by Ngaio Marsh
The floor space, normally left clear, was now filled with a heterogeneous collection of seats. The Claires’ armchairs, looking mildly astonished at their own transplantation, were grouped together in the front row. They faced a temporarily erected stage which was decked out with tree-fern, exquisitely woven cloaks, Union Jacks and quantities of fly-blown paper streamers. On the back were hung coloured prints of three Kings of England, two photographs of former premiers, and an enlargement of Rua as an M.P. On the platform stood a hard-bitten piano, three chairs and a table bearing the insignia of all British gatherings, a carafe of untempting water and a tumbler.
The Maori members of the audience had been present more or less all day. They squatted on the floor, on the edge of the stage, on the permanent benches along the sides and all over the verandah and front steps.
Among them was Eru Saul. Groups of youths collected round Eru. He talked to them in an undertone. There was a great deal of furtive giggling and sudden guffaws. At intervals Eru and his following would slouch off together and when they returned the boys were always noisier and more excited. At seven o’clock Simon, Colly and Smith arrived with three more chairs from Wai-ata-tapu. Colly and Simon stood about looking self-conscious, but Smith was at once absorbed into Eru Saul’s faction.
“Hey, Eru!” said Smith, who had a pair of pumps in his pocket. “Do we wind up with a dance?”
“No chance!”
“No fear you don’t wind up with a dance,” said a woman’s voice. “Last time you wind up with a dance you got tight. If you can’t behave yourselves you don’t have dances.”
“Too bad,” said Smith.
The owner of the voice was seated on the floor with her back against the stage. She was Mrs. Te Papa, an old lady with an incredibly aristocratic head tied up in a cerise handkerchief. Over her European dress she wore, in honour of the occasion, a magnificent flax skirt. She was the leading great-grandmother of the hapu and, though she did not bother much about her title, a princess of the Te Rarawas. Being one of the last of the old regime she had a tattooed chin. From her point of vantage she was able to call full-throated greetings and orders to members of her clan as they drifted in and out or put finishing touches to the decorations. She spoke always in Maori. If one of the younger fry answered her in English she reached forward and caught the offender a good-natured buflfet. One of the oddities of contemporary Maori life may be seen in the fact that, though some of the people in outlying districts use a fragmentary and native-sounding form of English, yet they have only a rudimentary knowledge of their own tongue.
At half-past seven visitors from Harpoon and the surrounding districts began to appear. Old Rua Te Kahu came in wearing a feather cloak over his best suit and, with great urbanity, moved among his guests. Mrs. Te Papa rose magnificently and walked with the correct swinging gait of her youth to her appointed place.
At a quarter to eight a party of five white gentlemen, unhappily dressed in dinner suits and carrying music, were ushered into a special row of seats near the platform. These were members of the Harpoon Savage Club, famous throughout the district for their rendering in close harmony of Irish ballads. The last of them, an anxious small man, carried a large black bag, for he was also a ventriloquist. They were followed by a little girl with permanently waved hair who was dressed in frills, by her fierce mother, and by a firmly cheerful lady who carried a copy of One Day When We Were Young. It was to be a mixed entertainment.
An observer might have noticed that while the ladies of the district exchanged many nods and smiles, occasionally pointing at each other with an air of playful astonishment, their men merely acknowledged one another by raising their eyebrows, winking, or very slightly inclining their heads to one side. This procedure changed when the member for the district came in as he shook hands heartily with almost everybody. At five minutes to eight the Mayor arrived with the Mayoress and shook hands with literally anyone who confronted him. They were shown into armchairs. By this time all the seats except those reserved for the official party were full and there were Maoris standing in solid groups at the far end of the hall, or settling themselves in parties on the floor. With the arrival of their guests they became circumspect and quiet. Those beautiful voices, that can turn English into a language composed almost entirely of deep-throated vowels, fell into silence, and the meeting-house buzzed with the noise made by white New Zealanders in the mass. It became very hot and the Maori people thought indulgently that it smelt of pakeha, while the pakehas thought a little less indulgently that it smelt of Maori.
