Passport to Hell
Page 6
But the whole landscape was blotted out for Starkie by fog which refused to lift. There was neither star nor lamp to be seen. He had had nothing to eat for the best part of twenty-four hours, and his swimming head made it easier to lose the way. He plodded on, as through a tenuous blue blanket. When his stiff body refused to carry him any farther he stumbled towards a solitary tree, and found with thanksgiving that it was hollow at the base. He crawled into the hollow, stripped off his dripping coat and wrapping his arms tightly round his chest, wriggled and twisted into an aching sleep.
There was only one companion when Starkie awoke in a still fog-wrapped morning—and he, with his handsome white tail and natty whiskers, was none the better for the presence of a member of the Delawares. Starkie froze stiller than the unwary rabbit, and wriggled towards him through the fern. Hands locked about the stroller’s white scruff. He killed the rabbit, skinned it with a penknife, and looked round for firing. He had no matches, and what his forefathers might have known of the art of twirling fire-sticks was a blank to him.
He ate the rabbit raw, shivering a little, but finding the taste of its blood less repulsive than he would have expected. Now he was terribly thirsty, and sucked the long grass-stems, curling their dew-beads on the inside of his tongue. But nothing satisfied the thirst, and fog cut him off from the world. He went on his way, beating farther into the hills. Presently he came to a square and fairly deep pond and, lying on his stomach, lapped at the water like a thirsty dog. It was yellow and tasted horrible. He recognized the dying flavour of sheep-dip used not very long before, and though he wondered if what would kill sheep-ticks would also lay out a human being, he was glad. Sheep-dip meant a farm not far away….
But he took the wrong direction. It was not until the third day of his flight from the Kittawa that he came to the wire fence which meant civilization again. By that time he could hold the fence and follow it down to the sheep-station, but no more. He had had nothing to eat since his meal from the raw rabbit, and had spent both nights in soaked clothes. It was a queer little figure, perhaps formidably tall for a boy, but childish enough in hunger and exhaustion, that stumbled into the station yard.
As the fog rolls back on a sudden from the Canterbury hills and reveals them broad-bosomed, tawny, and gracious, with the broad wings of red hawks circling grandly over them and the thin cries of sheep in the fenced-in paddocks, so for a whole week the penalties of outlawry disappeared from Starkie’s horizon. The station-owner, a tall Scot with a red moustache, was of the rare breed who ask few questions, and would sooner meet a strange youth with a pat on the back than with a rebuff. Starkie was filled and refilled with steaming bowls of macaroni soup. He was rolled in blankets, hot-bathed, hair-brushed, and generally civilized; the ancient housekeeper who attended to his bodily needs keeping up a constant mutter of scolding against the fate that permitted bairns to be fair clemmed. She took him in hand as nobody else had done since his infancy. Ruthlessly and with efficiency she penetrated the bath-room where his body lay soaking in hot water, saw him cleansed and outfitted in fresh woollens of a ghastly pink, scrubbed his head, called him a great lump, and released him with a look of womanly pride.
In the evening he was entertained in a red-plushed but not unpleasant parlour by the station-owner’s daughter—a dark little girl named Rita—who played for him upon an ancient upright piano, silvery trickles of tunes which seemed not at all unbeautiful to a sleepy boy, and smiled at him with bright, friendly eyes. Did the head of the house even notice that the waif from the fog was bronze instead of the appropriate blotting-paper hue? If he did he made no sign of his perception. The next week, brown boy and Scottish girl—Rita was ten years old—rode together on the bridle-paths that threaded the valley basin. Here at an earlier point of the autumn would arise the splendid russet sweep of the corn, coloured like Freya’s rich hair.
