Brown Bread from a Colonial Oven/Chapter 9
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IX
THE MOUNTAIN TRACK
The mountain track, as I love to call it, though probably its extremest altitude does not attain a poor two thousand feet, starts with decision. Stony as a river-bed, steep almost as a house-roof, up, straight up, it thrusts itself between two farms with their plantations, and at a height of scarce three hundred feet above the coach-road, forces us to pant, to pause, and instinctively to turn and look below. It is the first of its many favours; for what a view is here!
Immediately at our feet, some ngaio bushes expand their stars of foliage, and stripe with crooked shadows the sunny steep brown of the path; beneath them again, the tips of the blue gums, soaring high above our heads just now, glitter like a sea of silver; farther down yet, all golden-green with sun and summer, a shoulder of lush pasture juts out—pine-trees, doubled by their own shadow, fringing it with a soft blackness very enriching to the landscape, and its bright lawn broken by grey rocks and sprinkled with spots of smooth, shining colour by browsing cattle, “kingly-coated,” to borrow Meredith’s true word.
Last of all, far, far below all these brinks and descents of leaves and tree-tops and rock—Ah, this it is that gives the scene its unsurpassable attraction—nine hundred feet below, and so sheer down that it looks as if these pebbles at our feet could be kicked straight into it, there lies, like a jewel deep-set, a narrow gulf, a long inlet of water: a cool blue arm of the sea, thrust softly up into the bosom of these green and grassy hills. Smooth as satin, there it sleeps, and smiles. Its seaward extremity is three or four miles away, and cannot be seen from here; but right below us, see, is its landward end, its hand, as it were—a rounded gully-palm, all gentle with grass, curved about a crescent of gleaming sand, and holding in its hollow a little settlement of low red roofs, cuddled down among tufts of trees, and with a single line of Lombardy poplars seeming to coax it, right down, to the water’s edge. How picturesque it looks—and oh, how comfortably small and human, among all these immensities of hills and sky!
Do you see, besides, the wooden wharf that runs out into the water? That is where the coastal steamer ties up once or twice a week, and at the same time ties the settlement to the mainland; and it is worth a look on its own account, too. At close quarters, it is nothing but a rough and clumsy affair, none too clean, more than a little crazy; but, from this height, and in the fresh glory of this morning, magic clothes it! It is all fairy-light, and fairy-bright. It might be made of marble lattice-work, or of silver, so slender and shining it looks—and built out upon clear glass, or painted on it, so airily is it advanced upon the water . . . with a twin self, see! fairer yet, gleaming up to meet it through the lovely, unwavering blue. There is a charm of Italy down there, in the vivid colouring and enchanted aspect of the bay; just as up here in the rocky pastures and crisp air there is something Alp-like and Swiss. But Switzerland has no sea, Italy no such racy sense of newness and beginning. No! we are in New Zealand, and that is best of all.
But now we have got our breath again, and must push on. Good-bye to the trees, to the bay, and the snug little settlement; for we shall see no more of them till we reach this spot again on our return. On, and up! Resolute as ever, the track goes climbing now high into the enclosing hills. They are all cleared, these lower paddocks—both of Bush and of burnt Bush. Fenced off from the track by mossy old grey posts and slackened wires, away on either side of it they spread, steep of slope, and with a surface all tossed up into hillocks and tumbled down into hollows, but richly mantled over, at this season of the year, with the emerald velvet of the grasses.
