The Colour, page 15
‘Ah,’ said Harriet. ‘The mountains that cannot be crossed.’
‘Men have crossed them.’
‘But I cannot, Joseph, and nor can you.’
The bell was clamouring and it was time for Joseph to turn and walk on to the gangplank of the ship, but he searched for something else to say because he didn’t want to let the parting end like this, in a dishonest way, as if it what had never seemed final were suddenly afflicted with finality. He was tempted to make the promise that he’d sail back with his swag full of money and begin work on a new house . . . the new house of his imaginings in a sheltered valley where the winds wouldn’t reach. But, out of superstition, he said none of this and instead asked: ‘When I return, why don’t we meet at D’Erlanger’s Hotel? And I shall buy us a fine dinner.’
He hoped she would smile; he wanted to be left with this – the sweetness of her flawed smile – not her showy kind of sorrow. But her look didn’t alter as she nodded and replied: ‘Yes. Why not? A fine dinner. I shall give you back the gun.’
And then he was gone, and he stood and watched Harriet on the quayside as the moorings of the boat were untied and it began to move away through the water. He saw her waving to him, standing very tall and still.
A boy of fifteen or sixteen now came to sit down near to Joseph on the Wallabi’s deck. The boy took out a penny whistle from his jerkin pocket and began turning it over and over in his hands. He had no possessions that Joseph could see, only the whistle. His boots were worn and the jerkin frayed at the cuffs.
‘Why do you not play something?’ Joseph said gently.
‘On the Arrow, I played,’ said the boy. ‘Played my whistle and done all kinds of service and got a little gold, but I was cheated of it in the end.’
‘But now you’re trying again?’
‘All I can do, mister. Try again. Play my whistle again. Do my services again. Hope not to die again.’
V
Harriet rode to the Orchard Run. Billy’s gallop was frisky and he held his ears high. Harriet loved the sight of his fast-moving shadow on the ground.
She found Dorothy and Edwin whitewashing the stables. Dorothy, who was wearing a pinafore and a frayed old straw hat, said to Harriet: ‘Why do we like white so much? Is it the blankness of it?’
‘I am white now, Mama,’ announced Edwin.
Harriet and Dorothy looked at him and saw his face and arms covered with the chalky wash. ‘Oh, so you are,’ said Dorothy. ‘Do you like being white, or shall we put you in the tub?’
‘I like being white,’ said Edwin.
Dorothy’s fondness for picnics decreed that the white-washing would be ‘suspended’ and saddle bags packed with cold pigeons and cheese ‘and any bottle of wine that Toby will not notice is missing’ and that the three of them would ride to the river and have lunch sitting on the grass. ‘The dogs can come with us,’ she said. ‘They like to bite minnows out of the water.’
They let Billy rest, after his ride from Christchurch. Edwin combed the sweat from the horse’s neck and put a rug on his back and Harriet was reminded for a moment of the old tartan rug with which they’d covered Beauty.
Edwin said: ‘He’s pretty like this, on his own.’
‘On his own?’
‘I mean, not attached to the cart.’
‘Sometimes, he will have to pull the cart.’
‘Your donkey can pull the cart.’
‘The donkey walks very slowly now.’
‘Pare used to walk very slowly,’ said Edwin.
Harriet looked around to see whether Dorothy was within earshot, but Dorothy was striding towards the house, calling to Janet to prepare the picnic.
‘Have you seen Pare?’ Harriet asked.
‘No,’ said Edwin. ‘I think that log came back and her voice told her not to visit me any more.’
‘Suppose she came today, while you were white?’
‘She won’t come. She never comes.’
Together, they led Billy into the stable and put feed into the manger. Edwin’s face had a powdery, ghostly look. Through the powder, a single tear snaked down his cheek. He wiped it away.
‘Shall I shall tell you what has happened to me?’ Harriet asked gently.
‘Is it something bad?’
‘I don’t know yet. It’s about Joseph. He’s gone away to look for gold.’
‘Gone away to the West Coast?’
