A New Zealand Qyarter!J'

VOLUME SIX

1952

Reprinted with the permission of The Caxton Press

JOHNSON REPRINT CORPORATION JOHNSON REPRINT COMPANY LTD. 111 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10003 Berkeley Square House, London, W. 1 "'" I+CHARLES BRASCH AND PUBLISHED BY THE CAXTON PRESS

VOLUME SIX NUMBER FOUR DECEMBER 1952

CONTENTS Notes 259 Genesis, Bruce Mason 261 Mercury Bay Eclogue, M. K. Joseph 283 A Day by Itself, 0. E. Middleton 287 Highveld, Leo Sinden 294 A Little Gift for Harry, Roderick Finlayson 295 The Way Down, Hubert Witheford 302 Which Red Heart, John Caselberg 304 Farewell to a House, Basil Dowling 309 Restorative, Arno/d Wall 309 Voyage (11), Maurice Duggan 310

Commentaries: AUSTRALIAN LETTER, Vance Pafmer 317 A SECOND CHAMBER, E. A. Olssen 321 BROKEN BARRIER, Margaret M. Dunningham 326

Reviews: THE FOREST, Keith Sine/air 328 UNGRATEFUL PEOPLE, Mary Boyd 330 THE MALE CHARACTERS OF EURIPIDES, Denis Grey 331 AMIS ET AMILES, J. A. W. Bennett 333 PIULOSOPHY TODAY, R. G. Durrant 334 LEISURE THE BASIS OF CULTURE, H. 0. Pappe 335 POETRY IN MODERN IRELAND and IRISH FOLK MUSIC AND SONG, Charles Brasch 337 ISSUE, C.B. 338

Correspondence, He/en Shaw, Bill Pearson

Maori Studies by Hester Carsten Design by Keith Patterson I

A GOVERNMENT which stopped the publication of one adventurous and promising magazine has now thought fit to allow the appearance of another in a different field. The Education Department produced Educa- tion; it is the Maori Affairs Department which is producing Te Ao Hou, The New World, an illustrated quarterly in English and Maori 'intended as a magazine for the Maori People'. The appearance of Te Ao Hou is perhaps less surprising than the fact that no such magazine existed previously. The Maori revival of this century has apparently not been accompanied by any kind of journal stating its aims or reporting its progress. Twelve years ago, in his final chapter in The Maori People Today, Professor I. L. G. Sutherland noted the absence of even a news-sheet to keep the Maori communities scattered so widely through both Islands informed of one another's activities and of the work of the government departments concerned with them; he urged the need of some such periodical; and it is fitting that when one at last appeared he should have been among its first contributors. It is hard to tell how Te Ao Hou will appeal to the readers it is intended for. The first number (a second has not come out at the time of writing) is, unavoidably, largely the work of the unnamed editor, and smacks a little of official optimism; but it is varied (a table of contents however and possibly a less lavish display of type-faces in the headings would help to avoid the appearance of scrappiness), and it is well printed and generously illustrated. It is very much more than the modest news-sheet Professor Sutherland looked for; and the editor hopes in later numbers to be able to add other kinds of contribution, particularly ones by Maoris, to its general and special articles on Maori topics, its social news, and statements about official policy. Will Maori readers take it as speaking for them, or as speaking for the department and thus the government, and only to them? An official publication of this nature is always handicapped if only because it will always be under suspicion, and Te Ao Hou has an exceptionally difficult course to steer; but it deserves the goodwill and support of botli races, and if it helps to bring them closer together its work will not be wasted. In his vivid and sobering survey of the resources of the human race today, The Estate of Man, Michael Roberts remarked that 'The white race has, in general, behaved quite as well towards the coloured races as one man behaves to his neighbour in private life'; from which equivocal judgment he went on to speculate about their future relations. We are more conscious now of Maori-Pakeha relations than we have been in the past; witness a recent series of radio talks on the subject, and the film 259 Broken Barrier (whose crudely unconvincing account of the position will be exposed-one must hope, since it proved so popular-in later films). The subject needs to be discussed and the problems it involves made plain so that they can be met with understanding; most comments on it are altogether too simple and one-sided. And the better Pakeha and Maori understand each other the easier shall we find it to meet our Chinese and Japanese, Indian and Indonesian neighbours across the Pacific.

II

A people which has merely inherited its liberties passively will not guard them as jealously as one which has had to win them by fighting. We are too careless of ours; we do not know what it is to lose them, or never to have enjoyed them. The British House of Commons, through H.M. Opposition, does much to protect the liberties of the subject against encroachment by government; can this be said today for the New Zealand House of Representatives? The fate of the Legislative Council does not encourage one to think so; the existence of Parliament, as Mr Olssen suggests in this issue, is no necessary guarantee of democratic government. The formation in Wellington a few months ago of a New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties is both disquieting and encouraging. New Zealanders do not act in these matters without provocation-they are only too willing usually to 'leave it to the government'; but they can be roused; and when roused they can be vigilant. They will need to be, after the astonishing naivete of the statement of opinion attributed to Mr Holland that eighteen months of experience of parliamentary govern- ment by a single chamber had 'proved' that a second chamber was un- necessary in New Zealand. The National Council for Civil Liberties formed in Britain about twenty years ago has done and still does invaluable work in helping to maintain the traditional liberties of Englishmen at a time when govern- mental power is growing dangerously. The Council has been effective because of its independence and because of support by men of all parties and of none, including distinguished figures outside politics like E. M. Forster, H. W. Nevinson, and Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell. The New Zealand Council, whose principal object is 'to assist in the maintenance of civil liberties, including freedom of speech and assembly', is also non-party and non-denominational. That Dr J. C. Beaglehole has become its first president is indicative of its nature as an independent and impartial body.

260 BRUCE MASON GENESIS

CoNSIDER Te Parenga. A beach, three quarters of a mile long, and a hundred yards wide at low water. At one end, a cliff, rising to a squat promontory, at the other, a shallow reef. Before it, across a narrow chan- nel, Rangitoto: splendid, majestic, two immense flanges sloping down from the central cone to meet the sea in a haze of blue and green, locking Te Parenga from wind and tempest. Turn about, and you are facing a ridge, fringed by pohutukawas, single and stunted in the gardens, spreading and noble on the cliffs, lovely trees blooming only at Christmas when tiny red coronets prick through the grey-green leaves. Pain and age are in these gnarled forms, in bare roots clutching at the earth, knotting on the cliff-face, in tortured branches dark against the washed sky. The ridge rises steeply from Te Parenga to join the main road north, and on it stand the houses of Te Parenga, stolid wooden bungalows painted white and red to hinder the corroding air. Behind these unlovely walls, in the face of unsurpassed majesty and grandeur, the people of Te Parenga lead small, safe, secretive lives, gaining their bread honestly, conceiving their children legitimately, and bearing them without fuss, rearing them with kindness and commonsense. Those who go to church do not berate those who do not, nor think any the worse of them. If they come to Te Parenga with strong views on morals or government, their urgency soon dwindles in the cheerful lethargy of beach life, and strong views remain mostly secret and unaired. Each day, the men depart for the city by bus and ferry, returning when the best of the day is gone, and on warm evenings they saunter on the beach in family groups, mingling sometimes and talking of trivial matters in low voices. If the note of passion is seldom sounded at Te Parenga, there is yet room for a few characters who may, without obloquy, indulge in mild eccentricities. A rakish costume and a large vocabulary are not deemed inappropriate for, say, Archibald Jeffers, a beachcomber by inclination and deportment, but by heritage a man of means, drawing a tidy sum, they said, from a sheep station in Hawkes Bay. He is the only permanent resident of the Hotel M on Repos, and he can be seen every evening in the bar between five and six (by barbarous edict, the only hour when drinking is possible) codifying the local mores in a haphazard but authoritative manner. For Arch is something of a peripatetic philosopher at Te Parenga, and has been known to walk several miles to arbitrate in matters of social etiquette, for which his qualifications are unquestionable: 'Oh, yes, he's one of the Jeffers from Hawkes Bay, you know. Very big people. You knew his sister was married to the present High Com- missioner? Oh, yes. He lived in England himself for a while. Funny, isn't it that he should be-but they all have a black sheep, they say. Oh, yes.' 261 His voice follows cadences more British than local except when he is drunk or strongly moved, when it reverts to a rough pig-island twang and his mode of expression discards a somewhat exotic luxuriance to become simple and direct. Here he is, early in the evening, in full flow. 'Declasse, my friend, declasse. Though voluntarily, let me add. You see before you a prime piece of Hawkes Bay blood stock, intended as a choice offering to one of the less unsightly local heifers. But-better lower my voice, don't want the Vigilantes out-I wanted to be a violinist. My friend, the consternation! The planets stopped in their courses, the sky went dark, a shadow lay across the face of the land. A violinist! What if he can play the Wieniawski Concerto at the age of twelve! Send him quick and busy to a good, snobbish private school, fit only for treasons, stratagems and spoils, and when that's over, pack him off to England to see if there's any stuffing still left in him, and if there is, knock it out of him, and pray God, dear God, make him a good, whole- some New Zealander, and to me on their knees they said, don't let the pioneers down! Well, I succumbed. I did what they asked, and returned, the dutiful son, the fully-fledged yahoo, the graduate oaf. Then God, bless Him, intervened. He removed my father, and the dutiful son received his reward: twenty thousand acres of rich, profitable land, in fee simple.' His voice begins to thicken. 'Brother, on the morning after the funeral, I left that joint in a cloud of dust, said to my two brothers, all right, you jokers, get to work! And to my mother, goodbye you old pet, who broke my violin with your own fair hands, just watch your little boy! And so I came to Te Parenga where the sun shines, and nothing happens from one year to the next. Doing what? Gossip, chat, drink. I'm useless, and that's my revenge, see? They took my chance to be something: O.K., I'll be good for nothing, except maybe to kick them where it hurts them most. I see Mum sometimes, and a good solid uncle or brother too, and they get no change from me, just a raucous rendering of Baa baa black sheep- my theme song-neat, isn't it? And for the rest? Walk up and down the beach, get to know everyone's business, doing sweet F.A. Have another?' Arch Jeffers would be almost too eccentric a character forTe Parenga did not his patrician origin and his fortune raise him above the more vulgar forms of criticism. His interest in private affairs is not resented, because he never acts on the information he receives, he barely acts at all: as he says himself, he is a conscientious idler, a resolute drone. He will sometimes liken himself to the chorus in a Greek play, commenting on but not participating in the action. Wrapped around with ease and contentment, Te Parenga lies shim- mering in the sun of early summer. It is Saturday. People are lying on the hot, bleached sand, singly and in groups, languid with heat. The sea, greenish, white-flecked, glittering, rolls in, recedes, clotted with the dark and coloured heads of swimmers. The edges of Rangitoto are hazy and seem tilted at the ends. Some people stroll idly on the firm sand which the ebbing tide has exposed, some stand on it and talk, drawing curious symbols with their bare toes. Ice creams. Castles. Heat. 262 At Te Parenga, on such an afternoon, before such a gathering, appeared Effie and Sybil Brett. As they slowly advanced, a silence seemed to precede them. The idle, laughing groups were hushed. All eyes followed them. Effie was in front. She was a giantess of primordial and monolithic build, with a huge, vacant face, which would be beautiful did a plausible harmony in some way relate those vast contours. She had the swelling nose of the Maori of Melanesian stock, and large brown eyes, filled with what seemed a formal wildness, like the immense, chunky figures in the paintings of Picasso's neo-classical style. Indeed, she strongly resembled them, even to the long calico shift she wore untethered at the waist, giving her also the aspect of ritual baptism in some stern, nonconformist cult. Yet with all her bulk, she was light on her feet, dancing rather than walking, with an antic grace, an expression of delight on her face which did not seem quite to belong to her: it was impersonal and abstract, as though some astral sergeant had shouted: 'On the command be happy, be ... Happy!' Behind her, shrunken and gaunt, came Sybil Brett, sixty years old and more, very tiny and withered, suggesting with the thin pressed lips, the dead stony eyes, a fierce and savage strength. She wore only black, and on her head, an ancient hat of black velvet with a short veil. As she marched along, back rigid, arms moving as if on signal, she too seemed impersonal and abstract, qualities personified rather than a living per- sonality, but the forbidding qualities of an extreme Puritanism: nervous force, inflexibility of will, utter lack of humour, and that faith which would move mountains rather than deflect its propulsive energy. She was formidable. In one hand she carried a carved stick of Maori workmanship, and if Effie stopped to pick up a shell or gaze entranced at the splendour of the prospect, she prodded her in the back, and Effie, smiling, gathered up her monstrous bulk with the same antic grace, and laughing, skipped ahead of her. A chill fell on those who watched them pass on this calm and gleaming afternoon when the world seemed so clement and gratuitously ennobling to those who shared its joys, as if a gnarled hand had appeared and made clutching signs in the air before their faces. Who were they? What were they doing here? Had they come to live at Te Parenga, or had they just perhaps come over for the day? Sufficient unto the day, then, said Arch Jeffers. Those who heard him, agreed. But they were seen next day and for several days after. Arch Jeffers, intrigued, gave himself the task of finding out all he could. After a week, he had prised a few bald facts from the stony surface which they presented to his discreet little excavations. Their names. That they were half sisters. That they had taken the lease of the old house in Massey Street that had been empty for nearly five years. Effie was plainly a half-wit who could neither read nor write, and as plainly illegitimate, since Miss Sybil showed none of the Maori characters so patent in Miss Effie. That Miss Sybil was the sole relative and guardian of Miss Effie, and that-this was sur- mise-they had come to Te Parenga to escape scandal in the place they had left, though no one knew where this was or what had happened there, 263 but rumour assumed a hundred fascinating shapes in the effort to give it form. After this they were often seen on the beach, and were soon accepted as the most remarkable links in the chain of characters that was gradually encircling Te Parenga. No one spoke to them, but all talking ceased when they approached, so that they moved cocooned in silence. If, as happened rarely, they took a bus up the coast, they sat down in a stony hush, even children awed and subdued, and when conversation revived, it had the thin, bodiless sound of talk in church, with the same slight overtone of profanity. Not that the sisters diffused any savour of holiness. It was far more a feeling of gloom and foreboding, of suffering to come, of sudden violence flaring from them in what manner no one knew or would hazard, and more than all these, the cold, savage, primitive and alien force they seemed to carry with them. Once, a five year old boy, conscious of the sudden hush, asked who the funny ladies were, and received a fierce, 'Quiet, dear!' for his answer, and then said plaintively: 'I wish they would get off. They make me feel funny.' Out of the mouths of babes, said the eloquent looks of the mothers present, how apt of the child, quite right. The phrase followed them. Several people wondered if there was anything that could be done to force them to leave Te Parenga, but, after all, this was the twentieth century, and you couldn't ask people to go just because they made you feel funny. Not now, said Arch Jeffers, but if this were the sixteenth century we could say they had the evil eye and burn them on the beach as witches. Nowadays you've got to have a contagious disease before they'll do anything about you. His erudition was admired, but it did not help, since the sisters appeared to enjoy good health, and their title to live at Te Parenga was therefore secure.

