguerite’s letter twice over, the final paragraph several times, and then without a with-your-leave or a by-your-leave had decamped with it into the garden. In some dudgeon she had asked for the letter back again next time she saw him, but meanwhile the tiresome man had been into the forest and had lost it there. He showed little interest in Marguerite nowadays. Probably he had almost forgotten her.

  The dinner bell sounded, and she rustled her way down the steep stairs to the living room. Somehow or other, by some personal magnetism, she could get a rustle out of the calico petticoats from which Susanna herself could only coax a faint whisper, and, positively, as she came into the parlor, she looked almost chic. Susanna gazed at her in admiration. By turning up the hem and taking tucks round the bodice she had given to the dun-colored gown a fit it had never had when it draped Susanna’s lanky form. She had dressed her grey hair quite perfectly and tied a green ribbon round her waist to match her green earrings. They all, with the exception of Samuel, who was not there, and Old Nick who was eating a lump of sugar in his new cage and taking no notice of anybody, rose respectfully to their feet as she made her superb entrance.

  “Well done, ma’am,” said Tai Haruru. “That is a more becoming costume than rags and paint.”

  She put him in his place with a cold glance, for why must he remind her of past humiliation? Then she laughed, for she did not resent her humiliation. For some unknown reason she was a happier woman because of it.

  She glanced round the table. Yes, they were all there except Samuel; Susanna, William, and Véronique, who were also sleeping at the Parsonage, and Nat and Tai Haruru, who slept out with neighbors but were today Susanna’s guests at dinner. She was sorry that Samuel was absent just today when she was going to break to them her plans for the future, but it was more important that Nat and Tai Haruru should be present.

  “Are we waiting for Mr. Kelly?” she asked, meanwhile motioning to William to take his place at the head of the table and carve the joint.

  “I expect he has been called to some sick person,” said Susanna in her gentle voice. “So we won’t wait. Please to be seated, Marianne.”

  She need not have spoken, for William, automatically obeying his wife, was already sharpening the carving knife, and Marianne was already seated. She slipped deprecatingly into the chair at the end of the table, opposite William, feeling that the place should have been Marianne’s, wishing that Mr. Haslam would not push her chair in for her with quite such an air, or Nat bother to bring her a footstool. The joint was as Marianne liked it, she thought, but she was terribly afraid that she had overcooked the apple pie.

  And so she had. But Marianne, when it came, did not comment upon the fact; merely set aside upon the edge of her plate those portions of pastry that were a little burnt. Unquestionably she had changed. Though she was still Marianne, she was a much nicer Marianne, thought Susanna.

  “I’ve been thinking about our future,” Marianne said presently. “It would be best, I think, to leave North Island and go south. Véronique, darling, have you finished? You may run out into the garden and play with the cat. Aunt Susanna will excuse you. . . . It is for the child’s sake,” she said to the four grownups when Véronique had gone. “She has such dreadful nightmares. I would like to take her right away south where there will be no Maoris and no fighting. It is for the child’s sake.”

  Old Nick dropped his sugar and gave a derisive squawk with a twist to it, that somehow sounded like a question mark.

  “For the child’s sake,” Marianne repeated a little louder. Then she glanced at Nat, who sighed, and then nodded and smiled at her. Yes, he approved. It would mean another of the long arduous journeys that he hated, but what of that when it was for the child? William’s mouth had fallen open in stupefaction. Tai Haruru, smiling faintly, was applying himself to a second helping of apple pie, and from all the evidence that his inscrutable face gave to the contrary, she might not have spoken.

  “South Island?” ejaculated William. He turned to Tai Haruru. “What are the timber prospects in South Island?”

  “Not too bad,” said Tai Haruru laconically. “Mrs. Kelly, this is the best apple pie I have ever eaten.”

  “There’s a great future for sheep farming in South Island, so I’m told,” said Marianne. “I
think we should find wool more profitable than timber.”

  “You’re talking nonsense, Marianne,” said William, suddenly recovering himself. “What lumbermen know about sheep could be put into a thimble, and then there’d be room for a pint of beer.”

  “You can learn,” said Marianne. “Neither you nor Mr. Haslam are devoid of intelligence.”

  “What, exactly, are your plans, ma’am?” asked Tai Haruru in a voice of silk.

