Tussock Land; a Romance of New Zealand and the Commonwealth

Front matter

Tussock Land

Mr Fisher Unwin has projected a new series, to be called 'The First Novel library.' As the title indicates, it will consist of the first novels of such new authors as show exceptional talent.

Each Volume Crown 8vo, Cloth, 6s.

I

TUSSOCK LAND

I

Nineteen, aglow with health, with a heart untroubled, from sheer gladness of living Aroha Grey sang.

Overhead was the fathomless blue of the New Zealand sky. Across this arch of turquoise scurried thin wisps of white clouds, as if the keen, persistent wind that swept down the valley had blown the waves of the sky into foam. It was a crisp, splendid autumn day in the south of New Zealand. Already there was a taste of winter in the air, and the breeze that forever roamed these solitudes of tussock land brought with it this afternoon some memory of the Antarctic that had given it birth.

The long valley sloped slowly up to the narrow saddle, or ridge, that divided two watersheds. Towards that saddle Aroha Grey was trudging. On each side of her ran a range of hills, and, as she gradually climbed the valley, in the gaps in their skylines she caught glimpses of range after range of similar hills, until the horizon curtained in the world. She stood in the centre of a wide sea of treeless land, valley and plain and hill, streaked by winding streams and noisy creeks and made green by swamp. Little patches of scrub hung in the steep gullies of the hills; the sturdy brown standards of the flax and the faint white feather of the toë drooped over the streams in the valleys, and raupo edged the swamps with a ring of brown spears and green. Here and there a ploughed paddock loomed blue and naked on the river flats, or a sown paddock shone vividly green against the golden grey of the tussocks. But these were but little scars upon the surface of the land; everywhere else the silky tussocks held sway, clothing spur and valley with a faint tinge of gold.

Just before the girl reached the top of the saddle she paused. Ever since she could remember she had halted here for a few moments before making her way to the summit. Before her the slope ran gently up to the horizon; over the edge lay—what? The line of wind-swept tussocks against the sky had in it some faint suggestion of mystery, a vague hint of the unknown. As a child she had always shrunk from going quite to the edge of visible things: before the uncertainty of the unknown she had ever stood silent, wistful, hesitant, wondering. So now, as ever, she halted beneath the edge of the ridge, a little sheltered from the steady stream of wind that poured over it, and let her fancies rove.

Yet it furnished an index to her character that never once, however deep the twilight, however haunting the fear of the invisible—and to an imaginative child how real, how vivid that terror is!—she had never turned back without climbing swiftly that diminishing space of homely security and giving one terrified glance into the uncertainty beyond. Only to find it eternally the same, a yellow sweep of valley running down into a nest of level land lost among a monotony of broad-shouldered hills, and against the horizon a jagged line of glistening snowclad peaks. On days when the rain had washed the atmosphere to a crystalline lucidity the sharp naked outline of that range of mountains, rising majestically, fifty miles away, from an adoring multitude of hills, seemed so near to Aroha that she had only to stretch out her hand and feel the cool smoothness of each dazzling peak.

This afternoon as she halted she turned back and glanced at the way she had come. Her song broke suddenly off with a little laugh at her childish fears. Far in the valley beneath her crouched the homestead, a little group of scattered, unpainted wooden buildings—woolshed, huts, stables, men’s quarters and house. The little grey buildings looked pitiably small in the midst of this welter of hills. A few ploughed paddocks surrounded the homestead; some straggling trees betokened what was still optimistically termed the orchard; a cart track wound across the paddocks from the woolshed, disappearing far down the valley behind a spur; barbed wire fences faintly pencilled stiff lines across the level ground and ran straightly up the shoulders of the hills.

Along the valley writhed a little creek, like a serpent, glinting in and out of the ragged patches of green that clung about its path. And in the west stood the splendid sun, yellowing all the spurs, touching with golden fingers the distant hill-tops. And Aroha wondered, as she had often wondered before, why, with this valley leading so entrancingly into the clear west, the builder of the house had turned his back on the only vista in this sea of crowded hills, and set his house grimly facing the bleak hillside. Perhaps the incessant winds that had the valley for their path could tell.

