# Tussock Land/Chapter 27

XXVII
Effie and King had arranged to meet the next evening at their usual corner. Remembering his lateness of the previous evening, King was early at the tryst. During that day he had not thought much. He felt strangely dull and tired. He accepted his position in a lulling apathy for which he was thankful.
But now, as he waited in the grey of the dusk, he saw, in all its desolate bleakness, the sacrifice that he was about to make. That day he had avoided Miss Barbara Smith’s eyes. In the future he would have to avoid other eyes. Yet he hugged to himself the comfort of Effie’s love for him. She had been the means of dragging him out of the depths of his despondency, and he was grateful to her. Now he felt a man; there was the future to work for—his and Effie’s. He had shaken off his despair; there was dear, commonplace, doubt-lulling work to do. It was something, he felt, to have won Effie’s whole-hearted love.
But she was late this time. He strained his eyes across the gathering darkness. He saw her coming in every woman’s figure; but the faces he peered at passed unrecognising. He waited wondering, and watched the slow hand of the post-office clock crawl deliberately round the face. And she did not come. He stood there for an hour. Possibilities of accident or illness flashed across his mind, and he felt the ​intolerable agony of the thought that he must wait till the morrow to find out what had kept her. For now it was half-past nine and he knew she would not come that night. Yet he could not refrain from strolling down the street as if to meet her, never venturing far from the corner in case she might have reached it by another way. But she was not awaiting him beneath the lamp when he returned. At last, despairing, he went home.
There was no letter for him next morning. Perplexed, he went at lunch-time to her lodgings. She had left the day before, leaving no address. Was the landlady quite sure she left no address?
“Yes, the laidy was very perticler about that. She said perticler that if any letters came for ’er ’ere, they wasn’t to be forwarded nowhere. Told me to burn ’em.”
He turned away, wondering. He looked for her in the streets that afternoon, and was night after night, for a fortnight, at the corner where they used to meet. But she never came. He never saw her again. She had gone inexplicably out of his life, leaving no trace. He did not know any address that would find her. For a long time he woke every morning with the confidence that there would be a letter from her. None came.
What had prompted her sudden disappearance he never knew. He wondered whether her keenly intuitive, sensitive soul had divined beneath the show of love he had made her its poor pretence. He did not love her as she craved to be loved. Perhaps, in the clear morning light, she had vaguely seen the sacrifice lie was prepared to make for her. That she still loved him he was sure. And he loved her now with another love that had grown up in his new loneliness. He saw the dim striving of that clouded, ​common soul to pierce its way up to the vaguely-divined light. He felt that if one’s handicap is taken into account no one on earth could judge Effie. And he knew that a part had been taken from himself. That trust of her soul given into his hands had been rudely taken from him; he was not great enough to undertake it, And slowly he came to the conclusion that Effie, in one swift moment of blinding insight, had seen the sacrifice he was prepared to make, seen or imagined the drag she would be on him, and resolved to relinquish the greatest thing in her world for his sake—for the sake of her great love. But even he, with all his passionate sympathy, was unable to divine the grandeur of the sacrifice she had made. And a certain text came into his mind—“Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”
And whether she had gone up or down in the welter of life, whether her heart, with its fatal ease of loving, with its insatiable appetite for love, had led her down into the depths of life, or lifted her to the heights of renunciation he never knew. But he feared.... And yet he knew that wherever Effie was, her heart was warmed by the rich glow of that splendid renunciation. She could not utterly sink while in her heart she nursed that great memory. But often in his life, often through the long years, the thought came to him, “She is living somewhere now, perhaps near me, lost in the wide smother of the world, wondering, perhaps, about me, perhaps having altogether forgotten me, forgotten that once she so loved me as to cast her soul for me into hell. That would be the most terrible thing of all. And I am ultimately responsible. I threw away my trust.” And then the quiet hope would come to him, “Perhaps she is dead.” He never knew.
​In the months that followed he found himself, to his surprise, taking a keen interest in his legal work. His manager increased his salary and began to entrust to him more responsible work. Once he said to King, “I hear you’ve given up painting. That’s encouraging, most promising. Persevere at your work and we’ll see you somewhere yet.”
But King’s interest in his work was due more to his growing dissatisfaction with Australia than to a delight in the practice of the law. The long heat of the summer, the warm, moist atmosphere of the city, the unvarying brilliance of the sun, began to press upon him. Unconsciously he was finding out that he was not an Australian. His thoughts began more and more frequently to stray back to the land he had left.
