Journalese
Journalese
By
Robin Hyde
First Edition
The National Printing Company, Ltd
Delta House, Anzac Avenue
Contents
The Song-And-Dance-Men
IN a glass dish on the little office table were some wheat ears which to me looked uninteresting and decrepit. Nevertheless he had to arise, go forth into the outer office, and have a ten minutes' heart to heart talk with their owner.
When he came back, “It's like that,” he said dejectedly, “all day long. Have a cigarette. You can roll your own, I suppose? Those things,” with a bitter glance at the wheat ears, “were raised from seed that came out of some Egyptian tomb or other, about 3,000 years ago. He's germinated them. Now he wants to know if it's any use growing them in New Zealand—you know, on a serious profit-making basis. No money, no fun. Yes, that's what it's like, and all day.”
It is like that all day, in New Zealand journalism. In most of the grimy little second, third or fourth storey newspaper offices (no decent journalist was ever yet in on the ground floor about anything), life becomes a matter of routine work and of suffering fools sadly.
You'd think that these little offices would at least be obscure. They are not. All the wrong people know them off by heart. They are frequented by religious maniacs, women who state that they have been drugged on respectable racecourses and want a lot of publicity about it, more women who know the inside facts of murder trials and the most unprintable vital statistics.
There are also people who want you to believe like grim death (and in capital letters), all about a new faith-healer, bookies who won't be content to tell the tale once and leave it at that. Returned soldiers come up and offer lady writers bootlaces— brown ones at that. There's usually a sale, because there was once a war. I have sat by, suppressing mirth even as the Dormouse was suppressed at the Alice in Wonderland tea-party, whilst a powerfully-built woman with a chin that wouldn't take “No” for an answer made a determined effort to sell my editor dainty articles of underwear. (If there is a door between editorial sanctum and aide-de-camp's dugout, it either won't shut or doesn't fit).
There is also the telephone, and about this I would write with some feeling. It hits the women writers hardest and oftenest, and is used mainly by Wrong Numbers or by women whose names have been spelled incorrectly in, or left out of, the social columns.
I think journalism was begotten in sin, anyhow. If not, to judge by modern New Zealand newspapers, there's not a thing in circumstantial evidence.
'Way back in the time when we were discussing 3,000 year old wheat ears, the patient farming journal editor was trying to explain that journalism in New Zealand is changing. Before our eyes…
First we had America, then we had the depression. We could have stood either, but not both. And the Newspaper Proprietors' Association, such of it as is not already broke, has taken to crooning “For ever to have and to hold” over its money. There is what I call an extremely vulgar interest now taken in figures—outside the fashion page.
There used to be song-and-dance men on the stage. If you didn't like them, you threw tomatoes or raspberries at them. Otherwise.… you rather loved them. I don't know if you remember, but
Auckland Sun out —— and some sunset! Down in Christchurch, the first N.Z. Sun newspaper, to my mind the most likeable daily in the Dominion, cuts down on its contributors, and gets busy paying for its promising little brother's funeral expenses.
Christchurch Weekly Press out. …. with it, personal and vain-glorious memory of my first short story cheerfully featured on the paper's billboards. Green poster, black lettering —— and they were man-sized letters, too.
Read “The Seagull and the Wren,” by
“They said,” explained another Christchurch editor to me, “that it was a damned shame to pay 30/- for that story. So they put it on the boards.”
I'd have spent an extra couple of guineas, in fact probably they'd have been spent long before the cheque ever arrived, but there you are: black letters on a green board, sempiternal.
Otago Daily Witness, where for so long a while old Paul dug his toes into the trenches, and put up a stout fight after leaving the Labour cause: Aussie, where the Diggers used to read bits about one another: and more. Not only in New Zealand, of course. Years ago, the light that was the Triad flickered and failed when
One may find the new journalistic breakfast foods, syndicated “tripe” features run cheap from America, a bit glutinous and pre-digested. But the song-and-dance men are gone from the stage, and the men who could simply write are gone, most of them, from journalism. Sic transit. Still, we shall speak a little of what was, for much of it deserves remembrance.
Chapter I.
“The Garden Where One is Merely in Life”
it was ages and ages ago, in war days, as a matter of fact. They were publishing in England gift books, a Queen Mary's one, her Majesty very sumptuous in coronation robes of sapphire velvet on the frontispiece, a King Albert one, because everybody loved the late King of the Belgians, and the Blinded Soldiers' and Sailors' one, which was mine. I remember sitting curled up in front of a fire whose small black soot-demons flew like gnats from a dark-gulleted chimney, reading a story about a little boy who was, oddly enough, called Booley. He kept wanting the most unlikely things: first some red currant jam, then a king's crown, then a beautiful smiling waxen lady in a glass case, a lady with very golden curls and the softest smile in the world. Someone, an officious guardian-angel sort of person, eventually turned up with a little package labelled “Keys for Booley.” When he opened the cupboard where the red currant jam was, it didn't taste at all well, as it had been locked up a few centuries too long. And the King's crown (he had the key to that also) was too heavy, and when he opened the case where the waxen lady was, she still lay there, but she had stopped smiling. Then the guardian-angel person relented and came back with a last little key, and this was labelled, “the key to the Garden Where You Are Merely In Life.” Booley opened the garden door, and there was everything,
It's a rather odd thing, but journalism — or writing, if as nine out of ten young New Zealanders do, you enter the newspaper world hoping more to make a name for yourself than simply to be a £10 a week peg in a £4 a week hole—is exactly like that.
The things you want most to do, the things that look like triumph from afar off, you are given keys to: and in retrospect, you are more or less disappointed with them all. Then you're given the last key, I daresay it's imagination alloyed with a sense of humour, and you find, in the least likely places, at least a glimpse of everything you ever wanted.
Newspaper office — that should be like
Actually — you're high up, far above the grey streets and their mists and their little silver arrows of rain. Sometimes you haven't any window at all, because the favourite thing, in most newspaper offices, is to divide all spare floor-space up into rabbit hutches with compartments just a little sounder than cardboard. If you have a window, it's a tiny one. If you have a radiator, its cord is too short and you can only warm the most distant sectors of your limbs. If you have a telephone, somebody downstairs, usually a printer or a manager, is cursing fluently on the wire whenever you most wish to use it.
In the file room, where papers of the early days
In one such office, the walls are covered with the photographs, mostly very faded, of hundreds and hundreds of "oldtimers." They wear beards and whiskers, have been read for anything up to fifty years' time—and how they watch you, from the walls! Perched on a high cupboard is a skull. It was the extremely personal belonging of a Bohemian artist sort of fellow, whose death and subsequent bestowal were apparently a bit irregular.
Somebody says "Come along out and have a cup of tea." In Wellington there's one little all-night restaurant, Clewer's, where tea and toast seemed to have become a sort of journalistic habit. Auckland has a "literary corner" in a small teashop, too. Almost impossible to describe — the warmth and friendliness and the talking of "shop," none but the dull avoid the talking of "shop"—which goes on at such corners. More than anything, it's like the sudden lighting up of a darkened stage in a pantomime. All the little harlequin figures begin to move in a light that is warmth as well just illumination.
Your "beautiful wax lady": perhaps, if you're both feminine and unsophisticated (even since the war I have met some very young New Zealanders
And yet: there's an old house of wood, white-painted, shaded rather darkly with trees. Floppy-eared cocker spaniels, most sociable and wise and funny of all dogdom, accept their place in the sun here as a matter of course.… In a tree by a little dark pool sits a morepork, blinking at you out of cynical amber eyes. There are real cedars of Lebanon, sad-coloured, low-growing trees, and there's a tiny fountain. That is all—except such a charm and such a grace that it's like an indwelling spirit in this old house.
Another old house, a country one this time. Through the cool glades of its grounds you catch glimpses of arum lilies, cream-petalled, and the light makes great golden shafts among the pine trees. Yellow banksia roses tumble over the shabby white-painted walls, which could quite well do with another coat of paint (only they're much nicer as they are.) The banksia roses curtain into darkness the low verandah where people are chatting together. Suddenly there's a vividness in the air, and round the corner into clear sunshine comes the horses and their riders, the girls astride mostly, tweed-habited, a bright glimpse of hunting pink as the huntsman passes, a laughing confusion, the note of a horn, youth that is somehow very beautiful.
How slight they are, the notes of music, colour-tones of youth and deeper, softer tones of hospitality and grace. And how odd it is that not so much the frost-blackened nights and sullen grey mornings of
That is the garden where you are merely in Life.
Chapter II.
They Want to Write
Everything delicately lovely surrounded her. There was a tiny Venetian flower-boat in porcelain, an etching of a boy with his impish face puckered up into a whistle.
“There was too much poetry written in that Form,” said she firmly; “I believe, my dear, they used to read ‘Poems of To-day,’ go out and contemplate for a bit—and lo, forthwith another poem.”
It used to be her Form, as far as literature, alleged literature and literary attempts were concerned. And it was at Wellington Girls' College, where we all liked her—and I think that on this especial point she was wrong.
What is it gets into the blood and dreams of youth, singles one out here and there, shoves obvious incompatibles into a group, says, “Create, or be damned?” Of course, you probably are, anyhow, in the long run, but you don't know that for the time being, and perhaps you, or somebody else, may create something worth while. I suppose that usually, with women, it's best done via matrimony. But there were some, a group of malcontents if you like, who couldn't be content to leave well alone the scornful crystal moons, the bluegums straight as masts on the Wellington hills. They wanted to write. A similar group might have been found among our predecessors, the girls whose feet had hollowed out the College stairway, a wooden one, into little grooves, as the stone stairs in the caves of Kor were hollowed out by the tiny passing feet of Rider Haggard's “She.”
