The Passionate Puritan

Front matter

THE PASSIONATE PURITAN

THE PASSIONATE PURITAN

BY JANE MANDER AUTHOR OF “THE STORY OF A NEW ZEALAND RIVER”

I

The PASSIONATE PURITAN

CHAPTER I

It would not have mattered to Sidney Carey what kind of morning it was when she stepped out of the train at the Whakapara station for the first time. As it happened, it was blazing January heat, in the summer of 1912. But she hardly noticed it.

When he handed down her travelling cases the train guard wondered again who she was, and why she had stopped there. He thought of her several times during the day, and when he reached home he did not wait for his wife to begin her usual inquisition as to who had gone up and down the line, but volunteered a description right away of the only first-class passenger he had had on the morning train.

Sidney Carey was prepared to wait at the Whakapara station. Prepared because everybody she had ever heard of told picturesque tales of waiting at wayside stations. Prepared also because the unusually explicit letter of instructions she had received told her not to be disturbed if she had to.

For a minute she stood still looking about her. After one glance at the dusty bench in the stuffy three-walled waiting room she decided to leave her luggage where the guard had dropped it, and to put up her umbrella, and walk up and down the platform. She saw the other passengers go towards a group of low wooden buildings on the other side of the clay road that ran parallel to the railway through the valley. She had no time to observe them individually because a stooping man, whose only insignia of office was a battered headgear like a yachting cap, came up to her. He carried a mail bag stamped Whakapara under one arm.

“Miss Carey, miss?” he asked.

“Yes, I am.”

“Somebody’ll be down for you before long, miss. They know you’re coming.”

“Oh, thank you. Do you know if my luggage has arrived?”

“I guess so. There’s a lot of stuff gone up for you.”

“Thank you.”

The station master touched his hat with a rare respectfulness, and turning from her moved some cases into a small baggage room attached to the waiting room, locked the door, and with the mail bag under his arm followed the passengers across the road.

Sidney walked after him to the end of the platform and looked curiously across at the building. She saw Whakapara Store and Post Office on a sign over the door where he disappeared. She saw the passengers and farmers and settlers gather to wait for the opening of the mail. In spite of the heat and the yellow dust that lay over everything she felt fresh enough to be curious about all she saw. She recognised one of the buildings as a blacksmith’s shop, another as an extension of the store. All, save the smithy, were set on low wooden blocks, with a sad assortment of tins and rubbish stowed away beneath them.

A little apart from the central group stood the Town Hall. Sidney was to learn later what a Poohbah among buildings this absurd barn was—how it housed the activities of all denominations of ministers, of all brands of politicians, of the undertaker, the coroner, the wandering lecturer on character reading and “bumps”; of how it housed the annual agricultural show, the church soirees, the occasional bazaar, the intermittent movie, the ambitious wedding, the weekly dance, the anniversary ball—those hallmarks of western civilization that follow the British flag to the remotest ends of earth. Sidney did not take in all this as she looked at it, nor did she foresee in what circumstances she might learn to have a great affection for it. It did not look like a place that offered a chance for thrills.

Her eyes roved along the valley over the hills, partly wooded, burned and smoking in places, and all curiously desolate, even under the summer sun. Then she strolled to the other end of the platform and looked north. She could see the clay road and the railway running together for a quarter of a mile. She noticed that the train had stopped and was shunting empty trucks into sheds at the base of the hill on the right that rose like a cliff sheer up from the railway line into a mountain range. She remembered the station master’s “up” and “down.” And she knew without being told that somewhere up there was the Puhipuhi forest, lying like a land of dreams remote beneath the summer sun.

Sidney gazed hopefully up at its uneven skyline. She knew adventure lay ahead of her up there, knew it as surely as a child does when it sets out to dodge imaginary lions in a shrubbery in the twilight.

The train puffed on, and the sounds of its strenuous snorting died away. As Sidney was about to turn she heard a low rumbling up in the hills, a rumbling that swelled and stopped suddenly. Then something caught her eye on the brow of the cliff above the railway line. To her amazement she saw a pile of timber shoot over the top and drop down to the empty trucks with a short roar that echoed round the valley. Since she could not see the machinery by which it was done it had the appearance of magic. As she watched, another load came over and dropped and reached the bottom safely. It filled her with excitement. She knew it was linked up with the timber mill in the bush whither she was going.

Sidney Carey, at the age of twenty-four, expected great things of herself and of the world. And in this belief she had been encouraged by most of the people she had met in her native city, Auckland.