One Saturday morning, the Reverend Oswald Thirle was walking quietly along the foreshore rehearsing his sermon, or more correctly, ordering himself to do so, for the Reverend Thirle was a troubled man and the laughing image of his wife impeded the flow and cadence of his thought. I've a good mind, he thought grimly, to speak on the woman taken in adultery. But then you had to offer charity to the fallen creature, judge not, grin and bear it, let him without sin and such, and how could he perform these things with a heart griped with pain? Besides, and he spoke aloud, her infidelity, though by his observation imminent, was not yet de facto. He hoped that a wooden ponderosity of phrase would obscure the truth and mitigate its power to hurt. It didn't. A sudden heaviness of spirit assailed him. He contemplated himself with an arid and piercing detachment. How dull he was, how lacking in charm, how poor a guest, how awkward a host, how ineffectual with his parishioners, how unsuccessful in love, how unsuccessful in life! Why ? Why? How could God permit it? Hadn't he tried hard enough? The best years of . . . fingers to the bone . . . midnight oil • . . candle at both . . . Ruth. Still beautiful, still bathed in that tantalizing, pagan, oh undeniably 264 pagan radiance, that he had never penetrated, now at last sick of him, knowing and admitting her mistake. God, God. But the sermon. Business before heartache, he admonished with the stoical facetiousness which his calling had so often demanded of him. There are two sorts of love for God, he muttered, the true and the false, the genuine and the spurious. Take coin out there, he reminded himself in a mental stage direction, and rap it smartly on the pulpit. Hear that, my friends? You cannot mistake the solid ring of that coin. And God will not mistake the strength of your regard if your coin rings true. But what if your love for Him is only form? (Deeper) What if your coin has no core? (Oh, let it pass!) What if it is false, tainted, cheap, worthless? Have we the heart to offer God counterfeit money? (Hurl packet of paper coins into front pews.) Listen! Did you hear it? Nothing but the dry shiver of leaves before the wind. (Whitman? Must look it up.) Then, reprise: do you want your love to sound like this? (clink) or like this? (Another paper shower to the middle pews, aimed for old Mrs Raymond who never missed a service, slept throughout, and always shook his hand afterwards, saying: 'Lovely sermon, vicar!') There. That should make a bit of an impression. Then defeat struck at him again. Yes, it would make an impression. He well knew that the size of his congregation was in direct proportion to his stage effects. His sermons were guff: he knew it, Ruth knew it, and had long ago given up coming to hear them, and no doubt his parishioners knew it also. What had he said a moment ago? Nothing. Surely a love of God is a love of God and therefore true as far as it goes. Can it be pure and defiled at the same time? You either love God or you hate Him, and love is love and hate-no. You can ignore him too, as these Te Parenga deadheads do. Who would think, gazing at those stolid, sunbaked faces blinking in the diffused light, that their grandfathers had hacked this coast's present pastoral aspect out of savage wildness; that their grandmothers had borne their children without aid on the rush floors of their shacks, and that inhospitable soil, bush fires, and frequent cannibal raids had made up their lives? What had happened to that vitality? What was Te Parenga now? God's Little Acre, he had been assured once, in full sincerity. In that case, he thought, with a flash of insight, God was an absentee land- lord, an exile from His Acre, unknown, unsung. Now there's your sermon! I tell ye ye are lost sheep ! he shouted to the waters, and the lapping of waves sounded in counterpoint to the snigger he knew would rustle up and down the aisles. No, no, no. These lugs would never understand. They wanted guff, they wanted cheap effects, they wanted a Minister who would leave them unchanged after the solemn, Sunday chore, and they had him: Oswald Thirle, graduate of Cambridge University, brusher up of French, Italian, Russian and Spanish, mugger up of facts from north, south, east and west, oh and the man whose wife cannot love him. We about to be cuckolded salute you, he exclaimed to the reverberate hills and there was the pain again, reaching the inmost places of his heart. Why had he ever left Manchester? What idiot patter about a new life 265 had seduced him? How had he put it? To be a spiritual pioneer in un- discovered territory of the mind, sifting pure metal from slag and dross- ab how sharper than a serpent's tooth is a good memory of one's follies! And Ruth. Her name was Ursula but he could never bring himself to use it with its reek of the cloister. When he first saw her strange face at the Manchester Convention, her knotted, gold hair gleaming among the dark earnest features of the Lancashire prelates, the words 'alien corn' had come into his mind, and promptly, a moment later, the name Ruth arrived there. On their first meeting he had told her of this, and on their second had asked her timidly if he might call her Ruth. She looked at him carefully, smiled, agreed, and it proved finally to be the only thing she had freely granted him. What was she doing at an Anglican conven- tion? How had she escaped from the cinquecento canvas that was so clearly her home? By contriving to be the daughter of the Bishop of Bumley who was presiding at the Cohvention. For her face was oval and perfect in form as a virgin by Botticelli, and the unflawed innocence of those lovely lineaments glimmered on her face also. He saw her several times, found her totally mysterious and immeasurable, and recognized with a tightening heart that he was faced with yet another area of alien ground which he must know, must subdue. 'Conquer'the world, Ossie,' his mother had said, often. 'Let it love you or hate you, but never let it ignore you.' Mother and son were devoted allies against Joseph Thirle, the prosper- ous Oldham draper, and his humdrum, circumscribed, reach-me-down world, which none the less provided her with every comfort and took a Thirle to the University for the first time. Valorously Oswald strove to assume the heroic mould his mother had cast for him. Pushed, propelled, he flexed his mind and tackled knowledge with the manful vigour of a footballer on the losing side. 'Read the Encyclopaedia Britannica first, dear,' said his mother, looking up at him from her crochet work, 'it'll give you a general idea of things.' He tried but was quickly fatigued, but to deceive her, dipped into it here and there. Biology, metaphysics, Siamese architecture, the Zodiac, the Benedictine Rule, Sur le pont d'Avignon all rushed to join a turbid flood of shiftless, disorganized facts which raged, boiling in his head for years. He travelled, minutely guided by Ruskin through the European treasure house, filling large notebooks with sketches and observations. By the time he was twenty- one, his mother claimed that he knew six languages and could play three musical instruments. Did she realize, he wondered, that of Russian, say, he knew only: The young girl has failed to put a stamp on her envelope, and in Italian, a single short poem lamenting the transience of youth by Lorenzo de' Medici? She seemed perfectly oblivious, and whenever they had company would suddenly pounce on him, saying: 'Let's have something in Russian, Ossie', and the young girl would once more fail to stamp her envelope, or: 'How about a little Italian poetry, Ossie?' and pat, out would come 'Quant' e bella giovinezza'. Say something, do something, play something, be something, Ossie, was the burden of his life at home. It was her idea that he should go into the Ministry because 266 people had to listen to you, and he acceded, though more because of a remark he had once heard from a pulpit of the vast, uncharted waste of evil, and this had lured him with its promise of savagery and alien ground to be conquered. God was instantly vivid for him, an all-knowing, never-at-a-loss, super-dominant force, but with Christ he had to persevere. For a while nothing emerged from the vaporous chaos he saw in prayer, but at last he began to see a shadowy form; with surprise he recognized it as a Christ he had seen in Rome, in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Appalled by the pagan splendour of the Eternal City, suffocated by its baroque contorting and writhing, he had wandered into this church built above a Roman temple, and there, mild, benevolent, holding the Cross, but not brandishing it, nor hanging from it, neither proclaiming divinity nor demanding sacrifice, stood the gentle image which unwitting he had adopted as his Lord. He passed his examinations with some difficulty, and his mother died just after he was ordained, happily framing the words: 'Never let them ignore you, Ossie.' He buried her with relief. He had not resented her fierce efforts to sculpt an epic figure from his modest clay, though he divined that she had debauched him with her ceaseless chipping and hectoring and he saw in her death relief from constant pretence with her. It happened differently. Free he was of her physical presence, but he found himself enslaved by the fever she had inoculated in him: he had to go on, he must know, conquer, dominate, subdue whatever was difficult or obscure, and perhaps why he was never utterly discouraged was because he never really failed to master anything; always at the point where defeat was imminent he would pass on to some further intriguing opacity such as Rumanian syntax, the second law of thermodynamics, or a short history of Russian icons. No, he had never failed with things, but with Ruth .... Ardently he had wooed her and precipitately asked her to marry him. She accepted him at once, dutifully following the ironies of nature she seemed to embody, and so began ten years of unremitted purgatory for Oswald Thirle, he vainly trying to contain and encircle her foreignness, flailing like a fly in the web, she remaining alien and discrete, inviolate yet corrupt, innocent yet destructive, enigmas of the spirit which it was surely his task to unravel, yet still she eluded him, and though they had shared the marital bed, his ardours had been spent on her profitless: never had he really possessed her. Bitterly he learned that if one can ignore unpleasing facts, to people one must ever return, day after day, in months and years. Outwardly in the world of things and phenomena, he did not change. Unable to dominate in England, he found reasons for spiritual pioneering on unspoiled ground, and had found here an alienation more complete than he could have imagined, a total indifference to God as he put it, which was raising to its highest power a total indifference to Oswald Thirle. Still he hoped for fulfilment with her, still he waited for the descent of the Holy Ghost, still the obdurate angel with whom he daily grappled gave him no quarter. Misery, misery. 'Preacher! Preacher! 0 Preacher!' 267 A hoarse voice shouting these words shivered the dark, opaque surface of his thought. He turned, startled. A great brown shape was bounding across the sand in his direction. He did not need to be told it was Effie Brett, though he had not precisely met her, nor even seen her before, but early last week, feeling some misgiving about his neglect of the weird sisters, as he had heard them called, he visited Miss Sybil. Effie had been there too, invisible, but more than audible. From time to time there were great thumps on the wall and roars of 'I want to come out! I want to see the preacher!' and Miss Sybil after listening to her clerical visitor at- tentively without in any way acknowledging these demonstrations had suddenly shouted: 'Quiet, baggage, or I'll give you what for!' For a few moments, silence, then a pounding noise in six-eight time as though Miss Effie were galloping round the room gathering speed, then a crash, and the sound of splintering wood. Mr Thirle, shrinking on his comfortless chair, expected to see an apocalyptic horsewoman flash through the wainscoting, and a wild image of a mammoth circus artist, all smiles and spangles, laid momentary siege to his mind, but at the first sound of splintering, Miss Sybilleft Mr Thirle in the middle of a half-articulated word, seized a stock whip which hung on the wall, and which, with a tingling shock, Mr Thirle now saw for the first time, and rushed out, screaming: 'How would you like a taste of this, Effie!' and after some whimpering and muffled expostulation, the noises had ceased. Although Miss Sybil had roused his professional zeal by her statement that she had no need of churches and received her instructions from God direct, Mr Thirle decided not to persist further in enrolling the Misses Brett among his parishioners. He did not feel quite up to Miss Effie in his congregation, vital though she indubitably was. And now she stood before him, dwarfing him with her massive bulk, hair loose, clad as ever in her white shift, and the fierce, elemental strength of the woman obliged him to stay and listen. She was, he thought, like some ancient earth goddess, embodying fertility and all kinds of lush growth. She awed and appalled him. 'Well, Miss Effie,' he said finally. 'Preacher, will you baptize something for me? Will you wash it in the blood of the Lamb for me? 'Well, Miss Effie,' and he laughed a little, 'it depends what it is, doesn't it?' 'It's a baby, preacher. What else do you baptize, eh?' 'Just so, Miss Effie. A baby, you said.' He looked wildly round for some means of escape, but none offered. She waited tranquilly for him to resume speech, but he could find nothing to say. At length he said: 'You have a baby then, Miss Effie. You have-er-a baby.' Could anything sound more inarticulate and infantile! 'Not yet, preacher, but I'll get one sure. It's not hard, you know. Oh, it's no trouble when you set about it right. Thank you, preacher. Thank you, preacher. I wanted to be sure you'd wash it in the right blood when the time comes.' 268 Mr Thirle smiled feebly, gave a few trotting steps and sidled past her. She stood watching him, and the depth in those great brown eyes seemed suddenly unfathomable and possessed of ultimate wisdom and knowledge. Mr Thirle shivered and shook himself away from the sibylline intensity of the gaze that held him. She stood watching him for a while, and then lay down flat in the sand, her feet in the water, arms over her head. Mr Thirle hurried off, new thoughts spinning in his head. She was often seen in this attitude. People walking on the beach would suddenly come on her supine and abandoned in their path. Her position there was utterly arbitrary and adventitious, having no relation to comfort or convenience. But it seemed as natural and inevitable that she should be lying there as that the sun should rise and set, that a hill should be in its place or an island in the sea: it was of the order of Nature, requiring appropriate action, but as a work of God, removed from criticism. She became more sociable as the summer proceeded. A group would be chattering in the heat, smoking, swimming, lounging out the day in sensual ease, when a shadow would fall across them and there she would be, dark eyes glinting with a curiosity which seemed both passionate and detached. Immediately, conversation would languish, and each man and woman would become suddenly conscious of himself as a lone and separate being moored in a tiny skiff miles from the shore. She would stand there for a few moments and say nothing except perhaps, 'Hullo!' as she was leaving, spoken firmly in a definitive and conclusive manner, or 'Nice Day!' which she would throw suddenly into the constrained silence. But if there was a baby with them, she would stay much longer, sometimes half an hour, standing watching it, not hearing the angry injunctions of outraged parents to leave them alone. If she tired, she would squat on all fours, and stare at the baby without a blink, following its smallest movement, its slightest change of mood. As she did no harm, some were kind to her, and very rarely, let her hold their young child. Then she was in ecstasy. Tears of joy trickled down the brown cheeks as she rocked back and forth crooning softly half Maori, half English lullabies. It was then that some noticed the formal, hieratic dignity she seemed to acquire at the moment she held the child, as though suddenly she were the image of Motherhood itself, the Word momentarily made flesh in a bizarre, shocking fashion. They would dismiss it promptly as a mad blasphemy and see before them only a monstrous, inarticulate half caste, fondling their child. Effie may seem from this to have been left much alone, but in fact these meetings were possible only on Saturdays when Miss Sybil went to the city for reasons variously interpreted by the watchful citizenry. The more prosaic said that she probably received instalments from a grateful government for the burden she had taken off the state in Effie; the more romantic held that Miss Sybil was paid varying sums by bands of former sufferers pledging her never again to swim within their ken. She could be observed as the afternoon was fading returning from these expeditions with an equivocal looking parcel under her arm-whisky, it was averred with that omniscience available only to those fully absorbed in the affairs 269 of others, but no one had as yet observed her tippling. On every other day of the week, they were never separated. Miss Sybil was always behind Effie, pointing, gesticulating with her stick, her gnarled features com- pressed into the habitual savage mask. The house where they lived, on Massey Street, had been empty for several years. At best, it had been a graceless dwelling, planned perversely to be as disagreeable as possible. The kitchen, for example, had no window in it at all, and the main room, with the opportunity of an unrivalled panorama across the Gulf, faced an empty section, and the wall facing the beach had two small fanlights in it, so that Rangitoto could be viewed from within only by ladder. For these reasons, and because each year it had grown meaner and more uninviting, the rent was very low. The neighbours soon became accustomed to seeing lights in the house once more, and small boys resigned to it being out of bounds for perilous undertakings. One Saturday night after Miss Sybil's weekly journey, the people of Massey Street were jerked out of sleep by long and piercing screams coming from the mean little house. They lasted so long that the whole neighbourhood was roused. Some of them gathered in the street outside wondering which of them should go in, until one of the men moved forward through the gate and put his hand on the knocker. As he knocked the screaming ceased as if his hand held a sovereign touch. There was no answer. He knocked again. This time, after muttering and shuffling, Miss Sybil came to the door. The taut, compressed little creature was really making a night of it, as they said when recounting the incident afterwards. Hair hanging in thin grey hanks, eyes wild and not focussing, in her hand a stockwhip, the lash flapping free. She was clearly very drunk. ('So it was whisky. There!') 'Well,' she said. He began lamely. 'We were wondering if there was anything wrong.' 'No,' she said flatly, and as if this was the end of the conversation, made as if to shut the door. He persisted. 'But we heard screams.' Miss Sybillooked at him vaguely. 'Effie!' she shouted. Effie came in, her shift spattered with blood. 'This gentleman wants to know if there's anything wrong. Is there?' 'No, Sybil. There's nothing wrong.' She spoke with a cheerful unconcern. 'Have you any complaints, Effie? If you have, this gentleman and his friends in the street would be interested.' 'Oh, no, Sybil.' 'He said they'd heard screaming. Have you been screaming?' Effie said vaguely: 'Screaming? Have I, Sybil ?' 'Well, you make a lot of noise sometimes, but I wouldn't call it scream- ing. Perhaps you were doing your singing practice. Had you thought of that?' she said to the man with a wavering smile. He looked from one to the other, bewildered and resentful, and turned on his heel. The door shut and was bolted, the shaft of light extinguished. He reported to his friends and they made their way home, silent and fearful. A great dark 270 bird seemed to have unfolded vast wings over Te Parenga, shutting out the light. For a week, the house was quiet. Then came Saturday, and Miss Sybil departed as usual for the city, and returned with her parcel, now to the silent watchers a symbol of strange lusts. A tingling expectancy ran through the people of Massey Street. They looked furtively at their neighbours, and discovered in each face the image of their own sickening pleasure in store. The screams began a little after ten. They cut through the still night into avid ears all round them, and this time the drama had a text as well, which anyone in Massey Street could hear. 'You're bad, bad, bad! There's one for your badness. Conceived in sin! There's another for your sins. There's one for your bitch of a Maori mother, there's one for your beast of an English father, my father, God damn his soul to everlasting fire!' From their houses, people could clearly hear the crack of lash on flesh, and the chorus: 'Sin, sin, sin!' which followed every blow. After half an hour they ceased and Massey Street was silent. People tried to sleep. On the Monday following, Police Sergeant Dexter and a district nurse called on Miss Sybil. Miss Effie was on the beach, and Miss Sybil received them with every sign of blank hostility. Yes, she owned a stockwhip, and yes, she beat her sister. She did not propose to offer any explanation. 'Well, Miss Brett,' said the sergeant, 'I've had complaints from your neighbours, and several letters have reached me, alleging wanton cruelty to your sister.' 'That's my affair,' said Miss Sybil. 'No, excuse me, Miss Brett, when you live near other people, it becomes their affair, and if complaints are lodged, it's our affair. If necessary, we can take the steps preparatory to having your guardianship revoked and Miss Effie looked after by the State. You realize that?' 'Well,' said Miss Sybil, 'here's my sister now. Ask her if she wants to go. She can, if she wants to.' Effie came in, carrying a handful of shells and seaweed which she dropped on the floor absently and stared without concern at the visitors. The sergeant whispered to the nurse who replied, 'Yes, very well,' and said: 'Good afternoon, dear. Could we go to your room a moment? I'd like to have a look at your back.' 'What for?' 'Nothing to frighten you, dear. I just want you to take off your clothes for a moment--' Effie, suddenly, with a single movement threw off her shift, and was seen to be wearing nothing else whatever. The sergeant, a bachelor, flushed deeply. Her body, though ugly, had a certain primitive grandeur in the way the flesh, still firm, was disposed over the bones, none of which the shift was permitted to reveal, even suggest. 'Sergeant?' said the nurse, at a loss. Sergeant Dexter took charge. 'Turn round,' he said. 271 She did so. Her back was torn and still raw in places, a mass of scars and half healed cicatrices. The nurse, appalled, was about to flash into furious, denunciatory speech, but the sergeant silenced her, sensing that no conventional reaction would cover the facts in this context. 'Put your clothes on,' he said to Effie, and she put her single garment back. 'Now answer a few questions for me, will you? Can you understand what I am saying ?' 'Oh, yes.' 'Are you happy, here?' 'Yes,' said Effie, as though it had never occurred to her before. 'Do you like living with your sister?' 'Who else can I live with,' she asked lazily. The sergeant's voice grew soft and persuasive. 'Effie, how would you like to go to a nice home, with lots of nice people, just like you, where everyone is kind, and no one beats you, ever. How would you like that?' 'And leave Sybil ?' asked Effie, her eyes opening wide. 'Well, she could come and visit you-from time to time--' 'And leave Sybil ?' asked Effie again, louder, as though it were impious even to formulate the idea, as though the understanding boggled at it. 'But you'd be well looked after,' said the nurse, 'and have nice clothes to wear--' Effie beat her head, and roared, 'No! No! Don't take me away! My sister! Sybil! Don't take me away!' She collapsed on the floor, pounding at it with her fists, sobbing gustily. 'All right, all right now. Calm down, there's a good girl. All right, now!' The nurse with relief, for this was her ground, assumed a brusquely professional manner like a uniform. 'No, no, no!' moaned Effie. 'Ah ... ah .. .' Her groans filled the house. The sergeant turned to Miss Sybil who had sat throughout this unmoved. He had a feeling that the whole thing was moving beyond his grasp. 'Get her out of here,' he commanded brusquely. Miss Sybil did not move. 'I can order it,' said the sergeant, suddenly a little weary. Miss Sybil glanced at Effie, sprawling, tear-streaked, pitiable. No trace of pity showed in her beaten face. 'Go to your room.' Effie looked at her a moment, and seemed to divine that she could stay, clambered to her feet, then seized Miss Sybil's hand and pressed it to her cheek. Then she left. The hand thudded back to place on Miss Sybil's lap. She laughed, a curious, cracked shudder. 'You see? She worships me. Take her away, and she'll kill herself. If you do, her death will be on your head. If you want that, go right ahead.' The sergeant opened his mouth, closed it again. He exchanged a look with the nurse: she shrugged. Miss Sybil turned her back on them and began to talk. 272 'She's the product of sin. My father's sin. His sin has been visited on me, in her, and alone I carry it. She must be made pure and then the smirched banner will be cleansed. For every sign of sin I see in her, I whip her. I don't give her mercy: why should I? Was Christ offered mercy? If he had been would we be Christians today? No, we would never have heard of Him. It was because He suffered that he became Our Lord. So Effie must suffer too, to become pure. But she is big and strong: I am tiny and weak and cannot do it on my own, so I drink, to give myself strength. Then a fire lights within me, and I'm an avenging angel come to rid the world of its sinful burdens. Then I can exult and shout for joy, because God is with me, and I am His instrument. That's all I have to say.' The sergeant spoke with energy and precision. 'All right, Miss Brett, now listen. You've given your reasons which I'm not going to discuss. But the people you live with won't stand for this kind of thing, whatever your reasons, however good you think they are. You say your sister will die if she leaves you, and you may be right, but no jury in the world would convict me for separating you if you go on beating her like this. Before I leave, I want your solemn promise that you will not touch her again. If you do, and I shall know, as there are people here who will tell me, I shall separate you instantly and indict you for criminal assault, and with the evidence we have, you couldn't escape a long term in prison.' He rose, and the nurse also. 'Well, Miss Brett? What's your answer?' She said: 'I can see you want to drive us away. Everyone does, sooner or later. No one understands. They think I'm cruel, but I'm only just. That's why we've had to move so much. I don't want to move again. I can do nothing with her if we're moving all the time. She's too much for me then.' 'Miss Brett, I'm a busy man. Yes, or no?' 'Very well.' It seemed wrung out of her, by a slow compression of the will. 'Right, Miss Brett. You're doing the wisest thing.' She did not look up when they left.

On the third Saturday following, Miss Effie snatched a baby from the beach and began running with it pressed against her breasts, and with long loping strides, disappeared into Massey Street. The mother screamed, and fell into hysterics. The father and several other men raced after her, shouting. But she reached the house before any of them, and locked the door. The father, demented, raged and struck at the door with his fists. 'Open up, open up!' he shouted. 'Break a window,' suggested someone, but this required thought as they were all high, and there was no ladder. The gate clicked behind them. Miss Sybil stood there, a basket of provisions over one arm, but no bottle. 'What is it?' she said. 273 They told her, shouting each other down, threatening, denouncing, imprecating. 'Effie!' She yelled it. No sound, no movement. Her face tightened still more. 'Wait,' she said, and disappeared round the side of the house, and unexpectedly agile and wiry, clambered through a skylight arrangement, and a moment later opened the door. The angry men streamed through the house, through the squalid living room with no decoration but an enormous, bloody crucifix over the fireplace, to the bare bedroom, where on the mean, iron bed lay Effie, lying back with the baby in her arms over her head. The father grabbed it from her roughly. The baby, which had been gurgling contentedly, set up an enraged bellow, and Miss Effie gave a long howl of anguish, her face contorted and the huge, brown eyes filled with the dumb pain of an animal deprived of its young. That night the still air was rent by bitter, savage screams. 'Must have some left in the kitty, eh? You going to report her to Dexter? Not me, no, we can't have this kind of thing or none of the kids'll be safe. Yeh, for once she got what she deserved.' No action was taken against Miss Sybil.

The Reverend Oswald Thirle sat studying in his vestry, meditating with fury and an enveloping self-pity on his wife's infidelity, which was now indubitably de facto. He read again and again with a savage intensity the story of Christ and Magdalene, but still his thoughts were acrid, corroding his soul. Last night she had told him it was true, and with whom, and had laughed in her amoral, unfathomable way, and said it was her revenge for his dragging her across the world to this cheerless backwater where the sun might shine and the sea pound its way into the coastline, but blood flowed sluggishly and the breath of life was faint on the mirror of the spirit. Even in his extremity his wife's simple expressions of scorn and disgust sifted themselves in memory into the cadenced prose of his ser- mons. 'Let him who is without sin cast the first stone ... ' The words swam and wavered to his eyes, suffused it seemed in red. All very well for you, he cried inwardly to the gentle Face in his mind: did you have a wife? You knew pain, but not this pain! Eyes closed, he struck the desk before him with his fist, seeing only the calm face, and passed on to the higher regions of blasphemy, reviling God, cursing Christ, trampling on the Cross. Exhausted, he slumped in his chair, rage slaked, hardly feeling, hardly aware. 'Preacher!' Oh. Effie Brett. He could stand anyone now but Effie Brett. What did she want? It was almost dark. Immediately he became what he professed, assuming the mental apparel of the clergyman with no feeling of in- congruity, and hurried out into the nave. There stood Effie, barefoot, Miss Sybil's antique velvet hat perched on the back of her head. No more bizarre figure had ever entered those portals. But none of these things disturbed Mr Thirle at all, for in her arms she carried a baby of some 274 five months old. It seemed unhappy, and was making little, uncomfortable mewing noises. 'Hungry, are you, lamby pie? Well, just a minute pet, just give me a moment,' and there in the aisle, before God and His Saints, and the astounded Mr Thirle, she bared one breast and offered it to the child, who sucked at it greedily. Mr Thirle cleared his throat. 'Miss Effie, am I to understand that this is your child?' Effie smiled, preoccupied. 'Don't want it, eh?' as the child expelled the nipple and roared with vexation. 'Yes, it's mine. He'll need no other mother now. I want you to baptize it and wash it in lamb's blood. Remember? In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, ah-men!' Sweating and embarrassed, Mr Thirle tried to convey to this wild, untamed thing that the Church was hardly the place, and that even so- what was the use, as she was, he supposed, a virgin-but he felt that any direct reference to these things would further defile these walls, already so blemished today that reconsecration might be necessary; as these thoughts mulled in his head, tossing wildly about but not resulting in any action, an excited and indignant posse swept into the church, a distraught woman rushed up the aisle and snatched the child from Miss Effie with an exclamation of horror and disgust. 'Claude,' she said to her husband, 'I think I'm going to be sick,' and was led outside before Mr Thirle could speak, and silent, dismayed by these successive and ever- worsening profanations, he retired to his vestry. But Miss Effie was still there, and after a moment, she began howling, screaming: 'Where's my baby? Where's my baby?' Mr Thirle stood it for a time, but knew he must order the woman out or every vestige of sanctity would vanish from his church. He went out into the dimming nave, and there was Miss Effie before the altar roaring with grief. No, no, no. This must go no farther. And, he observed with a frisson of horror that she was still uncovered. The defilements, the violations of this day! He approached her, touched her. She sprang up, turned and sped down the aisle shouting, her fists clenched and arms held high over her head. Ah, quiet. Mr Thirle sat down in one of the pews. The light had almost gone. Poor, suffering, estranged, alien creature. Alien. Ruth. The associa- tion quickened, renewed its power to hurt, thrusting at him. At once he seemed to be taking part in some spectral pas de trois; in one hand he led Ruth dancing away from him, eyes glistening, mouth slightly apart with the promise of pleasure to come, and dancing towards him, Effie, colossal and sad, her shift awry, her great brown eyes full of her knowledge. Both alien, both apart, both foreign, the one lost to him, and the other ... what was that on the floor? Her hat. He sucked in his breath, panic sweeping over him. No, no no no. These monstrous thoughts must be cast out, banished utterly. But they refused exorcism, and suddenly took full possession of him. He picked up the hat and rushed wildly out of the church, down Anzac Avenue and on to the wide dark beach. Ahead, he could hear the sobbing cries of Miss Effie as she stumbled home. The 275 figure of Christ who still lurked dingily in a far off niche of his mind, blacked out altogether. From Rangitoto's vast bulk, a red beacon winked on and off. It was now quite dark.