The grasses! This is the time of their full glory. The summer warmth has made them succulent and strong, the summer heat has not yet dulled their hues and dried their juices. I should like to have a festival in honour of the Grass Goddess; she is so wholesome, so bountiful, so kind to the eye, withal, so simply beautiful. No wonder that Whitman wished to call his poems Leaves of Grass; the name suggests that which in Nature is most “natural” of all—most widespread and common, at the same time most divinely healthy, friendly, and fresh. Hid as yet within the sheath are those sturdy heads of cocks-foot grass which, later in the summer, will bring into the silence of the hills gangs of grass-seeders, broad-hatted, bent of back, sickle in hand—owing to the slope and surface, machinery is worthless here—to gather in its harvest. But here are silvery “goose-grass,” soft “fog,” all lovely dove-colour and purple, so baneful to the purse, so profitable to the eye; bronzing rye, fescue, and others whose names I do not know, already nodding in the brisk air their delicate heads, and, by means of their companies of straight-standing stalks, sending waves of glowing greenness through the light. And oh, smell! smell in, to some deep and vital part of you, the sweet scent of this white clover, blooming at their roots! How honeyed it is, yet, at the same time, how uncloying! All the freshness of the fields is in it, and it dwells in what delicious recesses! Stoop a moment, and look into, look through, this low, cool palace of green—vault beyond vault of green walls, green roof, equable green air—that the grasses build every summer for the clover and sorrel, the ants and spiders—yes, and for more than these! Look! where yonder out of its deeps, up, up into “the deep blue bell of day,” a lark springs, warbling. Does not some of oneself spring with him?
“Up with me, up with me, into the clouds:
For thy song, lark, is strong!
Up with me, up with me, into the clouds.
Singing, singing”
Yes, glad, and fresh—and free. Turn and look back a moment. Ah, I knew that would bring you to a full stop! If from below the peep was exquisite, of green and blue, fjord and settlement, from here the prospect is one all of width and splendour. Before us now there is nothing but sea, sea, sea: one spread, vast, moving field, veined with currents, shimmering with light, and shot like an opal with varying colours—purple and peacock, turquoise and azure, silver and gold and green—an illimitable world of shine and space. Surely it is illimitable? So free, so “out” it stretches, that it seems equally impossible to conceive that anything ever should stop it, or that it should anywhere stop of itself. As for the horizon, you feel at once how it must go flowing on beyond that. And yet, immediately, away to the west, here is its infinity promptly challenged, nay, put an end to, by old Mother Earth, standing and shaking out her apron, as it were, in flying folds—with very firm edges. Leagues and leagues from here can we see of the long peninsular coast-line. Stretched necks and promontories of bronze, with forth-standing cliffs of deep purple, and roots of black rock, wreathed with white foam: uplands and downlands of velvet verdure: deep indents of blue: clear as a chart on paper, here they all lie, printed on the sea, and stretching so far away that in reality they add to the effect of boundlessness, rather than take from it. To the north-west, too, across that great blue arc of sea-water which is the Bay outside the bay, look! Yonder is another edge of Earth, but one that stands upright, instead of lying out, and, in place of a coat of colours, wears a robe of bright white—the snows, namely, the Alps, that other hold of space and strength. Vast sea, far-flung earth, great mountain peaks; and, as though these were not enough, all this consummate depth of blue above our heads! One looks, one apprehends, a little one comprehends—and instinctively one draws the long breath of the free.
We may as well pause here a little while, too, and make the breaths as long as we can, before we tackle this last and steepest lift of the track. There are plenty of seats to choose from. Bush grew thickly, once, in these upper hill paddocks, and now old black stumps stand everywhere mouldering among the flourishing grasses, and grey helter-skelter logs, smooth with weather, emerge above them at strange angles, and shine like satin in the sun. That great sea-mirror is too bright to be looked at for long—let us turn the other way, and rest our eyes upon this calm green heart of the hills. It is a convulsed heart, for all its calm. Seamed with gullies, burst through with rocks, encrusted with crags, these great green heaps lie tossed in every direction, as though some earthquake had upheaved them. There is not much “as though” about it, either. Quiet though this land now lies, it was once smokingly upspued from a volcano; green to-day, it was once red-hot. What is more, they say that, after the fire, the sea down yonder took it in charge, and soaked it deep in brine, before the way of the world brought it back into the sun.