In Auckland, there's the same restless ill-worded wish among the 1934 youngsters. Well, anyhow, if it does little else, it provides the Funny Men who criticise the works of “budding writers” with a jolly good Aunt Sally. … . and one impotent when it comes to hitting back.
Free Lance office, Panama Street, Wellington. There reigned old Mr. Geddis. Probably there'll be a long line after him, but none will ever have more impressive editorial eyebrows. First poem printed, something about Poppy Day. But it was the dickens of a while since Poppy Day, no cheque had arrived. Beard the lion in his den, then……
There was something majestic about that editorial retort (quite kindly though; editors always are quite kindly to kids with pigtails down their backs, who come in and want to know why they haven't been paid for their work).
“But that was for a patriotic object. We didn't think you'd want money for that.”
I went out feeling like an interesting zoological sort of cross between Judas Iscariot and a worm. On request, would have executed a fleshy wriggle on the office floor. I never thought of asking him whether he gave away Free Lances, really dinkum free, or advertising space, when a patriotic object was in view.
About that time I read
There was much fun, though, in just trying to write. There is for everyone. Over in Australia, the Bulletin and the Triad shone stately, like Aldebaran and Neptune in our sky. (The literary sky's eyes must twinkle, rather, to watch the immense earnestness of beginners.) The Bulletin said “Promising,” twice it did. The Triad said “Shows signs of unusual promise,” which is, I suppose, the sort of thing you might say about a new kind of tomato, but I cut it out and kept it.
On second thoughts, the Triad certainly did best to lock it in the old oak chest. Meanwhile a contributor to the Dominion, I think it was
I heard a story about him that I liked very well. It happened (men say) when he was on one New Zealand paper, the editor of which everybody hated in the extreme. After listening to much blackguarding of this gentleman's ways and works, “I say, look here,” said the then youthful Mr. Baume thoughtfully, “this man is an editor, isn't he?”
It was agreed that such was the hideous state of affairs. “Then,” said Mr. Baume, with the air of one who doesn't let trifles stop him, “if he wanted me to kiss his foot, I'd do it.”
In the 1922 days stuff you remembered was going into Triad pages, some haunting poems, prose that had an edge like a scimitar. A man called Baeyertz was running the show. He was rather excitingly rude to almost everyone. You'll remember that the Triad described the singing voice of a gentleman of the Fuller clan as a “pig's whistle.” Said gentleman, possibly acting on the principle, “I don't care what you may say about me so long as you mention my name,” sang scales in court to prove Baeyertz a liar, but lost his libel action.
The mana of the Bulletin was great, and had its awkward moments for its many imitators over here in New Zealand. For example, I know of one New Zealand periodical which does its honest best, in the sweat of its photographers' brows, to cut something of a social dash. The Bulletin boasted —still boasts — social columns of the racy ilk. “Copy that style,” was the edict passed around among the New Zealand periodical's city social contributors. Down in Christchurch was a little lady who could write herself, anyhow, and who didn't much like being invited to copy the style of some other person. She's the only person I know of who ever definitely out-Bulletined “Bulletinese.” She sent one bride to the altar “neatly parcelled in white
The Bulletin was the first journal that ever paid me a cheque; I mean a cheque one could flourish, a cheque for a guinea, for a poem. May its substance never grow less. The poem was called “Pierrette,” which, of course, in those days nearly all first poems submitted to the Bulletin were christened. Now-adays I understand it's the fashion to call your efforts “Pink-Fronted Omnibus,” or something like that, but it's the same thing under a new if dingier label.
There's a lovable touch in some of the magazines put forth… . . and at what trouble, only the editors and staunch contributors know… . . by Colleges and Universities in New Zealand. Once on a day, some old wartime copies of the Canterbury College magazine came into my hands. It's sometimes asked if that lost generation, the wheatfield scythed so swiftly and strangely, was really the knightly thing that it has become in the minds of old men who limp along in Anzac Day processions.
Your answer's in magazines like that. There was such a bravery and generosity as only youth triumphant could show. Some of the contributions were odd little scraps of verse, or rather humourous letters. The stuff didn't get into anthologies or imagist collections, I suppose even such of the writers as survived have more or less forgotten it now. But it was touched with gold.
Wellington is a place that everyone passing through or staying in for a couple of days hates like henbane. It's so wind-tossed. And if you stay much longer, you get to love it. It's so wind-tossed.
Fitzherbert Terrace, the one street where huge dark pines used to grow in an untidy, fatherly-looking row, was the street associated with
Among New Zealand writers themselves, there is too often a ridiculous prejudice against the solitary voyager—and, curiously enough, man rather than woman is the chief offender, damning, or, to be more accurate, attempting to damn with faint praise, tepid civilities, depreciation. Though there is a certain drawing-room politeness preserved towards the dead, it does not go very far.
There's no need to write everything about those who want to write in a past tense. They still do. Among the Auckland University College students, two lads in the sweat of their brow and with their own printing-press, brought out The Phoenix, a quarterly now defunct; and brought it out pretty well, even if, in its first issue, Mr. D'Arcy Cresswell, author of “Poet's Progress,” did choose to sound so infernally ladylike about what New Zealand “culture” (Gott mitt uns) should be. It was a magazine of good printing—and how that counts!— some good prose, politics which certainly made you feel that wisdom doesn't always come out of the
Canterbury College, with its crimson-covered and hastily-suppressed little Oriflamme, printed in 1933 by a very small student conclave who later learned a bit about iron hands and velvet gloves, also provided some entertainment. I had one of the original copies. There was nothing whatever sensational in it, unless you count an advocacy of Free Love and extenuation of sexual diversions by one student. I thought his article was a little old-fashioned.
Just “wanting to write” usually ends, if your parents are well-to-do, in a head-and-shoulders photograph of you in the Free Lance, with a caption underneath like this:
“Miss Barbara Wuffles, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. T. Wuffles, ‘The Kennels,’ Dogsdale, who has gone to England to further her studies in music, for which she has a decided talent.”
I mean, by the time you're twenty or there-abouts, you become so ashamed of your heretofore literary aspirations that you'd as soon as not have a nervous breakdown should they be mentioned, so your parents vamp up another talent for you and pack you off Home.
If you're poor, you probably marry someone or get a job in a shop.
But there is a lady named Luck, a most capricious wench. So there was also a job, when I was sixteen years old, in the Dominion newspaper office, not the astonishing new building, the old disreputable one off Lambton Quay……
For a while, when the “minnie golf course” was all the rage and you couldn't step into a public building without treading on a “minnie,” there was one in the top floor of this old building. (This, of course, after its newspaper days were done.) It was tall and narrow, and the editorial staff roosted like corbies on the second floor. For a while I had what
But soon I was transferred to the “morgue.” The “morgue” sounds worse, but if you're at all sentimental and frequent newspaper offices you love it. It is very cold, usually fireproof and with a heavy safe door like a bank vault's, no windows of any kind whatsoever, and all around you, on shelves, are the huge leather-bound volumes of old newspaper files. The Dominion had an imposing morgue. Files, not only of its own publications, but of overseas papers with the queerest and quaintest old gaillard advertisements, went right back into the past, into days of gallantry and esprit. Just such advertisements must my beloved and erratic
Which reminds me: the most interesting of all Dominion files were those dating back to the days when “Bill” Massey was in Opposition. Being in Opposition may be bad for the little white soul and for the pocket, but it does wonders for the literary style…… a truth which never seemed to get home during the Dominion's later, larger-building days. Already the old “fighting files” were changing from black and white to the ivory colour that speaks of a page past and done with.
I liked the 'wayback articles signed “C.J.M.” every bit as much as the most highly-paid overseas “whimsicalities”: in fact, more, they were more human, not self-satisfied or standardised.
C.J.M. — otherwise
The Dominion ran a little rural journal, the Farmers' Advocate. I was its “Aunt Mary” and christened chickens, cows, children, on a page for the young idea. May God and the said chickens, cows and children forgive me, sooner or later. Doing that and doing more things, mostly scissors and paste, for the Dominion, meant the weekly payment of 30/- a week, which looked princely. The hours of the Dominion were long, as they always are on a morning paper, whose great presses are throbbing away, like a heart that won't stop, at about 3 a.m. Then your papers are passed put, under chilly sky and moon, to the lorries. But in these early days, I certainly wasn't “requisite and necessary” at any such hour. Later on, there were all-night sittings in the women's press gallery… but that's later on.
There was a daily column for upwards of 20 years under the initials “T.D.H.” Tom, Dick and Harry, that stood for. As a matter of fact, the writer, a quiet sort with eyebrows which refused to lie down and a stoutly-built person, was the Mr. Field who wrote “The Truth About the Slump.” Depending on which side you take, you agree that this is the worst or the best explanation of the depression yet supplied by New Zealand letters. Mr. Field has taken the depression very seriously, and the extraordinary thing is that somebody doesn't rope him in for Parliament. But in those days, I remember him as a man whose funnyisms (his column was supposed to be “light”) were practically always funny, and the wee scraps of verse with which he concluded his day's toil were never wrong. God wot, his erstwhile column is not so to-day.
Prime Minister “Bill” Massey, his last election successfully carried, lay a-dying. I was too busy christening chickens to know the difference between Reform and Liberal — or even the astonishing latterday corollary, that there's no difference at all, both are in the soup together.
