# Tussock Land/Chapter 10

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During the year that followed King’s meeting with Aroha he worked hard at his art. He went to the university, and did his utmost to interest himself in his legal studies. But his heart was elsewhere, and he gradually came to look on that little group of buildings nestling under the hill beside the noisy Leith as a prison-house. Within it were lectures to be attended, examinations to be passed; but once outside the ugly tin buildings of the mining school that prosaically guarded the gates of this modern temple of learning, a world of wonder and colour awaited him. On those solitary walks through the bush to and from his lectures King’s mind was not busy with jurisprudence. He was imbibing the meaning and the fragrance of the world about him, probing and trying Nature with a keen lust for knowledge. For he had grown to see the beauty of the aspects of this new land; to him, as to every New Zealander, there seemed now something crude and harsh in the remembered staring yellow-green of the English meadows, something sickly and unreal in the first leaves of the English spring. He learned the exhilaration, the energising splendours of the clear New Zealand atmosphere. He felt as if he had stepped out of a fog—nay, as if he had come to the possession of a new sense. He perceived for the first time what space and distance in all their naked splendour meant.
​He had petitioned his father for permission to attend art classes in Dunedin; but the Reverend J. Southern had his views on his son’s future, and Art did not enter into his conceptions. So there had been a few icy words of irony from the keenly intellectual man of religion, and King had writhed, as he always did writhe, under the pitiless cleverness of this man. Against the sarcasms of his father King was not able to make a stand. It struck him as unfair—part of the universal unfairness of childhood—that his father should be able to beat his dreams down with such incisive and terrible logic. The father’s point of view was right; but while King recognised this, his heart told him that sons also have a point of view. He was not old enough to understand that truth is a thing that eludes mathematical definition, and that to two differently-situated observers the same thing may have two, or a hundred, appearances, and that each of these points of view may be inexorably right.
So the Reverend J. Southern put art in its proper place, without the capital letter; and the boy, smarting under the scorn of his ideals, confessed himself unable to rebut his father’s sarcasms, and retired into a sullen reserve. Henceforth his father must stay outside the door of his life. And his father seemed content. King knew that he would never give up art and that in the end his talent must win. And then his father would be compelled to acknowledge his mistake.
His mother, with only half her husband’s understanding of their son, believed.
“Yes,” she would say, “I know that you’ll be a great artist some day. But wouldn’t it be better just now to be a barrister? When you’ve got a good practice you could easily give up your spare time to ​painting. In fact, I don’t see why, when you’re waiting for clients, you shouldn’t take your easel and canvases down to your office and do a little painting in between whiles.”
Yes, she was sure it would all turn out right in the end. For King was her own son; that was enough, surely! And then she would kiss him, with oh! such a profound belief in him, perhaps the more profound in that it was so mistily vague. And she would notice that his eyes had dark rings beneath them; he stayed up too late at night, drawing in his bedroom. He must be more careful. Oh, he must be an artist, since he was so set upon it; but it seemed so far off, and artists were such shabbily dressed people, and, meanwhile, there was his constitutional history examination ever getting nearer, and she was doubtful—King himself was doubtful—whether he would pass. He had been too much absorbed of late in a picture he was at, which he painted in his bedroom and kept hidden from his father’s sight in the wardrobe. Every morning, as she tidied her son’s room, she took out the canvas and studied it, without, however, arriving at any definite conclusion about it, save that it was a great and a glorious thing to be the mother of such a palpable genius. It was a big canvas, the outcome of many an early sketch. She wondered why he painted the bush—which everybody knew was all of one colour—a kind of dark, sombre, rich green,—as if it had all sorts of tints in it. He probably did it to make it look prettier; and certainly it did look much more beautiful.
So King steadily studied and painted, and consoled his heart with the knowledge that in the end he would come to his kingdom.
And of Aroha?
​He told his mother nothing. Aroha was alone for him. Not even his mother’s lips would have the privilege of mentioning her name. He was hotly in love with her—perhaps the more hotly because she had pushed him away. For he was only a boy—and I have known grown men who were as unreasonable. I daresay the gods find excuses for us all.
For a week after King’s return to Dunedin he lived in Aroha’s presence; his vivid imagination conjured up memories of her and went further and combined his remembrances in a thousand new impossible imaginings; he recalled suddenly with a shock certain words of hers, certain apparently unimportant gestures of hers that had lain unnoticed in his memory and now came to the surface with a new and insistent importance, demanding a new interpretation. He had her always with him; in the evenings he went long walks with her; he put her face into his painting and knew that she was looking over his shoulder as he worked; he set apart for thoughts of her the misty hours when he lay awake in bed and forbore to dismiss her memory by sleep, and he took her gratefully into his dreams. The thought of her was like an aroma about his life.
For the future he had no plans. It was enough that he loved Aroha, that he believed she loved him. She had not said so, but to the arrogance of youth nothing seemed more inevitable than that these two should love each other. He had to learn much of life yet, to understand that though love is given as freely as the flowers, it will not stay till it is won. He did not guess that there must be long service in love, that there must be denial and duty, that the knight in love must win his spurs. His love for Aroha was too swift, too easy, too inevitable for it to be of worth. Sometimes the gods give gifts, but ​invariably they exact payment. So we learn the worth of things, so we understand the wondrous value of our heritage.