Yes, these strong, unchangeable hills have had their changes—almost, one might say, their trials. I always find that very difficult to realise, though, for there seems always something primeval, something elemental about the hills, as though, just as they are now, so they were in the childhood of the world, as though, too, they had kept something of its childishness. For all their greatness, is there not a certain sense of play about them—Titanic child’s-play? Look, for example, at yonder gully-side—see the pictures forming and flying along it. The wind is their painter, the sun and the clouds are his palette, and with brushfuls of shadow and shine he is creating a moving pageant as heterogeneous as the contents of a child’s fancy. Yonder goes a sheep without a tail, followed by a map of the North Island flying along as if it were a bird that Maui hauled up on his hook, instead of a fish . . . now, there goes Maui himself, striding after it, and changing his shape as he goes; with a big bottle pursuing him, and, after the bottle, a queer, lopsided house. Look, too, up at the Pass yonder, where the clouds are massing themselves into domes and ravines—making believe to be their mothers the mountains, isn’t it so? just as human children masquerade in their mothers’ bonnets and shawls. . . . I wonder if little Paulie, that I am going to tell you about presently, ever did that? Ah, and one might change the simile, and remember that, as those clouds take the place of real snows, so in some human lives there is no more substantial variety than dreams and distant memories afford. You will take my meaning better presently.
To come back now to these hills. Apart from any actual frolicking, their whole atmosphere seems one of strength and gladness: frank, careless, simple, just an effect of sheer health and vitality, like a child’s delight at nothing at all but the sun’s shining. “There is sorrow on the sea; it cannot be quiet,” as Jeremiah noticed long ago; and snow-peaks aspire, and seem spiritual. But these great, grassy hills, in their lack of shade and mystery, their freedom, their independent joy and vigour, seem to me somehow always frankly pagan.
On again, and up—between green walls now. There is very little detail, and we have lost all view. Every sound, every little change in the sky or on the ground has now an extraordinary value. The cry of yonder quail fills the round world; that hare, pausing for a moment with long, dewdabbled ears at full cock, was an event; yonder purple foxglove almost a shock, among all this green. Yes, the hills have their monotony also—but here we are!
Where? At the place the mountain-track leads to. It stops here deep between the walling hills, you notice, with no view out at all, but that one peep of far-off sea—just enough to let you feel how far-off it is, and how held-in here you are. As little hint of the friendly settlement from here as of the grandeur of the seascape; and more burnt Bush than grass. Yes; this is where the house used to be. Do you see that bleached grey skeleton of a tree? That used to stand by the door—trunk, limbs, and even twigs all complete; but no trace, no chance of a leaf—like poor Eva’s life. Look, you can see the remains of the hearth still—that miserable hearth! I warn you that my tale is not a merry one—probably you will say that it little suits these strong and sunny hills. Yet it was lived among them. Yes; this is where Eva Symons used to live, and Joel, and pretty Paulie, brown as a nut, and ruddy as a little round apple. Poor Eva Symons! Hers was one of those stories of which a scandalised village at Home sees the beginning, and some unconscious colony the end. She was the daughter of a clergyman, well-to-do and well connected, and she made a runaway match with her father’s groom. Her family cast her off completely, and her husband and she came out to try their fortune in New Zealand. Perhaps no couple was ever less fitted for colonial life. Joel Symons hated work, Eva had never done a stroke of it. They had little money, no friends, and no “luck”; and so they drifted helplessly about from one untenable billet to another, until chance brought them, one fine day, to the little settlement down yonder. There they might have lived tolerably enough, had Joel been willing to do a decent day’s work, and Eva anything of a manager. But Joel was a skulker born, and as for her—poor thing! At home, the housekeeper had ordered the dinner, the cook cooked it, the butler carved it; all she had ever had to do with it was, to eat it, and go on being plump and pretty. As to dealing with the crude necessities of life, she had no idea how to set about it. But surely, you say, she could have learned? English ladies by the dozen learn to cook and clean and all the rest of it, before their first six months out here are up; and that without the aid of any magic, either; a little grit and gumption are all that is required. Grit and gumption—Alas! that was exactly what poor Eva had not got.