Truth published a cartoon of Massey's face, I remember, a fat morning-sun face, all beaming. “The Survival of the Fattest.”
It was printed somewhere or other that he was asked “Whom do you think will be Prime Minister?” And he whispered, “That fellow in the next room there.” The fellow in the next room was, of course, Mr. Coates. But perhaps the tale was only put around slightly to reduce the frightful and unfair handicap under which he started…… the fact that the public had got it into their heads
All the world saw Massey borne past through
I remember the election night when Coates went out of power. In front of the Dominion buildings, where the failure of something that had been the paper's very life and reason for living was placarded, item by inexorable item, the crowd roared. It wasn't a sporting crowd. It gave no audience to men defeated. All its own speech was the ancient “Vae Victis.”
A member of the Dominion staff: “Well, we thought everyone was listening to the Thunderer. 'Pears nobody was.” After which some of us went out and had a party, or would you call it a wake?
To the last day of his active editorship,
It is a pity they ever had a minnie golf course in the old—and not half so impressive—Dominion building.
Chapter III.
The House is in Session
When you're in Wellington, and darkness and the mists have settled down comfortably for another evening, it is quite possible that you will be fascinated by the lights. Auckland glares more… hard red and blue of Neon, a bit like Hell… Christchurch is properly dim and religious, Dunedin is gloomy, but in Wellington the lights in the harbour water whisper “Venice” to you, and you just hold your breath. It's the only place where I ever saw a 'bus completely surrounded by thousands of floating bubbles of opal. Mist effect, seen through a frosted window. Round Oriental Bay, water lapping up black by the Parade, seagulls screaming like untamed shrews among the little half-seen boats rocking at anchor, the lights, fat mellow golden ones, are arranged in threesomes. They remind me of Alfred Noyes' bacchanal fruits… “Grapes like melons—nay, clustering suns.…”
Mast-high beneath the deep-cleft shadow of the Tinakori Hills, and above
It tells you a lot of things. If relief works, unemployment, folly of laws, have crept like an ague into your bones, you probably curse the three lights, going by. If you're a fat person in a fatter motor car, you wonder how much longer they'll be able to stick it out. New Zealand politics seem, at the moment, to be acting on different types either as an
But the House itself, dating back to old days, when either muddles weren't so bad or we, being completely without education instead of half-educated, thought more of our chances of getting past them, has an interest deeper than the animosities of the moment. In some ways, it's as old as Magna Carta. Looked at from a strictly Colonial viewpoint, its history begins with the days when Auckland papers contemptuously wanted to know why the Capital and seat of Parliament should be placed in “a contemptible little fishing-village.”
Once Government House occupied part of the large and sprawling territory now covered by the Parliamentary Buildings. There is one great bare-looking room which was once on a day lustrous with the light of chandeliers, and crinolines spread there petal-wise, as the debutantes danced with the handsomely-uniformed blades of two generations ago.
You can see the sharp transition in period as you pass from one part to another of the House. Left (underneath the reared mast that displays the three little lights of Session) are such rambling obscure territories as the Law Drafting Department; sly little stairways lead you up to official rooms. There's a shadow of the old-time gay hospitality there still, the all-white reception room, in which Ministers' wives hold their official tea-drinking Marathons. There too is Bellamy's, which was forbidden territory to every petticoat whatsoever until Mrs.
However, Elizabeth being elected, they took the “No Women Permitted” notice down. History made all over again.…
The centre of the Parliamentary Buildings is where all the talk and all the legislative fun goes on. It is a rather fine structure—white marble, simple and stately in construction, as beheld from without, within beautifully polished, the grey streaks and markings of New Zealand marble showing like clouds and seas in the fitted blocks. Granite columns, gilt-topped, for the “Lords”: polished wooden shields, engraved with the names of the engagements in which New Zealand forces took part during the war, looking down on the red-carpeted floor of the Lower House.
The right wing is old, stair-wayed, lined with the many faded, scowling, bewhiskered portraits of Members long dead and gone. Upstairs the library: a little hall in which captured flags, torn and fading, show their black eagles against once blood-red fabric: the little glass case and Massey's Treaty of Versailles pen: the section of the library which is for M's.P. only, and through the mazes of which you proceed by the queerest little curling staircases of galvanised iron… down, down down.
There's another such curling iron ladder to the roof of the Parliamentary Buildings. Members go up to “take a breather” and watch the stars from a properly respectful distance. Their friends aren't supposed to, but do. They are summoned back to
“The doors are locked.”
All so solemn, but you get to like it. There has been more than one suicide from the roof of the Parliamentary Buildings, by the way. Also more than one little fire in the maze of old corridors below… . . rather timid little fires, but incendiarism dimly suspected during the past tempestuous three years.
An elderly Government Whip, returning from Australia, where he had been part of a British Empire delegation, once said to me that he was sorry for the Members who grew old and were thrown out. Inevitable, of course… . but their lives got so utterly bound up in caucus, in a ringing of division bells, in absurd solemnities.
“I dreamed that I dwelt in marble halls,” he quoted, and laughed rather sadly.
He was thrown out himself next election, with the general Coates debacle. Nor has he returned to his marble halls. He used to look very solemn and portentous, though, leading the Government flock over the red sea of carpet to the lobby, where the “Noes” — being in overwhelming majority — so invariably “had it.”
The press gallery proper is rather comfortable, equipped with swing chairs, special telephones, a decent view of the House. The women's press gallery (so-called) is a damnably uncomfortable and narrow little bench in front of a public gallery to which all women are admitted—overflow from the main ladies' galler—and in which a consistent hiss of chatter is kept up as you strive to get the sense (if any) of what is being said down in the chamber below. If you want to know for certain that you belong to an inferior, yes, a most inferior sex, spend an all-night sitting cramped in the women's press
Members of Parliament are the most awful liars. That is well known, but they are even more awful liars than you would expect. I was eighteen when I went to the women's press gallery first. Only the circumspection of a ware and wily sub-editor saved the Dominion from a plain statement in its next morning's columns that prior to the Opening of the House, a thorough search was made in the cellars, this custom having been brought out with the sailing-ships, a relic of Parliamentary procedure since the Gunpowder Plot.
Well, it was so convincingly told. There's a living for any M.P. who survives two elections as a confidence man, should the third election catch him napping. However, few actually do take to this. They still go on in optimism about “come-backs,” like boxers.
All the same, politics and their interpreters become of almost dramatic interest, like white mice in a schoolboy's locker, where would the fun of life be without them?
And there's a lot of kindliness in the House. I remember, there was one reporter in the women's press gallery who walked on crutches. One night, after the House had risen and the little group of Members was beginning to drift away, a voice hailed her from below: “Miss Novitia; Miss Novitia.”
She waited, and presently a message was sent around to say that on occasions when she had to stay late at the House, a car and chauffeur were at her service.
The voice belonged to the then Prime Minister,
There's a little tearoom in the left wing. It's distinguished mainly by the fact that its waitresses seem to have been there always, are invariably smiling and courteous. A notice says it's intended strictly for the wives and families of M's.P.—if such is the case in actual fact, it's odd to think how many bigamists we've elected to Parliament, and how astonishingly prolific they have all proved.
That's where you are taken to tea.
Early days in the little cramped gallery, I remember a very pleasant woman who leaned over from a gallery alongside. (By the way, segregation of the sexes is rigorously carried out in all galleries, even the Lords, poor old dears, sit alone in masculine solemnity in their own little niche. For interjecting from a gallery you are merely thrown out. A second offence disqualifies you for good.)
“Come along to tea,” said the very pleasant lady. Right willingly I followed her: but was alarmed when she sought to enter the door of the above-mentioned little tearoom. I warned her that only the elite and elected might take their womenfolk there. She laughed.
“That's all right,” she said. And the waitress called her “Lady Parr.” She is dead now, after so long and so quietly-borne an illness. I don't think I have ever heard that she was unkindly to anyone.
Sir James Parr, who hates his own first name (“Christopher”) likes to think that the great New Zealand public think of him as “Jimmie,” which they don't (he is too intelligent to be popular), was Minister of Education then. He has replaced “Tommy” Wilford as High Commissioner,
I saw him last in the lavender-carpeted offices allotted to the Leader of the Upper House. He tried to stress the importance of the “Lords,” but so many a time in old days, just for a rest, I'd gone round to the gallery of their granite-columned abode and watched ancient gentlemen with beards, incredibly aged gentlemen who even displayed the remains of whiskers, asleep in their high, red-plush armchairs. Sir James was one of the few New Zealand parliamentarians to go in, well and truly, for radio talking. He had brought back with him, after his first reign as High Commissioner in England, a very great deal that he wanted to say. He wasn't encouraged to say it. Everyone knows, of course, that round about Auckland, a by-election cropping up rather opportunely, he was urged by many optimists to stand in the interests of a new party.…
The years put a period to enthusiasm about mushrooms.
The Upper House has its one great day, of course: the Opening of Parliament. Black Rod, blue-lapelled ushers, clank of swords, the flamingo-coloured plumes of military headgear, the Governor-General entering in state, Her Excellency smiling and be-flowered, in company with the little knot of distinguished guests “on the floor of the House,” as it's rather quaintly expressed. The red carpets laid down in the House cost £7,000.
It's nicer to watch, up in the gallery, the strange resurrection of old bonnets, old ostrich plumes, old lace, which existed long, long before the deluge of modernity. Just for the one afternoon of long-winded speeches and rather childish picturesquerie it comes back.
