Sleep in the Woods

by Dorothy Eden

  As Briar got back into the wagon for the last stage of the journey the whole village assembled to wave goodbye. One woman, clasping a small child in her arms, kept pointing at Briar in a strange way and Briar could not help remarking, “I suppose they’ve forgotten good manners, so far from civilization.”

  “She’s not pointing at you, but at your bonnet,” said Saul. “She probably hasn’t had a new one for five or six years.”

  “Oh, is that all!” On an impulse Briar untied the ribbons and tossed the bonnet down to the woman. “Please have it,” she said.

  “Oh, may I! Oh, thank you, ma’am! It’s beautiful! Chipped straw and green velvet ribbons. Oh, my!”

  Her face was radiant. So it was on a note of laughter that they resumed their journey.

  “The poor thing!” said Briar. “Not a new bonnet for five years! Why, even—” She bit her tongue. She had been going to say that even when in service her mistress had occasionally given her a discarded bonnet or at least new ribbons.

  “Well, she has no place to wear it except church,” said Saul practically. “And a shawl serves just as well for that.”

  “My goodness!” Briar exclaimed. “I can tell you it’s just as well you didn’t marry Sophie. She’d have starved quicker from lack of finery than lack of food.”

  “And you?”

  “Oh, I—” she dropped her eyes. “I haven’t been used to a great deal.”

  “Then you must write to your mother and ask her to send you the latest fashions. I can arrange to pay for them in English currency.”

  “Thank you, Saul,” she replied stiffly. She hadn’t realized that accepting his kindness would be as difficult as enduring his domination. “But I shall wear out what I have first. If each bonnet is to last five years then I have plenty until I am forty years old.”

  “That’s splendid, but I don’t intend Wellington society to see my wife in a bonnet twenty years behind the fashion. Or even one year, for that matter. As soon as we’re settled I expect you to entertain guests.”

  “Me!” she whispered, thinking of the trays she had carried, the hair she had brushed and arranged, the gowns she had mended, the young ladies she had fetched and carried for.

  “Yes, you, my dear. And, if I’m not mistaken, you’re more than able to. You have the ability of an actress.”

  “You mean, I can imitate?”

  He had not noticed, or chose to ignore, the icy offense in her voice. “With excellence. And we’re not entirely in the wilderness. You’ll be surprised at what women can produce in the way of ball gowns, even here. Not people like Amy Perkins, of course, whom you gave your bonnet to. Her husband is a drifter. But there are other houses like Lucknow not too far away. We have week-end parties. You’re not at the end of civilization.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this sooner? Sophie wanted me to take another ball gown, but I said it was taking up valuable space needlessly.”

  “Sophie can bring it when she comes to visit, as no doubt she will.”

  And so, perhaps deliberately, though one would not have suspected him of such thoughtfulness, Saul had conjured up a picture of light-hearted pleasure. The menace that had hung over them yesterday and during the long night receded.

  The house was too new. It had no character. It was raw and young and as yet unloved. Like a human face, it required lines of living stamped on it. But compared with the hut in which Jemima was to live, it was a palace. Secretly, to Briar, it was a palace anyway, for she had never possessed more territory than a share in a servant’s bedroom in the attics, or, as in Wellington, a narrow, austere little room to herself.

  But here there was a drawing room, a dining room, a wide hall, a study, and an immense kitchen, and upstairs there were no less than six bedrooms, and most wonderful of all, a bath-room with a huge flowered porcelain tub which had been a source of wonder and perplexity to the Maoris who had helped transport it.

  The furniture was sparse as yet, but there was the piano in the drawing room, a good oak dining table and chairs, opossum and sheepskin rugs on the floors, and in the drawing room a very good carpet. A white Minton vase containing ferns stood in the hall, there was a well-filled bookcase, and various trophies, spears and swords, and a fine antlered deer’s head, decorated the walls.