King did not know women, hence he did not know Aroha. It was necessary for him to learn. So the gods decided that he should learn to comprehend Aroha by a knowledge of other women. It is only by squandering his love again and again that a man learns its value. King had to serve his apprenticeship in love. And it was a long apprenticeship.
When King received a letter from Aroha—not a love-letter, but just a sweet, serious note, telling him she was well, wishing him well, saying—in a postscript—that she had not forgotten, King read a thousand fantastic impossible things into it, and was supremely exalted for days. He replied in a strain of superb foolishness, and was snubbed by Aroha’s silence for three weeks. But he did not know—and, perhaps, it was well for him that he did not know—that that foolish, impetuous letter went about every day in the bodice of Aroha’s dress and at night was kissed almost to shreds. And he did not know how many equally foolish, equally impossible letters she had written to him during those weeks of silence, and posted, with many pangs, in the kitchen fire.
After that interval he was more careful; he wrote letters that were quite unimpassioned, mere essays in friendship; but he left her frequent opportunities to read between the lines. Perhaps she did, but she did not tell him so. In one letter there was enclosed a note from Mrs Grey asking him to spend the next vacation at Westella station. The morning King got that letter jurisprudence seemed a thing of small worth, even “atmosphere” was a futile phantasy.
Aroha had made up her mind now—or rather her ​heart had decided for her. She had relinquished the idea of decision. She loved King—that was enough. She felt herself undergoing some strange process of change that seemed to make another woman of her. Emotion overwhelmed her; her heart in a moment melted. There were times when she was but an embodied yearning. Aroha looked on with a kind of patient wonderment; she had become a strange, foolish girl, but she loved this new person who did such foolishly tender things. She gave herself up with a glad content to the sway of a passionate and dangerous tenderness.
So with a feverish zest she flung herself into the work of the household. It would help her over the time till he came. She saw in every letter of his how the boy was strengthening into the man. His love for her had changed him too. The weaknesses of which shamefacedly her heart—in the traitor hours of the wakeful night—suspected him, seemed to have died out of him in his new aspect of seriousness. He spoke less scornfully of his university work, more humbly of his art.
So Aroha saw him at Dunedin, qualifying himself for his life-work, proving himself by steady labour the fairy-prince of her dreams. And he was coming to Westella now—it was only three weeks. She refused to count the days by the big almanac over the kitchen wall: it made them seem to drag so slowly; but every night her heart made the reckoning for her, and she said with a great happiness, “In so many days...”
She would meet him at the top of the valley. He would come to meet her as he came before, up the long valley, out of the unknown into her dreams, swathed about with her imaginings, yet oh, so human and near! So she mused and worked, ​serenely expectant, save when suddenly her utter need for his presence made her knees tremble beneath her and she swayed with a delicious sickness.
At last the day came. Though neither of them had mentioned the route, she knew he would come up the valley to the ridge, and she went there to wait him early in the afternoon. And, as before, she paused below the ridge among the tussocks and waited a moment in a delicious fear and expectation. Then she took her courage in her hands and ran to the top. And straining her eyes down the long sweep of valley she discerned nothing but the yellow sea of tussock land. It was too soon. So she stood waiting... and waiting.
And there was no change in the restless sea of silky yellow, except the slow passage across its surface of a mob of sheep, moving in long lines, like a fleet of grey sails afar, along the narrow sheep-tracks that ridged the slope. And at last when the late twilight had come, for it was December and the days were very long, she turned back slowly, wondering. There must be news at home: perhaps he had come by another road. She ran desperately down the slope. He was not at the homestead, and had sent no message. I believe she cried that night. Aroha did not often cry.
Two days afterwards, and they were long days, John, going into Pukerau railway station for stores, brought back a letter and a telegram for Aroha. The telegram had been lying there for three days, waiting the rare chance of a rider passing on the unfrequented road that led from the railway to Westella. The telegram and letter were from King. A great chance had come to him. A young and rising English artist, travelling in New Zealand ​for his health, had decided to stay that summer in Dunedin, and intended to take pupils. It was too rare an opportunity for a student in this out-of-the-way country to miss. Of course he would not be able to come up to Westella this summer; he would avail himself of this wonderful piece of luck and stay in Dunedin and paint. He was sorry that he would not be able to see Aroha; but then there was his art!
And the girl sent him back a nice cheery letter full of good counsel, commending his decision and politely regretting that he was unable to pay his intended visit to Westella.
And when she had closed the envelope and saw John put it in his pocket before he mounted the dray, she felt that she had closed a door on her own life, that she had shut up something in her heart that would always stir and strive to escape. The scar of that wound would never heal. She had been maimed.
And when King received her letter, which was not the sort of letter he had expected, he wondered whether, after all, she really loved him.
But there was his art, and all that vacation he worked hard.
And Aroha, at the homestead, also worked hard.