The circumstances of her marriage might lead one to imagine her a girl of unconventional nature, with more than the usual share of adventurousness and self-will; but nothing could be farther from the fact. It was upon her timidity, not her recklessness—not upon her “spirit,” but her lack of it—that her unmanly lover had played; and upon her tenderness. Tenderness, sweetness, grace—these were qualities that she possessed in overflowing measure; but the pioneer woman has need, too, of some of the manlier virtues, and of these poor Eva had not a trace. She was clinging, instead of self-reliant; she had daintiness and delicacy, but no capability; both in frame and nature she was only slender where her need was to be sturdy. Her very gifts were her hindrances, in this new way of life. In her right setting, she would have been a creature of exquisite charm; as a fragile flower is exquisite in a greenhouse, or a naked child in the warm arms of its mother. But a hothouse flower would soon look sadly tattered out here on the windy hills, and we bundle in thick clothing the little ones that have to run out into the rainy cold. In the young colony, the sweet English young lady was but an incompetent drudge—not only ignorant as regards work, but seemingly without the capacity to learn. The other women of the settlement were good to her; it is a man’s mistake to think that women will not stand by each other, and Eva’s sweetness and her helplessness appealed to the mother in the coarsest fibred of them. They were one and all Englishwomen, too, of the English working-class, and they understood her plight. “Poor young thing!” they said, “and she such a lady, too!” So they managed, by degrees, to teach her a little cooking, and they used to “just happen in,” to help with her cleaning and washing. And Eva was very grateful to these kindly souls, despite their missing “h’s” and red arms—Joel, unluckily, had had a smatter of refinement, tongue-deep—but she never made friends with them—she was too “kept her distance,” and they theirs.
It was a dark day for her, nevertheless, when Joel decided that there was “easy money in cheese,” and dragged Eva away from the settlement and her good neighbours, into the hills—here, where we sit. It was lucky for her that her one child had been born some months before, and that it was a strong, healthy little thing, ready, like a true New Zealander, to make the best of whatever it could get; for you can see for yourself what the distance was from the bay to the wretched wharé that Joel put up here. The one or two visitors that did get as far, too, he received so badly that no others cared to court a like experience; Eva, entering these hills, had entered upon an isolation that was to last till death.
With every month of ill-luck, Joel had grown more exacting and morose. He was one of those people who are headstrong without being strong in the head, and whose ill-conditioned nature the sweet uses of adversity turn sour. The cheese-making, too, chosen for its alleged profitableness, and because he knew a little about cows, turned out, as he managed it, to be an affair of little gain for unremitting toil, the brunt of which fell upon poor Eva, for Joel was no fonder than before of work. He became now a tyrannical taskmaster, she, a trembling slave; and daily he grew more brooding and sulky, and more grudging. He grudged everybody, and he grudged everything. Eva’s one remaining luxury was her daily cup of tea; very well, she could have her tea still—but it must come off the manuka-bushes. The potato-crop failed, the first year, in the wretched little garden he had made—so he never set hand to spade again. Eva had to milk the cows, morning and night, but he never allowed her one drop of the milk, even for the baby; all the milk must be made into cheese, and all the cheese, except for the veriest scrap, must be sold. What for? Not to buy other food—they lived almost entirely upon that reserve mouthful of cheese, and the wretched loaves of poor Eva’s incompetent baking. Not on household goods—old trunks and cases made their chairs and table, sacks of fern their bed, and the one easy chair of the house—sacred of course, to Joel—was a wooden stool. Still less on clothes—the bags that the flour was sent in made all Eva’s drapery store; as best she could, she fashioned garments out of them for Paulie and herself. The child’s things “always looked as if they’d been chopped out with an axe, and stitched with a skewer,” a woman from the bay once told me; but she spoke in pity rather than derision.
And other women speak still of the dress that Eva used to wear when she came down into the settlement—which, after a while, she never did, unless she was obliged. It was a gown of lavender silk, and the bonnet was to match. But it was the style of bonnet that ladies had been used to wear twenty years before; and as for the dress, the silk of it was so rich it could have stood up of itself, but its delicate tint was all streaked and faded, and it had been made for a crinoline and fairly rioted about the emaciated figure of its wearer. They were the gown and bonnet that Eva had been married in. She wore these bitter remembrancers of her bridal because she had no other respectable covering; and she wore them as they were because she had not the smallest ability to refashion them.
No; what the cheese-money actually went into was—just an old stocking. Really, and without any undue play on words, the effect of misery on Joel was, to make him a miser.