A few long-horned cattle—prize stock—occupied a corner in the fortunes of the ranch; but the real power and glory of the place appertained to its ten thousand sheep—heavy-fleeced now against the winter months, a wild-eyed, moving mass of brown on road or in hawthorn-studded pasture. This green world where the boy and girl went riding was a self-contained kingdom of eminently simple habits. There were no entertainments, neither in the station-owner’s house anything more elaborate than his upright piano. Hospitality and their own self-reliance were the only suggestions which the inhabitants could offer to a swifter-moving outside world. Yet I can say in faith that these people assure a certain amount of greatness for the future of any country they may live in, and that they deserve the old-fashioned term—‘The salt of the earth’.
If the boy had known it, cupped within the dark hollow of these Canterbury hills was the only little patch of untroubled and happy childhood he was ever to experience. But he was as simple as he was young. Rita and her tall Scottish father had rebuilded the world for him. He had come to them a dripping waif, and they had welcomed him and treated him as a favourite. It takes very little to restore a boy’s self-confidence. He decided that his crimes were not so appalling after all, and that safely enough he could head for Invercargill. His host shook a fine red-locked head.
‘You could have stayed,’ he said.
Parting with Rita, Starkie experienced a sudden and dreadful pang; and, as he was no longer hungry, knew that it must be love. This struck him dumb, and he could only stand awkwardly, long-legged, thin, bronze-coloured, like a little Indian without the adulterations of civilization, when she produced from her bookshelf a small blue book, its leather cover sentimentally adorned with a circlet of white violets.
‘It’s my birthday book,’ she informed him. ‘Please sign your name in it, for luck.’ Grey eyes with their shy smile looked up, as if perfectly certain that luck is on the friendliest terms with all young people. He scrawled his name—J. D. Stark—opposite the date marked July 4th, and discovered an optimistic prediction in verse against his fête-day:
Though long in the night, thy star shall shine out
When the proudest shall fade.
He told Rita that he was coming back; he meant it, for she was the only charming and feminine thing he had known since his old infatuation for Avenal Lady. So she folded the book and safely bestowed it again, and waved good-bye to him from the door as, directed by his Scottish host, he struck out again over shining hills now altogether innocent of fog. The amiable barking and frisking of sheepdogs and the occasional breathless slither of heavy brown ewes herded down from their ambitious mountaineering accompanied him to the top of the wire fence. When he looked back, the station was a toy in a dark cup; a little house like a box; a trim, square garden; poplar trees that might have been sawn for the roof-garden of Noah’s Ark.
The curious thing was that this was the only real and quite unchangeable world Starkie ever knew.
*These game-cocks (stuffed, of course) now adorn the Dunedin Museum.
2 Good-bye Summer
TEN DAYS after he left the sheep-station in the Port Hills, Starkie arrived in Invercargill, thoroughly sick of the flavour of turnips, and with a lasting prejudice against New Zealand goods trains. He had walked to Christchurch, hunted in the long and grimy station for a goods truck labelled ‘Timaru’, crawled in, and promptly been shunted from one line to another until every bone in his body rattled. At Timaru he put in a day with a friend—one, Bert Smith—and then resignedly disappeared on another goods train, stowed away under tarpaulins that wouldn’t be lifted until they reached Dunedin. From Dunedin southwards it was all dusty road and hard-hearted little turnips; and when he arrived in his native town somebody must have warned the inhabitants to produce no flowers by request, for no welcome from home or elsewhere greeted him. Emerging from a near-by public-house he met David Harris, and reminded him of the days of old, when Harris as an eel-hunter had made up in keenness what he had lacked in practice. This port ran up a little flag of welcome, and a day later Dave arrived with news of a job for Starkie in Dalgety’s wool-store.
May Simms was a lissome brunette whose little silk frocks—she ran them up herself—clung affectionately to the lines of a slim body made for tennis, dancing, and surf-boards. She was only sixteen, and wore her hair down, the brown plaits advancing and retreating in their own minuet as she swung along the street, her head up, lips and sandals and tam-o’-shanter all a defiant berry-red.