They called Sir Joseph Ward “our only statesman.” He was a shadow when he came back after
Of the shadow, some say “Dulce et decorum est.” Others, that Caesar was ambitious—without having the qualities of a Caesar. However, “the oysters were eaten and put down in the bill.”
Sir Joseph made a rather good speech in the House once after his dramatic “come-back”: earnest, clearly-worded, and he looked better as a shadow than as the heavy-jowled person of old Dominion cartoons: more like the last of the Liberals, and that used to be such a good word. It was associated with the story, I believe a perfectly true one, about “Dick” Seddon and his knee-breeches. The Seddon hatred of dress clothes, still more of “fancy dress,” was notorious. Consequence, he put his most princely garb on so seldom that nobody had ascertained, until immediately before his audience with the Pope in the Vatican, that he had grown considerably too stout for said knee-breeches. He managed to get them on… but his retreat had to be carefully guarded, after the gallant obeisance required of him, the “breeks” having split with a sound of thunder. It was also told, with an air of conviction, that on one occasion, forgetting the stockings necessary for his “fancy dress,” he borrowed a pair from his wife. Both stories are probably fairytales, but rather amusing.
The first time you hear Sir
The most dramatic incident in re Wilford that I can recall as having witnessed in the House was the historic moment when he practically offered the ghastly remains of the old Liberal party, “Lock, stock and barrel,” to Coates triumphans. A very sick man was Wilford at the time, it was said, but Coates declined to coalesce then.
At the Dominion, a little man with twinkling eyes recalled a somewhat similar incident during “Tommy's” Mayoralty.
“Every time,” said he, rather vulgarly, “that things get really stiff, Thomas does a wilt.”
In the women's press gallery, such as it was, what surprised me was the quite extraordinary interest in the number of illegitimate children one Member was supposed to possess. (“Eight, my dear, not counting those among the Maoris!”) If true, he would cut something of a dash in Soviet Russia, in that if in no other respect.
All-night sitting… . supper adjournment at 10 o'clock, Ministerial benches usually almost empty, Labour benches usually putting up at least a decent show. It's Labour members, of course, who talk at least nine-tenths of the session's shining hours away. The Government emulates Brer Rabbit—lies low and says nuffin'. I have heard the most impassioned oratorial efforts delivered whilst the Minister whose department they directly concerned was out of the House—probably asleep, somewhere. Sometimes, as the hours and the speeches wore on, the comatose didn't bother to leave the House. The late Sir
By the way, though the Labour Party provided at least 90 per cent. of the speeches and almost all the dramatic incidents of the long night watches, one wasn't, in writing flippancies about the House, supposed to mention them, no matter how unkindly. They were to be ignored. I was finally requested, point-blank, to omit all mention of the Labour Party from my daily column. Replied that one might as well ask for a snappy scenario about Adam and Eve leaving out any reference to the Serpent.
The Labour Party, some of it, wasn't so bigoted. I remember one evening of a racking headache, sort of headache that makes you keenly anxious for instant death, headache that makes it utterly impossible to listen to a Parliamentary debate, leave alone writing funnyisms or even truisms about it.… . There was a cup of tea that did cheer a bit, yes. What cheered still more was the fact that, on that night alone in the entire history of the excellent Reform journal for which I worked, every word of the next morning's column was written by a member of the Labour Party. A fair amount of it was a savage onslaught on himself, beginning with mannerisms and ending with mentality. I had to type it out later, but I still think it was one of the best columns that the paper in question has ever displayed.
The House used to be rather happy about its bathrooms, in which, as the night hours grew darker
There are some stately rooms here and there, lost in the maze of corridors. (Yes, and you can get lost there, though in the dear old doggy days, a Cabinet Minister could usually be tracked by sleuths by the little blue trail of cigar smoke that floated after him.) The Native Affairs Room is one of the best… executed in the dark woods and pawa shell glinting of Maori tradition, beautifully carved as a Maori meeting-house of that nation's great days might have been. Maori members make either hopeless or magnificent speakers. The late “Pom” had his flashes of wit (wasn't one of the few House “incidents,” other than those obligingly provided by the Labour Party, started when he christened the present Prime Minister, then just Mr. Forbes, “snivelling George”?) Sir Aripana Ngata I have heard speak like an orator over the death of a brother M.P.: “The canoe of Death, hollowed from the tree of Sorrow, must visit every house.” On the other hand, watching the stoutish Member for So-and-So ease himself sideways on through a door, one wonders how long the people of New Zealand will continue to prefer such infernally bad circuses to bread.
The House has arisen… Mr. Speaker, who has sat calm as a painting in his tall carven, blue-upholstered chair, and with something of a good painting's ever-watchful look, has swished from the
“Vox populi, vox dei.” You won't hear it at the Talking Shop, though.
Chapter IV.
The Odd Sticks
Titbits in Wellington started off so pure that one might almost have called it the clean sheet. Its spiritual father, so to speak, was a man on the Dominion, Temple yclept—a long, lean, rather sallow and sorrowful-looking man. For some reason known alone to himself and his Maker, he thought it would be a good idea to try a new weekly. He gave me some work and even some money (I was then in very early Dominion days) amassing recipes for assumed women readers; writing articles about the ideal home, of which I knew considerably less than nothing, having at the time a one-room pied-a-terre whose chief adornments were a ghastly-looking galvanized iron double bed and a curious branching candlestick, also of iron, bursting out into lotus blossoms. However, living there and on boiled eggs (since the hen is at least a reasonably pure-minded beast, but you never can tell with sausages), was evidently a good and sufficient qualification for my very brief free-lance association with Titbits.
From its period of chaste mediocrity it emerged bloody but sufficiently unbowed to pass from Mr. Temple's hands into those of a more enterprising editor. It became sensational. I think its highest flight in sensationalism was reached during the visit to Wellington of the American naval squadron. The hospitality with which those unfortunate visitors were received was nothing less than a scandal, and the worst feature of it was that the nautical equivalent of the “pore blimey infantry” were the
Undeniably, Australia's gutter press had worked up animosity against the squadron on—of all things —moral grounds. To be quite fair, I don't think that the dour lack of any general welcome displayed in Wellington was as much the fault of the women, as of those sterling protectors, the menfolk. To be seen in company with one of the city's guests was almost a stigma—in the first day or two at least— on any girl's character.
Titbits was the paper which went far, and, I am glad to say, fared very badly indeed, in its abuse of the moral character of the American fleet. Even the ranks of Tuscany could scarce consider the feeblest of cheers, when an article in this impassioned and disinterested weekly stated, “These Boys Aren't Boys, They're Beasts,” and went on to describe with some gusto an alleged incident at a Wellington bay, when a local girl had (once more, allegedly) had her garments somewhat damaged by an American sailor.
That article did more to give the fleet a belated welcome in Wellington than any amount of white-washing could have done. Journalistic indignation was roused to a point where it had quite a genuine ring: wild rumours flew about the city that the writer of the article had been (a) beaten by a justly indignant deputation from the alleged U.S.A. Tarzans, (b) that he had been even more soundly horse-whipped by members of the local Journalists' Association. At all events, there was a published retraction and apology—but the writer thereof showed a resourceful brain. Reprinting an article of much milder, even civil criticism, he stated that “he hoped it was not considered too strong.” The article that caused the real sensation was thus never really retracted nor, except in implication, apologized for.
The Wellington Journalists' Association decided
Sequel to this. The Journalists' Association found themselves out of pocket for a trifle over £40 expended on entertaining their missing American confreres. Well, in those high and far-off times, there used to be some money to spend. A member of the said woe-begone Association drafted out the most touching little plea as to how all had been informed—through Government error, probably— that many a good pressman and true was to arrive with the Wellington detachment of the fleet, that it was up to the Association to stand by and order the tea-party equivalent of a rum ration. Hospitality is sacred, and so on.
I took this up to the House, and told the sad story to one M.P., himself at one time a first-rate journalist.
There is many a kind heart beats underneath an M.P's. waistcoat. In no time, he had the full tale in the ear of the Minister of Internal Affairs, now regrettably deceased, but a most kindly old gentleman. I received a wire a little later—a congratulatory one. The £40 odd had been passed through the Department's estimates. Long live Parliament —that is, if only it would revert to type and spend money again.
It is quite true that a question was asked in the House subsequently by a Member of the Labour Party as to what should be done with the number of “illegitimate” children who arrived in due season
Sometimes as fixed stars in journalism, sometimes as ships in the night, one meets with those who have had quaint adventures. Should they be dead, the evil they are assumed to have done lives after them. I think it would be better if we thought more of the funny side… . since, of course, we can't take mere aspirations seriously.
Faces just passing by in a crowd, dead faces some of them, others grown old. And of many of them, one knows nothing good, except that they saw visions and dreamed dreams. Perhaps that is not a little, but everything.
When old
A young Enzedder, free-lance journalist, rather a good one, in between times theatre commissionaire or just any old thing that turned up, went to a show one night with three fair young maidens. At the
Later she found out that her second companion in crime had done just that down the street—and the third, at the top of the theatre steps. The youth must have fancied himself mistaken for a gigolo, but he bore up all right, and, besides, he was really quite a good journalist.
Relief works have occupied the energies of more than one New Zealand writer who, by using brain instead of pick, shovel or what-have-you, may end by bringing some very real credit to his native land.