In that little valley the endless hills had shut in Aroha and her nineteen years of life. She had been born in that unpainted house, had played the great dramas of her childhood beneath its shade, had learnt to love and know each climbing spur, each entrancing gully, had followed the little creek up to the spring that gave it life, and down through all its wilful windings until a wire fence bridged it from bank to bank, and her father’s property went no further. Yet she followed it further in her fancy, saw it wandering slowly among the creases of the hills, finding its blindfold way to the river of which it had vaguely and incessantly dreamed, moving undeviatingly towards the unseen sea. The girl was sometimes a little envious of the creek; it could go so far, see so much, reach such undreamed-of goals. And she was shut in by those walls of hills—dead, lonely hills, untenanted save by the far-scattered, slow-browsing mobs of sheep, that looked in the distance like some strange efflorescence of grey flowers upon the tawny hillsides. So she was shut in between the earth and the low, windy sky.

She made chums of the rabbiters’ dogs, the quiet old horses that pulled the plough. To her the old shepherd who rode in for stores once a week from his wharë at the top of the run was a traveller from the ends of the earth. And out of the sheer loneliness of a solitary childhood—for to a child there is always something hopelessly incomprehensible in the outlook of her parents—she made friends with John, the young station ploughman, who used to save his wages to buy tickets for Tattersall’s racing sweeps in Australia, and who played at even-tide mightily upon the accordion. He was the only one in the station who was near her child’s mind; he was eighteen, and had not quite forgotten how to dream.

So she had grown alone, save for the people on the run and her parents. Then had come the glorious yet terrible day when she left the run for a short stay with her aunt in Dunedin. She was to see the Outside for the first time, at last to peer over the edge! And oh! how comfortable, how safe, had appeared the homestead that awful day! She felt as she rose that morning—she had lain awake, wondering, all night—that if ever she got back to the run she would never more stir from it. The hills were her own; they would never mock her.

Her eyes were wet as she climbed into the dray that was to take her and her small carpet-bag to the nearest railway station, ten miles away. To her mother, standing, outwardly calm, at the back porch, Aroha waved a frenzied farewell. Then she had to hold on tightly, as to a chorus of barking collies and a guttural “Hed-oop!” from John who was the driver, the dray creaked and jangled through the ford of the creek and climbed the other side. Aroha strained her eyes upon the diminishing group of the homestead, till at last a bluff, round which the road ran, shut it from sight. Then the tears came.

It was a long silent ride in that springless dray to the wayside flag-station. John was never a conversational youth; only on the accordion was he eloquent. And that day he seemed to the girl more taciturn than ever. To her half-terrified entreaties to be taken back he had no answer. On the station platform, as they waited for the train, he handed her ten shillings; he wanted her to get him something for a present-like for a young lady of his acquaintance. And Aroha felt a sudden jealousy of the woman unknown for whom she was to choose this gift. She had always considered John as her exclusive property.

Then the train had bustled in, and she had found herself thrust into a second-class carriage and in an agony of fear she had thrown her arms round John’s neck and kissed him. It was a kiss of fear, a clinging to the last familiar thing of her life ere she was flung out into the unknown. It was only long after the train had started that Aroha woke with a blush to the remembrance of the smile on the faces of the watching passengers at that impetuous good-bye.

It was a wonderful fortnight that the gods gave Aroha in Dunedin. To the girl the beautiful little southern city, set at the head of its long, narrow, winding water-way, lying between the placid water of its harbour and the long rollers of the Pacific, ringed about by its broad swathe of purple bush and crowned with rugged hills, was the World, the Unknown—Sydney, London, Paris, Rome!

But it was better to be home again, among the things that were hers. And since that brief visit to the city a year ago she had dwelt content within the circle of the hills. And when she had given John the lace collar she had bought for his envied love, he had handed it back to her, and gone suddenly out and chastised his dogs.