  The double bed in the big bedroom had brass knobs, and a snowy cotton quilt. The windows, as Saul had promised, looked over the tree tops to the soaring cone of Mount Egmont. Even the dressing table was not unadorned, for from somewhere had been found a pincushion, a china tray and an old silver mirror. A small vase held some springs of fuchsia obviously freshly picked.

  Briar had walked through the house in almost complete silence. She had not been able to express her feelings, for they were quite dreamlike. This could not be real, she could not be the mistress of a place like this. Why, even Sophie had only two bedrooms and a narrow dark parlor. Nothing so grand as a drawing room with a piano, nor a window that held within its frame the towering peak of a mountain.

  Excitement and pride made her heart swell and her eyes glitter.

  Then she turned and saw the tall figure of her husband in the doorway. For one chilly moment it seemed to her that he was sinister, the shadow hanging over this brilliant new life, the owner not only of the house but of herself.

  He was waiting for her to say something. What was there to say, except that she wished he were not there?

  “Who picked the flowers?” she asked at random.

  “Mabel Kingi, I expect. But you’ll have to train her as a servant. She’s lazy and ignorant.”

  He crossed the room towards her. “Well, what do you think of our house?”

  My house! she longed to say. She had come so far and been so determined. She deserved a reward all for herself, not one to be shared.

  “It’s very fine,” she murmured, not looking up into his face which she knew would be full of pride for something he had created. She didn’t want it to be his creation, but hers.

  Then she backed away. “No, Saul. Not now!”

  “I shall kiss you if I wish,” he declared calmly, and then his lips were suffocating her again. She had to submit. It was, after all, the price. Nothing could be obtained without a price.

  Later, when she lay in the wide bed, it was no use to say, “What about the Hauhaus? Aren’t you afraid of them tonight? Shouldn’t you be watching?”

  For he answered, “The dogs will bark. And my men sleep with their ear to the ground. Come, love! You have your reward. Now I have mine.”

  “My reward!” she gasped.

  “The position you married me for. Don’t imagine you ever deceived me.”

  His triumphant face, full of mockery and without tenderness, was intolerable. So if he made no pretense as to his feelings, neither would she. Stiff with distaste, she submitted to him. There was no danger that she would display the weakness of tears again, for now she was too full of anger and resentment. And also not a little panic as to whether her new exalted position in life would ever compensate for this.

  From sheer weariness she drifted into sleep to the calling of the little brown owls, the moreporks. The fragile forlorn sound followed her into her dreams. It seemed to be the symbol of the strangeness not only of her life, but of this new country.

  Moonlight shone in the window, and the peak of the mountain had a ghostly brilliance against the pale sky. The full moon rode over the forests and rivers and lakes, shining impartially on farmhouse and pa. Far away, across the Rimutaka mountains, the smoke from the great bonfire outside the forest pa of Titokowaru had died down, and the fuel that had fed it lay blackened and unrecognizable. Farther away, in the lonely and savage hills of the Urewera, the fiery Te Kooti was holding a war council. Fires were lit, and around the tall niu pole adorned with its ghastly emblems of severed heads, the naked, magnificent figures of his recruits from the Urewera, the Waikato and the Taranaki tribes revolved in a fanatic dance.

  Much closer to Lucknow, not more than thirty
miles away, the moon shone with its impersonal white light on four new graves, and in the wreckage of the ravaged home were strewn relics that had been brought lovingly and sentimentally across thirteen thousand miles of ocean—a copper kettle, a pot pourri jar with its faint clinging fragrance of English roses, a silver hand mirror, the severed china head of a doll, and the damp and blackened wreckage of a treasured best gown of green silk with velvet trimming.

  At this moment, in other forest pas, tribal chiefs were adorning themselves with their mark of high rank, the white-tipped huia feather, sign of a rangatira, and holding councils as to whether or not they would remain peaceful towards the white man, or take up arms and follow the great Te Kooti.

  For now Manu Rau, that wily white soldier, was dead, this could be the time to revenge themselves on the pakeha for taking their land and killing their young men, leaving them like broken canoes on the battlefield.