An inspector of police called on Miss Sybil next day and told her what had happened. He received from her a pledge that if Miss Effie in any way molested or troubled anyone at Te Parenga again, they would instantly leave, never to return. From now on, the sisters were never seen apart. Miss Sybil ceased going to the city altogether. Miss Effie stole no more babies. As the weeks pro- ceeded and summer sped on, the sisters seemed to soften a little and to become more normal. Miss Sybil was heard on two epic occasions to answer greetings, and Miss Effie seemed happier and more content. She would lie quite still on the sand for many hours with her eyes closed, crooning softly. The bleakness in Miss Sybil began to thaw. And yet, the people of Te Parenga perversely, though relieved of their violence, were unwilling to part with their eccentricities. As Arch Jeffers put it: 'After all, they brought a bit of character to this dull hole. Don't let them go all wholesome on us.' But the sisters' short spell as good citizens and keepers of the peace ceased abruptly. The rumour flashed from mouth to mouth that Miss Effie was with child. Once more she became the focus of attention on the beach, and odds were offered on whether it were true or not. Arch Jeffers was of the opinion that a more sedentary life, a more sedate outlook was expressing itself in flesh. For a while, the citizens were divided into rival factions, those for pregnancy and those against it. And the whole of Te Parenga kept their eyes skinned to watch the shape of events, as one humorist put it. By the middle of July, there was no longer any doubt. Miss Effie erect presented the unequivocal signs of motherhood. And now, of course, Te Parenga hummed with obscene speculation as to how and where, and odds were laid on paternity from end to end of the beach. Any large man was the butt for bawdy badinage and Arch Jeffers indignantly bore a good deal of this, as though slight in build beside Miss Effie's massiveness, he was her equal in height. And men eyed each other stealthily, knowing and secret grins appearing at the corners of their mouths, each suspicious of the other. And another deliciously vexed question was: how is Miss Sybil taking it? To the outsider, and that was everyone at Te Parenga, since no one was their confidant or friend, she did not seem to be taking it at all. The thawing which had been working on the frosty hinterlands of her goodwill slowly proceeded, and she had even been heard initiating friendly words- but-how was she taking it? The truth was, Miss Sybil did not know. She knew much of the workings of sin and was always alive to its myriad manifestations, but of the workings of nature she was ignorant, except in a general, fiercely undefined and indistinct manner. She knew of course the facts of conception, and 276 that in consequence a woman swelled and became ungainly. She noticed, without being particularly arrested, that Effie had put on weight, but as she never left her side, she assigned to this no other cause than a minor victory of virtue over vice. One morning, she and Effie sat on the soft grey sand of the foreshore where Massey Street debauches on to the beach. Although mid-winter, it was pleasant, and an oblique sun warmed them. Miss Sybil felt at peace and some of the fierceness and hatred that had been her life-long companions left her. Effie played in the sand, singing soft, vague songs. Miss Sybil's thoughts drifted back over the past. She thought of her childhood in the seventies, when they had arrived after the long exhausting journey from Liverpool, and of her dismay at the crudeness and rawness of life in a new country; of the pain of seeing her mother, who under the soft lamps of benign memory seemed ineffably beautiful, ineffably good, hewing wood and drawing water like a slave, after their lovely London house which memory enlarged and sumptuously refurnished; of the disappointment of her father in the land, which after great labour proved poor and unfruitful; of her mother's lingering illness, when that lovely face had hollowed and sunk on to the bones, and of her death in great pain when Miss Sybil was eighteen. Her father had buried her with every sign of grief, and he and his daughter had lived together in the empty- seeming house in a dumb anguish which had brought them close, until- she saw it now. Her father, leading in that woman, Aroha, that bestial, stupid, heavy-limbed Maori woman, showing her the house and inflaming her with a desire for its modest splendours, forcing Miss Sybil to wait on her and call her mother, placing her in the bed beside him which her mother had left less than three months. Ah! It was then that she had really known sin for the first time, had really experienced it as a fact of human existence, and it was then that she resolved to devote her life and all the energy at her command to extirpating this vile growth from the hearts of men. And oh her wild, grim joy when Aroha had died in scream- ing agony leaving behind her a little puffy animal, and how her father a year later was brought in one afternoon, his back broken by a fallen tree, but living long enough to hear her curse-oh there were compensating joys for the pain in life, for which she rendered thanks to the savage deity whose will she had chosen to fulfil. And the long years since, forty years of it, teaching, dressmaking, until that legacy had come from Aunt Sarah leaving her free; rearing Effie, trying to steer her into virtue's trim alleyways, discouraged but never defeated by Effie's obvious preference for the broad, seductive paths of vice. She was eight years old when she had first told Miss Sybil that she was going to have a baby, and Miss Sybil, shocked and appalled, had beaten her until she could not stand. And ever since, Effie had asked for babies, and Miss Sybil did not relax her zeal with the years, beating out vile thoughts through great pain, avenging through suffering the curse on her blood. And Effie had grown beside her, then shot up beyond her, until she was monstrous, and only a stockwhip would reach her poor, primitive soul. And yet Effie plainly adored her, but never never had she permitted herself one single token 277 of affection which might distract her from her appointed task, or Effie from salvation. She looked now at Effie's calm yet radiant face and a choking softness ran through her. The gaunt, set lines of her features blurred and faltered, tears filled her stony eyes. Oh if only Effie were at last redeemed, the relief, the pure joy of never having to punish this poor simple creature again; if only she and Effie could be like this always, and her long, hard life of singleness and devotion to the Most High be fulfilled. And Good Land, she thought, how fat she is getting! Too much rich food perhaps, though their fare was scarcely indulgent to the senses, Spartan rather. Then Effie suddenly looked at her in the curious way she had of responding intuitively to Miss Sybil's unspoken thoughts, took her hand and laid it across her swollen belly. Miss Sybil, confused, surprised, could make nothing of it until she felt a little fluttering tremor against her palm. 'That's him,' said Effie softly. Miss Sybil understood. With a wild cry she sprang to her feet, face livid, eyes horribly distended. She shook from head to foot and froth appeared at her mouth. Then she fell in the sand, face down, twitching. Effie laughed, and played in the sand, composed and happy.

The sisters were not seen for several weeks. Arch Jeffers, indefatigable, had observed Miss Effie come up Massey Street with Miss Sybil in her arms, and had made solicitous enquiries, to which Miss Effie answered, 'She fell down,' and this, passed from mouth to mouth, garnished, em- broidered, was padded out to assume more or less correct proportions: Miss Sybil knew. And when at last she appeared again, though from one aspect she looked unchanged, from another, one foot was seen to drag after her, one arm hung meaningless in its sleeve, one eyelid sagged, the mouth drooped at one corner, as though one half of her knew, and the other still pleaded ignorance. 'Well, she can't hurt Effie now,' they said. Miss Effie had become mountainous in the last stages of her pregnancy. She had now for many become that image of maternity which temporarily she had seemed. A vast contentment flowed from her. She passed slowly up and down the beach, eyes half open, her hands across her distended belly, her shift slowly tightening across it. She was watched warily to see if her lover would betray himself, but no one approached her. She was now always alone, and Miss Sybil was seen only rarely. She could no longer talk distinctly and in the shops was forced to write down her requests with her left hand as her right was paralysed. For the rest, she shuffled about, seeing no one, preoccupied with inward tortures. She had aged twenty years since Effie had been with child. Someone, inspired by malice, approached her and asked where Miss Effie would be delivered as they would like to send her flowers. Like stone, Miss Sybil stood, not an eyelash moving to show that she had even heard. But it was widely rumoured that Miss Effie would have neither doctor nor midwife but would deliver herself as long as Miss Sybil breathed. 278 The Reverend Oswald Thirle had been away from Te Parenga for over six months on sick leave, and rumours had filtered through to his parishion- ers that his wife, whom nobody at Te Parenga could abide, had left him and run away to Australia with the second mate of the 'Muriwai'. 'Well, what can you expect,' said one woman. 'She never fitted in here. Do you remember that garden party at the Vicarage when they first came here? Dressed up as if she was going to Court, long flowery dress, great big hat, and do you know what she said to me? Tell me, she said, you know what a doggy voice she has, tell me: do you hunt? Me, hunt! I just didn't know what to say to her. Stupid, stuck-up thing! We're well rid of her, and so's he.' Then it was heard at Te Parenga that he had resigned his living and was returning to England. There was much sympathy for him. In his absence, Athol Sedgwick, the curate, had been conducting the services and governing the parish. Congregations dwindled, for he was a serious young man putting his finger squarely upon good and evil and meticulously signposting the route to salvation. They missed Mr Thirle's passion and his medieval sense of drama. They had enjoyed the coin-flinging episode, and there had been other incidents, like the Towneley morality he had read, taking all the parts, of which few had understood a word-all in Old English! But it had been worth coming along to see what he was up to. So he was going away. Well, he would be missed. Arch Jeffers' closest friend at Te Parenga was Reg Johns, the barman at the Hotel Mon Repos. They seemed to have little in common. Reg had neither education nor finesse, was indifferent to the arts and perhaps actively hostile to music, yet in eighteen years he had come to an intuitive understanding of Arch Jeffers. He tried from time to time to persuade Arch to play the violin again, realizing that Arch had been ruined but was still capable of redemption and he divined that only music could do it for him. 'Why don't you give us a go on the old fiddle, Arch?' he would say. 'Not that I care for the stuff, but do you good, you know. Get some of that crap off your liver.' And each time Arch would reply in almost the same words. 'Reg, never, while she lives.' And Reg: 'Oh, don't give me that line of bull. She's good for another thirty years, isn't she? How you going to look, starting up again when you're seventy, eh?' 'No, Reg, it'd have to be something pretty big to make me start again.' And the subject would not come up again for several months. Their understanding of each other was deep, intimate, and unspoken. One afternoon late in October, Arch Jeffers ran into the bar in great excitement. 'We're not open, Mr Jeffers,' said Maisie, the slatternly barmaid, who sat smoking, the Free Lance spread open on her knees. 'I know,' said Arch. 'Where's Reg?' 'Out the back, cooling off,' she said. 'Why, where's the fire?' 'In your eyes, gorgeous,' said Arch mechanically, and pushed through the screen door. Reg was recumbent and snoring delicately. Arch shook him. 279 Reg said: 'What the hell's up?' woke, and saw Arch. 'We're closed, dopey,' he said. 'Can't I get a little shut-eye without interruptions?' Arch spoke urgently, with no trace of affectation. 'Listen Reg, I've got news.' 'You always have. What now?' 'A father for Effie Brett's kid.' 'No!' Reg sat up, wideawake. 'Go on! I don't believe it.' For three months little had been discussed but the identity of Miss Effie's lover. A secret ballot conducted both privately and publicly had been ticking off possible candidates, weighing up the chances of others, indeed it had become the winter diversion at Te Parenga this year. But in default of any incriminating evidence whatever, the game had lan- guished and died. A father did not seem to exist. If someone had suggested that Miss Effie had been immaculately visited, some might almost have believed it. 'Case of the wish being father to the thought,' said someone wittily, recalling Miss Effie's obsession with babies. 'No, you're pulling my leg,' said Reg. 'I'm not, you know. Take this in. I met the Reverend Thirle on the beach.' 'Well, so you met the Reverend Thirle. Where does he come in?' 'I'll tell you. He's only here for the day, see, to get his gear sorted before he sets sail. I saw him and went up to wish him Kia Ora, good trip and so on, with a well-placed word of sympathy for his domestic troubles. He seemed pleased, started to tell me all about it; how his wife wasn't happy here and couldn't stand the newness of everything, everyone calling each other by their Christian names and that, when he stopped speaking as if he were cut dead. I turned round and there was Miss Effie about ten yards away. Oh, I said, yes. Poor Effie. Got herself with child, no one knows how. I suppose you didn't know about it. Happened while you were away. He looked at me, as if he knew I was talking but didn't understand a word, and he seemed to uncoil, kind of, and his mouth fell open. Then old Effie saw him and lumbered up, calling preacher, preacher, 0 preacher! And just as she reached us, Mr Thirle keeled over and fainted. Effie laughed and seemed to think it was a game, and knelt down beside him and tried to open his eyes. They fluttered, but he didn't come round, so I told her to leave him alone. Now I wanted to know for certain: you won't blame me for that Reg, you'd be the same you know, so I said to her: do you know, Mr Thirle, Miss Effie? Oh yes, she said, he told me he'd baptize anything I brought to him and pour lamb's blood on it. I'd know him anywhere by his funny collar and no hair. Well, that didn't help much. So then I said: has he ever touched you, Miss Effie? And she said Oh yes, and nodded her head about a dozen times, but the poor fool agrees with everything you say, so I couldn't tell. Like a child, just lives for now, forgets what she's done in five minutes. So I told her Miss Sybil was out looking for her, and off she went. Then I sat Mr Thirle up, and he opened his eyes and gave a long groan. Luckily, being a week day there was no one about, or it might have been tricky. He stood up, trembling, and began to cry in awful long sobs. So being close to the 280 Hotel, I took him to my room, and left him on the bed. He didn't say a word, just stared, all the time. There it is, Reg. What do you think?' Reg sat on his bed, stockinged feet dangling, but not touching the floor. He didn't speak for a moment. 'You know, Arch,' he said at last, 'I don't think this should go any farther. It's too much for us to take here. I'm not much of a Christian, as you know, but it'd knock the stuffing out of the Church. It would, you know.' 'And I used to think nothing ever happened at Te Parenga!' 'Well, don't you think? Mum's the word, eh?' 'Yes,' said Arch, 'yes, you're right.' But by evening, the whole of Te Parenga knew. Reg swore innocence, so did Arch, and they had begun to argue when Maisie the barmaid came in and said with a wink: 'Trust you to pick up the old scandal, eh Mr Jeffers ?' and they realized who was the sly eavesdropper and cursed their stupidity in leaving the bar door open. 'Well, we couldn't have held on to it for ever,' said Reg. The buses buzzed with it as they sped home with their town-weary freight, on the ferries everyone talked of it, and behind the blank, secret walls of the houses, it was savoured and rolled over the tongue. Most people were genuinely shocked. Mr Thirle had been both liked and pitied: liked for the quality of his mind which amused but did not disturb, pitied for the beautiful and disdainful Ruth who so plainly despised him and loathed them all. In the year since the Brett sisters had come to Te Parenga, the calm smooth surface of life here had received many a dint. But their obvious eccentricity, and the impossibility of applying normal criteria to their behaviour confirmed the tone of Te Parenga by contrast, did not broach the cask which held their moral dispositions; but this shameful affair seemed at once to have removed the bung and wantonly spilled the waters of probity. As for Mr Thirle, he slipped out of the Hotel unobserved and it was assumed he had re- turned to the city, after dark, afraid to face his former parishioners. 'By God, don't blame him,' said one in a group talking of it. 'The dirty, filthy pig,' said his wife. 'I'm broad-minded enough, goodness knows, but that I won't come at. Her! Her! Think of it!' They thought of it, and the women stiffened with repulsion, but the men saw an image of the trim, circumspect form of the Reverend Thirle caught in the monstrous embrace of the formidable Effie Brett, and they sniggered, laughed, roared, and ultimately, after a day or so, the tension on the community was released in laughter. Three days later, the labour began. Huge, echoing screams hung on the still air of early summer, and again, half-acknowledged exultant looks returned to people's faces. This great moon-cow in parturition was ele- mental and primeval as though the earth itself were labouring to clear its womb. On it went, with the silent periods growing ever shorter, all through the night. No light came from the house, and this time the women glanced at each other without furtive lusting in their eyes but with the comprehension of women who had borne children themselves, conscious 281 that another laboured who had to deliver herself, for Miss Sybil had muttered 'No,' the only word she could still articulate, firmly and inexor- ably, to all offers of aid. And Doctor Soames had said he couldn't force himself on them if they didn't want his services, and that without him, the baby would probably die, which would be all to the good, enough idiots in the world as it was. No one near Massey Street could sleep. At four o'clock in the morning, three women in dressing gowns walked up to the mean little house. The door was locked and there was no answer to their repeated knocking. One of them stood on another's shoulders and shone a torch through the skylight. There was Miss Sybil sitting on a chair as though carved in clay; her face at once rigid and formless in a new and horrifying manner. Something akin to a smile extended one corner of her broken mouth. As they crept home, the screaming began again. The night was very long for those lying awake, staring and listening. By the morning, all was quiet. Boy or girl, which, which, for overnight, Miss Effi.e, as a victim of unbridled lust, had become an almost popular figure, and bets had been laid the night before in the bar of the Hotel Mon Repos. But the sordid little house held its secret close. The morning passed, and the early afternoon : nothing.' Dr Soames was called, and he and a party of women went up to the house. No sound, and the door was still locked. They broke a window and entered the dingy living room. There on the floor lay Sybil Brett, the half smile still on her face, and in ghastly parody of it, her throat was cut from one ear to the other. One hand clasped the crucifix, and the blood from her throat had covered the effigy of the suffering Christ. One of the women vomited on the floor. Next door on the iron bed lay Effi.e, quite dead, and beside her a little puffy blue bundle, strangled, the marks plainly visible on its throat. And as they stood there numb and aghast by the scale of the tragedy before them, a small boy arrived to say that the drowned body of the Reverend Oswald Thirle had been washed up on the shore at Te Parenga. Totally estranged, he had sought the sea, symbol of a still vaster aliena- tion than he had known in life, and sinking through its lucid darkness with a lifetime of memory exploding and dissolving above him, he passed at last to a region completely other, where there was no light, but no pain. Nearly everyone went to the funeral. The four coffins, poignantly disparate in size, lay together, and people wept openly throughout the service. 'The poor things. Oh, the poor things,' said one woman over and over again. As the service ended the piercing squeak of a violin off key traced a melancholy parabola to the ear: Arch Jeffers who had not played for eighteen years played now and could remember only Auld Lang Syne with its incongruous evocations of conviviality and joyousness, yet people wept, hearing it. The sisters in their anguish had redeemed one character at least. The large crowd streamed out of the cemetery and made its way back to Te Parenga. These remarks seemed to float above their heads. 'Yeh, makes you wonder if there can be a God at all. All that suffering! What can He want with all that suffering?' 282 'They were victims, you know. I don't know, but I knew they'd do something awful minute I clapped eyes on them. • 'Well, I say we've a lot to answer for. You shouldn't mix races. Or you get monsters, and that's God's anger.' 'We've been too greedy. Coming here, taking the land, and taking the people as though they belonged to us.' 'You shouldn't mix races.' 'You get men out of the way then. They're the whole trouble, if you ask me.' 'Well, let's hope they're happy now.' 'Shook us up a bit, eh? Going to be a bit on the quiet side from now on.' 'Yeh, yeh, it is.' The crowd thinned and grew silent, each member of it preoccupied with his own thoughts. The afternoon sky was a clear washed blue and Rangitoto seemed very close. Should be a fine day tomorrow.

M. K. JOSEPH MERCURY BAY ECLOGUE

Dominus regnavit, exsultet terra: laetentur insulae multae

I THE child's castle crumbles; hot air shimmers Like water working over the empty sand. Summer noon is long and the brown swimmers For fear of outward currents, lie on land. With tumbleweed and seashells in its hand The wind walks,· a vigorous noonday ghost Bearing gifts for an expected guest.

Hull down on horizon, island and yacht Vanish into blue leaving no trace; Above my head the nebulae retreat Dizzily sliding round the bend of space Winking a last red signal of distress. Each galaxy or archipelago Plunges away into the sky or sea. 283 In the dry noon are all things whirling away? They are whirling away, but look-the gull's flight Stonefall towards the rainbows of the spray Skim swim and glide on wing up to the light And in this airy gesture of delight See wind and sky transformed to bless and warn The dance, the transfiguration, the return.

The turning wheels swing the star to harbour And rock the homing yacht in a deep lull, Bring children to their tea beneath the arbour, Domesticate the wind's ghost and pull Islands to anchor, softly drop the gull Into his nest of stones and lead The yachtsmen and the swimmers to their bed.

II

A shepherd on a bicycle Breaks the pose of pastoral But will suffice to keep The innocence of sheep.

Ringing his bell he drives the flock From sleepy field and wind-scarred rock To where the creaming seas Wash shoreward like a fleece.

The farmer and his wife emerge All golden from the ocean-surge Their limbs and children speak The legend of the Greek.

The shadowy tents beneath the pines The surfboards and the fishing-lines Tell that our life might be One of simplicity.

The wind strums aeolian lyres Inshore among the telephone wires Linking each to each The city and the beach. 284 For sunburnt sleepers would not come If inland factories did not hum And this Arcadian state Is built on butterfat.

So children burn the seastained wood And tell the present as a good Knowing that bonfires are Important as a star.

And on his gibbet the swordfish raised With bloody beak and eye glazed Glares down into the tide Astonishment and pride.

Machine once muscled with delight He merges now in primitive night; The mild and wondering crowd Admire the dying god Where Kupe and where Cook have trod.

Ill

Over the sea lie Europe and Asia The dead moulded in snow The persecution of nuns and intellectuals The clever and the gentle The political trials and punishment camps The perversion of children Men withering away with fear of the end.

Fifteen years of a bad conscience Over Spain and Poland Vienna Berlin Israel Korea Orphans and prostitutes Unburied the dead and homeless living We looked on ruined cities Saying, These are our people.

We sat in the sun enduring good luck Like the stain of original sin Trying to be as God, to shoulder The world's great sorrow Too shaken to see that we hadn't the talent That the clenching heart is a fist And a man's grasp the reach of his arm. 285 Be still and know: the passionate intellect Prepares great labours Building of bridges, practice of medicine. Still there are cows to be milked Students to teach, traffic direction Ships unloading at wharves And the composition of symphonies.

IV The poets standing on the shelf Excavate the buried self Freud's injunction they obey Where id was, let ego be.

Yeats who from his tower sees The interlocking vortices Of the present and the past, Shall find the centre hold at last.

Eliot whose early taste Was for the cenobitic waste Now finds the promise of a pardon Through children's laughter in the locked garden.

Pound in his barbed-wire cage Prodded into stuttering rage Still earns reverence from each Because he purified our speech.

Cavalier or toreador Is Campbell expert to explore The truthful moment when we face The black bull in the arid place.

And Auden who has seen too much Of the wound weeping for the healer's touch A surgeon in his rubber gloves Now cauterizes where he loves.

The summer landscape understood The morning news, the poets' mood, By their imperatives are defined Converging patterns in the mind. 286 V

Come fleet Mercury, messenger of gods and men Skim with your winged sandal the resounding surf Quickly come bearing to all things human Celestial medicine for their tongueless grief. Heaven's thief and merchant, here is your port Lave with your gifts of healing and of speech All mortals who shall ever print with foot These silent hills and this forsaken beach.

Come sweet Venus, mother of men and beasts While meteors fall across the yellow moon Above the hills herded like sleeping beasts, Sweetly come lady, and with hand serene Plant fruits of peace where, by this mariner's mark The torrents of your sea-begetting roar And trouble in their dreams of glowing dark These sleeping hills and this forbidden shore.

