# Tussock Land/Chapter 2

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.