It was the custom of the country that young men and women between the ages of ten and eighteen—after which dealings between them were of a more private nature—might walk together without loss of prestige, particularly on Sundays. It was seldom, however, that a couple walked alone. The boys, half a dozen of them, wiry and brown in their open shirts and magnificent white flannels, would start off towards the bush, lingering so that the frailer limbs of femininity could catch up with them. At a bend in the road the girls would come into sight, very aloof and splendid, like a bunch of wild mares, with much tossing of heads and flashing of white teeth as they approached the loiterers. The party without difficulty would break off into pairs, each boy falling into step beside the girl he wanted. Very seldom the couples fell out of one another’s sight, and the few embraces between them were rough, childish, kissing-game affairs; but there was a tacit understanding that the walkers-out were plighted to one another, and interference between them meant trouble.
May wasn’t exactly the same as the Sunday-walking brigade. She would start out, if he pleased, but had a tendency to stray from the rest. She disliked other girls, and said so. She wouldn’t wear gloves, though her sister’s neat little paws were invariably tucked away in brown ‘fabric’. May’s fingers, brown and curly and strong, fascinated Starkie; so did the rest of her—the arrogant chin tipped back, the strong shield-shaped outline of her childish face, the eyes wide between the black sills of their lashes. On May’s unorthodox bush-walks, of a sudden he would find himself sitting beside her; an outcast from the herd but extremely comfortable in the tangled bracken, whose fronds uncurled little brown fists just above their heads.
He discovered that if he kissed May—which he did seldom, and clumsily—it sent a curious thrill to the roots of his being. Vaguely he decided that this had something to do with original sin, concerning which he had been tutored in his youth; and left the brown, scornful face with its berry lips more strictly alone, pretending to be engrossed in the machinations of a pair of fantails, who flirted their tails at him and tinkled like music-boxes among the flat honey-white discs of blossom on the elder trees.
The public rencontres of male and female were less disturbing. Homes—May Simms’ home among them, though her parents strongly disapproved of Starkie, taking the view that he was black—opened their doors on Sunday evenings; and the youths stood grouped tall and large-knuckled around the pianos, singing sentimental choruses, the clear little voices of the girls breaking like silver through clouds.
Come back to Erin, mavourneen, mavourneen,
Come back again to the land of thy birth,
Come with the springtime and sunshine, mavourneen,
And it’s Killarney shall ring with our mirth….
When Starkie joined in singing ‘Come back to Erin’, his intentions towards May were all that is most honourable. He tried to catch her eye, to discern some softening of the fine little pattern of her profile and throat. Outside bay windows the world floated blue and vague like an enormous harebell, and the voices of the War generation passed out into this blue straight as the lines of light that slanted through the curtains.
When summer came he began to entertain doubts about marrying May, though he loved her more than ever. May was summer’s girl. The brown of her burned proud and fierce; and she was always down on the strip of beach behind the grain-stores on whose cobwebby, warm-smelling floor-space there were sometimes mass assaults with sacks and French chalk in preparation for dances. It was not in those days permissible for girls’ bodies, in their red and blue swimming-suits, to come from the sea as fresh as Venus and slide straight into the arms of their dancing-partners. But May’s hair never stayed up under her swimming-cap; and when he danced with her afterwards in the grain-store, damp locks of it would tickle his face and tease him with the little tang of sea-salt.
May was as young and self-confident as a cat; and as the summer lamps burned deeper, great stars taking on warmth in their honey-colour, they used to slip away from the dances and escape to the beach. The bathing-sheds were locked after dark, but that didn’t matter. They undressed primly behind separate rocks and splashed into the lipping dark water. The moon left a trail like a huge golden snail’s across the black water, and they swam and floated directly in line.
At first they huddled into their already wet bathing-suits for the night swims. But then one night he heard a little laugh behind May’s covering rock—and out she walked, and stood just for a moment in the moonlight with nothing on. Then, frightened, she raced for the sea and was into the moon-trail like a seal lady. It took Starkie the smaller part of a second to defy his own bathing-suit and leave it a wet husk on the sands. Then he was cautious and flattering and reassuring, out in mid-ocean. Night was made up of laughter and tresses like seaweed, and a new springy freedom which was almost intolerable—like the first draught of mountain air. When they got back to the shallows and sat waist-deep in the foam, he noticed with satisfaction that while the nape of May’s neck, her arms, and her slim, tapering legs were nut-brown, the rest of her was white. There was nothing but laughter and sleepiness between them as they walked home.