But, of course, whilst articles, poems and such like can be accepted, staff jobs seldom if ever come the way of writers. The Newspaper Proprietors' Association has no money—sings that in its bath every morning. Also writers are supposed to be erratic. There was an historic occasion when
Very occasionally luck may smile even on a journalist. Ted Guy, sporting writer on N.Z. Truth, once won £1,000 in a sweep. He got so many letters from sick friends urgently needing fivers that he laid in a stock of halfpenny postcards
The “Count” used to conduct a milk-round down South in New Zealand. At first the Polish title of “Count,” which practically every literary paper in New Zealand has ascertained from his very expressive letters that he has discovered and doesn't mean to be done out of, didn't seem to content him: for once in London, there was quite a hefty scheme afoot, by which he and other shining spirits should become possessed of an island off Greece, Geoffrey to reign its King. Or is this story, which makes “The Count” sound a little like the spiritual fruit of an of course equally spiritual union between dear Edith Sitwell and the late (too late) Lord Byron, merely one of
Some New Zealanders, whilst yet writers, do contrive to do things in style. There is
When H.R.H. toured New Zealand, it was
Seriously though, I think perhaps New Zealand writers who have carried conviction “over there” do a great deal, merely in prestige, to help the odd sticks. Swedish drill became the fashion, didn't it?
And some of the odd sticks, I'd swear to it, are more than worth helping—out of this morass of slights and discouragements, little or no payment, recognition so far away. “Genius always makes good,” say the portly and complacent, omitting to mention how often the genius has been well and truly dead, probably in a quite harrowing fashion, long before the “making good” has started. London, where Dick Whittington does maybe get his one chance in a million, is afar, the fare, just so much, and these writers, the real ones, never seem to fluke a business head at the same time. All around, pressure of time, pressure of fools, pressure of indifference.
Another picture.… .
D'Arcy Cresswell's book, “Poet's Progress,” was first printed in the Christchurch Press columns, dead against the weight of mass opinion. Only now that it has succeeded everywhere, even New Zealanders have been heard to say that it's a good book. It's in the Defoe manner, and tells of the author's
Chapter V.
Outer Darkness
All New Zealand journalists, including several members of the Newspaper Proprietors' Association, are suspect of vague socialistic yearnings, though I honestly believe quite a number could bear up under the plain facts about the other side.
In a way, journalism and politics seem made for one another, like cooks and policemen. Where would the one be without the other, and why? Young journalists are invariably interested in politics, for one of two good reasons… either they want to “make” the Press Gallery at the House, which is a job of some importance and a good deal of fun, or else they are earnestly trying to find out just why the leader-writers of their respective organs—quite good fellows in themselves, many of them—should turn in such appalling “tripe.”
Erstwhile Reform or erstwhile Liberal papers (now confused, under the Coalition Government, to such an extent that the leader-writer is aware of very little beyond a desire to be as nasty to as many people as is possible) have by no means a monopoly of the cramped political style. I once met an editor of the Labour organ—nee The Maoriland Worker, and peppy enough in the old days. The editor's name was
In the outer darkness, beyond the twinkle of Parliament's three little lights, there is probably more fun for the roving journalist than in more orderly confines.
Election-time crowds… numbers being shot up again and again, on the huge billboards outside newspaper offices, as some hot favourite's majority slides to glory.
Speech by an earnest-minded little M.P., whose aitches had gone a-missing like Bo-Peep's sheep. Loud howl from the back of the multitude: “Hey— give 'im a haspirin or a h'aspirate.”
The 1913 strike, one of the most sensational episodes in the political history of the Dominion, had its brighter moments, apparently, though I was too young to imbibe that potent draught. But it is on record that
An extract from an account given by
“I recovered my good favour through the heights of the big 1913 strike, when I was fortunate enough to be the only pressman present at the most sensational moment of the business. I found myself mixed up with a violent mob intent on doing harm to the ‘specials’, at their quarters in Buckle Street. I took cover behind a fence in the storm centre. Shortly, stones, bottles and palings were hurtling in the direction of the barracks. The specials stood the onslaught for a moment, and then they charged the mob. The sinister note of a revolver was heard, and through the darkness firearms flashed. It was
Well, shall we? Yes, little ones: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all ye know, and all ye need to know.”
The New Zealand Herald, up in Auckland, had one of its rare moments of song concerning the 1913 riots. I think its outburst too young, too beautiful, to die, so reprinted in part herewith it stands:
The Men Who Broke the Strike.
Margaret, Peter and Jean:
Politics—so-called—introduced me to Mrs.
Mr. Fraser always vigorously disclaimed any hankering after the “unofficial” supporters who backed him up so staunchly (and so noisily) at the election when
I'm certain, if Mr. Fraser didn't actually perform this feat, that he could if he wanted to.
Mrs. Young, whose husband was “Tom” Young,
The quaint part of it was that her injured lord and master either detested or pretended to detest the whole situation. Not for worlds would he have opposed the overlords — still less carried out his wife's never-realised threat, and produced documentary evidence of their much less urbane politics during the old days of the 1913 strike. Interviewing Mrs. Young on behalf of a Wellington paper, I was informed by her that since she had announced her decision of standing her husband would not speak to her.
Mrs. Devanny would, though: so also several other “hecklers,” who bade fair to break up a meeting intended to be composed only of Mrs. Young's prospective election committee, and of the Press. It was held in the Oriental Bay Tea Kiosk. Interruptions were so frequent and so embittered that I couldn't refrain from starting something of a cross-fire. No referee being present, there's no saying who won.
Mrs. Young's first campaign meeting was at a little hall in Kent Terrace, and was dated, appropriately enough, for Guy Fawkes' night. She couldn't complain of having no audience. The hall was so crowded, so much more than crowded, that a way for her had to be forced through the mass to a side entrance. I don't remember how I got in (all
An overflow of the audience waited sullenly outside on the pavement. Some more overflow was perched in window niches, and, if I remember rightly, more than one window gave the mob best. Mrs. Young (it must be true that courage goes with red hair) made an attempt to speak. They threw crackers and other things… “Remember, remember, the 5th of November.”
It wasn't Mrs. Young's politics, which were apparently non-existent (she was far too mysterious and tentative about her “documentary evidence” for any rational person to take that seriously), but the sheer bad manners of the crowd which lured the youngest scribe present into doing something no person seated at a press table is ever justified in contemplating… . to wit, making a rapid ascent of the stage, beginning a speech. Moreover, for quite ten minutes it was allowed to proceed on its way untouched; I think owing to a certain amount of nervous prostration among those present, because no other young woman from nowhere had ever yet addressed them passionately as “Men, women and puppies of New Zealand.”
As for the speech, I believe it was otherwise so exemplary in tone that Miss Ellen Melville might have made it. All about the right of women to sit in Parliament, and damned be he who first cries, “Hold, enough.” Let nobody say that the wolf-pack doesn't sport a sense of humour. I was discoursing with some fluency on “our homes—our babies—”
Loud voice from the pit: “Thought yer weren't married, Miss.”
Second loud voice (encouragingly): “I don't mind marrying yer, Miss.”
Protest from a drunken gentleman, whom I tried to fix with a basilisk glare: “Shay, Missh, you trying to hypnotishe me?”
My impromptu speech got into the dailies, but somehow or other I wasn't sacked from my own paper, as would have been but justice.
There was a Town Hall meeting next… Mrs. Young, wise in her generation, took the absolutely unprecedented course of charging for seats at an election meeting. I am certain that this has never been done before or since. She did it, she said, to keep the wild ones out — but they paid up their shillings like little ladies and gentlemen. It was a more orderly meeting, though Mrs. Young forgot her lines—if she had many.
Like his late leader, Mr. Holland, Mr. Fraser is a lover of poetry. Mr. Holland, of course, wrote his own little book of poems, “Red Roses on Life's Highway.” I hope that unlike every other book of New Zealand verse I have ever heard about that one sold, because somehow one couldn't withhold respect from the leader who suffered so greatly in his youthful Australian days, who fought so bitterly here, who was deep-learned in history and in books old and new, who was never to see the cause he upheld come into its own. I can remember him, crippled and shabby, limping along Lambton Quay in the small hours, whilst Cabinet cars slid grandiloquently past.
The Glaziers' Harvest:
Probably the most sensational incident in the outer darkness of politics—most sensational, that is, since the 1913 strike, when “the cockies came to town” to break the biggest strike New Zealand remembers—was the street rioting in Auckland, 1932. It is safe to prophesy, however, that more history will be added during the next two years.
“Jim” Edwards, hero of the principal riot, the Thursday night affair of smashed windows and stolen goods, broke into the news first as a fiery speaker at meetings far redder in quality than the official Labour Party—prescribed pale pink pills by all its best quacks — would be likely to stomach.
I first heard him speak at the little London Theatre—Auckland's one and only sixpenny picture house.
“Jim,” still quite young though the father of eight, dark-haired, apparently with the constitution of an ox, a good speaker of the fiery style, owes Mr. Upton Sinclair a lot more than he would probably be prepared to acknowledge.
The first real clash, too (though of course everyone had been doing his or her British best to bring the thing on by anticipating it, and Auckland was simply over-run with hopeful specials-to-be, mostly recruits from the Colleges), took place outside the G.P.O. at noon one day with brickbats so plentifully provided by the Government at the old Railway Station site immediately back of the Post Office. Followed a Wednesday afternoon clash outside Bycroft's, in Shortland Street. A small detachment of police was mobbed there, and it is very generally admitted that had not Edwards made an attempt to control the crowds (who were slowly jamming “the defence” against a lorry), some of the police might have fared worse and gone a very long way farther, in a direction not likely to be popular with them.