One afternoon King had gone into one of the many underground tea-shops of Sydney to escape from the pervading heat. He sat at a marble-topped table and ordered the national lemon-squash. As he sat drinking and negligently considering the possibility of a water-ice, a vast individual lurched across the room and held out to King a huge, red hand. King looked at him in surprise. His first impression was that the man was appallingly new. His clothes shone with newness, his straw hat was startlingly white and stiff, his tie seemed to mourn the shop-window from which it had so recently been ravished, the creases in his trousers threatened to split if the wearer bent his legs, and his vividly chrome boots seemed to crackle with their first gloss. The beard he wore stood solid and spruce like the fleece of a newly-sheared sheep.
“You don’t remember me, Mr Southern?”
King recognised the voice. This was John, the ploughman of Westella run. But why the plough​man in Sydney, and why such a prosperous John?
“You wonder, maybe, why I’m so swell?” said John, heavily sitting. “Well, I’m rich; not a millionaire, of course; but I’ve got enough to—Not heard o’ me? Well, I am surprised. I thort everybody knew. At the Metropole, where I’m puttin’ up, they points me out to strangers. I thort every bloke in Australiar had heard of me! Didn’t you see it in orl the papers?”
He paused for the rhetorical effect. Then, raising his voice, and with a glance that included the other people in the room, he delivered this stupendous announcement.
“I’m Tattersall’s sweep. First prize on the Melbourne Cup!”
There was a stir at every table. Women and men turned and stared at him. John nonchalantly preened himself.
King remembered John’s devotion to the gigantic lotteries known throughout Australia and New Zealand as Tattersall’s Sweeps. These sweeps are held upon every important race in the continent, and the prizes run up to thousands of pounds. On the Melbourne Cup, John, holding a ten-shilling ticket, had won three thousand pounds. For years he had poured his wages into this huge lottery, sometimes drawing a small prize, the proceeds of which he immediately invested in more tickets, only to see them drawn once more into this great whirlpool of speculation. But with the true gambler’s instinct he had continued his investment in these perilously uncertain tickets, and now he had drawn the greatest prize in the sweep. He felt in some way that he had deserved it. In his mind there was a growing belief that in some way his personality ​had influenced that marble with the number of his ticket upon it to insinuate itself into the child’s hand that drew it from the barrel.
His immediate act on receipt of this news was to relinquish his position as ploughman at Westella. He had determined to see the world, and for a Maorilander the world is Sydney and Melbourne. But before leaving Westella he had been careful to stipulate that his place as ploughman should be only temporarily filled. Some day, he remarked, he might like to come back. Meantime, he would have a Gargantuan spree, whose dazzling recklessness would send his name, already famous, flashing across Australasia with the brilliance of a meteor. He would show them how a man should spend his money!
This was his first week in Sydney, and already the delight of spending money was beginning to pall. He was feeling somewhat lonely and afraid in this big, careless city. His joy at meeting a friendly face was enormous, and took the immediate practical form of ordering two lemon squashes.
John was brimming with the stupendous recital of his adventures in Sydney, and King let him run on, laughingly interested. But the man brought with him a memory of New Zealand that seemed to bring comfort to a vague pain. His bronzed bigness, his robust health, his cheery optimism, his fund of suppressed energy, seemed like a cool breeze in the sultry city. Suddenly an intense longing for his own country overcame King. He knew then what his soul had been inarticulately craving. It was a breeze. He wanted the keen breath of the ocean wind upon his cheek; in this city of high, stifling, narrow streets the very air was stagnant. He was a stranger here—a New Zealander. In a moment he saw his island home; his mind raced across that ​waste of the heaving Pacific; he saw the rocky islets stand stiffly up from a foam of white; he saw the ragged coast rise sharply into the clear air; he felt the whip of the wind lift his hair from his forehead; the bitter rain stung his face, and he shivered. Pungent and swift to his nostrils came the moist scent of the bush. That was where he lived, where he should be; and—the thought almost made him reel, so vivid it was—there he could paint again! It was not all over yet. Once back in that cool, crisp air, once enveloped by the strenuous ozone of his islands, and he would feel again the returning waves of inspiration, of hope. He was not alive here; but in four days he could be in another world. He thrilled with the suddenness of it. The door was not shut in his face for ever. An angel was fumbling at the latch.
John was telling him of the run. There had been changes. Mrs Grey had died a year ago.
Mrs Grey dead! And he did not know! King was startled, shocked. Then his thought leapt to Aroha. How utterly he had forgotten Aroha!