II

II

At last, with a little sigh that had no sorrow in it, Aroha turned again to the slope. Just a little way off it was—that line of rustling tussocks against the sky.

This was her chosen playground as a child, her palace of fancies as a maid. Here she used to throw herself full-length among the tussocks and gaze for hours at the ever-scurrying clouds. She wove vague and entrancing romances for herself out of this wide expanse of hill and sky. The little clouds were the boats of the fleet carrying her dreams over the world, voyaging wide across new skies, encompassing unknown horizons. Or the tussocks became the restless, rustling waves of a yellow-grey ocean, over whose vast surges she and her fairy prince would sail and sail away, out of the prison of the hills, out anywhere so long as it was with him!

For there was always a fairy prince woven into the texture of her dreams. He was vague, heroic, wonderful. But above all he was strong. Some wondrous day he would appear, and snatch her quickly to his heart. She would resist his kisses—just a little, that he might hold her the closer—and his lips would storm her reluctance with their great eagerness. So she would lie in his arms in a very faintness of joy. And all the world would be theirs to do with as they would. He must be strong; it was strength that her heart cried so passionately for. She was strong too; but she was a woman. It was a fine thing to be able to shape her life as she willed it, to master her fate, to decide, to rule. But for a woman there was a greater and a more gracious thing—to surrender all the strength that was in her in loving service to a personality richer, more puissant. She stood alone—she had stood alone all her young life—but her womanhood cried out at the unaccustomed burden.

So she waited for the fairy prince—the splendid, confident, irresistible fairy prince that would snatch her up from this niggard little life and reeve her, delirious with a divine helplessness, away—away.

And he would come—some day he would come. Of that her heart was assured. She could wait his coming with a woman’s patience.

At first the fairy prince took the appearance of John, the ploughman. He was yet little more than a boy, but he ploughed the straightest furrow in the district and had won medals at the annual ploughing contests at Mataura. His hut was close to the homestead—a one-roomed shanty containing a stretcher bed with a mattress of sacking and a kerosene box that did duty as a chair, its walls and ceiling papered with illustrations from the Sydney Bulletin. On a shelf over the bunk stood his accordion, his only treasure, and an assortment of evil-smelling pipes. The back of the door was covered by a constantly augmenting collection of tickets that had failed to draw a prize at Tattersall’s frequently recurring racing sweeps.

But after a short reign as fairy prince John had failed to retain the throne. He was certainly strong; and in the days when he was prince it was Aroha’s deep delight to lie out in the fields and watch John at the plough. Up and down the big paddock, in lines that never wavered from straight- ness, the team would go, and behind his triple shares the three steaming furrows would flow in black, even lines. So she would lie for hours, listening in a delicious reverie to the faint musical clank and creak of the harness, broken now and again by his half–intoned “Hed-oop!” and “Who-aa, the little mare!” and idly watching the sea-gulls busy over the freshly-turned earth. She wondered, as she watched the trail of gulls, that had flown a hundred miles inland to follow the plough, as they quarrelled with peevish cries, familiar about the furrows, whether she would ever repay their visits, cross the ocean that was their world....

But when the fairy prince put aside the solitude of the fields, when the mere kinship of life thrust these two together, he failed dismally to fill the rôle. John stood in such reverential awe of her—and all she wanted was to be loved! He was heavy of face, slow of speech. His lips were sullen, not stern. When she sometimes slipped out to his wharë after tea, she entered into no new realm of enchantment. She looked for the lover triumphant, and found only the ploughman abashed. Once she suddenly kissed him: it seemed to John a profanation of her lips. So, reluctantly—for she was very lonely—she deposed him from his proud place; and though the poor fellow struggled dimly to comprehend the reasons of his dismissal, and continued to understudy the splendid part she had once allotted to him, her imagination made the dismissal final. In such important things as a girl’s dreams, a mere side issue like John does not count.