There was a huge procession “set” for the Thursday night. Curiously enough, it was headed by eminently respectable Post and Telegraph department officials. The P. and T. had their own very just grievances—ventilated rather warmly in their little magazine, The Katipo, which has since been “suppressed” to the extent that it is not distributed on Post Office premises. It is, however, still flourishing: more than one official has had reason to
Mackenzie, Secretary of the P. and T. Association, an earnest man and a good speaker, but too emotional to get far as a leader, was with the front-rankers who swung past.
As was reasonably to be expected (since after the entrance of a very small percentage to the Town Hall, the police made an effort, gallant as it was indiscreet, to keep the rest of the dragon outdoors), it became impossible to find “parking-space” for the marching and now excited men. The rear ranks continued to press towards the Town Hall, not knowing quite what was happening in front. Mackenzie and other delegates set down for Town Hall speeches had effected an entry and nothing was known in the Town Hall of the disturbances outside. Less official but more powerful and popular leaders made a frantic effort to swing some of the procession into a lower street, making for the back entrance of the Hall.
After that, police accounts and procession accounts differ so materially that one pays one's money and takes one's choice. Edwards' statement and that of the many who backed him up was that on mounting a low concrete parapet to make a speech of thoroughly “pacifying” nature, he was bludgeoned by a police official from behind. Bludgeoned, beyond question, he was: but whether he first provided considerably more provocation than he admits is, as I have said before, a matter on which one forms one's own opinion. The police may have owed him some regard for his intervention in Shortland Street a day before. On the other hand, no speech of Mr. Edwards' made at the London Theatre or open air meetings could have been described as pacifistic.
At its very best, the bludgeoning must have looked uglier than it really was. On the following night I witnessed the same gentle operation performed by police truncheons on at least half a dozen skulls, young and old. It's an unpleasant enough spectacle to cause a good deal of righteous indignation. The truncheons (wooden, and not lead-loaded, as was incorrectly and unofficially stated later), cause a scalp wound and much gore. If the police wanted to provide a tame dragon with a taste for blood, they must confess to having supplied the wherewithal.
Edwards'Scarlet Pimpernel ilk, or even more notable, an agent provocateur of some use to the police. He was not arrested in any inglorious fashion, but walked into a police station and gave himself up.
“Jim's” downfall did the trick. Despite the neat little array of armaments (notably a deadly-looking piece of lead piping conveniently bound with a leather thong), which were produced in court next day, it would be simply silly to say that any considerable portion of the procession came along armed. The “weapons” produced were not sufficient in number, nor, had they been prepared, would the mob have rushed to collect stones from a rock-bordered “minnie” golf course near by, and palings from a slat fence. The fun began. But before
An old proverb says it's ill wind, etc. — which calls to mind the fact that Auckland's two principal plate-glass specialists, to wit, Phillips and Impey and Smith and Smith Ltd., reaped a glorious harvest, an ironical coincidence being that Phillips and Impey was one of the very few shops in Queen Street which had its plate-glass left undamaged, whilst Smith and Smith, safely domiciled up in Albert Street, likewise lost not a pane.
In a theatre, a suave “special” came on at the interval of an amateur first night (“The Constant Nymph” was being performed by the Auckland Little Theatre Society), to request the audience not to go out at the moment. The white handkerchiefs worn by the “specials” were faintly reminiscent of the Saint Bartholomew's Eve massacre of Hugenots: but I will always remember that intrepid force of novices best by the exclamation of an enormous and derisive lady in the throng. “Yah,” cried she, “Glaxo babies!”
His Majesty's Arcade, housing the old Theatre where all Auckland plays that hope for real success go on, is fairly wide, and the shops at one end could hardly boast a pane of glass among them, when at last the audience tumbled out to the still chaotic streets. One well-known Queen Street chemist's shop suffered a quite phenomenal loss of birth
On the next afternoon, the Waikato “cockies,” more politely known as the farmers, many of them old reserve force men with reverent memories of “Bill” Massey, came to town.
Equipped with a sense of humour, even the mob might have seen something distinctly funny in that wild ride up Queen Street, khaki-shirted farmers flourishing batons which happened, at the moment, not to be necessary either as reassurance or as means of attack. Though much had happened during that day of aftermath and of totting up damages— which ran into many thousands of pounds and were not covered by insurances—there was, at the time, nothing whatsoever doing in the quiet street of shuttered and boarded-up windows, one and all dismantled of everything that looked in the least valuable. The wooden shutters were kept up for weeks.
Had the farmers been lucky enough to arrive at a moment when that flourish of batons might have inspired a hard-pressed little band of comrades, they would, no doubt, have looked gallant. As it was, they reminded me irresistibly of
63 Newton Road, Communist headquarters, had been raided the night before. But little Schofield, the deep-voiced, white-haired American sailor who is veteran among that small knot of Lenin-lovers, was still industriously peddling copies of The Red Worker (now banned in New Zealand) among the Friday night crowds that thronged Karangahape Road.
Mayor Hutchison, much taken aback by Thursday's episodes, had threatened to read the Riot Act, which empowers His Majesty's forces to fire, at a few minutes' notice, on a crowd refusing to disperse. He would certainly have made history
Only one woman, also, was arrested as a disturber of the peace. She was a resident of Auckland's most plutocratic suburb, Remuera.
“Jim” Edwards was out of things… disappeared. There were many to say that he was dead…… secretly arrested. But the most persistent rumour in the crowd was that the miners were on their way from Huntly by lorry. It was a wild night.
The mounted police rode their sleek horses on to the pavements. Caught in a jam, one lame woman who couldn't get out of the way quickly enough, would have been trampled then: but an enormous labourer, evidently “one of the wild ones,” but not one of the unchivalrous, clutched her by the waist, swung her off her feet and out of the road.
“Stand back, you dogs — this is an innocent woman.”
Thank you, D'Artagnan of the crowds.
The splintering of plate-glass windows was sporadic—a stone flying here, then further up the street where it took some time for the police to “spot” the culprit. They were no respecters of grey hairs, to judge by the bloody ones seen that night.
There were one or two imitation baton charges —not the real thing, just a mere spectacular attempt to move the crowds on. Batons drawn, flourished in faces male and female: loud outcries…… The mob eddied into shop door-fronts. Many of them were there more for excitement than for any business reasons.
“Get out o' there, now—get along—no business there… . .”
Thing to do in an imitation baton charge is to zigzag… . get out, cross the street, make your way higher up again. What the thing to do in an honest-to-God foray may be, I haven't an idea. Pray for luck and a thick skull, I daresay.
The Huntly miners—mythical—really put a period to Friday night's excitement. It seems unwise to promise an angry crowd circuses unless you are ready, in due season, to bring on your bears. They “procrastinated evil,” as the Japanese publisher Noma has it, until midnight was near. Then the fuse spluttered out.
Some of the unhappy “specials,” nursing batons completely unloaded, were viewing pictures in the Drill Hall, and made no secret of the fact that they found it all very tame.
People when bored like trouble. New Zealand has had quite enough of the depression to bore rich and poor alike.
A rumour that
Time, well-known and witty American periodical, was a little flippant, not to say unkind, about the whole affair.
Alleged Time: “'Pon my word,” puffed Hutchison, Mayor of the City, “If you don't stop, I really must read the Riot Act.”
I'm sure the sober Auckland Mayor never puffed—however much he may have felt like it.
At the Ottawa Conference, an American newspaper blandly greeted New Zealand's delegates as coming from “a country whose chief occupations are riots, starvation and unemployment.”
I think they might have thrown in football and bookmaking.
Such is publicity. Since Massey died, we seem to have hit the newspaper world for a boundary only twice. Once by indulging in a most expensive earthquake, once by having a riot before our plate-glass was insured. And then, of course, there was that very sincere offer of paying our debts to the Motherland, when everybody, including the Motherland, knew we hadn't the wherewithal to pay them. However, hand-claps from the House of Commons were cabled out, and it's a comfort to get applause even in Press Association cables now and again.
Chapter VI.
Women In It
There once was a little restaurant just off Cathedral Square, in Christchurch. And, for that matter, I daresay that it still stands in the same old place. But on this particular hour out of all Eternity, I remember that the manageress didn't seem to mind whether bacon-and-eggs or cream cakes with “butterfly wing” trimmings was the cry, whether the ladies smoked or didn't, whether they stayed for an hour or two hours or from morn, till dewy eve. We were all in an inside room, sunflower-coloured, tiny mats and curtains of the bright gay yellow shining up against the outer greyness that is Christchurch on an early autumn day.
That was the time when women writers in Christchurch and from thereabouts (I don't mean placid social clubwomen with an occasional amateur writer thrown in like a silhouette on a Chinese lampshade, but women whose life was mostly writing or journalism) gave a luncheon to welcome a newcomer to the fold. Which was hospitable of them. I believe
The most vital person I can remember, from that hour in a funny little Christchurch restaurant, was not a young woman, and didn't look a strong one. Thin, grey-haired, small,
And there was more real force in her than in any ten of the rest of us put together.
A Japanese visitor to New Zealand, a few years ago, was asked by a reporter what made him come to this country. His reply was that
She was a journalist for long… . one of the few women in New Zealand ever entrusted with leader-writing work, in old Canterbury days. Keen insight into the world's affairs took her, the only New Zealander present, to fateful conferences in Ireland, where Eamon de Valera showed something of the card held by the most powerful and bitterly determined hand the Green Isle has known in a generation. She wrote of this, I remember, for the Christchurch Press, after the election when the Free State appeared to shake its shoulders free of the weight of domination laid on them over centuries. Her article impressed me as being the clearest-drawn thing I had seen in New Zealand journalism for years. Her Irishisms worry people like kindly but somewhat “precious”
A little house in a side-street just beneath Tina-kori Hills.… . I remember yellowing poplar trees there, the one day I went to tea with
The trouble would be, if it came to criticising
And there you have it, an understanding of all the simplicities, great and lowly, not to be explained away.