She had recently been arrested by a sentence by Arnold Bennett to the effect that whatever a person was was due merely to the accident of being born in the other bedroom, and because she had absorbed the profound truth in this remark even before she read it she was not as harmed by the success of her personality as she otherwise might have been. It was because she was born in a bedroom where the good fairies lavishly dealt out objective tendencies and gave but a minimum of introspective ones that she had sailed through the world with her head up, her eager eyes and mind roving to learn of anything and everything but herself.

Though not beautiful as a child, she grew more attractive every year. She was tall, slight and supple. Her hair was warm brown, touched in the sun with reddish lights, her colour clear and good, and her eyes blue and steady.

At the age of fifteen she had passed her first teacher’s examination second on the list for the Auckland Province. For the three succeeding years she had headed the list. In the wider state examinations for her certificates she had gained first-class honours for every subject she took except algebra, thereby establishing a record that nobody in the whole of New Zealand had reached at that time.

Being an inspired teacher, as well as a first-class student, she was naturally a favourite in educational circles, and naturally every headmaster in Auckland wanted her for his head assistant.

But some time before her dramatic triumphs the Auckland Board had ruled that every teacher applying for a big city position must have taught for two years somewhere in the backblocks. This was not only for the good of the teacher’s soul, but also for the good of the children of the remote farmer, the gumdigger and the bushman, who, the Board felt, ought to get some contact with the best it had to give them. After some wirepulling, and adverse criticism thereon, the Board had become rigid about enforcing the rule. Sidney Carey could not hope to escape it, even though she were a friend of the chairman, James Ridgefield. The most he could do, he said, would be to send her to the new school at his mill in the Puhipuhi where she would be within three hours of Whangarei, the largest town in the north, which was itself eight hours by steamer from Auckland.

And Sidney, knowing she had to go somewhere, said this would do finely. Once she had adjusted her mind to the idea of the change, and it did not take her long, she was enchanted by the visions she conjured up of things she had known only in short vacations. She liked the idea of the little bush school she was to open and start upon its way.

And she wanted something new. She had come to mental crossroads. She saw she had lived far too much in books.

Sidney was not a typical teacher. She loathed the idea of ever becoming hallmarked. It was her secret pride that no one who met her socially took her for a teacher, or could guess her profession. Out of school she never talked shop. She had already begun to project her mind into other fields. She wanted to write. And some success with newspaper articles had turned her thoughts to journalism. A discriminating newspaperman told her to get away from books, from teachers and theories, to talk less and feel more.

“You’re not half developed, even for your age,” he told her. “Why, you’ve never been in love! And you really don’t know the country. You have lived far too much in rooms, and you’re surfeited with other people’s vibrations. By all means go to the Puhipuhi. The very thing you need.”

Sidney knew he was right. And that was why she was glad to be on the Whakapara platform that summer morning, waiting for someone to meet her.

II

CHAPTER II

As Sidney continued to look at the siding, wondering if a third load would drop from the hilltop, she saw a man appear beside the trucks walking along the railway line towards the station. She wondered as he came on if he was to meet her. She saw that he was tall, that he held his head well up, and that he swung easily without stumbling along the uneven track between the lines. When he came to a high bridge crossing a dip not far from the station, he stepped from sleeper to sleeper without diminishing his speed.

Not wishing to stare she retreated to sit down upon her baggage, and did not look again upon the stranger till he stepped upon the platform. Then as he came towards her she rose.

Jack Ridgefield did not smile, for he rarely smiled. And meeting a strange woman meant nothing to him. But his grave courtesy was a force that radiated from him, powerful to attract almost every kind of person. It was one of the secrets of his enormous influence over the men in his father’s mill. He raised his hat some seconds before he spoke.

“Miss Carey?”

“Yes, it is.”

“I’m Jack Ridgefield.”

Her face lit up as she held out her hand. She always met people with the air of finding them the most interesting thing she had encountered in a long while. Then she knew a good deal about Jack Ridgefield. She knew much more of what his father thought of him than he did himself.

“I’m sorry you’ve had to wait,” he said.

“I didn’t mind it a bit, thank you.”

“I have to get the mail. I shall be back in a few minutes.”

She had noticed that he carried a dirty canvas bag. She watched him go along the platform and cross the road to the store. She knew his old dusty tweed suit had once been the best of its kind, and that his soft cotton shirt and collar had been clean that morning. She had seen that his eyes were hazel and his hair neither dark nor light. That there was nothing vivid about him but his strength and the sense of confidence he inspired.

In the store Jack met a sandy-haired country boy whose wagon was hitched outside.