At eight o’clock a premature wave of interest was caused by the arrival of Colonel Claire, Mr. Questing and Mr. Falls. They had walked over from the Springs, crossing the native thermal reserve by the short cut. Mrs. Claire, Barbara, Dr. Ackrington and Gaunt were to be driven by Dikon and would arrive by the main road. The three older men were ushered up to the official chairs, but Simon at once showed the whites of his eyes and backed away into a group of young Maoris where he was presently joined by Smith, who was still very puffy and pink-eyed, and by Colly.
Mrs. Te Papa was heard to issue an order. A party of girls in native dress came through the audience and mounted the stage. They carried in each hand cords from which hung balls made from dry leaves. Rua took up his station outside the door of the meeting-house. He was an impressive figure, standing erect in the half-light, his feather cloak hanging rigidly from his shoulders. So had his great-grandfather stood to welcome visitors from afar. Near to him were leading men among the clan and, in the offing, Mrs. Te Papa and other elderly ladies. Most of the Maori members of the audience turned to face the back of the meeting-house and as many as could do so leant out of the windows.
Out on the road a chiming motor horn sounded, and at least twenty people said importantly that they recognized it as Gaunt’s. The conglomerate hum of voices rose and died out. In the hush that followed, Rua’s attenuated chant of welcome pierced the night air.
“Haere mai. E te ururangi! Na wai taua?”
Each syllable was intoned and prolonged. It might have been the voice of the night wind from the sea, a primal voice, strange and disturbing to white listeners. Out in the dark Mrs. Te Papa and her supporters leant forward and stretched out their arms. Their hands fluttered rhythmically in the correct half-dance of greeting. Rua was honouring Gaunt with the almost forgotten welcome of tradition. The mutations of a century of white men’s ways were pulled like cobwebs from the face of a savage culture, and the Europeans in the meeting-house become strangers.
As they moved forward from the car Gaunt said: “But we should reply. We should know what he is saying, and reply!”
“I’m not certain,” said Dikon, “but I’ve heard at some time what it is. I fancy he’s saying we’ve got a common ancestor, in the first parents. I think he asks us to say who we are.”
“It’s not really very sensible,” Mrs. Claire murmured. “They ‘know who we are. Some of their customs are not at all nice, I’m afraid, but they really mean this to be quite a compliment, poor dears.”
“As of course it is,” said Gaunt quickly. “I wish we could answer.”
On a soft ripple of greetings from the Maori party he moved forward and shook hands with Rua. “He’s at his best,” Dikon thought. “He does this sort of thing admirably.”
With Mrs. Claire and Gaunt leading, they made a formal entrance and for the first time Dikon saw Barbara in her new dress.
She had been late and the rest of the party were already in the car when she ran out, huddled in a wrap of obviously Anglo-Indian origin. Apologizing nervously she scrambled into the back seat and Dikon had time only to see that her head shone sleekly. Gaunt had funked the hairdressing and make-up part of his plan, and when Dikon caught a glimpse of Barbara’s face he was glad of this. She had paid a little timid attention to it herself. Mrs. Claire sat beside Dikon, Barbara between Gaunt and her uncle in the back seat. When they had started, Dikon thought, unaccountably, of the many many times that
he had driven Gaunt out to parties, of the things that were always said by the women who went with them, of how they so anxiously took the temperature of their own pleasure; of restaurants and night-clubs reflecting each other’s images like mirrors in a tailor’s fitting-room; of the end of such parties and of Gaunt’s fretful displeasure if the sequel was not a success; of money pouring out as if from the nerveless hands of an imbecile. Finally he thought of how, very gradually, his own reaction to this routine had changed. From being excited and stimulated he had become acquiescent and at last an addict. He was roused from this unaccountable retrospect, by Mrs. Claire who, twisting her plump little torso, peered back at her daughter. “Dear,” she said, “isn’t your hair rather odd? Couldn’t you fluff it forward a little, softly?” And Gaunt had said quickly: “But I have been thinking how charming it looked.” Dr. Ackrington, who up till now had not uttered a word, cleared his throat and said he supposed they were to suffer exquisite discomfort at the concert. “No air, wooden benches, smells and caterwauling. Hope you expect nothing better, Gaunt. The natives of this country have been ruined by their own inertia and the criminal, imbecility of the white population. We sent missionaries to stop them eating each other and bribed them with bad whisky to give us their land. We cured them of their own perfectly good communistic system, and taught them how to loaf on government support. We took away their chiefs and gave them trade-union secretaries. And for mating customs that agreed very well with them, we substituted, with a sanctimonious grimace, disease and holy matrimony.”