Come swift ship and welcome navigators Link and line with your instruments this earth To heaven under the propitious stars, Show forth the joined and fortune-bearing birth And set this fallen stone a meteorite Where Mercury and Venus hand in hand Walk on the waters this auspicious night And touch to swift love this forgotten strand. Whitianga, January 1952

0. E. MIDDLETON A DAY BY ITSELF

DoWN by the mouth of the Mauku there is an untidy stretch of country which will take you right back to your boy years. Near the road is a mountainous rubbish pile which spills right down into the creek and looks (and smells) as though it just happened out of a rather pressing local need. On a cool day, and with the wind at your back, you can poke and probe at this heap and take away all kinds of useful and useless things-if you are built that way. And down there in the creek the eels 287 and inanga, and even the crabs and mullet and kingfish from the outer Manukau, collect and transmute the refuse in their own sweet ways .... The day I first went down with the hinaki, I thought I was back at Te Rakau: off on one of those tiring, exciting trips into the King Country which my brother and I had made so often with our father. It seemed impossible that this rugged stretch of estuary, with its toe toe and flax- covered banks, was only half-an-hour's fast drive from the city. There was even a pukeko, gangling and friendly in an aloof fashion, stalking through the reeds and flipping his tail-feathers. If you walked off the road, and ignored the fences and the gorse higher up, you could feel that here were a few acres of untouched New Zealand. A forgotten slice of pristine chaos amid the newer, brisker order.... I dumped the hinaki in tall grass by a culvert and clumped onto the bridge. Under me the water was blackish-looking and sluggish with conflicting eddies, but somehow it satisfied my first requirements of creekness. 'There will be eels here,' I told myself, and leaned my forearms against the wooden handrail. . . . I must have been staring down into the water for a long time before I noticed the other two. The place really was very like Te Rakau and I must have begun to drift back into those boy years again. Then I saw the line of corks stretched across the creek a few yards above the bridge, and knew I was not alone. There were two Maoris tending the net, and by the look of the bulging sugar-bags in the grass by their oilskins, they were having some luck. I sang out to the older one, a man of about thirty, in a grey Army sweater, and asked what they were netting. 'Sprats,' he called back, pointing to the sacks and hauling on the net again. I slid down the bank and trod carefully over the swampy part to where they were. They were making their last haul, and it was a good one. The net bulged with herrings which had come up the creek on the spring tide, and as he tipped them onto the grass the older man looked up and grinned. 'This the way to catch them, eh?' I grinned back and looked at the net as they stowed it carefully across a split sack. It was a well-kept looking net, newly-tanned by the look of it, and with fine meshes. It made me feel shy about my old hinaki. 'We came up from Ruapuru this morning,' said the older Maori. 'That's quite a step,' I said. 'Yes,' he said, 'but no trouble when you got the bike. Come up early, pull the net a few times .... We be back home for tea.' I didn't see how he was going to be back by then without doing some pretty hard pedalling, but I didn't disagree. Ruapuru was a long way off. One of those little inland dairying towns which have grown out of a blind faith in cows. The kind of a town where I always expect to see a pub called 'The Swinging Teat' or something like that; only it is a dry town. 288 MAORI STUDIES BY HESTER CARSTEN

I mentioned that I was looking for eels, and they both looked surprised. The boy asked if I liked eels, but said nothing when I said yes. The older one isaid he would show me a good place further up the creek as soon as he got his gear on to the road. So I picked up two sacks of herrings and followed them up the track to the bridge. Beside the my eel trap mocked me from the tall grass, but I picked it up as as I could and slid down the bank again. The others soon after, laughing together about something as they sloshed through the rushes, but serious again as they came up to me. 'Half a mo andl we see if there's anything in here,' said the big one, and he took off His boots and got into a drain. It was a deep dtain, and choked with rushes, and as he worked his way along it, exploritl.g likely hiding-places with his bare feet, there were times when only his head showed. The boy had Wljllked on ahead with his mate's boots, but I kept abreast of the man in tM drain, chatting to him when he surfaced and feeling a bit like a tourist ion a reservation. They were putting on a show for me. For me! It made me think of the people who speakf to foreigners in pigdin English and expect them to feel flattered. · When the talk 15ot round to telling where eels are by the colour of the mud I felt I wanted no more of them. Suddenly the older one hopped out of the drain and announced that there were no there, anyway. 'But bound to tie some up there where I told you,' he said, and sat down to put on his boots. We followed a !cattle track through scrub and gorse for about half a mile. Somehow, felt responsible for that gorse. There it was growing strongly among the manuka and looking much too sharp and green and successful in competition with the older things. I mentioned to the others that I thought it a pity the gorse had got such a hold up here, li>ut they didn't seem to be worried. 'The old soon fix that,' said the older Maori. Yet somehow didn't answer my unasked question and I couldn't help going on to think about the race of super-flies which some of the new insecticides are srlpposed to be producing. At last we down across a swamp to where the creek spread itself between clumps of flax. 'You get them 'alright,' said the Maori, '0 yes, I think so!' I looked down into the pool, and across to the creamy tufts of toe toe on the far bank. !rt was a good spot, alright. Somewhere I could 'cling rootless' at least fqr the rest of the day, if not until the need were gone.

I fidgeted with 1my fishing-bag and waited for them to go. They stood where they were. ! '0 well,' I 'I'll just sit here for a while and maybe set the trap later on.' 289 The boy sat down and started to pick his teeth with a grass stalk. The older man folded his arms across his Army sweater and continued to look at me with frank curiosity. 'By gee, you must know a lot of the Maori ways,' he said, out of a long quiet. I mentioned that I had knocked around the King Country for a good few years at one time. 'I heard about that place,' he said, 'they tell me they still use canoes down there.' I said that it was quite likely, and then remembered that I had, in fact, seen one; a fair dinkum old-time dug-out, somewhere on the Mangahoe I think it was. But they were ahead of me as usual. 'Can't beat the outboard though,' said the talking one. Now speedboats, racing cars, motor-bikes and time-clocks have a very special place in my scheme of values. It is a kind of chamber of mechanized horrors, a sort of psychic Elba where I exile all my pet hates. But I did like this little bend of creek and I wanted very much to be alone by it. 'Yes,' I said, 'they are a wonderful invention alright.' My talking friend then set off to tell me about the different kinds of outboard motor he had seen, their fuel consumption, speeds and relative costs. It was sickening. For the first time in my life I wished the internal combustion engine had arrived a hundred years earlier. 'If old Hongi or Te Kooti had brought out a fleet of those with pom- pom guns mounted on them, you beggars might not be here now,' I said without smiling. But they didn't mind that a bit. Thought it a really good one, in fact. And anyway they wanted to see me set the hinaki. With as much dignity as I could find at that time and place, I reached into my bag and pulled out a mass of fowl entrails and my knife. Why the knife should have been so interesting, I don't know. It was just an old thing I had knocked up on a rainy day out of a broken saw blade and a cow's rib. 'You make that yourself?' said the Army sweater, so I said yes and showed him how I put the rivets in. He looked at me strangely and handed over the commando knife (plastic-handled) which he had picked up in Italy for a few lira. 'Very nice,' I said, 'but this one does me.' And I dropped the innards into a bit of old shirt, gathered up the corners and put a string round the top, like a plum (luff. · 'That's my bait,' I said, in case there were any more questions. But I should have known. The boy wanted to know why I put the cloth round it, so I had to explain that it was to stop the eels tearing at the meat from the outside of the wire. Now I was all set. I picked up the trap and swung it out over the creek so that it dropped in a shady part, right under a flax bush. Then I anchored the whole thing to a tea-tree stump with a piece of number eight wire. 290 The Maoris seemed to lose interest in me after that and it wasn't long before they said they had better be moving off. 'Well hooray,' I said, 'and thanks for showing me the place.' 'Hooray!' they said, and headed back down the creek and out of my sight.

I settled back in the grass and filled my pipe. My first day of real freedom after the years in town. It was like coming out of gaol. Back towards the road a pukeko screeched,-or was it a laugh? The mere suggestion that it had been a pukeko took me straight off to the swamps near Arapai. Those harsh, high notes travelling over the swamps on frosty nights ... and shooting the odd one in an open season, and being careful to pull out those tough ligaments before you cooked him.... And if it had been a laugh? What did it matter, for today, anyway? I was living out a poem. 'Staying away in the far places' or 'wandering and ripening'. . . . I looked down into the water again. The pool was not so calm now. The receding tide must have been disturbing the creek even this far up and the reeds were undulating with a brisker motion. They were the kind of reeds which always fascinated me. The long tube of stem trailing a few leaves at its tip further down-stream, gave the plants a rootless, perilous look. It was hard to believe that they really grew in the creek. They looked more as though they had been washed from some paddock and were just floating there, or caught on some underwater object, until a flood carried them further down-stream. But they really did grow. I had found that out at Blagdon years before. Blagdon had been my first eeling creek and I had come to look for, and expect the reeds, in every creek since. Yes, Blagdon in the bad old years of '31, '32 and '33, with farmers going off their land and cattle moaning in the swamps along its banks, and no one bothering to pull them out. . . . And the hooks we used to buy, two for a penny. Not just schnapper hooks, but real blued, hand-forged eel hooks, from Old Chalkey Blanch- ard. They were the only kind you could use at Blagdon. I buried one, past the barb, in the palm of my left hand, one day, and sent my young brother bawling off to look for help. I could still hear his crying and see him running through the seagulls over Mr Brenner's ploughed land .... And left to myself, I had twisted and turned at the shank of the hook, felt it scrape the bone at the base of my little finger, and at last slit the skin with my scout knife and got the barb free. I put down my pipe and wiped my left hand with a tuft of grass. You could still see the small white scar, right below the mount of Mercury. The sun was getting hotter and an army of insects throbbed along the creek bank. Around me, the grass had a full, heady scent and I wondered 291 which was native tussock, and which imported,-and wished I knew for sure. There were so many things I wanted to know, so much I wanted to do, that the town had given me no chance of doing. Once I had thought that to live in the city and be near the library, or the University, were the most desirable things in the world. But those days were over .... BRRAAANG! It came from the direction of the road and roared up the creek. The cicada who had been palpitating against the cabbage-tree trunk above my head missed a beat, and somewhere a pukeko screeched again. I groaned softly and sat up. Some so-called speed king out for a day's alleged joy-ride, I supposed. There was another loud bang and a series of fainter explosions which settled gradually into a steady roar. I stretched my legs and stood up. The hinaki would be quite safe and my rest was over for a while, anyway. I walked back slowly along the cattle track to see who had come to disturb my quiet. It was a motor bike as I had guessed. One of those big, racy-looking American machines with wide handle-bars and plenty of red paint. Astride it was the Maori in the sweater, only now he had put on an oilskin, helmet, and goggles. The bike was popping and banging and the younger Maori was trying to balance the sacks of herrings across the petrol tank. They were at the far side of the bridge as I came up the slope and as I came out onto the road they started towards me across the bridge. The clutch went in with a flourish, the legs which had been steadying the bike were drawn up, and the front wheel bumped over the first plank of the bridge. They were only a few yards across when it happened. Not suddenly, in spite of their speed, but very gradually, or so it seemed to me as I watched. The motor bike began to wobble ('Steering gone!' I thought), then veered towards the wooden parapet on the seaward edge and toppled on its side. I remember there was a loud grinding noise as they fell and a great puff of dust. 'Mustn't panic,' I told myself, and started to jog-trot towards them. No one was moving and the engine was still roaring as I came up. Then I saw that both Maoris were under the bike-the boy with his back jammed against the parapet. I grabbed the handlebars and prized the machine off the rider. I shouted 'You O.K? You O.K ?' a few times, but neither of them moved. Petrol was spilling from a broken pipe, so I pushed the bike a few yards further on. The big fellow was getting to his feet when I turned round. He looked sick and one of his hands was badly cut. 292 We lifted the bike off the boy and sat him up, then the first one asked 'How's the bike?' I had a look at the boy, who didn't seem to know what had happened, and told him to stay where he was for a while. He didn't seem to realize how lucky he had been. The parapet had saved them both from the creek. The older man had started to tinker with the bike. 'By gee you were lucky!' I said. He nodded his head very slightly and rummaged in his oilskin pocket with his bleeding hand. 'Got a broken chain,' he said. I asked him how it had happened anyway, and he said the front wheel had got caught between two planks so that he couldn't steer. I wanted to say, 'Can't I tie up your hand for you?' but just then he called out, 'Hey Tai, you seen my crescent?' Tai rummaged in his oilskin and brought out a small shifting spanner, a screwdriver and a pair of pliers. This cheered up the other man a lot. 'Can't beat the crescent!' he said. 'Never travel without it.' And I was thinking ... 'Need more than a spanner to mend that wreck now.' It was an old bike, held together with number eight wire in many places, and without footrest for the pillion. The frame seemed to have been twisted by the fall, a feed pipe was cracked and the drive chain was broken. The boy had got up now and was squatting beside the bike and handing out tools as his friend asked for them. I held the machine steady and tried to feel interested in what they were doing. It just bore out what I had been thinking earlier.... Dangerous, ugly mechanical horrors .... Shouldn't be allowed on the roads. And the way people slaved to keep them going! Messing around for whole weekends when they could have been out in the open somewhere, or just doing nothing .... All those suburbanites in the towns, with their old wrecks of cars in back yards and garages. . . . Stripping down engines, reboring, grinding valves, changing tires, painting. ('I fitted new rings myself, it saves quite a bit.') Or perhaps that was their way of enjoying life . . . ? I looked down at the other two. They were working away intently, with a fixed, almost happy look on their faces which was beyond my understanding. The older Maori had edged right under the bike now, and was squinting up at the rear axle. Every so often he would ask for another tool and Tai would hand it to him from those seemingly bottomless pockets of his. And every so often I would notice the bleeding hand, now smeared with oil, as it groped among the spokes or reached out for a spanner. I wanted to offer again to bandage it for him, but slowly I saw that he was deliberately ignoring it. 293 When I looked too long at it, the hand would turn over, so that I could not see the palm, or there would be a demand for another pair of pliers .... The repairs took about three hours, and all that time neither one talked about being hurt. The only thing the older man would say was that it had been his first accident. 'Well,' I said, 'you're sure you'll be alright now?' 'Yes, we be O.K!' said the talking one. 'Well hooray again,' I said. 'Hooray,' they said, ' ... and thanks!'

I went up the creek again and hauled up my hinaki. Two smaller eels wriggled out through the wire netting as I pulled it in, but the big black fellow who was still gorging himself on the remains of my bantam made up for them. I opened the door at the end, tipped him into my sack, and reset the trap. There would, I calculated, be flesh enough in him to satisfy my protein needs for three days-the way I live. It had been a funny day really, and there were things about it which I still didn't understand. Even when I got back to the bridge, home, for me, was still a long way off-and of course the Maoris had gone. Only a few squashed herrings, and their wheel marks leading up the hill, showed me the way they had gone. More slowly then, yet rather more surely it seemed to me, I set off in the same direction. . . .

LEO SINDEN HIGHVELD

NoTIDNG matters here but the sky, The great, blue Transvaal sky that so encompasses the sight, Brimming the eyes, That there might be no earth, no smother of veld grass over the old red soil; Only the brooding sky over the immensity of Africa, Echoing the vast, still emptiness of the land.

Only the sky, but here at this altitude, A very part of earth. 294 And I was shown an emptied cocoon, dry as old thorns, Patched, a white appendage, to a twig in the scrub, Frail as the cotton windings in Egyptian tombs and waiting only for me, at a touch, to crumble it; And my fingers powdered the womb walls where a life had been, Scattered the last fragments of an earlier season.

Gone: and it was impossible to imagine what creature it might have been, How it had oozed from the crust, hesitating, And then, driven, seeping out into the African emptiness and away. Not even the dust from its wings is left.

Gone: and that is the secret of this African high country- It is old, so unimaginably old Its existence now is aeons past our time; Its quiet the peace that follows age, Far past our wondering.

Perhaps the silence of death Is like the silence hanging over these flat-topped hills, Lying deep in the gently concave valleys, Reaching under the scaling bark of the scrub And under the very bowels of the stones. Look! the trail of a veld snake gone in the dust.

RODERICK FINLAYSON A LITTLE GIFT FOR HARRY

THAT crisp morning, soon after the sun was up, Maori horsemen were ambling along the Tairua road to the village. Faraway puffs of dust showed where cars and buggies loaded with people were on the move too. All these travellers sooner or later converged upon the meeting- house by the bare poplar trees where, after every new arrival, the keening of the tangi for the dead broke out afresh. The funny grubby little bus from the Bentville railway station pulled in with more country visitors at about ten o'clock, and just before midday a big sleek bus, all chromium and gleaming blue enamel, hired specially by a party of city Maoris, arrived all the way from Auckland. The driver 295 blew his musical horn loudly to clear some of the village kids out of his way, but that only brought hordes more running and shouting, 'Hei! See the new pakeha bus! What about a ride mister?' 'Such behaviour at a tangi nowadays!' Mrs Tamahana, a stickler for solemnity, exclaimed. Men and women, most of the latter in the latest city fashions, piled out of the bus to join those already congregating in front of the meeting- house. It was winter, but the weather was beautiful--clear warm sunny days with crisp still nights-so that people loitered in the sun instead of hurrying to shelter. The village seemed to be crammed with men, women, children, babies, dogs, horses, and every kind of conveyance. No wonder such a crowd! The dead man was the last of the old chiefs of that coast. There were even paragraphs in his honour in the big city papers. In the bus with the city people came Harry Rose who didn't look much of a Maori. He had curly red hair and light grey eyes and a round pale face, rather freckly. As if he thought himself a cut above the others he narrowed his eyes and kept a little aloof in his expensive clothes, very sporty but nothing loud, nothing vulgar. Harry had a drop of the blood though-a Maori great-grandmother or something like that. He laughed it off as a joke if the fact accidentally came to light. Although sometimes, as when the Maori Battalion was in the limelight, he would boast in company where he couldn't be contradicted, that he could be a chief in such-and-such a tribe. He had been talked into this trip by his cousins, the Taunga boys, who worked in an Auckland foundry. He had no time for the bad old ways, tangis and all that, he said. But, although at first he was sulky at being dragged off to just such a show, now, strolling in the sun while the Taunga boys greeted relatives, he told himself that it wasn't too bad after all. A few days' spell from the dry-cleaners delivery too. Already the village kids were scrawling in the dust on the parked bus such legends as: Dont fence me in; and, Stick em up Cowboy. Just across the courtyard was the meeting-house with its splendidly carved posts and panels. And on its sunny porch lay the old dead man, his coffin surrounded by flowers and feather cloaks and family photos, and lean old women in long black skirts and black head scarves who suddenly took up their wail again. They seemed to eye the elaborately made-up city girls with some distaste. Near the poplars were two big marquees, one old, leaky as a sieve, but nice and roomy for the men, and the other new but dreadfully over- crowded for the women. All agreed it was a fair arrangement-if it rained. The weather continued fine however. Beyond the weather-beaten old Tairua village, on the river flats amid newly broken-in land, were neat new houses, large glass windows and aluminium roofs reflecting the sun. 'The big land scheme for the Maori Battalion men,' a friendly chap told Harry. In spite of the gossiping of the crowd and the bright hard sunlight it all seemed to Harry very remote. 'Almost as good as a movie,' he thought. 'Here's young Hira!' 296 Jack Taunga's voice roused him and he turned to find a good-looking young fellow talking to his cousins. 'Oh no, you don't sleep in the tent,' Hira said. 'My old man says you got to put up at our place. All in the family, eh?' Harry felt relieved that he wouldn't have to push in with the noisy crowd in the tent. They walked to one of the larger of the houses on the slope above the meeting-house, a place with a long veranda facing the sun, some old peach trees, and a garden of turnips in front. In the big dark kitchen they met Hira's good-natured mother, and Henare his father, a sharp-featured dignified man. Harry found he was to share Hira's room off the veranda. There was a spare bed covered with a tartan rug. It would be O.K. there, he decided. They trooped into the kitchen again for a bite of lunch-cold sausage, bread, and tea. Harry was so busy impressing Hira with the advantages of his city job that at first he didn't notice the girl who put his cup of tea in front of him. But when she moved over to his cousins he saw her properly. Then he didn't hear Hira offering him the sugar. 'Sorry, it's only rough and ready here,' Hira apologized, thinking that Harry hadn't noticed the sugar in the old treacle tin. 'Gosh! that's all right,' Harry said, dipping into the tin at last. 'Sugar is sugar any old way,' he said looking at the girl again. Of all the hundreds of girls he'd met, many real dazzlers, why had none knocked him silly like this? This girl now was rather thin. And she wore only an old blue dress, and no make-up. But she was different; gosh, she was different! It must have been her sort of freshness and her downright simplicity, he decided. And then she smiled at Harry. In the way that such affairs go it was plain from the very first that she liked him. He guessed it was his superior manner that did the trick. Yes, she liked him all right. You could still hear the faint keening of the women in the distance, but for Harry from that moment the old dead man was forgotten. And it wasn't quite like a movie show now. It wasn't remote and meaningless. Here I am, he thought, out to get this girl. No fooling. He guessed he'd never be satisfied with any other girl. He heard them say her name-Meri. Out on the veranda that afternoon, sitting on the sun-warped boards, they had a chance to talk. 'Hello, Meri.' 'Hello, you. You come from Auckland, Harry?' 'You'd like the city, Meri. You should come to Auckland. Look, you could get a job in a clothing factory. Lots of Maori girls do. Good pay, good times. You just ought to be there at some of the dances I go to.' She looked over the lonely river flat, over the raw new farms with the new Maori Battalion houses all fresh paint and aluminium roofs shining in the sun. 'Look, what about driving with me tonight to the movies at Bentville ?' She had to remind him that it was her grandfather who was dead. 'Sorry .... Never mind, wait till you come up to Auckland.' 297 They became silent, thoughtful. Around the old village the poplars and wild fruit trees were bare against the blue sky. Along the river banks the tufty heads of the cabbage palms glistened in the setting sun, and on the far hills the bush was mottled in varied shades of green. 'You two talk like old pals,' Hira remarked with mock surprise as he came to take Harry down to the chief's family at the meeting-house. It was that night that Harry first saw Tiki. Tiki was one of the returned soldiers now working on the new land settlement scheme, a big slow good- humoured chap some years older than Harry. Wearing a bright check shirt and khaki trousers he came over to the tangi after his day's work. He walked into Henare's kitchen with a slight limp. They introduced Harry and he seemed very pleased to meet this young visitor from the city. Some other returned men came in and began talking of war adven- tures; but Tiki had little to say of the war. And Harry was narked because he had done only home service and couldn't make a big impression. He was glad when they turned the talk to the life of the old chief. 'Hope I have such a long contented life. I've had enough adventures,' Tiki said. The old man was nearly ninety, Hira told Harry, and had never travelled far beyond his own district. 'Boy, I wish I see the big cities sometime!' Hira said. 'Ah, they settled down to life, those old people,' the father said. 'Look at his wife, down there at his side still, near eighty and faithful all the time. They marry young in those days,' he told Harry with something like deliberate emphasis, 'boys and girls in their own district. No need to go roaming looking for God knows what.' As they were going to bed by candlelight in their little room Hira said to Harry, 'You know Tiki is going to marry Meri soon as he finish build his house.' 'But Meri ... I didn't think she was his girl.' Harry was confused, didn't know what to say. 'Oh, it's not a case of sweet fall in love right now. You know, it was all fixed more or less by the old folk, before the war.' 'But how does Meri look at it now?' 'Oh, she's a girl. You know, they're all a bit silly sometimes. But you don't want to take too much notice of that. Girls settle down you know, Harry.' He had a feeling that Hira was trying to drop him a friendly hint perhaps. Anyway, it was a bit of a shock. Harry began to dislike the look of the big slow unromantic Tiki. But Meri likes me, he thought to reassure himself. Why shouldn't I have her? The following morning he drew the girl away from the others after a late breakfast when she had waited upon the men at the table. They walked down toward the river where the cowshed and willow trees hid them from view. He wasted no time. 'I know about Tiki,' he said. 'Hira told me. What are you going to do about it?' 298 'Oh, I do not know, Harry.' 'So you don't want to marry him, Meri ?' 'Oh, do not ask me that. I never met you then.' 'You would be stuck here for good. You wanted to see the city; get some fun out of life, didn't you?' 'Yes, I wanted.' He went on to tell her what they could make of life in Auckland together. He let himself become quite carried away. The girl, who had longed for a change from her unexciting monotonous life, could only shake her head sadly. 'This place awful lonely sometimes,' she said. 'Look here, Meri, come with me and let the rest rip.' 'Oh, but how? You don't know how these things are, Harry. Let me think it over.' But for Harry a decision was urgent. Two more days and the old man would be buried and the visitors on the way home. He lay awake that night thinking how much he needed Meri. He wouldn't admit the doubts that arose. Would Meri be happy, friendless, far from relatives in a strange city? In the smart haunts where Harry spent his time would Meri still look as lovely as she did here in the backblocks ? Would he be proud to own this ordinary Maori girl? What would his friends say? 'You pretty restless last night, Harry. Must be the old fleas,' Hira laughed next morning. Harry shook his head and pulled a wry smile. 'No fleas, Hira. If only there was nothing worse than fleas to worry a man . . . ! ' Hira laughed again and went off singing, 'Murder in de market .... ' As soon as he got a chance Harry had a word with Meri alone. 'This can't go on. No use me pretending. There's only one thing to do, Meri-you and me clear out together.' Although this was the tangi for Meri's grandfather and they would be burying the old chief after the solemn funeral service early next morn- ing, and although she had been happy with her parents, Meri now had only one thought-to go away with Harry. Harry said he would get hold of a car; borrow or take one. So they planned to meet in the early hours and get away before dawn. That night Harry would rather have kept away from the others at Henare's place, but he was drawn into a group around the kitchen fire and before he could make up an excuse to leave them in came Tiki. 'Oh, hell!' thought Harry. 'How can I look that fellow in the face tonight?' But there he was. 'Tell us something about life and death in the desert, Tiki,' some young fellows from down the coast urged him. He was reluctant. 'Gosh! All that! I'm a farmer now, you fellows.' They persisted. 'I tell you one thing then that I tell no one ever before. Now I can tell it because it has come to a good end.' 299 And he went on to tell about the wounded prisoner in the desert, an Itie, sick, starving, and in rags, and yet with such a childishly cheerful smile because he was sure he was safe-no more war for him. 'I thought, heck!' Tiki said, 'with all that the poor devil can still smile. So I give him a packet of smokes. You should see the way he act. As if I give him everything I got, eh? Well, after a while he says, "You have this. She keep you safe for home, like me." What you think it was? A holy medal, eh? Those jokers all Doolans you know. It was on a string to hang round the neck but I put it in my paybook, because I never want the boys to see it. They joke me, eh? They all know I'm not the religious man. But I say to myself, well, anyway I make one prayer: Keep me safe for my girl waiting home for me; keep my girl safe too. No harm in that, eh?' They nodded solemn agreement; it was a good prayer. But Harry, hot with discomfiture, edged away from the fire. He'd have to get to hell out of this! Looking toward the door to escape he was horrified to see that Meri had come in with some of the women and had been listening to Tiki's story. Something made Tiki turn too. 'Hello, Meri! .... You see, you people, my prayer answered, eh?' His big honest face shone with simple pleasure. 'Now I never need keep that holy medal no more. Perhaps it not so good for a fellow like me to keep it now and never go to church. I don't know.' He fumbled in his hip pocket and brought out a wallet, and from the wallet he fished out the medal. 'I think I give it away sometime.' He held it up in the firelight, a small silver disc dangling from a black cord. 'Bit battered and war scarred, but good all right. Who would like . . . ? ' Tiki began to ask. Quickly the father spoke. 'We have our guest of honour here. All the way from the big city. I think he should have a little gift. What about a gift for Harry here? What you say, Tiki ?' 'O.K. Henare! Harry sure must have this little holy medal. Now a young chap like him need it more than me, I guess.' Tiki laughed with pleasure. They all clapped and joined in the laugh. Beaming with goodwill Tiki held out the medal for Harry. 'No,' Harry protested, 'I don't believe in such things. No,' he said, 'perhaps your family would like to have it.' He caught Meri watching him and looked away embarrassed. He tried to turn his back on Tiki. But Tiki insisted. He got up slowly and pressed the medal into Harry's hand. 'You read the words, Harry. An educated fellow like you, Harry, you know what it means.' With them all watching him Harry was forced to look at the thing. He saw a woman's head, tried to spell out the worn inscription. But in his gloomy corner with only the flickering firelight he couldn't make out a word. He mumbled some vague expression of thanks and stuffed the unwanted gift into his coat pocket. 'That will keep your girl safe for you, eh Harry?' Hira gave a short nervous laugh. Harry forced a sickly grin. 300 They were calling the women to hand round some drinks. Harry was thankful for this diversion. But before Meri turned away to help the other women he saw her face full in the firelight, and he knew it was all up. No need now to ask her about tomorrow. The women were handing the men glasses of wine. Henare said that the Dally from the vineyard up the road had given him a gallon of wine. A good fellow that. He gave good wine for the tangi. Harry looked up. Meri was in front of him, offering him a glass of wine. She avoided his eyes until his persistent gaze made her look at him. Then she smiled, but it was a poor weak smile. He took the glass, held it eagerly up to her lips. 'Come on, Meri, you have a drink.' In spite of his jesting tone he was tense, his hand shaking, spilling wine on the floor. The girl turned her head slightly. 'No, Harry, don't.... ' So it was no use, eh? He put the glass to his lips and drained it. He didn't go to bed that night. In a mockery of his plans he set out for the railway-alone, no goodbyes said. He walked. There was plenty of time for walking. Even then he had a long wait at the lonely backblocks station, stamping up and down the platform in the bitter cold of dawn before the Auckland train pulled in. In a second-class smoker he found a seat beside an elderly dozing man; and with the clatter of the wheels in his ears he thought bitterly over his failure. He knew that it wouldn't have worked, of course, with Meri in the city; he knew that she would soon settle down and be quite happy with her man; that with the young, in two or three days nothing goes very deep; that it won't be long before he gets over it. But gosh! he guesses he will always remember her face whenever he sees a glass of wine. Suddenly he felt an intense curiosity to examine properly the holy medal, and not wishing to let the stranger see it he went out to the com- partment where the water-filter was, and took it from his pocket. It was battered all right. On one side the inscription was too worn and defaced to be decipherable. The other side was easier to make out though. Around the woman's head was the word LIBERTY, and in smaller letters below, In God we trust. Harry recognized it straight away. He'd seen plenty of them in Auckland around about 1942-a United States dime. He heard someone coming through from the next carriage. Hurriedly he pocketed the coin again, took one of the paper cups, filled it from the filter, and pretended to drink, although the cold water almost choked him. Watching in the mirror the man pass by he caught sight of his own strained unhappy face, the eyes bloodshot with fatigue-so comically tragic in fact that a hint of the irony of things broke through in the form of a rather twisted smile. He had been going to chuck the coin under the wheels of the train before going back to his seat. Now he thought, 'Well, perhaps someday I'll look on it as lucky.' He fingered the smooth roundness of the coin in his pocket. 'Someday, eh? In my own home, eh? Picture old Harry saying to Someone, Look, old girl, here's that phoney holy medal. Rea/lucky, wasn't it?' 301 HUBERT WITHEFORD 'THE WAY DOWN'