She was one of the New Zealand writers whom Mr. D'Arcy Cresswell damned without the aid of the old-fashioned bell, book and candle, and without the usual tepid civilities of “faint praise,” after Mr.
Of course there are decidedly entertaining little sidelights on the obscure position of women writers in this their “ain countree.” That starts long, long before I was born or thought of, long before older and better writers had started out to prove that what woman hadn't done, woman would none the less do.
When New Zealand women were engaged in a seems when one considers Mrs. Pankhurst and her lilies, how they grew, and how the Suffragist excitement in England was only thrust out of the limelight by the greater and more sanguinary sensationalism of war days), there was a little lady down in the Marlborough Province, a very discreet and restrained and modest little lady, whose husband most definitely Did Not Approve. He didn't like women writers: he was nauseated by the idea of women voters.
Oddly enough, his criticisms made least impression where they should have made most—in the bosom of his demure lady wife. In the secrecy of her chamber, she sat her down and wrote — firm newspaper articles, pointed ones, witty ones, human interest ones, all making it clear to the simplest mind that Women had Rights and was right after them. She wrote under an alias, of course, and her articles were all published in Southern papers. They created no little political sensation, and are deemed to have played their part in influencing the doubters out here. (New Zealand was the first country to get universal suffrage, you remember, even if the way its women have used their power is quite sufficient to put us in the backward-children class of Mother Earth's school.) I've always loved my little overshadowed lady, mainly because I can picture her, upstairs perhaps in a small beflowered attic sort of room, and with a softness of lamplight
was brave, alias or no alias. If you doubt it, go look upon the bewhiskered countenances of the menfolk whose legion portraits adorn the Parliamentary Buildings. Here were fellows not to be trifled with, no matter how engaging the trifle.
Two years ago, in the Auckland Library, I came on a dejected-looking copy of
Somehow that sureness gave me a feeling of sadness. What have we done with it, how lost it so utterly? “That one talent which is Death to hide. .” Year of Grace, 1932. No woman in New Zealand's Parliament yet;
I tried to persuade one quite open-minded young newspaper man to let me write about “the likes of 'er.” Nothing doing. We were all too depressed about the depression—thing to do is, pretend it doesn't exist, maybe to-morrow we'll wake up and find Santa Claus has dropped in. Besides, this wasn't a very respectable old lady. So many of them weren't: it made one feel happier, more (what's that dear old cliche?) in tune with the Infinite, when one found them alone and dirty and starving in
But no, I don't suppose really that it's much use bothering about slum tragedies. It would be all right, if the bulk of the people who had to be dragged into an interest in such were merely criminals, because a criminal you can almost always scare. But you can't frighten fools, until it's too late.
I know one New Zealand woman writer who was one of the Suffragette band in Merrie England at its merriest, the time when ladies were busy chaining themselves to railings outside important-looking public buildings. She is an Englishwoman, New Zealander by adoption: and first I saw her face, a rather fascinating one gaily topped by a tam-o'-shanter, in a portrait which decorated the little subterranean office of
Handling a children's page for a newspaper is a matter only less delicate than cruising through the social shoals. Witness the horrid experience of the Aucklander, Winifred Tennant, who was “Red Feather” and queen of the kids' kingdom on the late lamented Auckland Sun. She had to christen so many dear little pen-friends, also to bestow on them suitable “circle names.” Indian ones, she found, caught on to a quite remarkable degree. A little lass up North loved her selected pen-name, “Laughing Water.” And please, Red Feather dear, could her brother join, too? “Red Feather” had no objection, and christened the new aspirant “Little Prairie Flower.” He arrived in her office to see her next week. He was huge, alarming, nearly seventeen, and from one end of his district to another he was now, beyond prayer or pardon, “Little Prairie Flower.” I don't quite know how “Red Feather” passed the situation off; personally I should have offered to supply free beefsteak for black eyes over a period not exceeding six months.
Who now reads
Never let it be said that I forgot the one New Zealand novelist who has written a trilogy which has won most definite and well-merited praise overseas. Several have tried to catch the spirit of the New Zealand landscape—a subtle task, with all its tricky dull blues and greens and greys, the undertones of its surroundings and its life so much harder to depict than the critics (who, after all, are very seldom writers of any distinction) trouble to realize.
She has worked for her success, and it did not come to her easily, or in her youth. When I saw her first in the little women's Press Gallery at the House, she was a grey-haired woman. Her journalistic style was clever and whimsical, and soon she
Next meeting was up in Auckland.
She is the only scribe I've heard get a smart thrust home at the New Zealand farmer, who, taking him by and large, has made the local depression so very much more depressing. Backbone of the country he is, of course, and sees no need for a head-piece to complete the job. Nellie talked over the radio to the country folk: at the end of her pithy lecture, “Well, good-night, all you little Backbones,” said she clearly.
Chapter VII.
Footlights
To get a seat—or even, if you want technical exactitude, part of a seat—meant waiting for hours and hours. Nobody minded: the early comers to the queue in the little alley outside Wellington's alleged Opera House (never within my memory used for opera, and now converted into a cinema) kept cheerful because of their pre-eminent position—squashed flat against the closed doors. Late arrivals still had the bloom of optimism and the sociability of a cup of tea upon them. It was when the doors actually opened, and having climbed up a few hundred twisted stone steps, you realized you'd have to climb at least twice that number again before getting to the security of the Gods, realized too that the fat woman just behind you was showing the unexpected agility with which fat people so often do startle their competitors, that you felt a second's hatred of the man who planned that stairway.
Only for a moment… . then you were aloft, looking down over row and row of semi-circular wooden benches. A portion on one of these was your fate for the evening. Not anything so majestic as a seat. When the rows began to fill, a white-haired man used to wander along the aisles, shouting, “Hey, there, Cocky, move along, move along,” to your blushing cavalier. Usually “Cocky” had no objection. And while downstairs in the blue-plushed stalls solemn people purchased programmes and scorned the youthful vendors of “Swee-ee-eets,” upstairs peanuts and horrible home-made toffees were
At first, of course, it was only pantomime. Why only, when the pantomimes were in their fashion both wonderful and beautiful, which is more, Lord knows, than one can possibly say about musical comedies of to-day? There was a dazzling moment, brown and sunflower-gold, when girls who were all metamorphosed into butterflies of those shades came swinging out right over the stalls, on invisible wires.… That was surely magic, the opening brown and gold wings and the cheeky flowers pelted down, some of them falling right into the Gods. Then there was the smiling man with the snow-white poodles, eight of them, and after that a scene of weird magnificence and murk in Aladdin's cave, green and ruby-coloured demons arising in self-coloured puffs of smoke from the ground.
A solemn little girl came on and sang “When You Wore a Tulip.” Everybody admired her and her small partner very much, and the song, it was the first time Wellington had heard it, we thought very pretty. Many people whistled it.… But the little girl didn't sing it for the whole of the tour; her ballet skirts caught fire in the wings one night, and she was rushed away, to die in Wellington Hospital. Poor child of the yellow tulips—I don't suppose many have been so overwhelmed with flowers as she was in her sudden, lonely death.
The old Opera House was great, anyhow, in its way: all old Opera Houses throughout New Zealand are much the same. Blue or crimson plush, much-worn gilding, fat disconsolate plaster cupids which are invariably in dreadful need of washing. But here on the stage now empty, and watched only by the strange meaningless faces that flicker up from the cinema screen, Pavlova danced the Swan Dance, wonderful despite the fact that every alleged dancing teacher had taught a mimicry of it to the stolid
Although not comparable to Pavlova,
Lovely Adeline Genee eclipsed her, and is well remembered here. In her company travelled Volinine, the astonishing Russian dancer, who followed a rather expensive old custom of cavalier days, always smashing his wine-glasses that none other should drink from them. However, Volinine paid up for his shattered glasses. One night in the Wellington Opera House he performed a wild gipsy dance with so much vigour that the Gods, not content with
Those early days of the New Zealand stage were in some ways more adventurous than any we can brag of in the 'thirties, though nowadays any tiny hamlet which hasn't its own cinema must indeed be “last, loneliest, loveliest.” Although, in the very beginning of things, not so many companies thought it worth while to tour New Zealand, local societies whose ambitions, compared to the mild amateur theatrical aspirations of to-day, were as whisky and soda beside a particularly gentle cup of tea, had some great times. Down South started Pollard's Lilliputian Operas, from which numerous little New Zealanders eventually graduated to “the boards.” Mrs. Pollard, whose husband started this famous company, I met once in Christchurch — a quiet, gentle lady whose memory of the funny side of their great theatrical adventure was astonishing, and who possessed a huge pile of photographs of the “baby stars.” Gilbert and Sullivan operas were the company's chef d'oeuvre, and to doubt that the performances were really good would be to go against the judgment of every theatrical man and every newspaper critic of those high and far-off times.
Melodrama meant, of course, Bland Holt, who is still living in Melbourne. Bland Holt it was who, during one of his “thrillers,” “Lady Godiva,” brought on to the stage the first real, live horse ever
With one of the earliest companies to play Shakespeare in New Zealand was a woman who has since become mildly celebrated in quite another walk of life… .