But it was not long before the vacant throne was filled. This new claimant to the realm was a state school-teacher from Pukerau, where, day after day, he gathered into the little schoolhouse by the main road dozen children from the neighbouring township and taught them English with a strong Scotch accent. Aroha had met him at a dance given in the Hathaways’ new woolshed. He had worn an absurd suit of black with quaint little tails and a very niggard allowance of waistcoat; but his dancing was to the girl like the revelation of a new sense. He was a tall, sallow youth, with large hands, wide ears and a bulging forehead. In after life he became a cabinet minister.

After supper he had said some things to Aroha in an intonation that made her imagine that he was repeating a school lesson; but the words were beautiful. It was like a song that was too perfect to be sung. She had asked him what it was, and he had said, “Poetry”. Till then she had imagined that poetry was a thing in books in short lines with a lot of capital letters in the wrong places.

So she had put him on the vacant throne and worshipped him afar; but they had never met again. Once she rode to Pukerau and called at the schoolroom; but she was met by a cheerful young school-mistress with spectacles and a city blouse, and had been too confused to ask where her knight-errant had gone. Aroha was sure that he was strong; when he danced with her his strength had almost frightened her. But it was difficult work to continue loyally to adore when the prince never visited his dominions. So he, too, was cast out of her dreams.

Then there was a superbly-gloved youth she had met in the train on her way home. He had got her a cup of tea with an infinite grace. He had a moustache and smoked cigars. But he was far from her thoughts; he dwelt in a land impossible, of which she had caught bewildered glances in the Family Herald. With every wish to compass it she could never see herself in his arms. And for the girl it was now necessary that her fairy prince should be sufficiently human to desire to embrace her. Once she had been content to be put on a pedestal and worshipped; but with her approaching womanhood newer and more insistent desires stirred in her. Unconsciously her whole being cried out for love. And, after all, there was no fairy prince!

So she went back to her dreams and revelled in her rich imagination. For the present she must weave her own romances; but she felt assured that one day a reality, more glorious than all her desires, would step into her dreams and carry her off to heaven. Her life would be but one strand in a woven web of splendour.

And she knew exactly the way he would come. She had learnt that—oh! so long ago! Over the saddle towards which she was now slowly moving, a few hundred paces off, he would suddenly come, riding up the long slope that led to this narrow ridge from the valleys and hollows of the great world outside.

So on every one of her many visits to the top of the valley she would pause a while in a sudden, delicious, half-feigned terror, and then run to the ridge with an equally delicious, half-feigned expectaation, only to find ever the same picture—a yellow sweep of valley running down into a nest of level land lost among a monotony of broad-shouldered hills, and against the horizon a jagged line of glistening, snow-clad peaks. And though her keen eyes sought ever for his figure, never on any day came the fairy prince, sturdily breasting the long tussock.

Yet this afternoon, as Aroha, under the influence of her childish dreams, quickened her pace, and almost ran toward the narrow line of wind-swept tussocks, she had in her heart the same delicious, half-feigned certainty of surprise. She reached the top of the ridge and gazed beyond.

And, careering swiftly towards her, swept a terrified horse—riderless.

III

III

Aroha stood one terrified moment, then ran forward down the slope. The horse swerved past her at a gallop and disappeared over the crest of the hill. Even in her anxiety she recognised the animal; it was one of the riding hacks from Hathaway’s run.

There was nobody in sight. She slackened her pace with a sense of dismay. The horse had gone; even the thud of its hoofs on the ground had died away. The incident seemed almost unreal. She was quite alone; only a hawk stood high and black and motionless in the windy sky.

From the tussocks that had concealed him rose a figure, and the girl’s heart said tumultuously, “The Fairy Prince!” but it was only a boy—certainly not twenty years old—who had been thrown from his horse. He came limping towards Aroha, dazed and bleeding and angered.

“Where’s my horse?” he asked hurriedly, and paused at gaze.

