# Tussock Land/Chapter 11

XI
There were always King’s letters to remind her that the door was not quite shut. He wrote earnestly, full of his new purpose in life, enthusiastic about the promise of his work. But to the girl, jealously scrutinising every unimportant sentence of his, came gradually a recognition of the fact that he had ceased to put her on a pedestal.
He regarded her as a friend, his best friend, to whom he ever turned when in doubt, of whose sympathy when in trouble he was sure. That foolish, impossible love that had glimmered through his first letters, the little, broken-off phrases that he had permitted himself and left unfinished because he knew that she would finish them in her heart, died gradually out of his pages. She could see herself fading in his eyes. She felt herself thrust back upon herself, shut out from his life. The door clanged sullenly back upon her heart.
And she resented this hotly. It lowered her opinion of him. And she was a woman, and was proud. She was a woman—and said nothing. Indeed, her love for King, flung back upon her, returned in a new guise. Her letters became almost motherly in their grave sympathy, their serene cheer. Already she had begun to look on King as a boy whom she had nurtured: she would watch over him always; she felt herself keenly responsible for him; ​her heart went out to him with a great yearning that was nearer pity than love, and unconsciously she began to train herself to look forward to the time when he would go away out of her life, meet other faces, love someone else—when the door would shut tight for ever, and she would dwell in the stillness and the dark.
It was a drear time, and the discipline to a heart already sore and bruised was terribly severe. She parted from him daily, and in the long, slow nights the agonies were repeated. For her heart clung desperately to the memory of him, and each succeeding parting, each anticipation of the final severance, was as poignant as the last. So with suicidal hands she tore her heart and watched it bleed.
Then—almost inevitably it seemed to her—the end came. She got the letter from King that her heart had so long been vaguely expecting. She opened it hastily and, glancing through it, took it to read to her favourite haunt at the head of the valley. It seemed to cut her life in two. He was going away, to Sydney, and soon. He had had a quarrel with his father over his painting, and, stung to a white heat by his father’s sarcasms, had blurted out all his hatred of his university studies, all his dreams of art. His father, who had long suspected the boy’s inclinations, showed no surprise, and told King that he must now take his choice. He must decide once for all upon his life work. The Reverend Mr Southern would not stand in his son’s way; but if King decided to be an artist he must not expect his father to support him in a precarious profession of which his father disapproved. The boy’s decision was immediate. He would give up everything at once and go to Sydney. His father said quietly that he had better take a month to decide; at anyrate, he need not leave for ​Sydney till he had had that time to think it over. So in a month’s time he was leaving for Sydney—and fame.
Thus far she had hastily read as she walked up the valley. Now she was at the saddle, and she threw herself wearily among the tussocks to read on.
“Of course,” the letter continued, “I won’t be able to come up to Westella before I leave. But I shall write to you always, and it does not take long for the mails to reach Sydney. And you must always write to me. You are necessary to me, Aroha; I don’t think you could ever guess how necessary you are to me. It is to you that I turn when I am in the blues—and I am often in the blues. But your letters are always so cheering, so healthy, that it often seems to me that your heart must be always laughing. In that tussock sea you are drowned in a happy peace, safe from all the evil and the sorrows of the world. I wonder if you are ever dissatisfied, disconsolate? Sometimes, though you never even hint of it, I fancy you must have your miserable moods; but I suppose yours is that optimistic nature that refuses to be swayed by moods, that always takes the best from life. Well, I would like to be you, safe in your circle of hills, secure from trouble and responsibility and despair. That tussock slope will always remain for me an oasis in my life; there I knew something of heaven, there I met you; and it is to that sanctuary of quiet that I would like to return at the end. Perhaps I shall, Aroha. And I know that when I do I shall find you there—high on the ridge, waiting. That is my dream, Aroha. Well, if it were not for this assurance of a great future that I feel within myself, I would like to be you. It is the unfailing ​sunshine of your nature that I need. You have so much of it in your heart that I know that you have some to spare for your friend, King.”
Aroha turned the last page. There was no postscript. The blank page stared her cruelly in the face.