He named her with a sudden cold at his heart, as if he would learn that she, too... “How is she?” he said quickly.
“Just the same.”
King became aware that he had been holding his breath for John’s answer.
“Not married?” he said, wondering. “Isn’t she married?”
“No; nor likely to be. She’s got too much to do with managing the run. It’s all in her hands now; she won’t have a manager. And she’s making it pay, too. Frozen mutton is going up. It’s a splendid property now, run as she runs it.”
“And has she changed—changed in appearance?”
​John considered. “Well, I never exactly noticed. You see, livin’ on the run and seein’ her every day like, it isn’t likely I’d notice. But there was a chap who saw ’er before I came inter my fortune, and ’e ’adn’t seen ’er for years, and ’e told me she was altogether changed, grown older, more lines come on ’er face, got thinner, too. Well, though I can’t say as ’ow I’ve noticed it, you can’t live through trouble without it markin’ you. And—let me see ’ow many years it is since you was at Westella—gettin’ on for six, ain’t it? Well, six years is bound to tell on a woman as ’as trouble.”
He paused as if digesting the philosophy he had enunciated. Then, apparently satisfied that he had not committed himself to any sentiment to which he was not prepared to stand, he went on,—
“I often thinks she’s working too ’ard like. Workin’ ’erself to death. What’s she want to graft like that for? She’s makin’ money. I don’t see no good in workin’ when you’ve got money—like me. Spend it, I say, have a good spree, and then take up yer graft agen, like an honest man, till you gets enough to ’ave another spree. That’s what I’m doin’ with these ’ere thousands of mine. I reckon it’ll take me a year to go through ’em all, and then I’ll go back to Westella again. She’s keeping my place open fer me. I can always earn good wages ploughin’. ‘Marry,’ says some. Not me, I’ve known good men lose good places owin’ to their wives. My ploughin’ won’t quarrel an’ nag at me. A wife might. Not me!”
King hardly heard him. Aroha had grown older. It was strange that he had never thought of that. In his mind she was still the girl he had left—the girl with the eyebrows that met with an upward ripple, the girl with the rich laugh and the supple, slim figure. ​She had grown older! That meant that lines had come into her face, that worry had made her thin, that she was wearied with work. She had seemed a thing made for happiness, and she had become a galley-slave! She worked too hard. Why?
He asked John the question.
“I suppose it’s because of ’er tryin’ to forget,” he said slowly. “When a woman tries to forget she tries to kill herself. Seems to me as women are made up of nothin’ but memories. They broods so on ’em that their memories grows into themselves, and to try an’ forget is as ’ard as to cut a piece out of their ’earts. And Miss Aroha’s tryin’ to forget.”
Forget? No; surely she had long ago forgotten? As he had forgotten her. When his mind recurred to those glorious days in that sea of tussock land, he was conscious of scarcely one regret. It had all been delightful; but it was a fading dream, impossible to recall. Of late, he had once or twice determined to write to her; but on sitting down, with the blank paper in front of him, he had been unable to find the sentence that would connect two such distinct destinies, that would join two paths that had separated so long ago. But now Aroha had grown older. Somehow that seemed to bring her nearer to him. She had not lingered at the parting of the ways. She had trudged on, she had known the bitternesses of life. Perhaps her path had not been so widely separated from his, after all. Perhaps, even now, she was not far from him. Perhaps they two had, at short intervals, travelled the same hard road?
And she had not forgotten! She bad been truer to him than he to her. She remembered. Perhaps, as John had said, women were all compact of memory. Perhaps she lived yet in that past from ​which he had so brutally and wantonly gone. A wave of keen egotistical gladness went through him. He would go back to her, see her again, take up the dream where he had laid it down. . . .
“Yes,” John was droning on, sucking his lemon-squash through his straw with a deliberate relish. “Yes; he was a brute that man, treatin’ ’er so, he was!”
“Who?” asked King, abruptly.
“The bloke I’m tellin’ you of—the bloke she’s tryin’ to forget. She was in love with ’im all right, and ’e—well, ’e was just amusin’ himself. But I give ’im somethink to be amused at before I’d done with ’im, I did!”
A dim recollection seemed to vaguely amuse him. He rumbled with inward mirth.
King heard him with a dull pain growing within his heart. She had forgotten him, after all, had fallen in love with another man! There was something disconcerting in the thought of an Aroha who could love another man. She seemed to have defiled herself. Was it the same Aroha, the Aroha who had loved him? Another man!— Ah! but she had grown older!