Unclassed, exiled, isolated, and condemned to these circumstances of squalor, Eva had yet one great joy in life—her little girl, Pauline. The child—she had named her after her mother, that mother, whether living still or dead she did not know, who had disowned her—was sweet as a bit of white clover, happy as a sunbeam, and vigorous as a root of cocks-foot grass. Paulie seemed to thrive on want. The bad bread and the whey her sound little economy converted somehow into round limbs and rosy cheeks—no doubt this hill air and wide light helped. The balls and dolls and other playthings that other children get given them, Paulie gave herself. She made dollies of the foxglove ladies, boats of the green flax, golden crowns of capeweed for her mother’s silver head—Eva was grey at twenty-five—and the field-mice infants, and those grotesque little pigmies that are baby larks, were her own babies, to be visited daily in their own little wharés—but never, never, never frightened!
It was among Eva’s worst privations that the child could have no schooling. She lived too far from the settlement school-house, for one thing; and, for another, she was too useful to her father. Joel had put up no fences on his land; he grudged, of course, both the material and the work. On the one hand, Dodds, his neighbour, and therefore, from Joel’s point of view, of necessity his enemy—objected to trespassing cattle, and often impounded them. So Joel made a human fence out of his little daughter. She had to be out at daybreak every morning, seeking the strayed things; and she had to spend the whole day, wet or fine, snowy or scorching hot, in looking after them.
Fortunately she was a hardy little thing; she took after her father’s Border ancestors physically, although in soul she was her mother’s own daughter, sweet, patient, and submissive. All that Eva could, she taught her; out upon the hillside of an afternoon, by the firelight of an evening when Joel was away, as he often was, for days together. Reading, writing, singing—that was all the simple schooling came to; and the reading was all out of one book—the Bible; the singing was all of fine old hymns.
For Eva had never lost or outgrown the gentle faith of her girlhood; or rather, perhaps, she had grown into it. Had she gone on existing under the easy conditions of home, very likely she would never have entered half so deeply into the living spirit of her religion, or that living spirit into her. The profession of her creed would probably have become merely a graceful conventionality with her, at deepest a gentle dilettante pietism. But here, amid loneliness, trial, and failure, it turned existence into life. Its difficult dogmas presented no difficulty to her, its darkest sayings raised no doubts; for her seeking soul had penetrated far beyond these, and found a sure abiding place at its innermost springs of truth and light. To Eva, without the shadow of a doubt, one Divine Friend there was, Who understood all her troubles, Who, even, for some wise purpose, had ordained them, and Who loved her and hers with an everlasting love. If perhaps it is one of the weak points of this particular creed that its expression in words sounds so self-centred as almost to mean selfishness, on the other hand it is one of its chief bulwarks that its expression in terms of conduct is a selflessness almost perfect; and its ineffable consolations who would have the heart to grudge so sorrowful a life? For Eva, her Saviour shared with her the desolate hills; He walked on yonder far-away and sundering sea; He knew her terrors, her griefs He bore with her; and—He had given her Paulie.
And then—He took Paulie away. There came one winter’s day so wild with storm that—Joel was absent—Eva plucked up courage to keep her child at home. She and Paulie prayed, both separately and together, that no harm might come of it, and Paulie’s innocent faith made sure that a miracle would happen and an angel turn cowherd for the day. Alas! he must have been a black one, then; for the cows promptly exhanged their lean pasturage for one of Mr. Dodds’ fat paddocks, and, being discovered by the irate Dodds (riding home belated across the hills, and already exasperated by the storm), were driven off down-hill and put in pound. Joel was furious, of course; and, if he had to pay for it, so had the cows, and more than the cows.
It was only a day or two after, that Paulie, a long way off among the hills on duty, found a valuable beast of Mr. Dodds’ badly tangled up in supplejacks—there was plenty of Bush here then—and her childish sense of justice was delighted. Mr. Dodds had made her father lose his money, kick poor Pickle so badly as to break her leg, thrash Paulie herself, and knock her mother down. Now, Mr. Dodds would lose his beast, for every plunge tied it tighter up; and that would pay him out!
But then, upon the heels of that very “human” thought, came instantly her mother’s constant teaching, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.” It was a lesson, you see, that got daily practice, and Paulie went fearlessly up to the struggling animal to set it free. But a knife was needed to cut the twists of the vine, and a knife she had not got; while, if she went back all the way home to get one, the chances were that the poor beast would strangle itself before she got back, and the “enemy” not be “done good to,” after all. So she set to work to gnaw the supplejack with her strong little white teeth; and she had got it half done, too, when the terrified brute, finding one of its hoofs thus unexpectedly set free, kicked out with all its might, and struck its poor little deliverer.