  Just before dawn a dog barked, the staccato sound as fraught with terror as had the peaceful cone of Mount Egmont suddenly erupted smoke and fire.

  Saul leaped out of bed and was at the window in a flash. Then he picked up his rifle, which had been propped against the wall within reach, and went downstairs.

  He seemed to be gone for hours. Briar sat rigidly upright, wondering whether to choose to be attacked in her nightgown in the false security of the big bed, or to scramble into some petticoats and at least leave a decently clothed body to lie headless on the ground.

  But there were no more sounds and at last Saul returned.

  “Is it all right?” she gasped.

  “I think so. The dog was probably barking at a wild pig, or an opossum.”

  In the just growing light she could see him towering over her, to her tired and bewildered mind still haunted by her strange desolate dreams almost as terrifying a figure as the lurking enemy.

  “Do we have to be afraid every time a dog barks?”

  “Just careful. But don’t worry. It won’t be forever. Perhaps another year or two.”

  Had that poor woman who two nights ago had died sprung up in terror every time she heard a tree rustle or a bird cry out?

  “Two years!” she repeated, aghast. For even this one night had seemed to be forever.

  “Are you wishing yourself back in Wellington?”

  She couldn’t see this large, well-built, high-ceilinged room in the dark. But she remembered everything about it, also the rooms downstairs, the piano, the bath tub with its pink flowers, the staircase and the Persian carpet.

  Deliberately she shut her mind to the other more distasteful aspects of her life. Besides, she would not give her husband that ironic satisfaction.

  “I’m not wishing myself anywhere else,” she said composedly.

  In the full light of morning her spirits came surging back. She had slept again when Saul had left her, and awoke to Katie’s cheerful voice.

  “It’s eight o’clock, ma’am. I’ve brought your tea. I’ve made it myself because that black heathen in the kitchen doesn’t know the first thing about making tea. You could stand a spoon up in what the men drink. Did you sleep well, ma’am?”

  “Yes, thank you, Katie. It looks a beautiful morning.”

  “It is, ma’am. And I’ve never heard such birds. Gurgling and whistling and making more noise than Mabel Kingi. She sings all the time, those sad heathen songs. I don’t know how I’m going to get along with her, ma’am.”

  “You’ll have to,” Briar said crisply. “We’re here in this isolated place, so it’s most important that we all live peacefully. Remember that. I want no quarreling.”

  Mabel Kingi was the daughter of a chief and a white woman; she had been seduced by and then married to a white man, Thomas King, who had subsequently been drowned while trying to cross a flooded river. By then Mabel had learned enough of the strange ways of the pakeha to remain with white people.

  While he had lived, she had loved her husband and had tried to please him by learning to cook and keep house in the European way. But it was not a natural accomplishment to her, and she preferred to grow fat and indolent, sitting on her haunches smoking her clay pipe and singing the haunting songs of her race, rather than doing anything so strange and unnecessary as polishing floors or using a duster.

  Eating, yes. She could boil potatoes and the sweet kumaras, and turn immense sides of mutton on the spit, and even produce solid lumps of over-baked bread. But to pick flowers to stick in jars, and make the wide high beds standing on four iron legs, and keep the linen white—no, that was not suitable employment for a chief’s daughter.

  Didn’t these white people know that the great towering mountain, Mount Egmont, was her ancestor? Once he had used to speak in roars and rumbles and immense clouds of smoke, and although for many years now he had been silent, One never knew what day his angry, awe-inspiring voice would be heard.

  If the new white mistress, for instance, demanded too many duties of her, giving her no time to sit singing her songs, it was very possible the mountain would tremble and smoke and the great voice come forth. Or if that pakeha girl, Katie, with the strange red hair, and the cheeky grin, got too sure of herself and ordered her, Mabel Kingi, a chief’s daughter, to do this and that, then certainly the watching ancestor would speak.