THE WAY DOWN

FAREWELL, Leviathan! It is beyond our zone you spout your plume. Locked from the sustenance of your storms there drowns On winding streets some august power of man.

All of your luminous hieroglyphs dissolve, One word remains-'descend'- Descend the steep way of the stony gulf The dome is closed above.

You leave me on that stair with murky brand, An ember, panther red, To light in its descent my fascinated flesh And hunt my voice among the twittering dead.

AT THE DISCHARGE OF CANNON RISE THE DROWNED

ONE forfeit more from life the current claimed And on the horizon rose white-sheeted spars; Bare of their canvas when the morning came They rode the bay that held its prisoner.

Some days then, by our time, of windless rain That poured and ebbed to shroud or almost show The unpeopled decks, the looming guardian On the phantasmal world where no clock marks Duration of the cold abandonments And weird acceptances that lead man hence.

But from the flickering scene one stark vignette Glares in ambiguous hues of hope and death- Out of a port-hole bursts a smear of flame, A blast of thunder from the flood rebounds With gliding leap, impelled by answering fire, Lazarus rises from his restless couch. 302 Now his corrupted life is as the charge Exploded in the cannon's narrow depth, Native no longer of the earth, he springs Breaking the waters he surrendered in And as he leaves the limbo of vague dream Out of the wash and weed he plucks his death.

So back from harbour to a mounting storm, Into the gale that blows from their high port Back from mortality the vast sails slide.

THE LONG BODY

MY body's track down thirty years of time Flickers on the horizon of my power A demon that my dead tongue writhes to utter. Yet from the sealed subtraction of the past Some sense of that too real presence leaks. A childhood tableau frozen on the vase Stirs in its trance as the returning streams Of melancholy love and cold desire Attain its aspect in their round once more. Here twines the conch shell, tapering to the spire And final point where all dimensions gutter.

SHIVA

IT was in childhood that the insects came, Life's premonition, So dreadful, so fragile A Dresden world of ill. And, as upon my palm the caterpillar swayed, The Serpent God of death and generation Into His mystery received my soul. Though decades pass His table still is spread. The crash of distant empires is the Wine And lust's close shock, the Bread. 303 JOHN CASELBERG WHICH RED HEART

SOMETIME after dark a bright star came up over the mountains. It shone out of the lustre of the sky onto black-etched summits of the mountain barrier, half-lit the shapes of cliffs and falling ridges, showed by their furrowed gloom mazes of gullies and gorges in the valley below, and shone a little on pools in the river. Overhanging the water a dim rock stretched up to the star. In the further darkness of the water's edge a trout was lying, occasionally rising to the surface, snatching at insects and rippling the pool. Beneath it two wreathing strands of darkness emerged flowing slowly and hovering for long by the rock; then the two eels struck together. One eel-length flinging upward grasped the trout above its tail; the other flurrying forward missed its strike and spun again to rend. But from the hidden depths of the pool came a surging and a bursting that for one savage moment churned the water into froth and sent the two smaller eels flicking away downstream; and the kokupu-tuna-the great eel-, thrusting up, swallowing the torn trout in one gulp, curved over on itself writhing slowly and sank back through the water slowly into the gloom. The harsh cry of a Maori-hen rose and echoed in the undergrowth, and ebbed into silence again. Dawn came greyly, without colour, into the recesses of the valley. It came with a tumult of birds' song, and showed moss green on the rock and a green fern trailing from the rock in the water and the sky above the trees over the pool and a black wall of rock in the pool and green stones in the shallows; but glimmering and faint it could not reach down to the hole where the great eel was lying, motionless, but with gills trembling. The kokupu-tuna was sterile. Many years ago she should have made her migration down-river and out into the ocean to breed and die. But her gonads had not developed, so that each year she stayed on in her lair, feeding; and growing larger, fiercer, and more powerful, season by season. The trout lay heavy and unwanted in her gut. In the afternoon streaks of mist crept up the gullies and round the crags of the mountains, eddying in the snow-grass basins, swirling thicker and thicker and eventually encompassing the mountains as a thin drizzle spread out over the valley. By evening the drizzle had turned to rain; which grew heavier throughout the night, until all the creeks were swollen and the bush was full of the spattering dripping sound of rain and the valley rang with the noise of torrents falling down the mountainsides and with rumbling as the river itself rose up into flood. The autumn rains had set in early, and with each day of rain the flood grew higher. Stones, branches, logs, whole torn trees, rushed on the crest of foam of the river. At the bottom of her deep pool the eel was still withdrawn. Long ago she had vomited and passed out the last vestiges of food from her gut; 304 now, in a stupor, she only half-heard the crashings above and only half- saw the mad swirling objects being whipped by. But beyond her lethargy a change was occurring; there was a quickening of blood within her as at last her ovaries slowly expanded. One early morning, into the murkiness of the dying flood, she emerged from her hole. Her tail beating for the last time in the walls of the rock lifted her black body slowly, rising and drifting, until she felt the swirl of flood waters away downstream and with an eager swirl of herself was lost for the last time from her pool. Going down-river she swam always in the deepest water, keeping close to the bottom where there were stones moving but no branches or logs. She fled like lightning where the water was no longer dark but foaming in rapids or shallows; often in the daytime she laid up in a deep pool, waiting for darkness before travelling on. After several days she came with countless other eels into a lagoon near the sea. One moment she had been flicking through the flood; then she shot far out into the still water of the lagoon. Down she sank, past other eels veering always away from her, past the first male eels, nuzzling to the deepest bottom where she found an eel-less space and sank resting into the weed. In the apparent calm of the lagoon she did not feed again and her gut was withering as a huge gonad swelled and throbbed convoluted down half her length. Lying still, her eyes increased in size and brightness, the large flat lips on her jaws narrowed and thinned, and her skin silvered slowly. Then she left her resting place and came in the night to the seaward side of the lagoon, where thousands of female and male eels swarmed together: the receding flood had left a sandbank between the lagoon and the open sea. With a surge of herself she flung up the sandbank towards the sea, writhing and pounding as she moved forward until the dry sand clogged the slime of her skin and choked her and held her powerless, her pectoral fins biting into the sand and her gills bursting with polluted blood. She beat her way back and fell into the water. With the other swarming eels she darted backwards and forwards seeking a way out over the sandbank. Then she plunged deep and once more came flinging into the air high up the bank and surged forward; and once more the sand dried and clung to her, but she squirmed her way onto the crest and lay there gasping as the sand slowly took the life from her. In the seaward cliffs gulls and gannets screeched all night long, waiting for daylight when the rising sun would complete the sand's dessication: waiting for the kill. Ahead the swell of the sea came in as waves to the coast, rolling and spurting up the beach. At midnight it was high-tide and the racing waves began to recede. Mouth agape, the eel smelt the sea, and felt drops of spray like little fires stinging onto her. In her frenzy she struggled on and over the crest and felt more spray burning her and fiercely pushed down to the salt where small waves were skimming and at last the seawater washed her back into life again, clean, strong, and urgent to travel on. 305 It was a lonely coast. The gulls still screamed in the cliffs. Further, in the bay, a few lights winked from fishermen's cottages. Overhead was the great bowl of the southern sky. Away from the dark silhouetted land she fled out through the waves to the open sea. With daylight her long fins were hardened as she drove down away from the suction of light above and the land behind through green and murky undersea-water. She swam out over the steep continental shelf into the gloom of the ocean floor: past underwater precipices; past rocks and caverns; over and through vegetation that swirled frantically in currents or sudden storms; past countless swimming and feeding and fighting creatures that flitted across her own determined path. The days of her journey became weeks. To the small white mass of her brain sensations like fires leapt from her gills, where water passing furiously freshened and refreshened the blood that thumped scarlet into every muscle-segment of her body; and came like fires from her burgeoning gonads. She entered the tropics, stung to a frenzy by the new heat. Further still, not exhausted but strained in every nerve, vein, and fibre of her body, she came to a lip of rock where the water welled icy over the heat of her out of a chasm near the equator. She did not pause but swam downward with other eels into the cold black deep; sinking, after the boisterous ocean, into an immensity of calm and darkness that was her goal and was to be a deep of achievement and the cold and black place of her death. A large male eel came towards her out of the darkness. Together, the male eel hovering a little behind her, they swam on and downward into this bowel of the sea itself; where it was utterly black, and the ice of the water almost burning on them as it came up in slow surges: as they sank slowly, surging. The pressure grew and grew as they sank further, throb- bing in on them, throbbing their blood feverishly, pounding and pounding them as they strove pounding downwards together. Together they came to rock. And the silver gleam of the kokupu-tuna began thudding near the rock in the gloom of the abyss; and shuddering gusts tore her molten flesh, tore the blood-vessels red and oozing inside her and blood from her heart, tore the little white streams of ova from the orifice of her, shuddered and shuddered and terribly shuddered her until there was no more life left in her. Behind her the male eel died slowly and accomplished as his seed too poured into the water. Up on the surface the sun shone brilliantly. Dazzles of light spread from the blue sea and sky out to the horizon. A seabird drifted on the breeze; its wings were wide and white, but stretched, and hardly shaking. Down below rocked the eel carcases. Days later the tiny jelly-like eel larvae came floating to the surface in their millions. The sun glinted on a squirming transparent mass of them. Small fish leapt in the air, feeding on the larvae and being preyed on in turn by larger fish and by flocks of seabirds. 306 The larvae drifted south and west with a hot current, away from the breeding place. The current swung them further and further south, through nights dark with storm and warm days, towards the Great Barrier Reef of Australia; and further south, until on clear nights the stars of the Southern Cross came up into the sky and hanging bright over the sea beaconed a continual direction. Then they were turned eastward: the water grew colder, the sea greyer and rough, and the sky filled with wind. They were met by a cold current driving north from the bitter Antarctic wastes; and, swinging with it, they too swept north into sight of the black, mountainous, bushclad, desolate region of south-west New Zealand. Near this coast their metamorphoses occurred. They grew thin, changed to elvers; little fins appeared dorsally and ventrally; and supplementary hearts were formed on their dorsal aortae. No longer dependent on ocean currents they began swimming in towards the openings of this buttressed coastline, seeking out the river entrances, driven to discover the wounds of freshwater flowing out from the land to the sea. They approached in storm. The streaming waves were whipped higher and higher by the wind, gathering themselves and rolling and rushing and battering the headlands where mist-shrouded and rain- and wind-torn mountains fell into the sea. The elvers were a milky streak trailing in the gloom of wave troughs, or lost in the foam of their crests. In the night they were swept towards a first black wall of rock where the water boiled and each wave reared like thunder and burst its spray high up ·the cliffs; and they were caught, helpless, in the dash of a wave and an onslaught of foam that flung them headlong and seething up and exploded on the rock and stripped the life out of them. But one elver slid back to where leather tongues of seaweed writhed and hissed and spat onto the shore; it was drawn under the seaweed by the recoiling wave; and sucked swiftly into deep water it swept on the next rush of water through to the safe · bay beyond. Swimming slowly it wriggled on up the almost land-locked bay to the river estuary. In the pallor of dawn the estuary was barely rippling, and white. The elver moved more quickly; it felt a new touch about it, a new softness brushing gently and clear on its skin, soothing the hazard of its entry: a touch of promise of freshwater flowing from secret regions within; and with the, approach of the sun rising inland on the valley en- trance it sank down in the mud to a peace of renewal and slow growth and long preparation. . It stayed for many weeks in that place, feeding on the abundant insect life there, growing from an elver into a young eel. Then it joined a shoal of young eels preparing for the last stage of their journey to the land's interior. All day the sun had been warm on the water. At dusk the young eel swam wriggling· among- a swarm qf eels into the river proper, pushing through down-flowing water, fins and tail quivering in the water as it headed upstream. Its skin was rio longer silver, but had darkened after lying in the dark mud. . - Penetrating up-river it grew strong and- vigorous. Ifi the daytime a new sunlight lit the pool where it was hidden with a·Jresh green light never 307 seen before; and when it travelled at night the moon glared overhead, or cloudy rain fell hissing onto the surface of the river. One night the young eel came to a pool where there was bubbling and roaring from a waterfall ahead. The water shot down a wall of rock onto smashed stone and foamed in the darkness, thundered, echoed in the gorge and sprayed the gorge and its shaking white flowers and the overhanging trees. The eel swam tentatively up to the rushing water and was swept back to the pool. It sought a way up the walls of the gorge, to fall back time after time into the water below. Then it slithered up through the rush of foam to the waterfall and pushed itself up the rock behind the main torrent of water, wriggling and still wet, clinging to the rock and straining and thrusting up and up until it found a small crack where it went swiftly upwards through easier water to the summit and over and disappeared into the darkness beyond. Now it was in the headwaters of a river valley. During the night it entered a still pool lying in shadow. A rock stretched overhead. The guarded valley and the bush and the pool and a deep hole in the pool lay at peace as after long travail. The stars shone clear and cold; and clearest of them all shone a bright star, cold and white-pulsing. A stag roared in the bush. The young eel slid to the bottom of the pool, hidden and undiscoverable in the land's heart. The bright star paled as a glow came into the sky, and the mountains blackened. Immersed among stone in the water the eel's gills shook tremulously; its supplementary heart had gone with its journeying; but the small true heart, buried in the forepart of its body, bulged and con- tracted thrusting blood through the vessels of the body that lay dark and deep and at rest and beginning in the gloom. Dawn came. There was a noise of birds. The bright star disappeared and mist rose in the valley.

308 BASIL DO WLING FAREWELL TO A HOUSE

HousE, in your reticent way, Do you regret that the time has come to say Farewell, or think that I now betray The sweet and sad of the times we have had?

Door and ceiling and wall, Will you cherish the weakening echoes that in you call, And keep the invisible print of all Our glances and looks, like words in books? And the garden that, each year, Has been its own slow-turning calendar, Do its borders and blooms look lonelier Or its branches grieve as we take our leave? Such fancies are vain, maybe, And the hope of what cannot be felt is vanity; But I linger musing wistfully That even what's dead may have tears to shed.

ARNOLD WALL RESTORATIVE

LIFE is like a diamond nestling in my palm, Shamed, tamed, and somnolent in a deathly calm, Shorn of wild rugosities, shamming peace and rest, With fires of the ancient earth glowing in its breast; They dug it from a dark place not caring whence it came, A rough thing, a feral thing, smoothed and made tame, Gave it natty angles to liberate its flame, For every ray they set free they damped a thousand down Prisoning a sunrise in the gauds about a crown;

Shall we roll the aeons back, begin the tale anew? Can we drain a rainbow from a drop of morning dew? Rouse the holy relic from its slumber in the shrine? Restore the chicken to the egg, the jewel to the mine? 309 MAURICE DUGGAN VOYAGE (11)

As this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horror of the half-known life. Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire feelings; but whereto does all that circumnavigation lead? Only through numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those we left behind secure were all the time before us. Herman Melville

THE harbour retreats; on the violent crest the ship strikes and shudders; strewn baggage, bruised flesh, the terror of the sick, are all the ballast of the voyage. Clinging to what is readiest we straddle the rollercoaster deck and brighter than bile the sea heaves over the glass and the ship swings impartially between sea and sky. What element is ours, green sea and white wave, pale sky and blown cloud? The broken stem of a drinking glass impales our palm, reminding us of the eternal bonus on pleasure, the bonus of pain. The passport queue, stuck in the companionway, weaves back like a multicoloured serpent through the abandoned luggage, bodied out by the dour victims, the eternal form-fillers, and the simple who want to get it all over and done with, and relax in peace. None can hold back from suffering in these blown few hours. In the wild wind heaved-at and transfixed, craned like seagulls into the gusts, here and there ringed by despair, the staunch hearts pull into their maritime imaginings the salt air of the sea. They heave at their lungs and smile in their upright superiority at the chorus, blindeyed and despairing, who clamour from the bucking rail. What's a few hours on the washboard sea, their faces ask? What to the threemonth child, wailing, wrapped and wrapped, are these few hours? What are they, to the woman who holds it, but a foretaste of damnation as her face swings white and immolated against the angled sea? Her eyes are pale jelly, washed sightless by despair and the whipping spray. Her blown scarf is plunged on by the bargain hunting wave and, bedecked in the instant's bargain, the wave heaves on. Under the astonished mouths of the ventilators the hands of lovers, wet by spray, slide apart: king of it all a sailor rides, and inch by inch the coast, reluctant and desired, jerks towards us. Gulls in flight bend towards us and kneel in air and bank and slide away, dipped and gone to the wave's crest- small, plummeting and terribly white. . . . and the white wing Of song relents no augur Hints of the destroyer. 310 Under the bastion the ship's nose swings and this is yet another coast where field beyond field the green land slides, ploughed here to yield up, passed, we believe like coin from hand to hand and death to life. Shall fervour save us?