‘Yes.’
‘Papa said yesterday “the West Coast is a terrible madness”. But I don’t know what he means. Sometimes he says “there is a terrible madness in these sums of yours, Edwin”.’
Harriet stroked her horse, smoothed a tangle from his mane.
‘Perhaps your Papa means that all these things are difficult to understand?’
‘Gold isn’t difficult,’ said Edwin. ‘You get a pan and fill it with mud and water and slither it around and everything falls out except the gold. That’s what Mama taught me.’
‘Yes. But sometimes there is no gold in the pan to remain after the rest has fallen out.’
‘Then there is no point in it.’
‘There is the same kind of point as there is in going to the toi-toi grass to call to Pare. For a hundred days there may be no one there, just as, for a hundred days there might be no gold in the pan. But on the hundred-and-first day . . . there she will be.’
Edwin looked solemnly at Harriet. After a while, he said: ‘I’m going to begin counting.’
They sat by the river and the sun shone on the water. The pigeons were tender and tasted of something earthy, like fungus or like damp dead wood. The wine Dorothy had stolen from Toby’s store was sweet and cold.
While Edwin played in the creek with the dogs, Mollie and Baby, Dorothy talked about what it could mean to find riches in the earth. She said: ‘I have no right and Toby has no right to criticise anybody for going to the goldfields. My father owns a tin mine and almost all of what we’ve been able to build here comes from that money . . . that tin money. Chance arranged it this way. But for the men who work in my father’s mine . . . for them, every day is hard. I have seen them in the cold English winters, standing up to their knees in that icy, reddish water. And I think that on the West Coast, in the swamps and in the gullies, everything will be very hard indeed.’
Harriet rested on her elbows and looked at the sky. She felt stiff from her ride. ‘Joseph isn’t afraid of hardship,’ she said.
‘No, I know,’ said Dorothy. ‘Building your house out of cob must have been extraordinarily hard. But I wonder what made him go now, when there is so much work to be done on your farm?’
Harriet started to explain about the creek and Joseph’s fossicking for gold there. She said: ‘He began to dream about gold. He couldn’t let it go. And the things Joseph wants, he has to try to have them then and there and cannot wait. That seems to be the way he is.’
When Dorothy said that she understood this and that every human life hurtles too fast through time ‘with too much spinning off and being left behind for ever’ and how we fly this way and that trying to catch those spinning things, Harriet’s mind returned to the brown curl she’d seen in Joseph’s fly box, and the person to whom it belonged, whoever she was, the person who had been left behind.
She looked over at Dorothy, still wearing her ancient hat, with her legs sticking straight out from her muddy skirts and seemingly with no thought for elegance or vanity, and saw in her a confidante whom she thought would be silent and true. She took a breath and said: ‘Joseph fled away from England. There were his father’s debts, but it was not only these. I think there was something else. Something he never talks about.’
Dorothy picked up her wine glass. She was a woman who liked wine very much and who thought every single sip a marvellous pleasure. After a few moments had passed in silence and pleasurable sipping, she said: ‘I have never supposed that men have no secrets. I discovered a postcard in Toby’s dressing-case which said Fondest love from Scarborough. I couldn’t read the signature, the writing was too poor. But it was Maud or Mabel or some name like that. It gave my heart a jolt. But then I thought, what does it signify? We can’t pretend the lives of men begin or end when we marry them – just as ours do not either. All we can hope is that nothing too hurtful has been done.’
Harriet picked at the grass. She found that her appetite for the cheese which lay beside them on the dry tussock had vanished.
‘And suppose something hurtful has been done?’
Dorothy’s wide face, in the shadow of the hat, looked at Harriet intently. ‘Then I imagine, in time, it will come to light, because most of what we think is buried away for always seldom is. But you should not create a myth of wrongdoing, Harriet. I am sure that Joseph Blackstone is a good man.’