It was not until evening that Eva, wandering distraught to seek her darling, found the little mangled body, still moaning. . . . The stars kept vigil with them through a night of agony. . . . Then at daybreak, little Paulie left the hills for ever. In the one sacred half hour of peace before she died, she told her mother the story. “Did I do right, mother?” she asked, and, “Quite right, my darling!” the mother answered. It was the supreme sacrifice, and it broke her heart. But you can live on with a broken heart. Eva lived on for years.
Then at last there came a day when one of the settlement women happening to ask Joel about his ”missus,” was told, carelessly, that she was sick, or said she was; anyway, he couldn’t get the slut to stand up on her feet, and he had no time to waste looking after her, he hadn’t. On that tacit invitation, two of Eva’s old neighbours hurried up as fast as they could, though snow was threatening, and found her, as Joel had said, too ill at last to rise. She was lying on some old fern, that had broken out of its rotten sacking, and she had a ragged old skirt over her.
The women asked for blankets and linen, and something in Joel’s face made them keep on asking, until at length, with a curse at their meddling, he flung them the key of an old leather trunk that stood in the corner, and went out, swearing. They opened the box with no little curiosity; it was one that had come with Eva from England; and in it they found the lavender silk gown, some beautiful old embroidery, and a wreath of flowers made of feathers (“I guess she had kept ’em for Paulie to play with,” the woman who told me said), one of Paulie’s poor little flour-bag garments, and, underneath all the rest, some fine linen sheets and beautiful blankets. When they asked her why she had not used these, Eva faintly answered that Joel had feared they would get injured by the smoke, which indeed at that very moment, oozing forth from the defective chimney, was inflaming the eyes and hindering the breath of the dying. For Eva was dying at last. The long imprisonment, the dark discipline, among these happy hills, was done.
“And, my word, she died game!” the neighbour told me. “Never a whimper out of her, not a single word of all that she’d gone through. Just you think what a life she’d had of it up there—cut off from everybody, with them hills an’ nothin’ but them hills, year in, year out . . . an’ then Paulie dyin’, an’ that way, too, all along of her father . . . an’ she herself dyin’ for years, a inch at a time—cancer in the breast, it was. An’ Joel! there! I can’t stand to speak of him, the brute! When we come to lay her out, there was marks of his givin’ black an’ blue on her poor body, an’ we’d to bury her in that laylock gown, for he’d give us nothin’ else. An’ yet, with all that, she never let on, not she! When she asked was she dyin’, an’ we told her yes, her poor face did kind o’ shine out, an’ no wonder; but that was all. An’ then she said, to be sure an’ give her love to Joel (her love! I guess he’d killed that afore they’d been wed a year, but you bet she done her best to keep the skeleton dusted), an’ she thanked us ever so grateful for our help, for she’d not lost one o’ her pretty ways, poor dear—an’ that was the end.
“Us help her? I guess ’twas the other way about; I’m sure I think of her often an’ often when I’ve any little thing to bear. However did she stand it? Why didn’t she run away? She’d ha’ thought it wrong to leave her lawful husband, I reckon; she was very pious, you know. Why didn’t she make away with herself? But, of course, she’d ha’ thought that wrong, too. An’ she could send him her love! Look here—her flesh was all broke, poor thing, and I guess her heart was, too, but her spirit—my word! that was as strong as strength. We used to think, you know, that she’d no pluck at all; but it come to me that day that, for sheer clear grit, there wasn’t one of us, man or woman, could hold a candle to that poor crushed thing.”
A sad story. Yes—only it ends, you see, better than happily; it ends in triumph! The helpless, dependent girl whose weakness at its beginning so marred her whole life, had gathered by the end of it a strength that left its witnesses amazed.
It was a very different kind of strength from that of these hills, certainly; and yet I am not so sure? Eva would have said, “The strength of the hills is His also.” Perhaps they are only two verses of the same poem. Shall we go down?