  So the middle-aged Maori woman, fat and slovenly in the cast-off cotton dress of some previous mistress, gave her flashing smile and rolled her enormous dark eyes, and sang, in her high pure voice, the ancient songs of her people. But if her dignity were assaulted she drew herself up in royal affront and even slightly daunted her mistress.

  Indeed, in that first week, Briar found herself constantly making peace between Mabel and Katie.

  Katie would come flying upstairs. “That black bi—begging your pardon, ma’am, that Maori is deliberately making dirty footprints with her great bare feet on my clean floor.”

  And then Mabel, stalking upstairs, arms folded, head held high, brown eyes flashing, black hair streaming down her back, every inch a rangatira, would appear exclaiming, “Pi korry! Mabel Kingi will not be talked to like a servant. I will call to my ancestor who dwells in the mountain. He will cover you with fire and smoke!”

  And Briar, desperately borrowing Aunt Charity’s hauteur, would say firmly, “If you two are going to fight, one of you will have to leave. That’s final.”

  Katie, at least, did not intend to leave. For although the country was deadly quiet, except for the chattering birds, there were a great many more men about than she had thought there would be, and already the shepherds were showing interest in her impudent red head.

  Mabel did not intend to leave, either. She loathed and abominated work of any kind, but it was better to do a little of this than be cast out to survive by weaving and selling rush baskets, and wandering from place to place. Although the white people had this necessity to scrub floors and wash many petticoats, at least one approved of the comfort of their houses. Mabel’s indolent air hid a good deal of shrewdness. She meant to stay the possessor of the little room next to the washhouse, where she slept on a woven rush mat and hung up her two cotton dresses.

  So there was an uneasy peace, and Briar, exercising a firm determination that hid her own nervousness and lack of experience, was able to get the house in order.

  She hung the two portraits one on either side of the fireplace in the drawing room, and spent a morning resolutely admiring them. She had an impetuous wish that old Mrs. Whitmore could materialize beside her, so that she could say, “See! Now are you ashamed for me to be your son’s wife?”

  But before Mrs. Whitmore was invited to visit she had to learn to do a great many things: make candles and bake puddings and cakes, give dinner parties with the right air of assurance, learn to ride and shoot more accurately, and conceal her hostility towards her husband from the servants.

  Even had she been able to, she did not see any reason to hide it from Saul himself. For he had a similar and almost devilish disregard for her feelings.

  X
VI

  LEAVING THE BABY with Martha Peabody, Jemima trudged over to offer her services in the big house, and to gape and admire. Delighted to see her, Briar chattered almost as hard as Sophie.

  “I’m learning to bake bread. Already I can do it better than Mabel. Saul says we’re to have a dinner party soon, so I’ll be able to use my wedding silver, and Saul has a Meissen dinner service that belonged to his grandmother.”

  “It’s yours now,” Jemima said softly.

  So it was. A dinner service as fine as any a duchess would use. One of her rewards.…

  “Oh, Saul has various family things,” she said airily. “Most of the good families here have. But, of course, one has to take great care of them because they can’t be replaced. I shall trust no one but myself to wash and dry them.”

  Jemima clasped her hands. “I’m so glad for you. You’ve done so well. And you haven’t forgotten your friends.”

  “Not you and Fred, anyway.” Briar’s voice softened. “And little Rose. Are you all right in that tiny cottage?”

  “We’re fine. The roof leaked a bit until Fred fixed it. And the baby caught a cold, but she’ll be all right now the place is dry. Jimmy and Lucy love it. They think it’s a game. They didn’t even mind when everything I cooked at first was either burned or raw.”

  She was so thin and pale. The bones showed delicately beneath her skin, bird bones, framing eyes too large and sunken. She hadn’t entirely recovered from her ordeal on the ship. But her eyes met Briar’s indomitably.

  “When Rose gets rid of her cough and the potatoes are up and the winter’s over,” she said cheerfully, “we’ll be grand. Fred says it rains a lot in the winter, but he’s fixing it so we can have a fire inside.”

  “Jemima, I wish you’d come and live here for the winter.”