Something checked the eager inquiry on the girl’s lips, too; and for a minute these two looked at each other, shut in by the infinite loneliness of hill and sky, almost with an air of recognition. The conviction swept suddenly over each that they had met before—when? ... how long ago? ... in what other unimaginable world?

The wind swept the waving yellow tussock slope, the white cloudlets sped across the turquoise sky, the solitary hawk paused on wide wings watching. It seemed as if the whole world waited for some approaching miracle. So they stood—boy and girl—at gaze.

And to these two young souls those few moments were an eternity. In that startled interchange of glance the old patient world was weaving two lives into one. And the pattern was of a wondrous hue, and the woof thereof was love.

Aroha was dressed in an old blue print gown, whose short skirt was a reminiscence of her seventeenth year. Nineteen years demanded another six inches. Beneath its ragged edge the creases of her thick stockings about her ankles plainly showed. On her feet were thick-soled, stubby-toed shoes. On her head, tilted back, was a faded blue sun-bonnet that had known many washings.

To the boy this homely-attired girl seemed hardly human—an ærial thing poised between him and the sky, a frail spirit impalpable, maybe the soul of this wide expanse of tussock land. Her figure was slight, too girlish for her nineteen years, but in New Zealand youth lingers long. She wore no corsets, and as she leaned, swaying with a supple grace against the audacious wind, the loose, blue print dress displayed the outline of her long slim limbs and the sweep of her boyish breasts.

From beneath her sun-bonnet a few wisps of brown hair strayed—deeply brown in shadow, but chestnut when the sunlight lifted it in his golden fingers. Her eyes were richly brown—of the hue that is too vivid and warm for black, too dark for brown. There was passion in those eyes, but there was reserve and strength. Above them her eyebrows ran toward each other, not meeting but ending with a wonderful upward ripple that gave her face a strangely arresting and ethereal charm. Her nose almost had an irresponsible tilt; but the firm, full lips, and the deliberate chin gave the face a gravity and a strength rare in womanhood. The keen, crisp winds of this land of the far south had stung her cheeks into a rich brown glow.

And to King Southern, a-stare, she was the most beautiful woman he had ever dreamed of.

“Did you—I beg your pardon—but did you see where my horse went?” he said at last, groping for words, reluctant to break this strange silence that seemed to have bound them about with chains.

“Oh, he went over the ridge. I guess by this he’s down at the homestead gate,” she replied almost as unwillingly. Then a quick sympathy leapt into her face, and she cried, “But, oh, you’re hurt?”

Her voice was rich and wonderful. An aroma of youth seemed to come from her presence. King had never imagined that a woman could have such a voice. He saw at once that all his conceptions of womanhood—and he had many—would have to be revised. He had not taken into account the great factor of a woman’s voice.

“Hurt?” he echoed. “Yes, I suppose so.” He looked down at his leg with a certain sense of its complete detachment from his concerns. In the presence of such a being a mere bruised ankle seemed an unwarrantable intrusion.

“I don’t think it’s much,” he said at length, gingerly trusting his weight upon the foot. “I’m not much of a rider, you know; and the horse’s leg seemed to give way all at once, and I found myself among the tussocks. I think I came off over his shoulder.”

“Put his foot in a rabbit-hole,” she explained.

“Oh, that’s it?” he said, enlightened. Then his wondering gaze returned to her.

“But who—” he said and stopped.

Suddenly the girl beneath his gaze became self-conscious. She remembered the shortness of the old skirt. She felt annoyed at herself caught at this hateful disadvantage by a mere boy. She understood from his glance the thickness of her stockings, the ugliness of her shoes. She moved behind a big tussock that concealed at least her feet from his eyes.

“Oh, me?” she said, “I’m Aroha—Aroha Grey. We live down there; that’s our station—Westella, it’s called. You can see the homestead from the top of the ridge.”

She moved quickly up the slope and gained the crest. The boy paused to watch her. He noticed her swift, lithe stride, the sinuous grace of her every movement. He never remembered having seen a woman walk so easily. She swam.