“Are you in a hurry, Jimmy?” he asked.

“No, mister.”

“Would you run some luggage along to the siding for me?”

“You bet.”

“Thanks, Jimmy. It’s there on the platform with a lady. Don’t take the lady.”

Grinning, Jimmy ambled out.

Sidney Carey looked at him inquiringly.

“I’m to take your baggage, miss,” he said awkwardly.

“Thank you,” she smiled.

He was well along the road before she heard Jack Ridgefield’s steps again. She turned to meet him.

“We shall have to walk to the siding,” he said, nodding his head at it. “I should have met you with a buggy, but we had a bad washout on the road up above two days ago, and it isn’t fixed yet.”

“Oh, I don’t mind. I’m ready to do anything the country asks of me.”

A suspicion of a smile crossed his eyes, enough to make her feel he thought her words a boast. Indeed, he looked at her tailormade citified appearance and wrongly judged she had no idea what she was talking about.

“I’ll take that,” he said, reaching for her umbrella.

“I can carry it, thank you. You have that bag.”

But he took the umbrella, as he took everything he intended to take, and they started together along the dusty yellow road.

“Would you like it up?” he asked.

“No, thanks. I like the sun.”

She calculated, as she swung along beside him with a step as free as his, that he was only a year or two older than herself. She felt already that he was difficult, that he was the kind of man for whom most speech was meaningless.

But Jack felt that as a host he must exert himself. He began by asking her what kind of boat journey she had had to Whangarei, and they found no difficulty in asking and answering questions till they reached the siding.

There the boy in the wagon passed them.

“Thanks, Jimmy,” Jack nodded at him.

The boy grinned back, pleased to have served him.

Sidney followed on between the rails of the siding. Men unloading flitches from the mill trucks to the railway ones looked at her curiously, touching their caps. Beside a shed she stopped and gasped. From her feet straight up into the sky ran a line of steel rails. Her bags were already strapped to one of the two wooden trucks that seemed to hang at the bottom of a heavy steel rope.

“You don’t have to ride up,” said Jack Ridgefield, “there’s a path.”

She saw now the zigzag outline of it.

“Does anybody ride?” she asked, remembering her boast.

“We usually do. But I prefer not to take up people who don’t like the look of it.”

There was nothing in his voice or manner to imply that he thought nervous people foolish.

“I’ll ride up,” she plunged.

She had hoped for a responsive look from him, but she was disappointed. It didn’t matter to him whether she was scared or not. But he carefully arranged his coat on the back truck for her to sit on, told her how to place her feet, for the trucks were not boarded right across, showed her the chain to hold on to, and then with another man jumped lightly onto the front truck and gave the signal to start. Someone at the shed blew a horn which was answered up the hillside, and they began to move.

The whole way up Sidney kept her eyes fixed on Jack Ridgefield’s reassuring back, and held her breath. She would have been ashamed to admit her relief when they came to a standstill, and when a log was lowered as a buffer across the line behind them.

Waiting for them at the top was a short sad-eyed man with a pair of magnificent draught horses.

Sidney began to get up.

“Oh, we go on,” said Jack, turning to look at her, “unless you’d rather walk. This line runs right into the mill. It’s three miles.”

She knew that if she walked he would have to walk with her. She settled back.

“Certainly, I’ll ride,” she answered, determined to enjoy the novelty.

After the horses were hitched to the trucks in tandem fashion they began slowly to ascend a long slope of even steepness. Almost immediately they plunged into high bush, the trees often meeting overhead. Sidney began to be thrilled. Down one side she saw a good way into the depths of a ravine and heard water roaring out of sight at the bottom. On the other side she stared into tropical undergrowth that looked as if no man had ever worked his way through it. She knew it must have been a tough job to lay that railway there. She learned afterwards that Jack Ridgefield had engineered it and overseen its construction as a boy of twenty.

Sidney sat, as she had to, very still, sniffing the bush, delighting in the rattle of the trucks, in the click of the horses’ hoofs on the wooden sleepers, in the crack of the sad-eyed man’s whip as he walked beside them, his queer language of exhortation moderated considerably by her presence. For a mile they proceeded ever upwards till they came suddenly out upon an open space where there stood a shed, a stable and a water trough. Two small trucks lay on a siding beside the line, and nearby there were piles of spare timber, large cans of black grease and a heap of sand.

Here the trucks were braked to a standstill and the horses unhitched. The driver, Bill Hardy, slapped the hindquarters of the animals with an exclamation intelligible only to them, and, their harness clanking, they set off along a track that ran beside the line.