Perhaps May’s face wore for a few days the fineness of the young girl who begins to think herself seriously in love, and who sits with her eyes heavy with dreaming. The gate under the coprosma hedge, in any event, became definitely an enemy strong-point, and Starkie was no longer invited within for draughts and dominoes. Mr Simms appeared in carpet-slippers and spectacles to tell him that he didn’t want coloured boys hanging around his house. Starkie retreated, but watched the Simms’ gate like a cat at a mouse-hole. He watched in vain. Reason and shame prevailed upon May. Instinctively thoughts of love drew her onward to thoughts of marriage; thoughts of marriage became bound up with the colour question—which had no part at all in the gay, delightful game of being a young Diana worshipped in the moonlight.
With a sore heart, Starkie slunk back to his own lodgings night after night. He went down to the grain-stores very seldom. But one visit was fatal. He saw two people, young and very happy, slip out from the stuffy hall. He heard the girl’s tinkling laugh, and watched them head for the flat brown rocks of the beach. Sentiment said unreasoningly, ‘May, May, you couldn’t!’ But he knew perfectly well that for May the charming game had begun all over again on smoother lines. The youth who now partnered her bore the name of Alec, for which Starkie liked him none the better. He brooded over the Alec problem. Then one night he lay in wait behind the grain-stores. Alec and the faithless May hove in sight, and were confronted by a sullen dark figure.
The rest was remonstrance from Alec, squawk from May, straight left from Starkie. Alec, though large, was no boxer. The blow caught him on the point of the chin. It was the end of a brief combat. Starkie departed, feeling avenged, but no more amiable.
In the morning Bob McCauliff warned him that the police were asking questions. He produced a feeble alibi—‘I was in bed, sir’—but knew how long that tale would hold water. His brother George was up in the Wyndha
m Valley cutting flax. Starkie sent him an urgent wire. Within the day the gates of refuge opened for him. George wired:
Job here, young fool, £2 week.
He was through with women for ever. His sole possessions a suit of clothes and a draughts-board, he headed for the Wyndham Valley, flax, and the two Finnegan brothers—of whom Tom Finnegan, was an old bruiser with the cauliflower ear and squash nose of his former profession, and Bob—long and rangy, just as dangerous a customer when crossed. It is a proven fact that the Irish can’t argue, nationally or individually, and the brothers Finnegan perfectly exemplified this.
But the life in Wyndham Valley had its tang. Starkie had to walk from Mohawk—for the little train, discouraged, gave up its uphill puffing long before it came to the mountain pockets where the flax stood shiny green, tough, and higher than a man’s head. It was cut out from the pockets in huge bundles weighing more than a hundredweight apiece, hooked to thirty feet of trace-chain and hauled by horses to the smoother ground where the waggons for Finnegan’s flax-mill could pick it up.
The first ten days were back-breaking nightmares, working hours spent in envy of the practised ease of the flax-cutters, whose great steel hooks swept the air as evenly as their breath was drawn and exhaled; the nights a matter of crawling stiff and wretched into a bunk in his brother’s house. Then he struck the rhythm of flax-cutting, and could do the job on his head. His muscles hardened up, he could let his body take care of the stiff green swathes, and watch the shadows of clouds pass faintly blue over the mountain clefts. It was a wild place, but fresh-smelling, and with a steep beauty. A west-coast bee-farmer had left a score of white hives here, an experimental extension of his domain, and a continual stream of Italian browns and German blacks danced in the air above the hives. The hive-sentinels kept ward; the workers went off to gather the curious dark-brown, pungent-flavoured honey of the brown and white manuka blossoms. The hives were robbed of this, and the dark honey smeared on huge door-steps of bread with which the men filled their bellies at noon.