The station is named. We hammer across a continent, to me the first, and peer on to platforms, hallucinated by sleep so that this is for a moment National Park on a winter midnight with those huge grey moths, jewelled with rubies, flying in and out of the light; but for a moment only. A clear smear wiped through the misted pane is shaped like Africa and through the clearing a man pushes a stall: the stall has coffee and cognac, chocolate, cachou nuts, bread rolls stuffed with sausage, pears, bananas, Perrier water, Chianti and Ruffo, biscuits, pulp fiction in three languages and cardboard cups of hot milk. The steam from the coffee and milk rises in the cold air. Then, as in a movie, the stall is gone and a man with a lantern and a steel spike tilts at the train. The lantern gives him red bleeding hands. He is real; am I? Not magus or angel, not Dandy or Ishmael or Ahab, what do I claim for myself; am I real? A voice shouts and without any more warning the train is running out through a sleeping town. Take it lightly, the wheels command. All night the heat and cold well over me and my china sleep is cracked with the complaints of my companions. This is what Lawrence hated, the promiscuity of travel; grit and smoke swirl in the dark and our eyes stream tears; river and field and town in the dark flee by or palely stare from under the half-formed, rising moon. Disguised by our passports we burrow through the newsy frontiers while the names, like someone we have always known, nod from deserted platforms and are gone. Officials reach through the drawn curtains and snap on the light and in a fear of embarrassment we avoid each others' eyes. We settle back; the curtain rings chatter across the metal rod, the door slams, the light goes out; only a pale blue ceiling lamp burns now, an eternal firmament secure from caprice, as without a word between us we go, crated humanity, into the dark. In the morning we stand in the aisle by the windows and in the clear light before sunrise watch the lake below us with the water already shining and, off shore, black fishing boats, and over the pines and the pink tiles of fleeting roofs the mountains still in mist. It's Maggiore, someone says, but it's better the other end.

Joined hands, noon's upright praying hour, time's gothic . . . and somewhere among all those trains and platforms is the one I want. The ticket seller is eating grapes. My ticket when I get it has a small stain of purple back and front. And my train leaves, from the platform I have come from, in three minutes time. The sun beats down and the dust rises and steam blows on the platforms: I cross under the lines 311 through the marble sottopassaggio where it is as cool as death and walk towards the train where it has been standing for three hours in the sun. The only empty seats are for the disabled in work and war. The Sunday sun rakes at my raw head and the straps of my rucksack squeeze the water in and out of my shirt; but when in the darkened carriage I can see again I am no longer embarrassed by the heat; everyone is sweating. As the train moves off they hang from the windows to catch the blasts of hot air. The train winds slowly among vines that are sprayed with some sort of sulphate so that there is an almost green bloom on the purple and I remember W who saw, not without some truth, the fate of the modern world in the piles of superphosphate sacks on the line north from Auckland. The woman opposite me kneads her rosary. The silver figure of Christ, riveted to an ebony cross, spins and dances in the light that leaks under the blind. The wooden seats are cooler and more upright than plush. The train halts a long time at an empty crossing and then moves on. The woman's fingers reef in the beads and her lips move. Half under my breath I might be saying the same prayers.

The white cloth is brilliant, the wine is dark, the glass leaves a purple circular stain. A priest in a dish hat and a black cassock bolts by through the bright day and the shadow of the station awning lengthens imper- ceptibly. The wine is heavy; though the next half-litre is light and sour, I am disinclined to move. The platform is empty. The proprietor of the restaurant comes through the curtain, which is made of light hanging chain, and sits at the table. Awkwardly we talk. He calls back through the door and a boy brings another bottle. The awning shadow creeps out towards the lines, over the swept boards and the sign that advertises medicinal brandy; a white hen moves slowly onto the boards and pecks between the cracks; a long way off the hills rise up. The rucksack is on a barrow. The porter runs one wheel against the kerb, braking down the hill, zigzagging through the town. Wonderfully unencumbered I follow and at each corner, so that I shall not be lost, he grounds his barrow and waits for me to catch up. The weight of the barrow has taken him forward at a run and he is panting. He is an old man with a white stubble of beard and he does not care for English cigarettes. We cross the square where dusty pigeons bob and strut and the stone mouth of a thirstless gargoyle gargles water and turn away, under an arch, into a bare stable yard that smells of ensilage. The old man leans the rucksack against a wall and promises the bus will leave from here tonight. He looks down without expression, as I count worn notes into his hand and when it is done he points out a cafe where I may wait and takes up the barrow again and turns away. The square dusty yard is empty except for myself and one bicycle and the flies. Even from here I can hear the water falling in the fountain. 312 The bus goes out across the plain; the grapes plumb purple from the vines; the sun is going down; we stop at each village. Along the road the maize stalks, dark brown at the top and pale burned brown below, bend harvested before the vines' lush bloom. Scooter after scooter goes noisily past in a bursting flare of open exhaust and the bus climbs slowly up the first hill. At the first turning and exactly in the centre of the road the bus breaks down. The driver pushes back his cap and makes a mouth at the passengers and climbs out to open the bonnet; the tin roof creaks in the cooling air. Mter a little while we drive off and in five minutes we have broken down again. A piece of bad luck; trouble with the fuel. And, as he sucks petrol from the tank into a can, the passengers fan themselves and shout advice. He fills the carburettor and we drive on that until it runs out, and he fills it again. We advance, jerkily, through the failing light. Above us on the hill we see the road curving and, on the first heights, the pale crenellated castle and the bell towers of the town and the sheer villa companied by cypress and poplar tree. Plunging and stalling we climb and the sun wheels behind us as we turn. We go by the carburettor- full where, in his different day, a poet climbed up horse-drawn among the vines, climbed into the cooling air like this but saw not this-row on row of rusting army vehicles-parade among the leaves. Take it lightly. We swing into the square, circle and stop. One by one we descend to the stones. The driver offers a finger and protests that he is a lucky mechanic: we are lucky we had him or we would still be miles below stuck in the middle of the road. I learned it from Germans, he said. Germans. They tortured me because I was a partisan and I knew something but they taught me machines. Look. His sleeves are drawn up over long scars. In the square a fountain splashes and the sun fades; we confront the plain where spire after spire rises through the ground mist. The air is cooler; the walnut trees stir. There is a smell of dust and coffee and fruit and a smell of sweat from my shirt; pleasant enough smells, all. The driver has covered his scars. We all have scars. He waves to the bell tower where the birds fly out and a moment later the bells begin to ring; he waves a hand in benediction over the laboured plain; he climbs into his bus and lets off the brake and coasts back the way he has come. Thinking of a bath and a drink I cross the square. It takes longer than this to discover that tomorrow is something other than what one has pursued.

The sky, in alternate layers of blue and dark, stone grey, hangs over the plain where, after the rain, each tree shows distinct and upright among the irregular patterns of the vines. The spires that are miles and miles away stand out and, behind them, the mountains. This was the first thing distinct and isolate and was associated only later, and still subjectively, with the distant clear precise backgrounds of some of the Italian painters. It had all those qualities, perhaps, because of the height from which one saw it and the clear air and, most important of all, the peculiarly 313 graded recessions of distance. The houses and towers so much farther away than those in the foreground were smaller but not less distinct or detailed and the eye, for surprising distances, could separate easily object from object and object from background. Voices carry up from the flat and a car climbs waspishly over the circling road, droning over the chanting from the kindergarten and the spinster-cries of the nuns. The town curves round the hill and the road goes out turning through chestnut trees where, watching two cows grazing, a man sits on a wall, propped over his staff as if impaled and fast asleep in the sun. But when the cows move off he wakes to their hammering bells and moves slowly after them, coming awake and moving off all in one movement like a clockwork figure. (In the Dolomites they are cutting the grass with reaping hooks, cutting it very short and piling it into squares of sacking, so that one is continually passing men and women bent under enormous sweetsmelling loads of it; carrying it in for the winter; the vines and trees and grass climb the mountain as far as the bare rock and houses appear where there seems no way up, precarious above the rushing slopes and the cold dark streams that run in shadow. Everywhere the vines converge, following the line of the hill. The gardens are not the gardens one remembers-still, laid-out, precise and dead-but chaotic and fertile. The fades and the bats fly crying out of the trees and the mosquitoes begin their bugle.

We are not to be reproached because we talk too much of food. Monte Grappa gives its name to a cheese that is firmer than cream cheese and paler than butter and beautiful with salad. The meat is expensive and very good. We eat thin slices of veal, just blushed with blood, cooked in marsala and oil and served with beans and garlic and marble-sized onions, and sweet potatoes that are not as purple as kumaras but taste the same. And because the heavy wines put us to sleep we drink Ruffo and Valpolicella. The figs almost burst to the touch; the grapes are full- fleshed and almost translucent; the apples are tasteless. Day after day, sitting and sitting while the sun shines and up from the kitchen comes the singing singing of a girl; a girl with goitre and bitten fingernails and black hair. Over the plain where the hills seem almost to join a fume, like steam, of cloud turns to brass as the sun goes down. The shadows climb up the apricot walls. Why then must one turn from the windows that are screened against the night, only to read: 'Man is born a Spectre or Satan and is altogether an Evil, and requires a New Selfhood continually, and must continually be changed into his direct contrary.' Take it lightly. And the carabinieri, past the dark walls, drop down through the town in their khaki pairs; instead of a rosary a bandolier, instead of a crucifix a small revolver. One of them shows a sickle of bald skull until his canted cap. They go by without speaking, so close under the window that we 314 could spit the grapeseeds on to their heads. They walk through the town and turn and walk back. In the evenings they sit in the wine shops and listen to popular songs and commercial jazz played on an accordion. They are from the south: terroni, colonials. The accordion roars and they laugh and drink.

Keith Patterson

You will be a long time at it, sorting Venice from the calendars and the chocolate boxes, from the post-cards, water-colours, Ruskins, Heming- ways, enthusiasms and history; and while you are trying you are adding something of your own; something no better and just as unreal; some- thing which, if multiplied enough, would be simply something else through which anyone, looking in their turn, would have to delve. You stand halfway across the humpbacked bridge in the cold wind and look down and see the slicing water and then the cold teeth of a gondola come sidling greedily out, and in that moment you know ... so much is over, over for good, over for all. Nothing has been taken from you and nothing has been given. The quick tongue of water licks over the marble step remembering neither purple nor ornate oar, consummate barge nor timeless progress. The tongue of the wave goes in under the catherine-wheel plummeting balcony and washes back. Women descend the steps from the bridge holding down their skirts against the seducing wind and boys run whistling, sharper than files, over the steady stones. The wind, in from the Adriatic over the calf-deep mollusced water, turns two pages of the map and somewhere between two saints and a canal you take a wrong turning and are lost among the wire-wicker grins of muzzled dogs and the smells of oil, food, wine, coffee, sewage and the sea. Barges of wine go past, their purple tide behind the white glass lapping 315 at the salt, turn ponderously into a corner and are gone. What confronts you now? There under the awnings the spectators sit, lost all in a wilderness the age has made, drinking their wine and waiting some fruitful resurrection that can never come. The city's tokens, the city's sun cannot ransom them from their silken jails. They drink and wait. Signore, a beggar cries. Signore. Take it lightly, he might have said. Take it lightly or you'll find you can't take it at all. Man is altogether an Evil.

On any day you can see them being oared down the Grand Canal, drinking it in on reel after reel of celluloid, with two cameras so as not to miss anything through having to reload, 'shooting' the palaces, the people, the churches, San Marco and the Basilica at long-distance, pigeons, other gondolas and the prow of their own, sighing bridges, flying bridges, wooden bridges, spires, men, women, children and muzzled dogs. They are charged at the rate of about a pound a quarter hour and if that seems much it has been much, much less: they ask what they can get, what they know they can get. Who is there to blame them for remembering that the winter is cold and cold winds blow through the canals and that no one will come then who can so easily or so painlessly pay? Take it lightly. What, after all, is real? Shut your eyes and get it all down: how, at Murano, after the seaborne crossing that might have been prelude to almost any delight, the glass for which the island is famous was only ornate and ugly: how, in the other direction over the lagoon, where bare-armed boys grope for fish in the speckling shallows, lies C'hioggia-'quaint' of the guidebooks. There, over the white bridge and away from the repetitious street, past the tan nets drying in the sun, the church of San Domenico holds unreconciled within its walls two worlds. One is the quattrocento world of Carpaccio's Saint Paul and the other is newer than this moment, old only in its superstition, and is celebrated with a base tinsel ornament, a virgin seven feet high seated in a gilded throne and supporting offerings of flowers and card- board hearts-the wishes of those who by wishing pray-returning from under her nylon bridal veil stare for stare. And cap in hand with wonder the fishermen come to stare. To which world do they, Peter-fishers, belong? To which do we? Where in all this is the reality? Don Quixote de la Mancha is now plain Alonso Quixano and there is nothing he can do but die; life is reality transformed. Now we are seeking again reality enough to take us tilting. Out in the lagoon the crayfish pots are sunk on poles and boats with practically no draught at all go through them, and the poles, with the pot on the end like the plunger on a ramrod, are heaved in. The Adriatic is held back by the islands, curving down from the Lido and its costly tide, and in the house-deep villages the washing blows before the pink and yellow walls, the terracotta walls, the chalkblue pale and umber walls, while at an uneasy rest, four deep and brightly coloured, the fishing 316 boats stare with their painted dancing eyes to where the sun's coin spills over the shallow sea. Out to sea with all ocean's momentum the waves plunge and break.

The room I rent at four hundred lire a night is approached through a street of shops so that I walk home past windows of food. In the evening I turn into the street with nothing to do but choose. Rice with tunny fish, rice with scampi, rice with mussels, rice with saffron; pasta of every kind, and gnocchi, and cold veal stuffed with garlic, and green peppers stuffed with rice and chicken and mushroom and egg-plant; thin soups and thick, meat balls, rice and fish, wurzel, and misto mare, the mixed sea, tossed in flour and flung by the sievefull into boiling oil and served with lemon and wine. Nothing to do but choose. The bells of the Frari, through the tolled hours of the afternoon hammer in their long nails. The wind, crisp with rubble turns a corner and slams a shutter and the bells swing on. Choose lightly. The vibration shakes a glass in a room where a rucksack lies packed on the bed and the small sound is a knell. Take it lightly, the bells advise. And now, let us go.

COMMENTARIES

VANCE PALMER AUSTRALIAN LETTER

THE passing of Sydney Jephcott and E. J. Brady during this year has meant the snapping of some of the threads that bind this country to its literary past. Jephcott was eighty-four, a robust, original old man, living alone on his sheep-farm at the head of the Murray and still, at the end of his days, turning out cloud-capped verses and writing to his friends in an ebullient, personal style that was salted with humour and irony. Sixty years ago, in The Australians, Francis Adams had hailed him as the most promising of the country's poets. Jephcott did not fulfil that promise: he poured the overflow of his life into the afforestation of the countryside and the improvement of his farm: but he remained young in spirit, and a little before his death could describe his situation to a friend in the witty grotesqueries of a rhyming letter: 317 .... I wait on Kharon's jetty And fumble for my fee; You'd think me in his debt, he Remains so deaf to me, A-sitting on old bluey I coo-ee and I coo-ee And where in hell is he? Undoubtedly he would have met Kharon with a volley of rough banter when he came. E. J. Brady was a simpler type, a balladist and a pamphleteer, retaining even in advanced old age something of the buccaneer swagger of his twenties when he wrote sea-chantys and was a voice of militant unionism. Their spirit, which was similar to that of other veterans remaining from the Nineties, helps to explain why this country has maintained a certain literary tradition unbroken. They were loyal to the ideals of their youth, these veterans, yet sufficiently responsive to a changing world to meet a modern generation on its own political if not literary terms. There are two of them left, both well over eighty-Dame Mary Gilmore and Bernard O'Dowd-and though their work has been different in style and substance, all had an underlying bond. They came of a day when literary, social and political ideas seemed so bound together as to be inextricable, and they remained wedded to the conception of the poet as the voice of the people, making articulate the vague aspirations of the common mind. You have to go back to the Australia of the Nineties to understand their outlook. At that time the country was extremely conscious of its isolation, but determined to make this isolation an asset instead of a handicap. There was an insistence on the contaminating influence of the old world and the benefits of being far removed from it. Secure in our remote seas, we were to make Australia a paradise for the common man, or perhaps the uncommon man of the future! Bernard O'Dowd, who was later to find a full expression of the national mystique in The Bush, put a fundamental question to the country in his first published sonnet. Was it to be a 'drift Sargasso where the West, In halcyon calm rebuilds her fatal nest', or was it to be 'Delos of a coming Sun-God's race?' The question was rhetorical, admitting of only one answer, and to safeguard the future of the coming sun-god's race was the work of poets as well as politicians. Perhaps primarily the work of poets! Politically, this meant preventing the evil bird of the old world from building its fatal nest on these shores; economically, the creation of a collectivized state; and socially, the spread- ing of a doctrine of mateship. Our version of liberty, equality, and fraternity. All the literary survivors of those days were active politically. Mary Gilmore was a foundation-member of the A. W. U., the largest of the rising unions, and when the bushworkers were defeated in a strike that shook the whole country, she went with William Lane and his followers to build a New Australia in Paraguay. At the same time E. J. Brady, a dapper young clerk in a mercantile concern, walked out of his office 318 when some pressure was put on him to join a house-group of special constables, and placed his gifts for journalism and balladry at the service of a small, working-class paper. Jephcott supported the New Australia movement. Bernard O'Dowd, who had had a stormy youth leading local rebellions against his ancestral faith, was working his way through a law-course, but when he had established himself as librarian of the Supreme Law Court Library in Melbourne, he surreptitiously helped to found a fiery little weekly, The Tocsin, and poured into it a flood of volcanic prose and verse. Probably no group of young writers was ever so confident of a paradisal future for their country or so convinced that their mission lay in pro- moting it. Their fervent, almost fanatical patriotism did not arise from any deep attachment to the soil; it was an idea in the mind rather than an instinctive expression of the feelings. Even the most ardent spirits of those days thought of Australia as a lean, unlovely mother, denied the teeming richness of more favoured lands. In the writing of the period- the stories and sketches-Nature was a bitch-goddess, an enemy to be fought. You had the dauntless selector trying to wrest a living from the hostile earth, the shepherd watching the crows hang round his starving flocks, the drover battling through with his mob in the face of flood or drought. Yet behind the sketchy mining-camp or the straggling township (often called Last Hope or Dead Horse Gully), you had the vision of Australia Felix-so abstract a conception that for some, and not the most light-minded, it could float as far afield as the jungles of Paraguay. It might be interesting to speculate on how far the literature of this country would have been enriched if. the talented young writers of the Nineties had spent as much time in struggling with the problems of their craft as they did in social and political agitation. A lot of woolly rhetoric would probably have been shorn away; an occasional masterpiece might have emerged. W. B. Yeats once said that a lifetime was not long enough to master the difficult art of poetry in. But all such statements tend to make literature a matter of words and technique, avoiding the questions of what creates the initial impulse to write and what gives it nourishment. Is it really possible to treat literature as a craft in which perfection may be reached through severe apprenticeship and long practice? It is hard to imagine many of the poets and storytellers of the Nineties writing at all if they had not been stirred by a sense of social and national resurgence. The only writer unmoved by this general ferment was Chris Brennan, whose inspiration was Mallarme, on the one hand, and Greek and Latin classics on the other. But whatever absolute value his work has, it has not proved fertile as a seedbed. On the whole, the work of his contemporaries has. From it has come a tradition of humanist writing, democratic in tone, and fitted close to the idiosyncrasies of national feeling and character. Whether you like this writing or not, it has an individual flavour-most noticeable, now that the ballad has become a thing of the past, in short stories and novels. Usually this fiction sets its angle of vision, not in some detached point above the battle, but in the middle of the working community. The values 319 are more likely to be those of the shearer than the squatter, of the workman rather than the boss. The idiom, too, is that of the man on the job, with his slang and his colloquial rhythms. This distinguishes it from most English writing where the style aimed at is usually a traditional literary one, and the point-of-view is established in a secure middle-class. In our fiction there isn't much emphasis on the interior life of the individual; there is more on his activities as a social being, or his experiences at work. On the other hand, it isn't assumed that the interior life is the asset of a special class; it may give depth to the feelings of a derelict black girl, as in Xavier Herbert's Capricornia, or the inmates of a susso camp, as in Kylie Tennant's The Battlers. Such is one part of the literary influence of the Nineties. There has lately been some talk of a lost tradition, but the wonder is that this tradition has proved so strong and fruitful. It might have had less con- tinuing force if the veterans surviving from those days had broken with their past and settled down into a complacent old age, but they have remained singularly radical in spirit, singularly youthful in outlook, singularly sensitive to the conflicting issues that trouble a generation far removed from their own. You have Mary Gilmore, that spirited old lady, protesting that a renewed China is likely to be a better ally for us than a re-militarized Japan, and reacting from the government boycott of a Youth Carnival for Peace and Friendship by announcing that she intends to write regularly for a communist weekly; you have Bernard O'Dowd repeating in a recent speech that Australia can still be the fabled Astraea Redux, if she wills it: 'if not, why then, simply Europe with its aura of failure over again, with perhaps a tinge of colour added for variety- and more woes.' These evidences of vigour on the part of the oldest writers have prevented a break between the generations. How can youth eat its former chiefs in the time-honoured way when, no matter how outdated their forms of expression may have become, they prove so abundantly alive! Whatever may have happened in the political world here, the literary world has never had excuse to talk oflost leaders, though its veterans haven't paraded their loyalty to their ideals. When Bernard O'Dowd refused a knighthood some years ago, he was angry that the incident should have been made public. 'To make capital out of such a refusal,' he said, 'would be as shameful as acceptance.' At eighty-six he is still vigorous in mind and is going over the past with the writer of his biography, which will be something like a spiritual history of our last seventy years.

