Black Beech and Honeydew

by Ngaio Marsh

  The Wallworks were to join us on this expedition but were prevented at the last moment so here we are, an odd little party, camping out at night and following at a walk, since Tim knows no other gait, the convolutions of the lonely coastal road: up and over Mount Hercules, down to Lake Ianthe, in and out of water-races until we find one of them in spate and a row of frustrated motorists on the near side. With a great jangling of billy and frying pan and a grinding over boulders, Tim walks us into the ford. The cart lurches and tilts, water churns about its axles. Tim plunges and veers but knows his job and we emerge triumphant on the far side. We camp in the bush beside a lake but are tormented in the daytime by sandflies that, sated with our blood, blunder on to our wet canvases and stick in the paint. At night, mosquitoes take over. We move on and at last arrive at the Franz Josef where there is an empty hut. We stay here in preference to the tourists’ hotel.

  The rata is in flower. It splashes the lower slopes of the forest with washes of incredible scarlet and overhangs the green caverns of the glacier. Bill and I, who have both started big canvases, paint steadily day after day. Tim meets a wall-eyed mare as elderly as himself and bolts with her into the bush from which after an exhausting search we extract him, very much above himself, leaving his decrepit minion to flaunt round in circles with her tail up, giving broken-winded whinnyings.

  We spend a day on the glacier with a famous guide, Peter Graham. He is a man of immense charm and tells us in a plain unaffected manner that sometimes he hears voices in the deep crevasses. It is a misty day and the going is slippery. A woman in the party who has been to Switzerland wails continuously that there, on much less tricky ice, we would have been roped. ‘They rope you for anything in Switzerland,’ Peter Graham says. My mother, who is immediately behind him, unobtrusively holds a strap of his rucksack. ‘It made me feel surprisingly better,’ she says afterwards. We have to jump over a crevasse. It is no more than a long stride but very deep and green. Rendered lopsided by the heavy paintbox I have been foolish enough to bring, I am secretly appalled. On the return trip we find hot springs a few feet from the lateral moraine of the glacier. If you want to bathe in the big one, Peter Graham says, you cool it with lumps of ice.

  At night we walk into the bush. The banks alongside our track are hung with glow-worms and we speak in whispers as they incline to take alarm at the sound of human voices and put out their lamps.

  People still say of Westland: ‘It’s different on the Coast. It’s another country,’ and although nearly forty years had gone by since our last camping holiday there, I found, when I revisited it with a theatre company not so long ago, that outside the main towns it felt and looked and smelt the same. The Otira Pass was still hazardous going in a car and there was only one other route through the mountains from east to west. Ghost towns with their shells of gold-rush pubs have not yet been smothered by bush or cleared to make roads. There is still gold in the rivers and hills but so remote that only a handful of lone prospectors look for it and the dredges, once some of the biggest in the world, have all shut down. The tracts of devastation they left in their wake will I suppose be slowly re-captured by the bush. Native timber is carefully protected nowadays and behind the few railroads and highways lie vast tracts of virtually unexplored forests. It is still the same Coast.

  I daresay, if one should turn away from the main routes of the tourist and explore those inconsequent little tracks that lead to nowhere in particular, one might come upon such another recluse as the lady we visited near the shore of Lake Kaniere.

  She lived in a deserted lumberman’s shack in a bush-clearing. We had been hunting for subjects to paint when we saw the smoke from her chimney and found her chopping wood for her fire. She was white-haired and very thin and wore a sacking apron over her ramshackle grey dress. Her working-men’s boots were broken across the insteps. She asked us, in the modulated, clear voice of an accomplished hostess, if we would come to tea with her.

  Her single room was scrubbed and airy. A piece of threadbare patchwork covered the bunk. Apart from the usual bush bench and table and a single broken armchair there was no furniture. A goatskin served as a rug before the fire. The cups we drank from were exquisite. One or two ghostly photographs – a very pretty woman in full Victorian evening dress and a group of three children, the boy in an Eton suit – were pinned to the walls. On the unplaned plank over the open fireplace stood a dim Edwardian photograph of a garden party: the ladies in picture hats trailed parasols and the top-hatted, frock-coated gentlemen stood about attentively in heroic attitudes. The façade of the first Government House at Wellington formed their background.