Then the hills seemed to close round Aroha, to hem her in in a rampart of silence for ever. She looked drearily at the horizon; that last ridge of hills against the grey sky seemed to menace her, to thrust her back. Here was her world: let her be content. Outside there were loves and hates, passions and regrets, and deeps of happiness and despair. But here for ever lay the smooth ocean of peace. The solitude was a benediction. The great few stars, slowly opening in the sky, seemed to her like the jewels of a vast silver altar. Was it for her to escape from this sanctuary into the welter of the world?
She thought, “He comes to me for comfort always. He asks me for a bare friendship, in which the woman is to spend all, the man nothing. He wants my love, and will return me its worth—in gratitude. Can he ignore the fact that I love him, that he has loved me? That has changed us both: our lives have merged. He cannot get away from that, and, ah, God! I know I cannot tear my heart apart from him. But he is a man; and men forget. They go away; they have so much to do, so many new interests to take up, such wider outlooks to view. They have their work, and it is always a new element in their lives; it does not hedge them about, cling to them as a woman’s work does. It takes them far from themselves.
“But we women stay always. We see the same ​thing over and over again; we do the same meaningless, futile tasks day after day; we go through the same damnably monotonous round of life from sunrise to set. And the things we have to do—the petty little house-tasks—so wrap themselves about our lives, that we can never lose ourselves; never for one clear sweet moment forget that we are alive, forget that we have been hurt. No; hour after hour the wound rankles; we cannot forget; we have too much time to remember in. And I shall have all my life—and I am so young—to remember in!
“Only, every day I shall continue to go through it all—but the difference now! There will be something lacking that will hurt cruelly and will not cease to throb. At every moment I shall miss something that was there once, that will never be there again. The man enters a new world, where nothing intrudes to remind him.... But we women do not change, do not escape from it all. Only, the sun won’t shine again, and we twist a knife in our hearts by remembering how the sun once shone—that is the hell that we women make here for ourselves. Oh! he is wrong, unkind, callous to condemn me to this prison where I go round and round, day after day, in the drear company of my thoughts.”
Then she went through it all again. She would have plenty of time to think it all out now. He had forgotten her.
Then she reproved her heart for its bitterness. She must make allowances; she must remember that he was very busy, very ambitious, very much troubled. No doubt he liked her best of all his girl-friends—and she divined that he would have many girl-friends. Perhaps she was something more. But already separation had eaten deeply into that love of his, and now he was going ever ​further and further away! She contemplated that great stretch of sea space between New Zealand and Australia with a deep horror. Those endless leagues of the Pacific lay like a great array of dragons between her love and her. Separation was an implacable thing, more implacable than hate.
She recalled the few cases of love in absence that she had known. There was Janet Mackay, the eldest girl at Aorangi run. She had been utterly in love with Fred Beattie, the lawyer at Gore. Aroha remembered having to suffer much one night that Janet stayed at Westella, listening to Janet’s enthusiasms over Fred Beattie. Janet ticked off his perfections categorically, and when Aroha had mentioned that she rather preferred his younger brother George, Janet had serenely unpicked George before her eyes, leaving a mere thing of disconsolate shreds. And Fred had gone to Westralia and left his legal business to George. The engagement was announced with great pomp before he left. As soon as he made his fortune at Coolgardie he was to return and crown his triumph by marrying Janet. He prospered much on the fields, and wrote frequently. But he was making too much money out of the boom to return just then. It was the chance of a lifetime, and he took it. And after years of waiting Janet married George, and did not invite Aroha to the wedding.
Then there was Mr Percival of Mataura, who had come to the colony because of a love affair. She remembered him—a keen, crisp, clean-shaven business man—and wondered where he concealed the sentiment of which he was suspected. He had loved a woman in England who had married another man. After her marriage there had been an interval of silence, and then she had written ​him a letter of passionate regret. She had made the great mistake. He replied, and gradually a correspondence had grown up between the two, year after year, until at length the husband had died. Then Mr Percival had hurried to England to marry her. The great mistake was after a lifetime to be remedied. But he returned in four months, alone. She had seen him often since—a keen, crisp, clean-shaven business man.