VI
Joseph was trying to sleep on the windy deck of the Wallabi. Near him, the boy with the whistle, whose name was Will Sefton, lay and slept with his head on a coil of rope. Now, Joseph could see the holes in the soles of Will’s boots. He took out of his swag an old woollen jacket and covered the boy with this. There was something about Will Sefton which reminded him of Rebecca’s brother, Gabriel, and, after gazing at him for a while, Joseph looked away.
Not far from where Joseph sat, in the shelter of the ship’s housing, two Chinese men were boiling rice over a tiny spirit lamp and the fragile blue flame of the lamp, which would have had a little warmth to it, soon began to tease and torture Joseph. He couldn’t take his eye from it. He wondered whether he might approach the men and ask to warm his hands. He would try to explain that this was all he wanted, that he wasn’t begging for rice, but only to warm his frozen hands, so that he could go to sleep.
The Chinese men were whispering in their language, which was like a language of percussion, Joseph thought, each with an instrument on which he sounded a strange and startling measure. Joseph listened and watched. He could smell the rice beginning to boil. Lit by the small flame, the expressions on the faces of the men seemed neither cheerful nor sad, but to have about them a strong degree of resignation, as though the world had pestered them – like a mosquito or like a fly – pestered them for so long that they could no longer be bothered to swat it away, but just let it settle quietly on them.
Joseph remembered Mrs Dinsdale referring to a Chinese family who ran a market garden nearby as ‘the Celestials’ and when asked why she had coined this name for them, saying: ‘Well, I did not coin it. It is a general term. John Chinaman has his head in the heavens, owing to the opium he smokes, so I suppose that is how it came about. For there is nothing else celestial about them, even though they believe their Emperor to be divine. They are quite filled with degradation, so I have heard tell. And I, for one, would certainly think twice before purchasing a lettuce from them. One would not be able to tell what might be lingering on the leaves.’
On the Wallabi, the two men whom Joseph was watching so intently seemed to have crept into visibility only as the darkness had come on. They were barefoot but warmly clad in padded coats. They surely had no berth on the ship and so must have been there on the deck all the time, but Joseph hadn’t noticed them. It was as if no one had noticed them. Yet now, there they were with their lamp and their hot food, hunched quietly together, while all around them men lay and drank or snored, with their backs turned.
Joseph began to wonder how, in the crowded and competitive world of the gold-diggings, the Chinese would survive. He saw in them some quality of patience, which he envied. He knew how ardently, with what breathless expectation, he was rushing towards gold, but he also believed that it was that very desire which would sustain him, through disappointment and cruel weather, and which would ensure that he persevered until his fortune had been secured.
Without desire, nothing is made.
And yet he also knew, from the hours and days that he had worked sifting mud at the edge of the creek, that gold-mining is pure drudgery: a drudgery of the body and of the mind. And so perhaps the miner who is patient and resigned and goes about each day with so small a portion of hope that it is almost no hope at all can ferret out from difficult ground, or even from ground abandoned or overlooked by the multitude, nuggets of the precious colour nobody else would ever have found.
Joseph kept watching as the Chinese stirred their rice. He didn’t move from where he was, only tried to warm his hands on his own body. He understood that even here, on the open deck under the stars, these people had fashioned a private world for themselves around the minute flame of the lamp and that they would resist any intrusion into it.
Joseph closed his eyes. The Wallabi was a coast-hugging boat and the seas wouldn’t be rough until they reached the strait. He tried to empty his mind of everything that he longed for and let the rise and fall of the steamer lull him to sleep. At the edge of his internal vision he saw something white moving like a waterfall or like the muslin curtains he had drawn around himself and Harriet in the bedroom at D’Erlanger’s Hotel.
PART TWO
The Riser
I
Out of Nelson, the Wallabi ploughed north into the Tasman Sea with a strong southerly wind in pursuit, helping to speed it on. But as the old steamboat rounded Cape Farewell and turned south-west into the roar of the wind, it seemed to the passengers of the Wallabi that they had entered an altered world.