“James!”
“A fine people ruined. Look at the young men! Spend their time in…”
“James!”
Gaunt, with the colour of laughter in his voice, asked if the Maori Battalion didn’t prove that the warrior spirit lived again.
“Because in the army they’ve come under a system that agrees with them. Certainly,” said Dr. Ackrington triumphantly.
For the remainder of the short drive they had been silent.
It was too dark outside the meeting-house for Dikon to see Barbara at all clearly. He knew, however, that she had left the cloak behind her. But when she walked before him through the audience, he saw that Gaunt had wrought a miracle. Dikon’s connection with the theatre had taught him to think about clothes in terms of art, and it was with a curious mixture of regret and excitement that he now recognized the effect of Barbara’s transformation upon himself. It had made a difference and he was not sure that he did not resent this. He felt as if Gaunt had forestalled him. “In a little while,” he said, “even though I had not seen her like this, I should have loved her. I ought to have been the one to show her to herself.”
She sat between Gaunt and her uncle. There were not enough armchairs to go round, and Dikon slipped into an extremely uncomfortable seat in the second row. “Definitely the self-effacing young secretary,” he said to himself. In a state of great mental confusion he prepared to watch the concert, and ended by watching Barbara. The girls on the platform broke rhythmically into the opening dance. They were led by a stout lady who, turning from side to side, cast extraordinarily significant glances about her, and made Dikon feel rather shy.
Of all the Maori clans living in this remote district of the far North, Rua’s was the least sophisticated. They sang and postured as their ancestors had done and their audience were spared Maori imitations of popular ballad-mongers and crooners. The words and gestures that they used had grown out of the habit of a primitive people and told of their canoes, their tillage, their mating, and their warfare. Many of their songs, sacred to the rites of death, are not considered suitable for public performance, but there was one they sang that night that was to be remembered with a shudder by everyone who heard it.
Rua, in a little speech, introduced it. It had been composed, he said, by an ancestress of his on the occasion of the death of a maiden who unwittingly committed sacrilege and died in Taup tapu. He repeated the horrific legend that, one night on the hilltop, he had related to Smith. The song, he explained, was not a funeral dirge and therefore not particularly tapu. His eyes flashed for a moment as he glanced at Questing. He added blandly that he hoped the story might be of interest.
The song was very short and simple, a minor thread of melody that wavered about through a few plain phrases, but the hymn-like over-sweetness of some of the other songs was absent in this one. Dikon wondered how much its icy undercurrent of horror depended upon a knowledge of its theme. In the penultimate line a single girl’s voice rang out in a piercing scream, the cry of the maiden as she went to her death in the seething mud cauldron. It left an uncomfortable and abiding impression, which was not dispelled by the subsequent activities of the Savage Club quartette, the ventriloquist, the infant prodigy, or the determined soprano.
Gaunt had said that he would appear last on the programme. With what Dikon considered ridiculous solicitude, he had told Barbara to choose for him and she had at once asked for the Crispian Day speech: “The one we had this morning.”
“Then he was spouting the Bard by the sad sea waves,” thought Dikon vindictively. “Good God, it’s nauseating.”
Gaunt said afterwards that he changed his mind about the opening speech because he realized that his audience would demand an encore, and he thought it better to finish up with the Henry V. But Dikon always believed that he had been influenced in his choice by the echo of the little song about death. For after opening rather obviously with the Bastard’s speech on England, he turned sombrely to Macbeth.