Jack Ridgefield jumped off, the driver taking his place. The front truck then began to move, Sidney had not noticed why, and went off slowly at first, but gathering speed down the slope till it whizzed out of sight.

Jack held out his hand to her.

“Get off for a bit, Miss Carey, and stretch,” he said. “You must be stiff.”

She found she was so stiff that for a minute she could not straighten herself.

When she looked about her she was disappointed to find that haze and smoke veiled most of the country. She could see clearly only about half a mile down the line where the other truck had disappeared. She and Jack Ridgefield stood alone somewhere up in the air. She felt rather than saw that they were above everything for miles around. A gentle breeze, warm with passing over hot valleys, but sweet with the scent of burnt fern, refreshed her.

“It’s a pity it’s so hazy,” he said, seeing she was enjoying it. “There’s a good view from here when it’s clear. If you’re rested we will go on.”

He helped her back, let go the brake, gave the truck a starting shove, and jumped on.

That first bush ride, shooting down slopes and along flats, was one of the most exciting things Sidney had known. She knew well there would be no accident with Jack Ridgefield at the brake. She magnified the difficulty of his job absurdly at the time, so that the ride carried with it not only the romance of racing through a veiled and unknown land, but the thrill of certain danger if one thoughtless move were made.

She was conscious of spinning by the two big horses tramping their way back to the mill, of glimpses of a road on her right, and of bush on her left, and of racing down a last slope on to a wide flat, a curious flat, unlike anything she had ever imagined. As far now as she could see there were no green trees, there was only fern and scrub, with enormous table-topped stumps, bleached white, rising everywhere above the parched brown. And here and there were clumps of twisted skeletons patched white and black, pitiful remnants left by many a fire to mark that lesser company of trees that had stood around the giant kauri like pages round a throne.

The great stumps stretched out their roots above the ground like the arms of an octopus, and all above them and around them rose visible waves of heat like the lines on watered silk. In spite of the wind created by the speed of the truck, Sidney was excessively hot.

In a few minutes buildings and timber stacks covering an extensive area began to shape themselves in the film ahead, and now above the roar and rattle of the truck she heard intermittent sounds that she could not recognise.

On the outskirts of the concentrated part of the village Jack Ridgefield braked the truck to a standstill.

With an inquisitive glance down an avenue of timber stacks at a huge zinc mill belching boards, she followed him along a narrow track in the fern, past stumps and rotting logs, at the back of a cluster of small houses, till they came to a newly-built structure set in the middle of a burnt patch. It looked to her just like a little shed.

“This is the school,” said Jack, pausing a moment.

She was rather astonished at its crudeness, but in a mood of being prepared for anything remarked merely that it would seem small after what she was accustomed to. Then she followed him on round the burnt patch to the end of a row of cottages, surrounded by paling fences, set a chain or two apart, on the western side of the village.

In this row lived the mill aristocracy. First nearest the school was her own house. Then came Jack Ridgefield’s, then that of Bob Lindsay, his chief accountant, then the head saw doctor’s, and at the end, the chief engineer’s.

In front of her own prim little gate Jack turned with one of his rare smiles.

“Well, Miss Carey, here you are.”

He opened the gate, and followed her in. He picked up her two bags which had already reached her verandah, opened her front door, and stepped after her into her one large room. It was filled with furniture and trunks and boxes of books.

“We’ve left everything for you to fix as you want it, Miss Carey, but I’ll come along after dinner and open up your boxes, and you can have all the help you need. If you don’t like the shelves where they are I’ll move them. Anything you want done can be done without any trouble. The whole place will want to look after you. As a teacher here you’ll be a god. You’ll probably be bored to death.”

She smiled eloquently at him.

“It will take a lot to kill me,” she said gaily.

“That’s fortunate, or perhaps it isn’t.” Now I’ll take you to the Mackenzies. We’ve arranged for the present for them to give you your meals. You can make any change later you like. But as Mrs. Mackenzie is the best cook in the place you will probably stick to her.”

At the saw doctor’s cottage a pleasant little Scotch woman bustled out to meet them. Sidney’s eyes lit up at the sight of her. She looked so hospitable and capable, as indeed she was.

Jack introduced them briefly.

“Come in, Miss Carey. You must be very tired and hot.”

“I’m leaving you in good hands,” said Jack turning away. “I’ll see you later on.”

Sidney entered an oppressively immaculate little dining-room, with a beeswaxed floor that she knew set a standard for the village, and everything shining aggressively in keeping.