  Our hostess, smiling indulgently, asked about our painting and made poised conversation with my mother. When we left we shook hands with her and she hoped we would meet with good weather for the rest of our holiday.

  ‘It rains a great deal on the Coast,’ she said. ‘A bore, of course, but one can’t have everything.’

  She waited for the prescribed time while we walked away and then we heard the door of her shack close.

  ‘Did you recognize the photograph on the wall?’ my mother said. ‘She must have been lovely as a girl.’

  I think I see, now, after nearly half a century, that although, during those long visits to Westland, my whole intent was to translate what I felt about it in terms of paint, the more valid but scarcely recognized impulse was towards words. I had a small success with a short story about a ghostly stagecoach which was, I am afraid, a bastard offspring of E. M. Forster’s Celestial Omnibus. I made a tentative approach to a novel of which I shall have something to say later on. I think I was aware of the danger of writing a book that would turn out to be – not, alas, a rattling good yarn but merely a chunk of pseudo-colonial romanticism and much too long. There was, and is, room for a rattling good yarn about the Coast but I was not and am not the one to write it. A gap waited and still waits for a penetrating and aesthetically satisfying novel born of that formidable landscape. Our contemporary writers are, I think, too solemn and not grave enough to achieve it. In New Zealand letters of today there is a wearisome dread of superficiality that inspires the dragging in backwards through a native thornbush of an all too easily anticipated symbol. That sort of writing would be no good for the Coast.

  I find that in retrospect the figures of the drunken seranaders, the boys who drowned in Lake Brunner and the lady of quality in the shack near Lake Kaniere seem like the shadows of my own shortcomings. Perhaps that is why I often think of revisiting the Coast but, though it lies within a day’s journey, never do so.

  The summer holidays of 1920 were the last I was to spend camping in Westland. The coming year was to bring a change.

  IV

  One of the greatest events of my student days had been the visit of the Allan Wilkie Shakespeare Company to New Zealand. The first intimation we had of this was the sight of one or two shop windows in Christchurch draped in black velvet with a skull and a crown in the centre. Then there were the advance notices and posters. Allan Wilkie and Frediswyde Hunter-Watts in Hamlet to be followed by Twelfth Night, As You Like It, Macbeth and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Apart from the disastrous matinée of Romeo and Juliet (which in any case I could not be said to have seen) I had witnessed, while still at school, two performances of Shakespeare: Othello and The Merry Wives of Windsor by the Oscar Ashe Company. Othello had harrowed me so much that my memory of it is one of unnerving details: black hands tearing lilies to pieces: a black face convulsed and animal-like, the same hands putting out candles, closing round an arched throat, striking down and inward with a sword of Spain: with these, an incredulous sense of looking, appalled, into an unsuspected chasm of human suffering and knowing it was true. I still have a feeling that a perfect performance of this play would be insupportable.

  Of The Merry Wives, I remember that Mr Ashe wolfed an entire chicken and that for the last scene the stage was covered, a foot deep, in horticultural salt.

  The Wilkie Company gave m
e my first real joy in Shakespearean acting. The opening night of Hamlet was the most enchanted I was ever to spend in the theatre. We waited from four o’clock in the afternoon, in an open passageway at the top of an outside iron staircase. By half-past six the stairs were crammed and the crowd, as seven approached, began to stamp with a ringing rhythm that shook the whole structure like a thunder-sheet. We were next to the doors and heard the rattle of the metal ticket box and the sound of the bolts being drawn. In those days, early-door theatre queues in New Zealand were not decorously mannered as they are in London. When the gallery was opened the crowd surged forward. By a prearranged manoeuvre I (an old hand) having gained an entry, plunged down the steeply-raked wooden seats as if they were giant steps, flung myself into the front row and spread myself. My mother descended by the centre stairs and was soon beside me while the mob thundered in behind us. We had achieved the best seats: plumb in the middle, beside the two arc-lights. An hour to wait with the excitement piling up on itself. Not far above our heads was the painted cupola, imported from Paris, with its lavish Hippolita, Indian Puck, capering lovers, bearded Theseus (who looks like an Athenian gendarme) and any number of airy fairies all capering about a mild Bottom and a singularly nubile Titania. Programmes were bought from a man who came down the rows asking us to move up a little, if you please, so that more people could be crammed in. I can see the programme now. Gertrude – Miss Lorna Forbes. Claudius, King of Denmark – Mr Augustus Neville. Polonius – Mr Edward Landor. Ophelia – Miss Frediswyde Hunter-Watts. Hamlet – Mr Allan Wilkie. All new names to us and little did I think how familiar they were to become before 1920 was out.