320 E. A. OLSSEN A SECOND CHAMBER: THE REPORT OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM COMMITTEE

I THE sorry history of New Zealand's Legislative Council has been told too many times to need re-telling. After the Councillors had been tamed by the Ballance Government in the early nineties, the second Chamber mainly served to provide seats to which successive governments nominated those deserving of their patronage. In these circumstances it is hardly surprising that, shortly before its abolition, the Council should have been described as 'one of the most futile and ineffective second Chambers in the world.' 1 Before discussing the Constitutional Reform Committee's Report recommending the establishment of a Senate, which the Committee tabled in July 1952, it may be of use to describe the events that immediately led up to the appointment of that Committee. In August 1947, Mr S. G. Holland, then Leader of the Opposition, introduced into the House a private member's bill for the abolition of the Council. The bill naturally failed to become an Act; but for various reasons the move touched the Labour Government on a sensitive spot, and within two months special committees had been set up in the House of Representatives and the Legislative Council, with members drawn from both Parliamentary parties, to consider whether or not New Zealand should have a uni- cameral legislature. The members met several times as a Joint Committee; and in 1948 the Committee appointed by the Legislative Council did submit to the Council proposals for reform, and the Council endorsed these proposals. On the other hand, the Joint Committee failed to make any recommendations, and Government and Opposition members later accused each other of having deliberately prevented this Committee from reaching any positive result. z When Mr Holland's second private member's bill met with defeat in 1949, the way had at least been opened for the inclusion of abolition as a plank in his Party's election programme; but, at the same time, Mr Holland stressed the point that the National Party would, if returned to office, continue the search for an alternative to the Council. lL. Lipson, The Politics of Equality, p. 360. ZN.Z. Parliamentary Debates, vol. 289, pp. 548, 551, 555. 321 As leader of the new National Government, Mr Holland introduced the Legislative Council Abolition Bill early in the 1950 Parliamentary session; and he had already assured the bill's passage through the Council by the nomination of twenty-five (later increased to twenty-nine) new Councillors. On 30 August 1950, the House received a message that the Act, which provided for the abolition of the Council as from 1 January 1951, had received the Royal Assent. About a fortnight later, on 15 September, the House appointed a select committee of seven members 'to consider the establishment of some other or like body as an alternative to the Legislative Council'. The Councillors also appointed seven of their number to a similar Committee, and, after the Council's abolition on 1 January 1951, the two Committees met together as the Constitutional Reform Committee. As the Parliamentary Labour Party refused to nominate any of its members to sit on either of these Committees, the Joint Committee therefore consisted exclusively of members of the Parlia- mentary National Party. The Committee laid its Report, recommending the establishment of a Senate, on the table of the House on 15 July 1952. In what follows it is suggested (a) that the Report recommended vesting the proposed Senate with powers inadequate for the effective performance of its most important function, and (b) that this weakness in the Report is a direct consequence of the political conditions under which the Parliamentary Committee pursued its enquiries.

n Probably the most important, as well as the most difficult problem facing the modern democratic State is the problem of securing traditional civil and political liberties in the face of an increasing concentration of power in the hands of the political executive. True, the abolition of the Legislative Council has not really added to the power of the New Zealand executive, because the Council had, as already noted, long been completely subordin- ate to the purposes of the executive. Yet the act of abolition did give renewed emphasis to the manner in which political power has come to be concentrated in the executive. As things now stand, for example, the execu- tive may use its parliamentary majority to curtail political and civil liberties, prolong the life of Parliament beyond the conventional three-year term, or alter the electoral laws in ways to suit itself, etc. 3 It is worth noting, moreover, that 'the centralization of power attracts inevitably towards the administrative centre those for whom power is an end in itself', 4 so that the process naturally tends to be cumulative. It is not surprising, then, that virtually all of those who gave evidence before the 1947-48 and the 1950-52 Joint Committees should have expressed strong dissatisfaction with the present situation; and, rightly or wrongly, virtually 3cf. D. J. Riddiford, 'A Reformed Second Chamber', in Political Science, September 1951, pp. 23-25. 4Alex Comfort, Authority and Delinquency in the Modern State, p. 17. 322 all of these witnesses also agreed that a second Chamber provides the best method of relieving the dangers incident to this situation. Many of them rightly remarked, too, that a second Chamber cannot give any effective protection against an abuse of power by the executive unless it enjoys (a) a fixed membership, so that it cannot be 'swamped' by the executive, and (b) either a general power of dissolution, or, preferably, a power of dissolution on a number of defined constitutional questions. At first glance the Report tabled by the Constitutional Reform Com- mittee does go a considerable way towards meeting these requirements. It does, for example, recommend the establishment of a second Chamber (a Senate), and it does recommend a fixed membership. On the other hand, though, it is also proposed that the political parties in the House of Representatives should nominate the Senators in proportion to their numerical strength in the House. This obviously means under New Zealand's strong two-party system that the majority party in the Lower House would control a majority in the Senate; and although it is said that an element of competition distinguishes this method of nomination as against the old system under which the government alone made nomina- tions, it is difficult to see how it could in fact lead to any substantially different result. The element of competition is indeed only permitted within the framework of a government monopoly. When the term of a Senator's office is fixed at three years, so as to coincide with elections to the Lower House, the subordination of the Senate to the executive is completed. Under this scheme there can be no doubt that the Senators would 'in a very real sense [be] hand-picked'.s In brief, the weakness at this point stems from the decision to organize the Senate on strictly party lines; once this decision had been taken, the Committee could do no other than ensure that the executive would always have a majority of nominees in the second Chamber. In the next place, it is recommended that the Senate be vested, not with a power of dissolution on a number of defined constitutional issues, but with a general power of delay for two months. This, perhaps, is better than nothing, but it can hardly be pretended that this power is adequate to meet the danger latent in the present situation. Indeed, the Committee members showed themselves apologetic about the niggardliness of these proposals when they anticipated the criticism that a Chamber vested with these slight powers hardly seems worth the trouble and expense involved in its establishment and maintenance. 6 To this criticism, though, they have a rejoinder; for it is said that the justification for the setting up of such a second Chamber must rest not upon its powers to override, restrict, or delay the activities of the elected House of Representatives, but rather upon its ability to render efficient, wise and practical assistance to that House in the discharge of duties which tend to increase in number, in scope, and in complexity. 7 5The Report, p. 28. 6ibid., p. 19. 7The ibid., p. 11. 323 To secure these ends it is therefore proposed that Senators should sit, for example, on a number of Joint Select Committees together with members from the House of Representatives. The details of this proposal are good enough in themselves, but they have little relevance to the main purpose for which a second Chamber is needed in New Zealand. As already noted, the real need is to secure protection against a misuse of power by the executive in relation to certain defined issues; and it might well be complained that though the Report begins by acknowledging this need, it ends with proposals which mainly aim at making the executive more efficient.

Ill In turning from the Report to consider the political conditions under which the Committee worked, one is impressed less by the weakness of the recommendations than by the fact that the Committee did agree to recommend the establishment of a second Chamber of any kind; for the Committee members certainly knew that this recommendation would be as unacceptable to the Prime Minister as to the Opposition. It is at any rate difficult to see how a reader of the debate on the second reading of the Legislative Council Abolition BillS can avoid this conclusion. The Labour members made quite clear their own determination to oppose the setting up of any alternative to the Council. The Prime Minister said that for his part it would suit him9 should the proposed Constitutional Reform Committee fail to find an alternative; and he made the same point more positively when he said that careful study of the question had convinced him 'that a single Chamber in this country will give us the best results'. 1 o As for the recommendation made in the Report that the number of seats in the Senate should be fixed in order to prevent swamping, it is worth noting that the Prime Minister and the late Mr Fraser exchanged assurances in the House during the second reading debate that they would on no account stand for the establishment of a second Chamber with a fixed number of seats. Indeed, throughout the debate no speaker on either side of the House said a word in favour of a bicameral legislature, though it is true that the Minister of Education, Mr R. M. Algie, after having expressed his conviction that a second Chamber is unnecessary, said that he hoped that something would replace the Legislative Council. In these circumstances it seems pertinent to ask why this second Constitutional Reform Committee should have been appointed. The probable answer is to be found in Mr Holland's realization that his Party's supporters included a minority who favoured a bicameral legis- lature, and by setting up the Committee he doubtless wished to persuade this dubious minority that their view would be given a fair hearing; this at least appears to be implied in Mr Holland's remark that he intended SN.Z. Parliamentary Debates, vol. 289, 19, 25, 26 July 1950. 9ibid., p. 544. 10ibid., p. 727. 324 appointing the Committee because 'friends of mine ... many supporters of the political philosophy to which I subscribe think there is a chance of finding something by way of an alternative', 11 and, more tellingly, Mr Holland referred to 'a number of well informed and well read newspaper editors' 12 who favoured a bicameral legislature. On the other hand, the Leader of the Opposition apparently felt no need to cope with a dissident minority among the Party's supporters, and he therefore declined the Prime Minister's invitation to nominate any Labour members to sit on the Constitutional Reform Committee; and some two years later the Opposition refused to debate the Report when the Minister of Education, Mr Algie, who acted as Chairman of the Committee during the greater part of its life, introduced it in the House in August 1952.

IV It would seem, then, that in recommending the establishment of a Senate the Parliamentary Committee sought to please those who had stressed the urgent need for a second Chamber; then, to please the Prime Minister and the Opposition, it divested the Senate of any effective powers against the political executive. The Report has in fact pleased nobody, and there seems little room for doubt about its fate. A few days after the Report had been tabled, a press item stated that the Prime Minister held 'the view that eighteen months' experience of a unicameral system of Parliamentary government has proved that New Zealand can do quite well without a second Chamber'. 1 3 It is apparent from what has been said, of course, that this view is contrary to (1) the findings of the Legislative Council's Committee of 1947, (2) the evidence of those people, many of them experts in constitutional law, who made submissions both to the 1947-48 and the 1950-52 Committee, and (3) the recommendations of Mr Holland's own Parliamentary Committee, even though those recommendations did not vest the proposed Senate with anything like adequate powers. In brief the Prime Minister's view of the case runs sharply counter to the available evidence. On the other hand, the situation has not provoked any widespread public protest, though it is significant that a New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties has recently been formed in Wellington with Dr J. C. Beaglehole as President. As for the Opposition members, they themselves aspire to belong to a future government, and have nothing to oppose to the Prime Minister's light- handed disposal of a constitutional question as important as any that has faced the country for many years. All in all, those who have stressed the need for a second Chamber as a safeguard against an abuse of power by the executive may be excused should they see in the political conditions under which New Zealand has become a unicameral State some confirma- tion of their fears. 11ibid., p. 724. 12ibid., p. 544. 130tago Daily Times, 21 July 1952. 325 MARGARET M. DUNNINGHAM BROKEN BARRIER

I WENT to see Broken Barrier expecting to enjoy it. I already knew of Roger Mirams as the most distinguished of the New Zealand Film Unit cameramen. The cameraman is the star of the short documentary film and, in the past, Roger Mirams has given us many star performances, such as Round Up on. Molesworth. Few of the National Film Unit films made any deep exploration of New Zealand's social problems but they did achieve a uniformly high standard of photography and editing. Such films as The Coaster, Oranges from the Cook Islands, Power from the River and Housing in New Zealand were good documentary films by the standards of any country. The latest films from the National Film Unit which I have seen seem to have got a bit heavy-handed. The portentous- ness of Beech Forester is very tiresome. Only Moana Roa (the Cook Islands) has some of the old charm and competence. In many ways Broken Barrier is a most worthy successor to those old National Film Unit documentaries. In this film produced for the Pacific Unit, and with apparently a very small budget, Roger Mirams has lost none of his skill as a cameraman. Indeed I doubt if he has ever done anything as good before. One will long remember the opening sequences on the little known Mahia Peninsula-the long line of breaking surf, the face of the old Maori woman, the Maoris fishing in the rock pools. If these opening scenes remind us a little too forcibly of Song of Ceylon or Man of Aran, well-what better documentary films could we be reminded of? Visually Broken Barrier is always in good taste. It escapes the vulgar and the obvious, is often very beautiful and sometimes-as when the heroine takes the two children to school on her horse-it is acutely and sensitively observed. But Broken Barrier is not a documentary film. It is supposed to be a feature film and it has a story scenario written by John O'Shea. A young journalist visits the East Coast to write popular articles on Maori life for an American magazine. He works for a Maori family and lives with them. He falls in love with the daughter of the house. He wishes to marry her. This is the 'Barrier' which is to be broken. The girl has educated herself to cope with pakeha New Zealand. She is a sister at Wellington Hospital. The journalist has a 'snooty' family living in a pretentious house at Lowry Bay, who disapprove of the match. Eventually they do marry and the Maori mother says 'nothing should be allowed to part them' because 'they love one another'. This story is the unsatisfactory part of the film. The journalist is ashamed to admit to the Maoris, and especially to his girl, that he is writing articles about them. For the articles were superficial, intended to suit the requirements of an American popular magazine and be read by a public who knew nothing whatever about the 326 Maoris. The offence of Broken Barrier is the same as that of the articles. The film was presumably made for the overseas market and there its effect may not be undesirable. It does emphasize, what is undoubtedly true, that the position of the Maori in New Zealand is very different from that of the negro in the United States or the coloured person in South Africa. We like to say this to the world at large, but, as conversa- tion at home, it simply isn't good enough. Racial inter-marriage in New Zealand is not-thank goodness-so much a social problem as a private and personal one. There is no organized persecution of anyone who breaks the barrier. The prospects for successful inter-marriage depend almost entirely on the relative educational and social status of the couple. The absurd household at Lowry Bay would be a formidable obstacle to ninety per cent of New Zealand girls. John O'Shea may have done this deliberately to gain the wide sympathy of cinema audiences for his Maori heroine. ('Poor kid, fancy her having to deal with a snooty crowd like that.') In fact it seems to support the basic fallacy of the film-that there is a well-known existing convention of opposition to racial inter-marriage between social and intellectual equals. While there may be prejudice on this point we have sufficient examples among us to know that it can be carried off successfully. The barrier to be broken is a personal one. It should remain so. There is nothing to gain and much to lose by encouraging self-consciousness on this question. The effectiveness of the story is not helped by the absence of dialogue. The device by which post-synchronization gives us the thoughts, but never the conversation, of the boy and girl, is successful up to a point. It was, I understand, employed both for reasons of economy and to lessen the demands made on the acting ability of inexperienced players. But the fact that we never know what they say to one another makes it much more difficult to convince us that these two have more in common than a night in the long grass. Their unilateral 'thinking' does not effectively convey their relationship to each other. When they quarrel over the American magazine articles words seem more than ever to be a necessity to the action. It was interesting to contrast Broken Barrier with the much less distinguished New Zealand National Film Unit film Aroha. This docu- mentary seems to have been made with a Maori audience in mind. Its theme is expressed in the sentence the Maori undergraduate uses to her Maori fianc6-'We can do anything, if we want to'. Extensive and effective use of dialogue is the best feature of Aroha. Broken Barrier then has not solved the problem of combining docu- mentary technique with a feature film story. Nor is it an effective docu- mentary of race or social relations. It shows us-and very beautifully, too-how life is lived by the Maori sheep farmers of the Mahia Peninsula. Just as Coal from West/and years ago showed us how life was lived in the mountain mining township of Denniston. Coal from West/and would not have been a better film had it ended with the question-Can a Denniston miner's daughter marry a boy from Lowry Bay?

327 REVIEWS

THE FOREST. A Comedy in Three Acts. D'Arcy Cresswell. The Pelorus Press. 2ls. and 7s. 6d. The Forest is an important addition to our literature because the verse is fully developed, sustained throughout and finished with a technical precision achieved only by our best short story writers but by no poet in a work of any length. In Mr Cresswell's blank verse we hear the authentic accents of an original poet, less obscured by archaisms than in his earlier writings, though still reminding us of the English masters. He has found a medium admirably suited to statement and argument. The poetry, which resides in the rhetoric more often than in the imagery, meets the drama and they sustain each other. Often, when the play offers little, the verse rescues it with some wonder- ful touch, as when a new character, Mrs Salter, is introduced to the audience, As fresh, as rare, as odd to these rough mountains As Aphrodite in an Iceland fiord! ... She's coming now, around the further side Of this same house, under a parasol, Floating along as if by parachute! (in a whisper) Look, here she comes, a little at a time .... The play is rich in wit and, in the comic scenes, good fun-for instance Lucifer beating Gabriel: 'You vestige! You mere rumour! You improbable piece of fiction, you!' There is also some good stage business, such as the use of asides from the invisible Gabriel, or a double conversation among the visible and invisible characters, to save a dull scene, a device which is over-done, but Mr Cresswell's theatrical resources are too limited to prevent the play from degenerating at times into a debate. Altogether, however, The Forest seems to me to be considerably superior to its predecessor, Mr Curnow's The Axe, which suffers from a failure of the imagination. The Forest is fully understood-but there is so little in it to grasp. Mr Cresswell is a fully-fledged Romantic who would flee from modern industrialism, from the 'shallow prodigies of modern science', to a pagan world 'three thousand years and more ago'. Today the affections are choked in their infancy by a materialist and over-intellectual world. One wonders why his flight does not end in the middle ages, since most of our miseries are attributed to Copernicus, alias Lucifer, who prized apart heaven and earth, which ought to meet in nature, so that 'men's minds grew proud and secular'. In The Forest Mr Cresswell thus continues to write of the preoccupations of Lyttelton Harbour (1936). Like all our greatest rebels, he turns out to be a moralist. He wants us to hear, in nature, the voices of eternity. Alas! since Copernicus has divided poetry from prose, mystery from knowledge, only the poet can hear the dryads. It is not really our bush, incidentally, that they inhabit, unless some 328 miserable second growth, in which case it is appropriate that The Axe preceded The Forest. Wordsworth, as Aldous Huxley has pointed out in his essay 'Wordsworth in the Tropics', writes of a conquered enemy, not of the sinister forest primeval; and so does Mr Cresswell. However, he has in mind not only New Zealand and the poet, but nature and society, so his forest is really woods. Though we are assured that ideally 'reason, senses and imagination go hand in hand', the romantic danger of scorning 'our worthless reasons' is not avoided. The Devil's power is not sin but reason. Established religion, work, commerce are also on his side as well as Americans, who are his own creation. War, liquor and all things emotional are on the side of the Gods. Here, you will think, is the honest Anti-Puritan, but no-sex, it turns out, is in the Devil's sphere. In The Forest Mrs Salter is in league with the Devil, alias Copernicus, alias a timber merchant, Mr Bishop, to induce her husband to sell New Zealand's last private forest to Lucifer, alias etc., the lady for money, the Devil so that he can expel dryads, the sole manifestation of the spirit world left on earth. It is impossible to ignore the sexual theme in The Forest, since its iteration is so insistent, and it is here that Mr Cresswell's romanticism recedes, as a romantic view so often does, into absurdity or evil. Women are out on the streets, painted up and in business. This 'trade name "love" ' is mere lust and whoring. The mutual love of the two young men in the play, however, is 'Nature's strongest card, her ace, her trump'. The product of their marriage is art and poetry, glory and fame, which 'Aren't found abroad if women are as well', though it is conceded that 'the love whose progeny is children' is as natural, if less romantic. There is no need to argue with such views: to state them is to expose them. The poet knows the power of love but not the majesty of sex. He knows that men may love men, but he thinks man alone knows the spirit, while woman, who represents materialism and worldliness, seeks to pull man down to the flesh 'if to his soul he climb', to quote fromLyttelton Harbour. It is clear that Mr Cresswell, holding such views, must have found New Zealand more intolerable and the New Zealand Mother more oppressive than the majority of our writers and artists. In rejecting our intolerance and our narrow puritanical mores he offers us an asceticism a thousand times more tyrannical, for what, after all, are his views on the nature of man and woman if not Puritanism writ large, not to mention their affini- ties with ancient dualistic religions. The Forest is a comedy of ideas. The author retreats from the ills of the modern world into an intellectual junkshop, an end which is sympto- matic of almost all writing in New Zealand and indeed of the recent literature of the western world. Its sickness is that it is sensitive but not strong, a characteristic the opposite of the New Zealander's social virtues. Its sickness is a failure of the intellect. No serious attempt is made to grapple with our problem whole, and our writers surrender to an anaemic mysticism, crankiness, a diluted Anglicanism, the 'thought' of Gurdjieff- the man who killed Katherine Mansfield-cynicism or cheap self-pity. 329 It is clear that a literature cannot thrive on such a limited view as that of Mr Cresswell, but a poet can do so, and carry his mental shackles round like a wreath. After all The Cocktail Party proceeds from and proffers another mumbo-jumbo with perhaps less followers than Mr Cresswell's. It is not so superior to The Forest as the fashionable will believe. The Forest is beautifully printed-apart from two misplaced pages- by the Pelorus Press and illustrated with fine wood-engravings by E. Mervyn Taylor. Why, someone asks, are the dryads female? Keith Sinclair

UNGRATEFUL PEOPLE. George Fraser. The Pelorus Press;. 7s. 6d. 'Tms short book or long pamphlet', so its author tells us, is not 'a studied and accurate history' of New Zealand; 'rather it is an arbitrarily chosen hotch-potch of events, significant and footling, between the years 1925 and 1935.' It attempts to explain why the large majority of New Zealanders, who in 1925 hopefully elected the Coates government to usher in a period of 'Safety, Progress and Prosperity', threw out the Forbes-Coates coalition ten years later, in a mood of bitter resentment and deep ingratitude, for what it had done 'with the best of intentions for the public good'. Ungrateful People is a collection of episodes in which we are confronted with a chaos of subjects: weather reports, films and fashions, song hits, cricket and rugby matches, the Melbourne cup, daily news from home and abroad. Some of the episodes have no shape at all, others are really short stories. The author pleads laziness and lack of time for this chaos. Yet clearly it is intentional. Both trivial and important happenings are adroitly selected and artfully disordered, to illustrate the state of the public mind during this decade, and the things with which it was pre- occupied. Some of the fundamental trends in our national life and charac- ter emerge willynilly. The book too has a sort of unity, for there is the major theme indicated by the title, and there is a moral, or should I say, a warning? · Take the case of the Irish immigrant, allured to a land of plenty and opportunity by dazzling advertisements, who ends his days as a swagman and suicide. Or there is Ben Sutherland, the civil servant, 'a man without initiative' according to his staff record card in the Railways Department. Yet he lived to found the Self-Help 'co-ops' to do battle against price rings, and to revolutionize the grocery trade. We are reminded too of the frustrations of the Samoans who preferred self-government to good government, and of the rioters, who in 1932 wanted work, not soup kitchens, sustenance and a balanced budget. Then we have the few men of moral courage, who defended our civil liberties in a time of national crisis, which in New Zealand invariably produces a witch hunt. It should not be necessary to stress the timeliness of such warnings today. Ungrateful People we can see is in the tradition of Tonwrrow and Here and Now. 330 The material seems to be culled mainly from newspapers and personal reminiscences. Neither of these sources provide the stuff of history, and many of the author's facts and interpretations must be open to doubt. Scant justice is accorded to the work of Coates and his 'Brains Trust' in assisting New Zealand's recovery from the depression. The excuse (p. 44) that the full records of the Keynesian period of the Coates govern- ment are no longer available is not good enough. A lot remains to be said of the origins and significance of the Mau movement in Samoa. And surely it shows some lack of understanding to associate the Kelly gang and the Native Affairs Commission? To recapture the public mood of this decade, I would still turn to J. C. Beaglehole's New Zealand; A Short History or John Mulgan's Man Alone. Nevertheless we must be grateful to Mr Fraser for his vigorous and impressionistic, though somewhat slick sketches of 'Only Yesterday'. The book is illustrated with expressive line drawings and is printed attractively. Mary Boyd

THE MALE CHARACTERS OF EURIPIDES: A STUDY IN REALISM. E. M. Blaiklock. New Zealand University Press. 35s.