Now, they felt the true and heartless immensity of the sea. Through the mist and spray, they could see land, still, and they turned their eyes again and again towards it, wanting to glimpse some refuge there, in case the struggle of the ship against the high waves began to be lost. But what they saw on the shore were mountains rising into view, one above the other, straight from the water’s edge, and it seemed to them, on this West Coast, that the land had set its face against them.
They kept searching for a place where a boat might put in if it had to, but none appeared. The cliffs were implacable, the dense bush clinging to every inch of their fantastic height. The men on the boat could only hang on to the Wallabi, to those objects that were bolted down, objects that should have been immovable, but which now seemed to alter position as the ship pitched and rolled. They were heard to curse as a taut rope suddenly went slack, or the ship’s rail – even this – reared up and bruised them on the arm or the jaw. A perpetual ache lodged itself in them. They felt as though they had walked a hundred miles.
Joseph stared at the mountains. He thought back to the journey from England on the SS Albert, and the hope that had seemed to shine then on the blue-green waters and the triumphant feeling that he’d had of sailing away from danger. He could barely recall days of cloud and cold, though there must have been some on that first voyage, but in his memory, all across the Indian Ocean, as week followed week, the seas had been bountiful and bright.
Hours he’d spent, staring at the wake of the Albert, seeing distance accumulate between him and the things that had almost destroyed him, and it was as though the sun were following him, moving southwards as he moved, and in the nights the stars came crowding to his eye.
But here, after Cape Farewell, both sun and stars disappeared, as though for always, as though the Wallabi were moving irrevocably beyond any ordinary or comforting thing into a place from which nobody on board would ever return.
Joseph and the boy, Will Sefton, held to the ship’s rail in the stern. The boy was pale, sunk in silence, shivering in the raw cold. When something white and slick floated up and was borne along for a moment in the wake of the boat, Will stared at it until it disappeared. Then he began to tell Joseph how he’d spent two years working for an undertaker in Queenstown.
‘The job I had,’ he said, ‘was the filthiest job on earth. Sucking out with tubes the foul stuff from the dead man’s gut and pumping in the chemicals.’ He said: ‘If you want to know what I think, Mister Blackstone, I think the living body is ninety per cent dead matter and only some little spark in us keeps the rest of it alive.’
Now, he mumbled to Joseph, as the spray rose and drenched them for the hundredth time: ‘I feel I’m dead, Mister Blackstone. All through me.’
Joseph urged the boy to endure, for that was all there was to do, to carry on existing. Either the Wallabi would be engulfed by the waves and they would all drown and their bodies be hurled against the hard roots of the bush at the edge of the land, or the paddle-wheels would keep turning, inching them on against the onrush of the sea, until the mouth of the Grey River was passed and the level ground of the Hokitika plain let them in.
But when Joseph contemplated the shore and let his gaze rest on its green vastness, he felt for the first time that the struggle to dig gold out of such a wilderness would be greater than any vision he’d ever had of it. He thought that his arduous work on the Cob House, cutting tussock grass and mashing it with earth, would seem as nothing compared to what would be asked of him here and that perhaps gold was the only thing that could lure men to a place where Nature asserted so supremely her disdain for anything unable to exist in the darkness of the forest floor or in the high branches of black beech.
To the boy, Joseph said: ‘How shall you survive these miles of bush, Will?’
Will stared out and up at the mountains. His eye rested on the tops for a moment, then on the sky above, where now and then they could spy a bird circling, but his expression didn’t alter. ‘Same way as I survived on the Arrow,’ he said. ‘Do my duties. Keep silent. Wash my arse in the river.’
There was sickness on the ship, with men vomiting and spitting and some howling like dogs in their misery and fear. And most of them thought, while these days lasted, that no cradleful of gold was worth the terror that had rushed in on them with the southward turn of the ship. They wished themselves back in Christchurch or wherever they had come from. They longed for warmth and stillness and a soft place to lie. They found it difficult to breathe in the salt air. They complained that they had not been warned that, on the West Coast, there was nothing but mountains – mountains on land and mountains of dark water rising up in the winds against the dark sky.