  At a quarter-to-eight the first reserved stalls and circle patrons began to come in. One heard the thump-thump of turned down seats and caught sight of acquaintances who sometimes, in edging to their places, would look up at us in the gods and wave. The fire curtain – The Iron as I would learn to call it – crept upwards and there at last was the peacock-blue velvet curtain.

  There is much to be said, and perhaps later on I may try to say it, for theatre in the round, for the open stage and for the Elizabethan plan. But I think I am glad that the theatre of my youth was that of footlights and the curtained proscenium. I cannot believe I would have felt the same delight, endured the same rapturous agony of anticipation, if I had stared for an hour at an acting area made commonplace by unfocused light from the auditorium. A performance was ‘a mystery’ in those days, a happening that bided its time in concealment and though ‘they’ could look at us, and sometimes might be detected doing so through their spy-hole in the curtain, we must be denied everything until the appointed time.

  At last the orchestra came in, then the conductor, Mr Bradshaw Major. Then the house rose for ‘the King’. The lights dimmed and there were drums.

  The live orchestra may often have produced sounds of extreme vulgarity, though in this case it did not, but it also engendered and wound up to its quivering extreme, the joy of anticipation. My state of mind, while I awaited my first Hamlet was, I concede, scarcely more grown-up than that of the little girl who, with Ned, frantically devoured chocolates while she waited for Bluebell in Fairyland. Except that I knew what was coming.

  Who’s there?

  Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.

  Long live the king!

  Bernardo?

  He.

  You come most carefully upon your hour.

  ‘Tis now struck twelve. Get thee to bed, Francisco.

  For this relief much thanks: ‘Tis bitter cold and I am sick at heart.

  Have you had quiet guard?

  Not a mouse stirring.

  Well – goodnight.

  The best opening scene, I swear, in dramatic literature.

  I wonder what I would think if I saw that performance again tonight. Allan Wilkie was in the direct line of the English actor-managers and this was an actor-manager’s production. Of his performance, I remember best the climax to the play-scene when Hamlet, exultant, flung the Gonzago script high in the air and the leaves fluttered down in an arc as the curtain fell. Frediswyde Hunter-Watts, his wife, was a Pre-Raphaelite Ophelia: delicate, gentle, with a cloud of bronze hair and a strangely moving little break in her voice. The Polonius was excellent. Of the others I remember little. Strange that the effect of this Hamlet should be so vividly recollected and the details of the performance so vaguely retained.

  My mother and I sat up till all hours talking it over: she, I suspect, taking pleasure in my delight and perhaps a little subduing any strictures she may have felt disposed to make.

  The Wilkie Company played for about a fortnight in Christchurch. For the first time, I, with some of my fellow students, cut evening life classes to go to the theatre. The plays that, under Miss Hughes, I had learned to read with a growing sense of wonder, I now saw in their native climate. I may have realized then, however dimly, the essential difference between those often jarring opposites: Shakespearean scholarship and Shakespearean production.

  The Wilkie Company paid, I think, two return visits to New Zealand during my student days. They were our gods. In the excess of our devotion, I remember, several of us sent Miss Hunter-Watts (Mrs Wilkie) a weighty sheaf of spring blossom tied with pink ribbon. ‘From five art students’, we wrote on one of my mother’s visiting cards and left it at the stage door. Can we possibly have stolen this token of our esteem from an ornamental island, civically maintained on the river Avon? I am inclined to think that our parents’ gardens not being equal to our design, we did so augment our offering. I seem to remember one of the boys climbing down from a conveniently situated bridge after nightfall. We had the gratification of seeing Mrs Wilkie take her curtain call, heavily burdened with our massive tribute and of receiving a note from her saying that she herself had been an art student before she went on the stage.