She did not turn. “That’s the station,” she said, pointing. Far down the valley she could see a black speck. It was the horse that had been stopped by the barbed wire fence of the top paddock.

But the boy made no response. She turned. He was limping painfully toward her.

Immediately she was at his side. “Oh, you’re hurt, you’re hurt!” she cried in a low voice.

“No, no!” he said, almost angrily.

“Let me help you. Lean on my shoulder,” she commanded.

He drew himself erect.

“Thank you,” he said stiffly. “I can manage by myself.”

“You can’t,” she declared. “You must let me help you; I am stronger than you.”

She put her arm, slim and muscular, about his waist. The warm, soft touch of it thrilled him strangely. It was the first time that a girl’s arm had been about him.

But to be succoured by a woman, a mere girl! He shook himself roughly from her.

“Stronger?” he said with scorn. “A woman stronger than a man?”

Instantly she was abashed. How could she be stronger than he—her fairy prince? It was his strength that was to be the sceptre that would rule her heart. But—and she flushed—surely she had not so soon accepted him as her fairy prince? She shot an intent look at him. That her fairy prince? A mere boy, thin, sallow-faced, with large dark eyes and lips that were almost a woman’s. The well-cut nose and the spacious brow redeemed the features, but the mouth and chin were—her mind leapt at the word—weak. He was a boy, unmarked by the lines that life would give; he was likable, lovable, perhaps. It was a handsome face, but not—ah, never!—the face of a leader of men. Here was no conquering prince. He had the eyes of a dreamer, the infinitely sad eyes of a dreamer. And yet...

She was recalled to herself by a sudden blanching of the boy’s face. He stood a moment swaying and would have fallen had she not leant forward and caught him in her arms. She was almost as tall as he. He steadied himself at her touch. She saw the perspiration on his forehead, the little dent between the brows.

“Thanks,” he said gratefully. “I’m afraid you are—stronger than me, after all!”

In a moment she was all mother. “If you can walk like this, I’ll help you down to our homestead; but, perhaps, I had better leave you here and run down and get a dray sent up for you?”

King hesitated. It would be horrible to go down to the homestead a mere helpless weight on a girl’s arm. But he felt her presence very near him. Her face, keenly pitying, was at his shoulder. Her eyes made him waver. It was very well to stand thus; and she was divinely near. The setting sun lay upon the valley, flinging the hills ablaze. Her face was lit as with an exaltation hardly human. He looked into her eyes. She returned the glance frankly, proudly, triumphantly—the unconscious look of the woman who has found her mate.

So the boy and the girl were held one moment silent, with steady eyes. And in that moment the earth completed her deliberate, age-old plan, weaving these diverse two into a bond inseparable. Time and Life might break that bond; their paths that had so haphazardly crossed, might sweep apart, never in this wide vastness of the world to meet again. It mattered not; that moment had broken down the barriers. They would move apart changed, each carrying something of the soul of the other, each leaving something of a soul behind. Of that moment a child had been born that would live and grow eternally. This patient old earth had done her part.

And boy and girl felt only a great glow of happiness inexplicable. Of the great alchemy of life, of the grand experiment made by that ancient chemist upon them, they were blindly ignorant. Only to each in that moment it seemed as if somewhere, afar off, there was a faint sound of singing. …

“I think, if you don’t mind, I can get down with you helping me,” he said.

The sun stood on the farthest range of golden hills. About them waved the wide ocean of tussocks.

So, facing the sun, the two moved slowly over the tussocks, sinking together into the darkening valley.

IV

IV

It was a new Aroha, less ethereal, more human, that King saw that evening at the homestead. She had changed her short gown for a skirt that emphasised her slim tallness; at her throat was a piece of lace, and her hair had been laboriously smoothed from its rebellion, and lay in heavy waves of glowing brown upon her head. She had grown from the spirit of the waste to a woman, conscious of her sex, hedged round with home-keeping things. King felt dumbly uneasy at the change; it seemed a desecration.