  “Sell our land at the settlement,” said Marianne. “Then take ship to South Island. When we’re there, buy a wagon, horses, cooking utensils, all that’s needed for a long journey. Then trek south.”

  “Sounds like the migration of the Children of Israel to the Promised Land,” said Tai Haruru drily. “I did read the Bible once. It bored me, but portions of it are still in my memory. What’ll you eat in the wilderness, ma’am?”

  “Better take all the food we can with us in the wagon,” said William gloomily. “And where did you think of settling, Marianne?”

  “Oh, we’ll light upon some pleasant pastureland,” said his wife airily. “And spend our bit of capital on it, and upon the hire of expert labor, and there’ll soon be nothing about sheep that we don’t know.”

  There was a short silence.

  “But why sheep?” asked William dismally. “If it’s for Véronique’s good that we should go south, why then, go south we must. But why wool? I know timber. I love it. Why can’t we stick to timber?”

  “Because there’s a bigger future for wool,” said Marianne.

  “How do you know that?” demanded her husband.

  “Whenever I come to Wellington I listen to men talking,” said Marianne. “I don’t go about in a dream, as you do. I make it my business to listen and learn. And you know, William, I’ve an instinct for these things. I just know we could make money in wool.”

  “You’re sure what you call your instinct is not just association of ideas?” asked Tai Haruru. “As I told you, I once read the Bible, and now I can never think of sheep without immediately connecting them with the prosperity of Job.”

  “At one period he lost the lot and had boils,” said William gloomily.

  “Just a bad year,” said Tai Haruru. “Taken as a whole he found the sheep farming business highly satisfactory. Eh, Marianne? And if I remember rightly a short period of humiliation and poverty did not, as with so many, have any permanent effect upon his natural aptitude for possessions. Am I right, Marianne?”

  She observed him intently. It was uncanny, the way he always brought the hammer down on the nail. There was another silence, broken by Susanna speaking for the first time.

  “Samuel and I have friends living at Nelson,” she said in her gentle voice. “We had meant to go to them in a few weeks’ time for a little holiday. You could go instead. They would take you in, Marianne, and give you all the help possible, and set you on your way.”

  “That would be very kind,” said Tai Haruru. “Well, ma’am, I hope matters are now settled to your satisfaction.” He poured himself out a glass of water (there was never anything stronger than water on Susanna’s table) and held it up. “Here’s to the flocks and herds of Job,” he said, and drained it with a wry face.

  2

  It was evening before Samuel returned. Véronique was in bed, and Marianne and Susanna were sitting in the back porch stitching at new little dresses for her. Susanna, a laborious needlewoman, was utterly absorbed in what she was doing, but Marianne, though her clever needle never ceased to dart to and fro like lightning, looked up now and then at William and Tai Haruru, deep in conversation at the bottom of the garden. She was astonished, and a little puzzled, at the way the two men had taken her decision. She had expected vehement opposition from Tai Haruru, so passionately attached to his kauri trees and his Maoris, and easy compliance from William, who was always compliant. But it had been the other way round. Tai Haruru had received her proposal with the sleek acceptance of a cat invited to a bowl of cream, while William had argued the point. And now Tai Haruru was smoking his long curved pipe with an air of peace and serenity, while William’s shoulders were bowed and his face furrowed with distress. She felt a little annoyed with him, as well as puzzled, for he had nothing, as far as she could see, to be grief-stricken about. She felt troubled when she looked at him, and the sudden irruption of Samuel into the porch was a welcome distraction.

  “Has anything happened, dear?” asked Susanna anxiously, for Samuel’s eyes were blazing in a face whose pallor was almost luminous with intensity of feeling. His wife knew the signs only too well. Samuel was on salvation bent. In another minute she would be asked to receive some poor derelict soul into the house, feed him, and shelter him, regardless of the fact that William, Tai Haruru and Nat had finished the whole of the joint at dinner, and that Samuel was already sleeping in the passage that Véronique might share Susanna’s bed. . . . Or else she was to be seized by the arm and haled off to the dirtiest quarter of the town to attend the accouchement of some poor drab of the streets. . . . Or else (worst thought of all) he had suddenly received a Call.