“I have almost forgot the taste of fears …”
and continued to the end
“… it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
It is a terrible speech and Gaunt’s treatment of it, a deadly calm monotone, struck very cold indeed. When he had ended there was a second’s silence, “and then,” Dikon said afterwards to Barbara, “they clapped because they wanted to get some warmth back into their hands.” Gaunt watched them with a faint smile, collected himself, and then gave them Henry V with everything he’d got, bringing the Maori members of his audience to their feet, cheering. In the end he had to do the speech before Agincourt as well.
He came down glowing. He was, to use a phrase that has been done to death by actors, a great artist, but an audience meant only one thing to him: it was a single entity that must fall in love with him, and, as a corollary, with Shakespeare. Nobody knew better than Gaunt that to rouse an audience whose acquaintance with the plays was probably confined to the first line of Antony’s oration was very nice work indeed. Rua, pacing to and fro in the traditional manner, thanked him first in Maori and then in English. The concert drew to an uproarious conclusion. “And now,” said Rua, “the King.”
But before the audience could get to its feet Mr. Questing was on his and had walked up on the platform.
It is unnecessary to give Mr. Questing’s speech in detail. Indeed, it is almost enough to say that it was a tour de force of bad taste, and that its author, though by no means drunk, was, as Colly afterwards put it, ticking-over very sweetly. He called Gaunt up to the platform and forced him to stand first on one foot and then on the other for a quarter of an hour. Mr. Questing was, he said, returning thanks for a real intellectual treat but it very soon transpired that he was also using Gaunt as a kind of bait for possible visitors to the Springs. What was good enough for the famous GeofTrey Gaunt, he intimated, was good enough for anybody. Upon this one clear harp he played in divers keys while the party from Wai-ata-tapu grew clammy with shame. Dikon, filled with the liveliest apprehension, watched the glow of complacency die in his employer’s face to be succeeded by all the signs of extreme fury. “My God,” Dikon thought, “he’s going to throw a temperament.” Simultaneously, Barbara, with rising terror, observed the same phenomena in her uncle.
Mr. Questing, with a beaming face, at last drew to his insufferably fulsome conclusion, and the Mayor, who had obviously intended to m
ake a speech himself, rose to his feet, faced the audience, and let out a stentorian bellow.
“For-or.. ” sang the Mayor encouragingly.
And the audience, freed from the bondage of Mr. Questing’s oratory, thankfully proclaimed Gaunt as a jolly good fellow.
But the party was not yet at an end. Steaming trays of tea were brought in from outside, and formidable quantities of food.
Dikon hurried to his employer and discovered him to be in the third degree of temperament, breathing noisily through his nostrils and conversing with unnatural politeness. The last time Dikon had seen him in this condition had been at a rehearsal of the fight in “Macbeth.” The Macduff, a timid man whose skill with the claymore had not equalled that of his adversary, continually backed away from Gaunt’s onslaught and so incensed him that in the end, quite beside himself with fury, he dealt the fellow a swingeing blow and chipped the point off his collarbone.
Gaunt completely ignored his secretary, accepted a cup of strong and milky tea, and stationed himself beside Barbara. There he was joined by Dr. Ackrington, who, in a voice that trembled with fury, began to apologize, none too quietly, for Questing’s infamies. Dikon could not hear everything that Dr. Ackrington said, but the word “horsewhipping” came through very clearly several times. It struck him that he and Barbara, hovering anxiously behind these two angry men, were for all the world like a couple of seconds at a prize-fight.
Upon this ludicrous but alarming pantomime came the cause of it, Mr. Questing himself. With his thumbs in the arm-holes of his white waistcoat he balanced quizzically from his toes to his heels and looked at Barbara through half-closed eyes.
“Well, well, well,” Mr. Questing purred in a noticeably thick voice. “So we’ve got ’em all on, eh? And very nice too. So she didn’t know who sent them to her? Fancy that, now. Not an idea, eh? Must have been Auntie in India, huh? Well, well, well!”