No, she must make allowances for King. But to let him go without seeing him! Suddenly this drear expanse of tussock land took on a malevolent aspect; the hills seemed horribly near, they crushed in on her. Nature and she were antagonists. Her heart craved something more intimate, something infinitely more human. As she turned to go down to the homestead it seemed as if she was entering a valley of long despair.
Suddenly every muscle in her body grew tense with a stupendous hope. She stood stone.
“No!” she thought, “I’ll not be passive under it all! We women are always too passive. No, it is mere cowardice, self-indulgence, a luxury of laziness common to womankind. It is so easy to drift, to be carried along by an irresistible fate, to slip from the too heavy burden of responsibility. It is a degrading thing—that entrancing luxury for submission that so fatally clings to us women. We shrink from action, initiative, will, and every time we timorously withdraw it seems to me that not only our individual souls shrivel, but that a part of the soul of the whole sex is irremediably atrophied. It is that that has made women such pitiable children in so many things where man is a master. No, I won’t so easily submit. Not till I’ve tried, made my effort. I’ll go down to Dunedin and see King!”
​That evening, at tea, the girl’s preoccupation prevented her doing more than make a pretence of eating. For now that she saw that she must go to Dunedin to regain King—and at her possible failure in that quest she did not dare to let her heart even glance—her purpose weakened. She saw how impossible it would be at the present time to leave the run. They were short-handed; it had been a trying year with snowstorms and heavy rains, wool was down, and ever dropping lower. And a difference of even a halfpenny in that fatal barometer of the London wool-sales meant, to half the run-holders in the Colony, the difference between prosperity and the mortgagees. No, she could not leave Westella.
She determined to write to King. It was to be such a different letter. In it she would lay bare her heart, shed, as it were, all the tears that had gathered in her eyes, let him see a woman desolate and disrobed of pride. She would cast aside all her woman’s armoury of coquetry, throw herself upon his breast and put her lips against his. She wrote rapidly, almost frenziedly. Her mother, reading on the other side of the room, looked up often at her daughter with a keen pity that almost comprehended.
The letter was finished. The girl could not trust herself to re-read it. She rapidly enclosed it in an envelope and addressed it. Then with a sigh she put it down, and buried her face in her hands. She had taken a step that her sex cried out against; but her heart was happy. She pictured King reading the letter. Then a phrase of the letter recalled itself to her memory. Suddenly it struck her that it might convey a wrong impression to him, and it was most important that he should not mis​understand. All her future was sealed within that envelope. If he did not read it aright!
She tore the envelope open again, and read the page. It seemed to her new mood chill and distant. And she had thought, as she wrote, that it thrilled with her passionate personality, was warm with the perilous nearness of her love. A cold hand seemed laid on the page. How was it possible ever to interpret herself to him? Oh, he should understand without a word, if he loved her!
And if he did not, after all? Then he would read her poor, piteous letter from a new standpoint—one that she had not considered. He would criticise, stand aloof, judge. She tore the letter to pieces, and swept them into the fireplace.
Her mother rose. “Aroha, child,” she said, softly, her hand about the girl’s neck, “I’ve been thinking you need a change. You’ve been working too hard. I think you ought to go away for a little while.”
“Go away?” echoed the girl in a daze. “Where could I go?”
“Why not to Dunedin?”
To Dunedin! And King! She was one splendid thrill of joy, every nerve aflame. But she crushed her tumultuous hope.
“Oh, but I couldn’t leave you, dear,” she said.
Her mother took the girl’s head on her breast. It was such a flushed, feverish forehead! The motherheart melted in a flood of passionate tenderness. She looked into the wide eyes of her daughter with a sudden fear. The girl was ill; her heart was ill! She might die!
“Aroha, love,” she said in that grave, deep voice of hers, “I am anxious about you. I’m frightened of keeping you shut up here so much. It is all different with me. I am old. Life has done all that it means ​to do with me; but with you there is always that infinite promise. I must give you your chance. You must go away from this cramping place for a month or so. You must come back to me strong—strong.”
The girl began to cry, softly and gratefully. It was so good to cry, to feel the touch of a mother against your cheek, to struggle no more. The mother did not check her sobs, but her strong arms were about her soothingly.