Mrs. Mackenzie, flustered with importance, drew forward a rocker to the open window.

“Sit here, Miss Carey. The mill whistle will blow in five minutes and then my husband and boy will be here, so we’ll wait for them. But you shall have a cup of tea at once.”

III

CHAPTER III

By the middle of the afternoon Sidney had hardly begun to unpack the boxes and trunks that Jack had opened for her, because she had been beguiled from real work by the interest of examining her little house and the school.

She had settled with James Ridgefield that she would try the experiment of living by herself. She had almost enough furniture, she said, and he told her the Board would supply necessary things that she would leave behind. He assured her she would be perfectly safe, and he agreed with her that she would not want parents about her ears all the while, that her soul, being rather an individual specimen, would need all the aloneness it could get in a place where her habits would be continuously in the centre of the village green, as it were, for inspection.

“They mustn’t know you smoke,” he had said.

“Of course not,” she laughed, thinking that would be easy.

In fact, she thought it would all be easy, absurdly easy, as she made her first exploration.

Her little house had a peculiar charm. It was brand new, unpainted, as were all the other houses, and zinc-roofed. It had one large room, as rooms went there, with an open fireplace, two large windows (one set in an alcove with a broad seat), and well placed bookshelves. It ran from front to back, and opening off it were a bedroom and a kitchen. The whole thing was unpapered, simply lined and ceiled with heart of kauri, sweet with the exquisite freshness of the pine.

In the yard she had found a woodshed and wash-house, and the primitive sanitary arrangement of those parts. There was a fine pile of wood cut ready for her and a big box of kindling. One or two heavy thunderstorms had fortunately half-filled her zinc tank. The ground round her house had been dug, and someone had begun a flower garden for her. She was deeply touched by all this preparation.

For a chain or more outside her fence the fern had been recently burnt off, as it had round the school and all the other houses. Sidney was to learn later that in the summer and autumn fire was the demon against which the whole village guarded unceasingly.

When she had gone through her house half a dozen times, changing her mind each time as to where she would put her furniture, she walked over to the school. It was the smallest institution for the improvement of the race that she had ever seen. Its one room and porch were like a toy house. But in her comprehensive mood of loving everything she felt an instant passion of proprietorship for it.

The desks and furniture were all there waiting to be arranged. Again she blessed the Ridgefields, father and son, for having made her beginnings so easy. So far she had not discovered anything essential that they had not thought of, and even the Board had been prompt with her first batch of supplies.

She was full of unbounded interest and curiosity about the whole place.

After dinner she had stood on Mrs. Mackenzie’s verandah looking over the tops of buildings at the mill. Set at the corner of the village farthest from the school it dominated the plain as a cathedral dominates a medieval town. Its two giant smoke funnels rose, spires of industry, above everything for miles around.

The village lived by it, for it. The first morning whistle woke the whole place up; the second started streams of men along paths leading to it from all directions. At the third there arose a palpitating roar of machinery that vibrated out over the flat. Later whistles guided the lives of the men and their families throughout the day. In case of fire there was hardly a man who would not have deserted his own belongings and rushed to save it first.

The plain about the mill extended for some six miles one way and three the other. It was a kind of table top between the lower ranges about Whakapara and the higher ones of the Puhipuhi proper. It dropped into deep gullies on three sides.

Thirty years before the entire flat had been covered with one of the finest bits of big kauri in the country. It had been cut by James Ridgefield’s predecessor, who left him the much harder job of working out the forest on the ranges. The flat was thus a graveyard for the old trees, their enormous stumps the eloquent tablets to their memory.

The Puhipuhi had also known the glamour of silver mines. Years before, the rumour of metal back in the ranges had drawn a horde of prospectors seeking a new El Dorado, and though the gullies were mostly strewn with forlorn hopes, the magic name still clung, and there were still men who poked about its stony ravines with imperishable optimism.

Mrs. Mackenzie had taken Sidney past the engineer’s house at the end of the row, to a spot where they got an uninterrupted view of the mill dam and the open plain beyond. The mill was built beside a shallow bush creek that came down from the ranges. Nothing but the genius of James Ridgefield and his son could have made a working proposition of that summer dry watercourse. By a series of fourteen dams on various tributaries back in the hills the power for bringing logs down to the mill was so well managed that it never ran out of timber. When the mill dam got low and the logs scarce the “system” was set to work, and the birds of that country fled from the extraordinary sight of great trees bobbing down the dry river bed on the first rush of a flood that came from no rain they knew of.