IN THIS work Professor Blaiklock takes the seventeen authenticated plays of Euripides in approximate chronological order, and in a series of essays develops his analysis and interpretation of their male characters. His principal aim, as the sub-title reveals, is to present Euripides as the 'realist'; and it is for this reason that he concentrates on the poet's men. For he agrees with Gilbert Murray that the women characters show traces of 'romantic' handling, and thus do not display this realism at its sharpest. In any case, whether or not one accepts this judgment, a study of this kind has not only its own intrinsic interest, but an additional value-it is a useful counter-emphasis to the view that Euripides is mainly interested in portraying women. Professor Blaiklock's treatment is penetrating, sympathetic, subtle, and shrewd; and it can be a joy to watch his acumen so delicately at work. He refuses to dictate to the plays he handles; instead, he allows them to dictate to him. Thus his interpretations are soundly based, and con- trolled at every step by careful scholarship and understanding of his author. But nothing exceeds like success; and occasionally one feels that he cannot entirely escape the vices of his virtues. Some readers for ex- ample-though I should not be among them-might object that it is over-subtle to detect a complete and finished characterization in the forty-eight lines given to Menelaus in the Troades. Others may think it is pressing 'realism' too far to turn the Hercules Furens into a case-study in epilepsy. Yet not the least of Dr Blaiklock's merits is the quality of his provocation. None of his interpretations can be dismissed easily: they stand out in the round, they challenge the reader to confront them again and yet again with the studied text. 331 Nor does he seek to force the characters all into one mould. Where there is political or social comment as well as psychological analysis (as in Admetus or Menelaus), we are encouraged to give due weight to both. Euripides the religious iconoclast is not dragged forward on every possible occasion; we are invited as well to find in Euripides the satirist, the sensitive observer, the moralist, and even the man. Professor Blaiklock does his best to steer a judicious and middle course between the extremes of Euripidean interpretation; and in the actual work of the studies them- selves, he will not turn his poet into a hobby-horse, despite the implica- tions of his sub-title. Euripides may be a 'realist', but he is revealed as much more besides. For the Greek of his text, Professor Blaiklock has a sensitivity-as when he notices (Troades 871 sqq.) the change from an active to a middle verb and back again, and points out how this expresses Menelaus's ambiguous attitude to the captive Helen; or again detects in a change from first to third person (Hippolytus 1040) an appeal for support of a dwindling conviction. Such insight makes one wish he would be his own translator. The version he adopts is not the most fortunate, and I find myself regretting that where there was a Way, there was perhaps no will. But he does much to make the translation live by his own comment, and above all by remembering that the plays are meant to be acted-there can be few Euripidean scholars who possess so nice a sense of theatre. It may seem strange to find unsatisfying a book with virtues so many and so obvious. Yet I do not find it satisfying, and I will suggest two reasons why. The first is a problem of form and style. Essentially, Professor Blaiklock's task requires minute attention to the text, and detailed support or refutation of the views maintained or rejected. Its proper place would seem rather to be in the introduction to an edition of each separate play, where the reader can refer easily to the text, and the writer need have no qualms about giving scholarship and argument their full scope. (The appendix of collected excerpts in this present book attempts to meet the first requirement, but nothing will really do it short of the entire plays.) On the other hand, the allusive essay of interpretation in the T. R. Glover manner must take all preliminaries for granted: here, scholarship must be worn lightly; its erudition is ornament, it argues only to adorn. Pro- fessor Blaiklock, I suspect, is caught in an uneasy compromise between the two. His book is only in part intelligible to a reader not wholly armed with the panoply of Euripidean exegesis, yet it is not entirely in the genre of belles lettres. (And sometimes, one may remark, the Greek quotations are translated, and sometimes they are not.) The book thus has the air of asking its audience at once for too little and too much, and one wishes it would say either more, or less. The other difficulty comes, I think, from Professor Blaiklock's own talents and scruples. The interpretations are so rich in approach, so various, so carefully restrained from excess, that one is left wondering what exactly he makes of Euripides. But what is really suspicious is the feeling that this would not matter in the least, except for the task he ostensibly imposes on himself. He attempts, and even on occasion actively struggles, to live 332 up to his sub-title. But as one reads the studies themselves, it appears more and more that they are a subtle and telling refutation of the book's avowed thesis. When it comes to the point, Dr Blaiklock's honesty and comprehension will not allow him to treat Euripides simply as a social and psychological commentator, or as the poet of spiritual disillusion. He draws perhaps more wisely than he knows; but under his fingers grows a portrait of a tragedian who is essentially Greek-a Greek poet, and therefore a teacher, and a teacher with a mission. In these terms, the ambiguous realist-romantic antithesis of the intro- duction is revealed as inapposite. For the truth is, I suspect, that it will not take us far if we approach Euripides in terms of antitheses drawn from modern aesthetic theory, even if we could be sure what they mean in their own context. It is not a question of the 'realist' who 'faces facts' and the 'romantic' who 'tends away from actuality'. Did not Homer and Aeschylus and Sophocles face the facts? And if they are realists, how to contrast Euripides with them? Surely it is better to expound Euripides in terms of art as the Greeks understood it-in terms, that is, of the shifting aesthetic theory of his age, as we find it later in the pages of Plato. For he is the very embodiment of those contradictions between the mimetic and the educative views of art which contemporary aesthetics found so baffling. How can one imitate, without imitating everything, bad and good? And how can one educate, from exemplars of evil? But if we grant this point, we must think not of a preoccupation with the psychological and the sordid in the modern manner, but rather of the problem of educating in a new way. The psychology of Euripides finds its parallel in the Republic, and its progenitor, perhaps, in Heraclitus-just as his new way of educating appears in Plato and Isocrates and in the sceptical excesses of the Sophistic movement. The 'realism' of Euripides would then be balanced against his place in a consciously educative tradition; and it might turn out to be nothing but the old 'idealism' in a new guise. There is nothing in all this to contradict what Professor Blaiklock actually says. But I fancy it may contradict what he thinks he ought to be saying, in view of his introduction. And if I am right in finding the book unsatisfying for this reason, what is weakness in the book is strength in the author; he triumphs as the victor of his own defeat. Denis Grey

AMIS ET AMILES. AN EXPLORATORY SURVEY. J. A. Asher. Auckland University College. (Bulletin No. 39, Modern Language Series No. 1.) 2s. 6d. IT rs proper that a college which has among its alumni such masterly editors of medieval texts as Kenneth Sisam and P. S. Ardern should sponsor a monograph on a neglected chanson de geste. Hofmann's edition of Amis et Amile, though reprinted in 1882, is not, one suspects, available in many New Zealand libraries; Mr Asher is therefore justified in devoting many of his pages to a summary of the long and intricate 333 story. If that summary does nothing else it may revive in some of us memories of the English romance in which we found full recompense for all the rigours of philology: reading of Belissans' bold wooing, we remember the Green Knight's lady, with her frank 'Ye are welcum to my cors'; and the sombre setting for the third encounter of Amis and Amile recalls the 'wysty' landscape ('claterande fro the crest the colde borne rennes') that Gawain traverses on his perilous journey to keep his tryst. Mr Asher comments that the French poet here uses the so-called 'pathetic fallacy' with considerable skill. He would doubtless agree that, whether such scenes come within Ruskin's definition or not, the phrase does not adequately indicate the medieval poet's treatment of his charac- ters in relation to nature. His further comments on the style and diction of the poem usually take the form of comparison with other chansons. Here few of us are equipped to follow him, and he sometimes smacks of the thesis-though he perceives that in this romance parallelism and balance are more than literary devices, but reflect its whole psychology. One sympathizes with the isolated specialist who essays to combine a 'popular' with an 'academic' treatment. Perhaps he must reserve the technicalities for his colleagues, and attract the layman by proceeding to the unknown from the known. Thus, he might begin with William Morris's more familiar rendering of this tale; which, being based on the hagiographic prose version, leaves a completely different impression from the chanson-and serves to illustrate the limitations of nineteenth-century medievalism. No university that professes to give a liberal education can ignore medieval literature; but until we recognize that medieval civilization was far more complex than Morris made it out to be, medieval studies will never thrive here. J. A. W. Bennett

PHILOSOPHY TODAY. K. B. Pflaum. Auckland University College. (Bulletin No. 40, Philosophy Series No. 1.) THis pamphlet is based on a series of broadcast talks given by the author, who is lecturer in Philosophy at Auckland University College. It consists of a necessarily brief account of four 'schools' of contemporary philo- sophy: the Neo-Idealism of Gentile and Croce, modern realism, logical positivism, and existentialism. It is a bold man who would undertake to render the diversity of philosophical opinions here represented intelligible on an allowance of ten pages per opinion. Mr Pflaum's achievement, though considerable in view of these difficulties, nevertheless reflects them. It is not clear to what extent the original broadcast talks have been amended for publication, but one is left wondering what the listening public made of them. The audience for talks on philosophy in New Zealand must be small, and the number equipped to understand with any degree of completeness these short summaries of highly technical theories must be yet smaller. 334 The talk on the Neo-Idealists is perhaps the best. Here the author is helped by the fact that he is dealing with the views of only two men. When he comes to deal with realism, he has to select from a bewildering array of more or less related theories. He chooses Professor Price as an exponent of realism, and manages to give an adequate summary of an involved theory. The difficulty of finding a common core of doctrine among a great variety of presentations faces him again when he talks about Existentialism. His account of Logical Positivism suffers in a different way. It is probably the easiest of the talks to understand, but in other respects is perhaps the least satisfactory. Mr Pflaum doesn't like the Logical Positiv- ists, nor their near allies, the contemporary British philosophers of the linguistic movement. He makes this plain in his opening talk. He has no patience with those who 'play with a new apparatus of philosophical terminology', after having 'eviscerated traditional philosophy on the altar of tough logic and doubtful psychology'. His impatience can be sensed throughout his discussion, and causes him to do the Logical Positivists rather less than justice. Behind the logical arguments one feels, lurks a moral judgment, and underneath the critical exposition of a point of view we are aware of what is rather like a castigation of heresy. In conclusion, one is driven to ask was this series of talks well con- ceived? It might have been a better plan to have taken a particular philo- sophical problem, and show the kind of discussion it has provoked. The listener then would have been better able to see that the different view- points are relevant to one another, that they are 'honest attempts to solve perennial difficulties'. The self-contained treatment of each theory, im- posed by the chosen framework of the series, may have encouraged the 'positivistically-minded "masses" '-if any such listened to the talks-to believe that philosophical theories are 'flimsy speculations and fanciful theories'. It is to be hoped that among future bulletins will be ones written specially for the series, so that they need not suffer from the inevitable limitations of broadcast talks addressed to the general public. R. G. Durrant

LEISURE THE BASIS OF CULTURE. Josef Pieper. Faber and Faber. 10s. 6d. 'LEASURE,' says Hobbes, 'is the mother of philosophy, and Common- wealth is the mother of both leasure and philosophy.' Dr Pieper agrees with the first part of this statement, but would strongly disapprove of the second part. Leisure, according to him, is not dependent on political arrangements (such as pax Romana or the British Commonwealth) or any man-made device. Leisure is not simply non-work or the laziness of the 'leisured classes', as depicted by novelists from Fielding to Evelyn Waugh and surveyed by Thorstein Veblen. Nor is it identical with hobbies, such as week-end gardening, home-building or collecting gramophone records, silver spoons or stamps. 335 Leisure has of old been connected with the liberal arts, with learning (scho/a-school=leisure), with the insight of the philosopher. It is the same as the development of the personality, the awakening to the meaning and the possibilities of life. It is the contemplation (theoria) leading to a questioning and admiring of human propensities and divine concerns, a widening of personality and a deepening and harmonizing of experience, in other words the scale of values. This has been understood by religious people and by philosophers since Plato. However, Dr Pieper differs from most contemporary British philoso- phers on important points. He would not allow in the inner circle those who are in any way tied up with the practical and servile arts. He leaves no room for a Newton or Rutherford because they were not disinterested but used their knowledge to mould nature and, through its medium, society rather than metaphysically interpreting it. Detachment from worldly concerns is essential to Dr Pieper. He has no patience with philosophers who pursue knowledge for knowledge's sake (in contrast to pursuing it for the sake of the good life). He rejects Hume, Kant, and Hegel, and, by implication, Hobbes. He often quotes Goethe with ap- proval but must be held to incline towards mysticism rather than Goethe's Faustian religion of activity. While he has one or two quotations from Bacon, he is clearly opposed to the British scientific tradition with its respect for facts and its utilitarianism. He contrasts the functional know- ledge of the servile scientist with the resigned wisdom of the gentleman who transcends the workaday world. He is clearly (and admittedly) in the tradition of Platonism and Scholasticism and very near to their secularized off-shoot, Romanticism. However, though he is blind to the potential blessings of science, he is not uncritical towards philosophers, not only those he rejects but also Christian thinkers unless they have preserved their capacity for wonder and humble questioning, a desiderium sciendi rather than the pretence of knowledge. Anselm, it may be said in interpretation, was a philosophos in his beatific vision, in his doubts and their solution; but he became a workaday craftsman when he undertook to prove God's existence. Dr Pieper makes it clear that his philosopher must suffer rather than demon- strate his knowledge, gain his insight per connaturalitatem rather than per cognitionem. These views save the author from the suspicion that he is pleading the case of professional philosophers. His rejection of science and reformers makes Dr Pieper deny that ultimate values can be derived from any but the sources of tradition and revelation. He distrusts the ratio innate in man and his capacity to learn from experience. He adds nothing new to this problem which has been discussed so widely in the last two hundred years. He certainly neglects the negative side of historical experience with systems of faith. However, he has fine and wise things to say about the value of cult, worship, and celebrations as contrasted with the games and amusements in force today. This touches on the most important aspects of leisure today, as owing to labour-saving devices people will have increasingly more time--to waste or to use. 336 Mr Eliot in his preface insists on tying philosophy to theology. Dr Pieper sets his scene against the German post-war background, asking his audience not to bargain their salvation against the prospect of material reconstruction. His warning to keep the flame alive that has been lit by Western tradition is not quite pointless either in the setting of the colonial New World with its over-estimation of things technical and material, as well as with its taking for granted of things at which we should rightly wonder. It may be fit to conclude with a quotation well worth pondering: 'A man who needs the unusual to make him "wonder" shows that he has lost the capacity to find the true answer to the wonder of being. The itch for sensation, even disguised in the mask ofBoheme, is a sure indica- tion of a bourgeois mind and a deadened sense of wonder.' H. O.Pappe

POETRY IN MODERN IRELAND. Austin Clarke. IRISH FOLK MUSIC AND SONG. Donal O'Sullivan. Published for the Cultural Relations Committee of Ireland. Colm 0 Lochlainn, at the Sign of the Three Candles, Fleet Street, Dublin. 2s. each. IRELAND is one of the poorest countries of Europe. The eighteenth century squares which are Dublin's pride have the distinction and charm of their age, but they seem hardly worthy of a capital city; coming from England one is struck by the modesty of Dublin's domestic architecture as com- pared with that of say Cheltenham, even Exeter-not to mention Bath. And the poverty of Cork, the second city of Eire, is appalling; there is little to equal it in western Europe, except in purely industrial towns, till one comes to Naples-or to Spain. But cultural and spiritual life do not depend solely on wealth, and three times at least Ireland has brought the world incomparable gifts: her early Christianity; her eighteenth-century prose and philosophy- Swift, Berkeley, Goldsmith, Burke; and the poetry, plays and novels of her early twentieth century-Moore, Yeats, Synge, Joyce. She is living now in the shadow that followed that last blaze of glory. These two booklets belong to a series called Irish Life and Culture, which is similar in intention to the British Council's series, The Arts in Britain. They are well printed and pleasantly illustrated with black-and- white drawings; the work, it would seem, of a small press which cares for individuality of style, they look less correct than their sleek British counterparts. Both series are examples of that conscious cultural propa- ganda of our time which governments make use of, directly or indirectly, to increase their prestige or strengthen their economy. But work written for such a series need bear no taint of propaganda; if it does bear any such taint it will fail of its purpose because both the prestige of the govern- ment sponsoring it and the reputation of the author will suffer. Private judgment remains; literary standards have not disappeared. To con- tribute to a series of this kind is no worse compromise than to dedicate one's work to a patron or to conform to what one knows public and publisher will find acceptable. 337 Austin Clarke and Donal O'Sullivan both write easily and informally with no trace of official tone. Mr O'Sullivan has rather less to say about the folk music and song than about how it was collected and recorded; but he persuades one of the wealth and variety of it, and one would have been grateful for musical quotations to accompany the Irish and English words he quotes, for it is clearly one of Ireland's great creations. Mr Clarke's well-balanced account of the Irish poetry of this century provides incidentally an interesting background to Yeats's work-and Yeats is the one Irish poet who transcends Ireland. His essay might be compared with Alien Curnow's introduction to the Book of New Zealand Verse; in both one sees the provinces engaged in establishing and defining their identity in relationship to the capital, a task by no means purely literary. But it is a pity that Mr Clarke writes of 'modernism' and 'modernistic poetry' as if these differed from 'poetry'; how they differ he does not say, and the unreal distinction confuses his judgment at times and so weakens one's trust in his guidance. The provinces, new and old, are afraid of clear thinking; they are uncertain whether they possess spiritual identity, and fear that clear thinking might show they do not. Yet the fear is unnecessary and unworthy of them, and only confirms them in provincialism. It is perhaps their new perilous independence and precarious economy which make the Irish doubtful of their status at present, because politically they are starting afresh, with little more experience behind them than we have and with no greater certainty of the future. But they need not suffer our apprehensions; spiritually they exist; they are not a people without history-part of their history is in these two essays. Charles Brasch

ISSUE. Published by the editors, John Caselberg and Colin McCahon, 9 Barbour Street, Christchurch. Nos 1 and 2, June and September 1952. THis four-page sheet-a cross between broadsheet and pamphlet-has now crept out twice, so unobtrusively it might easily escape notice. No announcement accompanied it, and it does not make one itself; the first number contains seven short poems by John Caselberg with a design by Colin McCahon, the second contains four short and two longer poems by J. M. Thomson with (since these leave little space for a design) a broad black free brush-line down the front page which rather unhappily suggests a mourning border. Both numbers are well printed on good stiff paper. Issue does not (or not yet) bear comparison with the series of Ariel Poems which Faber and Faber published in the thirties, but it is a venture with distinct possibilities, and these two numbers make an interesting beginning. C.B. 338 CORRESPONDENCE

To THE EnrroR Sm: In the somewhat neglected 'Married Man's Story', that remarkably masculine and most enigmatic of all Katherine Mansfield's stories (al- though the school is no riddle in this country) the pen of the narrator painted with poisoned irony a domestic landscape bleached of love, where faint hope was wedded to ruthless, diagnosing indifference; where the chief actor's meaningless mime was performed above a solitary abyss that reached down to a shocking childhood. Neither exile nor invalidism fogged the glasses worn to tell this imaginatively analytical story. And yet, although the incidents seem remote from the writer's own life and the style colder, more knife-edged than in much of her prose the story is a compound of all the more characteristic elements. The most pro- vocative and revealing link exists between the married man's dramatic discovery that 'Everything lived, everything', and Linda Burnell's similar yet softer, more sentimental experience in 'Prelude' (5). Only the married man's acceptance, his turning towards 'my silent brothers ... ' suggests a loneliness we scarcely dare to follow, a mysticism breathed on by the devil, a capacity beside which Linda's is nothing more than day dreaming. But the basis of the story lies in the conflict between feminine persistent hope and masculine hypocritical denial. Nobody is going to call her or to wonder what she is doing out there. And she knows it. And yet, being a woman, deep down, deep down, she really does expect the miracle to happen; she really could embrace that dark, dark deceit, rather than live-like this. 'Like this' was not to live cat and dog. It was for the man to deny his wife silently in his mind-as in the opening scene watching his wife and child, and in the third scene recalling her hideous confirmUion photo- graph and their wedding afternoon in the park when 'a great gush of hard, bright sound from the band' aided the husband to turn on a sham show and avoid answering her question. It is interesting that the central character is someone conc«ned with the technique of writing who ruthlessly makes use of his own conplexities for subject matter. 'That is how I long to write. No fine efiects-no bravura. But just the plain truth, as only a liar can tell it.' So states the married man when at last he is left alone. And this leads on to the thought that it might be salutary to read a warning into James Bertram's lines: -the scrupulous minor artist who might have been remembered for a dozen flawless stories, if the rest had been allowed to die. (Landfall 23) A warning lest, in the rising welter of gossip, publicized tantrums, privacies and personal tangles the sight is slowly lost of a strict disciplinarian who sifted and transformed raw material into a shape and significance far removed from extraordinary feminine fussing. He/en Shaw 339 SIR: May I ask you to correct these errors in my article in your last issue? They are probably due to the haste with which I transcribed from an earlier draft. I have italicized the amended or inserted words: p. 210: ' ... a little man piped up that he knew we knew what we were talking about . . • ' p. 218: 'If nature can't be controlled, then man must be.' (not nature). p. 221 : 'Now the New Zealand child is not noticeably different from children of other countries.' p. 227: '3ZR's request programme' (not 3ZB). Bill Pearson London

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Mary Boyd. Lecturer in History, Victoria University College. John Caselberg. Born at Wakefield, Nelson, 1927, educated at Nelson College and Otago University; spent eighteen months in western Europe in 1949-50;. at present il student at Christchurch Teachers' Training College. Margaret M. Dunningham. Born in Wellington 1911, educated at Victoria University College. Tutor-organizer in Adult Education in Otago. Vice- President of the Dunedin Film Society. Roderick Finlayson. Author of Brown Man's Burden and Sweet Beulah Land (short swries), Tidal Creek (novel); is publishing another novel shortly. Married with six children and lives near Auckland. Denis Grey. Born in Nottingham 1918. Read Greats at Oxford. Senior Lecturer in Philllsophy at the University of Otago since 1946.

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED Brian Bell. An Informal Report of Margaret Mead's Wellington Lectures, August 15 and 16, 1951. John Rhodes, Box 1970, Wellington. Henri Storck. The Entertainment Film for Juvenile Audiences. Unesco, Paris. 7s. 6d. Immortal Poems of the English Language. Edited by Oscar Williams. Pocket Books, Inc., New York. 35c. Trace. A Chronicle of Living Literature. Edited by James Boyer May. P.O. Box 1068, Hollywood 28, California, and 290 West End Lane, London N.W.6. No. 1. June 1952. 9d. or 20c. 340