  He had received a Call to set sail for New Zealand, and only Susanna and her God knew what it had cost her to drag her roots up out of English soil and follow him. . . . Or how intensely she had disliked pioneering life in this wind-swept, God-forsaken country all these years. . . . She realized, of course, that it is the cross of a parson’s wife that her husband’s Calls may not always seem to her to be her own, and she had borne her cross in such a manner that only she and God knew that she had it. But that did not prevent her dreading changes and, even more than changes, partings. She looked up at her husband’s face now with her hand to her throat to hide the little pulse that always beat there very fast when she was afraid. . . . And she was very afraid. . . . For a long time now she had felt that a Call was on the way. They had been in this little parsonage for some years, and by pioneer standards the life they had lived in it had been comfortable and undisturbed. Too comfortable. Samuel had been bound to feel sooner or later, even though he slept in the passage more often than not, that he was far too comfortable.

  “Yes, Samuel?” she asked tremulously.

  It appeared that Samuel had been spending the afternoon at the hospital. The English wounded had been brought back from the forest, and at last they knew what had happened at the pa. The word “pa” reached at once to Tai Haruru at the bottom of the garden, and he and William joined the group on the porch. “Tell us what you know as coherently as you can, Kelly,” he commanded the excitable little man. And Samuel, subduing with iron control the fires that had been lit in him by what had happened, sat down on the porch steps and confined himself to surface events with commendable lucidity.

  It had taken the Red Garment three days to subdue the pa, and the fighting had been bloody and magnificent. Young Lewis, who was himself among the wounded, had been astonished at the vigor of the Maori defense. It had been his first experience of the toughness of the tuas, and it was his earnest hope that it would be his last. “For it’s a damn shame to have to shoot down such fine fellows,” he had said to Samuel. “They may be cannibals and bloody heathen, but by God, they fight like Christians.”

  Altogether it had been a costly expedition; and though they had destroyed the pa, the last word had undoubtedly been with the Maoris.

  “Undoubtedly,” said Tai Haruru, and smiled.

  “What I would give to know that Jacky-Poto and Kapua-Manga and Hine-Moa are still alive!” cried Marianne.

  William grunted in agreement. “I’d give ten years of my life,” he said.

  “I may be able to send you word,” said Samuel, “for it so happens that I am leaving for the pa tomorrow; I’ve a holiday owing to me, you know. The first long holiday I’ve had since we came to Wellington. I’d meant to spend it at Nelson with Susanna. But I’ve changed my mind. I shall spend it at the pa.” He spoke quietly, but now that t
he restraint imposed by the telling of the tale was lifted, his inner excitement had blazed out again and his face was once more alight. “There must be great suffering in that Maori village. Wounded men and bereaved women. Suffering both of mind and body caused by white men. I shall go on horseback with a case of medical supplies.”

  “Mr. Kelly, are you mad?” ejaculated Marianne. “You’ll be murdered. Spare a thought for your poor wife, for goodness sake.”

  But Samuel, his fanatical eyes already looking across the garden in the direction of the forest, was not considering his poor wife. As Susanna had guessed, he had had a Call. Or rather, the way had suddenly been opened for him to answer the Call that had come to him on that night when he had looked through the palisade at the settlement and fancied he had seen weeping figures moving through the fern. Susanna’s face had blanched, but she said nothing. She knew it would be no use.

  “How well do you know the Maori language?” asked William. “You can speak it a little, I dare say, but without a thorough knowledge of it you’ll get yourself nowhere except into your grave. You couldn’t attempt a task such as you propose without a first-hand interpreter, and where will you find a man crazy enough to want to run his head into the hornets’ nest of a bereaved cannibal village?”

  “God willing, I shall find him,” said Samuel confidently.

  “You needn’t look far,” said Tai Haruru, “for he’s here.”

  They looked at each other, and the comradeship of their meeting glance was familiar to Marianne, for they had looked at each other in that way on the verandah at the settlement.

  “Mr. Haslam, I must tell you that I do not intend to take with me medical supplies only,” Samuel said formally. “I shall take also the Gospel of Christ. I shall take salvation.”

  “No harm in that,” said Tai Haruru tolerantly. “With only a smattering of the Maori language at your command, you’ll not make much headway with it. But I’ll not interfere with you. If you’ll let me have my way first with the sick bodies of men, about which I suspect I know a great deal more than you do, you can have your way later with their souls. That’s only fair and right; though I shall have the advantage of you, the bodies being existences in actual fact and the souls mere figments of your imagination.”