“Tell me—his name—who?”
John ruminated. “’E was a bloke named Colley—oh! a ’igh-toned bloke ’e was! Son of a big merchant-cove in Australiar, and ’e was up to Mataura on a ’oliday when ’e saw ’er. ’E got to ridin’ over to see ’er—’er mother was alive then—and she seemed to like ’im, and they got friends like. They ’ad arranged to get married, and ’e went away to Dunedin to fix things up. Then one day ’is father arrived unexpected at the ’omestead, and there was rows. ’E’d come all the way from Sydney to stop ’is son makin’ a blamed fool of ’isself, ’e said—and ’e looked the sort of bloke as usually gets ’is way, too. ​’E wasn’t goin’ to let ’is son, who was ’is heir, to throw ’isself away on a country girl like Miss Aroha—’er with Maori blood in ’er, too—and ’e bein’ an Australian thoart as ’ow Maories was niggers. So ’e stormed and stormed, and Aroha said as ’ow she wouldn’t give him up, not she, ’cos they loved each other, and it was no use ’is torkin’. Then the old cove rode away, and that girl went about the run as praud as a queen. But one day a letter came from the bloke she was in love with, sayin’ that ’is father was that angry with ’im for wantin’ to marry ’er that he was goin’ to chuck ’im out without a blooming penny. And so he found ’e ’ad made a mistake, and would she be so kind as to release ’im? And she went about for a week like a ewe that ’ad lost ’er lamb, waitin’, she seemed to me, for the bloke to come to ’er and say ’e never meant to write no such letter. But ’e never wrote, nor nothink. Of course, I got to hear all about it, and when she asked me to take a letter addressed to ’im to the post—I was ridin’ in to Mataura—and I saw that it was addressed to Dunedin, I made up my mind that I’d just deliver that there letter myself. So I took the train to Dunedin, and I called on the bloke. I ’anded in the letter and said that I’d wait for an answer. And when ’e said, ‘There ain’t no answer,’ I ups and says, ‘It’s my opinion as how you've been guilty of conduct as is unbecomin’ to a gent!’
“He fired up at that. ’E ’ad a stick in ’is ’and; but, Lord! what’s the use of a stick at close quarters? I marked ’im, all right. And would you believe it, when I went back an’ told ’er what I’d done, she fired up and told me I was a brute, and that evening the missus give me notice to go.”
John smiled a deliberative smile. “But, bless you, I didn’t go. They couldn’t get on without me ‘angin’ ​about, and the next night Miss Aroha came an’ asked me to tell ’er all about the scrap. And when I told ’er ’ow that bloke ’ad stood up to me, and took ’is gruellin’ like a man—’e was a thin Australian bloke, plenty of reach but no stamina—when I told ’er of his pluck, the colour came into ’er face again and she told me that I was to stay. But she said that she would never forgive me for what I’d done—never. And I don’t believe she ’as, neither, though that’s two years ago. Now, ain’t women funny creetchers?”
They both sat silent for a long time.
“’E was a game enough bloke, too,” said John, at last. “I don’t wonder at ’er bein’ fond of ’im.”
Then John launched out again upon the wonders of Sydney, and King was content to let him talk.
So Aroha had forgotten him? It was a smart blow at his egotism. He writhed. But slowly a saner mood came. Had he not quite forgotten her? Women were said to be so constant. But what reason had he given her to remember him? Plainly, he could think of none. And then another thought came. She had her troubles, too; she in her turn had gone through the agony, had been seared by the furnace. Startlingly clear it came to him that this brought her only the nearer to him. They had both lived. They marched, after all, upon the same road of life—a road of regrets and pain and memories. Each had gone far, and perhaps the two paths were even now converging. He felt an overpowering desire to see her again, to change greetings with this other soul who knew what life in all its splendour and all its sordidness was. How she must have suffered! And through suffering he had learnt how suffering craves sympathy. At least they could meet again as friends.
And Aroha was in New Zealand, in that wind​swept, rugged ribbon of land lying far out in the midst of the illimitable Pacific. New Zealand, where he was to find energy and hope, hope and—Aroha!
His incurable egotism was about him once more!
And in that noisy, sweltering tea-shop, beneath the streets of Sydney, King shut his eyes and saw again Aroha with an aureole of memories about her, standing high on the summit of the tussock ridge, her dark eyes glad for him, her lithe, sweet, joyous body breasting the sturdy wind.