  Between the first and third visits of this company I wrote a play. It was called The Medallion.

  The plot escapes me. It was a Regency piece with a central scene in which a number of high-stomached blades caroused together in a manner derived without prejudice from Shakespeare, Sheridan, Wilde and the Baroness Orczy. I think it ended with an insult and a duel and am sure a Lady’s Name was in question, although at that time I had no idea just how or why the situation I had concocted should tarnish it, being still largely uninformed of the facts of life. I think my play must have been very bad in a slightly promising way. It still puzzles me that my mother suggested I should send it to Mr Wilkie.

  For a few shillings I had bought an old and faulty typewriter and, with many dreary setbacks and repetitions, at last produced a stuttering copy. Before I could lose my nerve I left it at the theatre with a note (rewritten not more than half a dozen times) saying that if he could spare the time I would be very grateful indeed for Mr Wilkie’s opinion. I begged him not to trouble himself to read my play if disinclined to do so and said that I would collect it at the office after the company had left. This was in case Mr Wilkie should think I manoeuvred for a meeting. It is the only time I have ever asked for a completely outside criticism of anything I have written.

  I was astounded, stimulated and terrified when Mr Wilkie wrote asking me to call at his hotel when he would return the play and tell me what he thought of it.

  My mother said that it would not be suitable for me to go alone to the hotel and she would accompany me. This was a great relief.

  To this day I cannot walk into the Clarendon Hotel in Christchurch without remembering that call. I have no doubt I was white to the lips though why I was so agitated I would have been at a loss to explain. It had nothing to do with my play. I remember that after she had sent up our names and we waited in the lounge, my mother gave me a look and said I’d better buck up. Then Mr and Mrs Wilkie came in and, little as I dreamed of such a thing, the foundation of a long friendship was laid.

  I have scarcely any recollection of the meeting. Mr Wilkie seemed immensely tall and his wife extremely beautiful. He said
, I fancy, that my central scene showed some appreciation of actable dialogue and that I would no doubt write another play. My mother spoke about the pleasure their season had given us and presently I was floating home on a pink cloud.

  The company left Christchurch and I returned in a peculiar state of mind to the Art School.

  With a group of fellow students, I shared at this time a small, scantily furnished room at the top of an old office block near the school. We gave it the courtesy title of a studio and in it we had meals between classes, worked at anatomy, perspective and composition, talked and talked and sometimes sat to each other as models for the head. My parents would meet me there on nights when we went to the cinema or the theatre and the room became a rendezvous for our friends. Late on a summer afternoon with my paintbox slung on my shoulder I climbed the stairs alone and walked in.

  Mr and Mrs Wilkie were sitting in the studio.

  ‘I obtained the address,’ Mr Wilkie said in his resonant actor’s voice, ‘from your father. I have a suggestion to make.’

  To this day I have no idea how he found my father and at the time was much too dumbfounded to ask. My bewilderment was, I suppose, comically apparent and the reason why they both seemed so amused.

  I was speechless. Beyond an open window, somewhere down the street a gramophone blared out the final duet from Trovatore. I have only to think of those plangent exchanges and at once I am back in the studio and Mr Wilkie is smiling at my astonishment.

  ‘How,’ he says, ‘would you like to be an actress?’

  CHAPTER 6

  Winter of Content

  They were passing through Christchurch on their way to the North Island and had only two hours to spare before they left. In a trance I heard that Miss Lorna Forbes was obliged to return to Australia for domestic reasons and that her absence would leave a gap in the company. If, said Mr Wilkie, I intended, as of course I did, to write for the professional theatre, it would be of advantage to me to learn something about it from the inside. He planned to make a return tour of New Zealand with four modern plays. He offered me a part in each of them. My father, he said, had not rejected the idea out-of-hand. How did I feel about it?