Of course,
There were some desperately funny little crises in plays of the old days.
In Christchurch, amateur actors were not to be daunted by trifles. On one occasion, a hero was bidding a fond farewell to his sweetheart in her tiny attic room. Setting — said attic, an upstairs window, a door. Rushing to the door, and waving a last goodbye, he discovered to his horror that it had stuck. There was no other apparent exit, but this was a young man of “infinite resource and sagacity.” Crying “Goodbye” yet again, he made a dive for the window and stepped through it—regardless of the fact that to the best knowledge of the audience, he had to descend three storeys through empty air before reaching Mother Earth.
Once and once only, also in Christchurch, I have seen Grand Guignol stuff attempted, by the Christchurch Little Theatre Society. It was a dreadful experience. One playette, christened “The Nut-cracker Suite,” depicted the terrible vengeance of a cuckolded husband on his faithless wife and her paramour. He inveigles them to a house in the mountains carefully fitted with a moving ceiling, crushes them flat between ceiling and floor, whilst the strains of “The Nutcracker Suite” tinkle merrily in the distance. To watch the canvas ceiling descend in jerks, showing the empty space of the theatre beyond, was a gruesome ordeal for the most carefully repressed sense of humour.
Once within memory every seat at the Auckland Town Hall has been booked right out on the day the box plans opened. This was for Galli Curci's first New Zealand tour. Amelita Galli Curci is one of the very few singers who could win a success of personality, apart altogether from the quality of her voice. I heard her sing during the several concerts of her second tour: her youth and her gift were both so far on the wane that the Galli Curci legend would have been utterly defeated—had she not remained Galli Curci. I have never seen any other artist so completely and easily change the mind of an audience which came prepared for the worst. Her voice was thistledown — yet its tenuous, gleaming, floating little by little took the imagination, its delicate notes were as lovely as ever was the famous nightingale
The little Spanish singer, alive to her finger-tips, became a figure of note in the city during her stay there. She was not one of those deplorably uninteresting and stodgy concert artists who, on arrival at a strange place, instantly go to bed and continue just to grow fatter and fatter. On board ship she joined in all the deck games. A little Auckland dress designer of real originality—the first, I think, to introduce quaint “longs” and braces, coupled with bright-hued shirts, for women's wear — was enchanted to have Amelita come in and buy half a dozen outfits of this kind, for her voyage home. The Galli Curci press photographs, mostly open-air ones, taken on her wonderful dahlia farm or by the swimming pool where she and her husband spend the summers, were the desire of the informal sort of paper's heart, but Galli Curci, on her second tour, left behind her just one photograph inscribed with a special personal message. And this was not given to a friend, but to a girl who worked in a music shop, and who had made a speciality of introducing Galli Curci records to all-comers. “If you play my records,” said the little singer, “it is for you to have this.” And she handed over the portrait. At another store, she came in late one evening, kept the assistants some minutes after their usual time for departure. Every girl in that department received a gift of chocolates. Small things… . . yet, in a crowd of artists who deliberately cultivate an unpleasant manner with those not in a position to
The most comic incident of Dame Clara Butt's New Zealand tour was her appearance in Wellington in a glittering silver frock. From the Gods rang out the voice of one who evidently liked them massive: “Luvly tart!” Dame Clara joined in the roar of mirth.
And needless to say, I met the very antithesis of such pleasantly informal people. I think the most unbending singer I ever had the pleasure of interviewing (well, it was a pleasure, in a morbid sort of way), was
Hislop's assumption of the abysmal ignorance of all colonials was funny. A friend came in: he discoursed in French concerning the woefulness of having to see reporters.…… Quite good French, if not so expressive as his English had been when he was on the topic of Australians.
The first musician of any note whom I can clearly remember was
Melba's name was bestowed on a series of creams and perfumes displayed in New Zealand after her tour here. They were christened “Love Me” and “Ador' Me”—rather characteristic of the diva's vanity.
A picturesque personality was Balokovic, the Slav violinist who a few years ago arrived in New Zealand in his wife's gleaming white yacht, Northern Light. Northern Light was about the most perfect little craft that had ever glided into Auckland harbour, and sensation-hunters were much disappointed and annoyed when all access to the wharf where she lay moored was cut off, and sentries posted at the gate. This was natural, for
One of the first actresses from whom I had to extract an interview was tall, blonde
The really adorable lady of the “Barretts of Wimpole Street” company was, of course, Flush, the blue roan cocker spaniel, doomed by the irate Mr. Barrett to a watery grave on his daughter's elopement. I'm glad that the play permitted Flush to escape, even a stage death for a blue roan cocker of such impeccable manners and such a humorous little face would be too much altogether for this scribe.
“Happy and Glorious” was the only war play, with the exception of Sheriff's “Journey's End,” that has been shown in New Zealand. “Journey's End” — all whizz-bangs, no women, much shouting— went over with a bang, literally as well as figuratively. “Happy and Glorious,” which was a real play, enjoyed houses half-full, and restless, laugh-at-the-wrong-moment houses at that. It was queer, and anything not perfectly plain or simple is passing comprehension in New Zealand. “Macbeth,” poor martyr, suffered similarly. Had Macduff, in the closing scene, simply pulled out a revolver, banged it off and shouted, “You're dead,” all would have been well. But when the severed and covered head was brought in, the company not feeling game to introduce revolver practice into the Dark Ages, wild mirth was the result. “Happy and Glorious” evoked the same sort of reaction. Perhaps it was too much in earnest to be a good play…… and perhaps, yes, the public is always right, and living doggerel is better than your dead Shakespeare.
When
Ships that pass…… I remember how dreadfully disappointing
The first “Italian Grand Opera Company,” brought around by Fuller's and in Wellington staged in the house which was then famous (except among strict parents, who called it vulgar), for its vaudeville turns, was responsible for a novelty. You could “book” for the Gods. But the unscrupulous and wily bought blocks of seats, retailed 'em at a profit. There was something thrilling about the operas, yes: but I thought it amazing and also amusing that the second company's tour, also dubbed “Italian Grand Opera” (and all the stars were, of course, straight out from the Milan galaxy!) proved in Auckland not merely a popular success, but a social event. Not to attend each opera was, quite definitely, to leave undone those social things which you ought to have done. The operas were belarded with the most enormous sopranos, tenors more overwhelming still, and, to make things happier, almost interminably long intervals.
It was during a performance of “Rigoletto” that
was exquisite, one could have listened with shut eyes for any length of time), was dropped: all seventeen stone of it. I believe she was badly bruised, but gamely appeared before the curtains at the end of the performance.
The whole company lived in Shortland Street at a block of flats, indulged in Italian cooking. The singers were dears, rather. I met a mirthful little brown-faced baritone, laden with brown paper bags and parcels, heading up Shortland Street. He could speak but little English, but when I asked him what the shopping was all about, a wistful smile over-spread his face.
“Ah… Spaghetti… Macaroni… tomato, .… . ah, good…” he cried, in a crescendo of ecstasy. I think the company's Italian meals must have been delightfully entertaining.
Wandering through the flats in quest of an elusive prima donna, I found Molly de Gunst, the Queensland soprano whom the company had taken to its bosom, and who was taking the leading part in more than one opera. Big, black-eyed, black-haired, and with all the warm and amusing Australian friendliness, Molly led me away to view her flat. It was literally lined with bottles of beer. Everybody who called in the evenings seemed convinced that the girls wanted a party. Everybody brought the wherewithal. None of it was ever quaffed, for beer-drinking was regarded as a sin against the Holy Ghost. I've often, in thirsty moments, wondered what happened to all that beer. If it kept on coming in at such a rate, long before the company left Auckland they must have had quite enough to start a German cafe in style.
Szigeti, whose wizard violin was accompanied by the piano-playing of the little Russian Prince Nikita Magaloff, an exile from Reddest Russia since his baby days, was a musician of a shy and retiring
Probably the most dramatic concert artist whom New Zealand has seen as yet is
I wrote a verse called “Chopin Ballade,” posted it, without further comment, to the Russian musician, Pouishnoff. A letter of thanks and appreciation arrived at a newspaper office, addressed to “
I'm afraid women aren't really on equal terms with men yet. The compilation of “Who's Who” is a delicate matter undertaken by Dr.
A classic stage example of the fuss made over the (sometimes) sterner sex was provided when the youthful
The very nicest young performers whom I ever met were Auckland girls… . . Betty and
The New Zealand lasses (both in their twenties) started in a Sydney warehouse the little “Theatre of Youth.” Folk-songs caught on. They designed their own scenery, what little of it they ever used, and their own costumes into the bargain. Their music was the silvery tinkle of a spinet… . ideal accompaniment for the quaint musical fables that they brought to the stage. Here in Auckland, they were received as prophets—without honour in their own country, but their show was good.
Fragrance of steaming coffee… . ridiculous little blue and bright green scenery bits labelled “This is the Sea,” or “This is a Field,” the two troubadours in peaked hats and smocks, and an old harmonium (they couldn't find a spinet here) tinkling under the hands of a woman with coiled long hair.… Those two girls could do the most absurd things, and lo, they weren't absurd at all, but laughable, natural, refreshing.
One of these days, the Union Steamship Company will do the right thing and present
Long may it be before we ring down the curtain for ever on the old theatres of blue plush and begrimed plaster. No, I'm against renovating 'em. Once tidy up Eden, and in will slip your progressive “talkie” serpent. He has enough of earth to deal with as he list, let the trail of him be absent from some few chosen spots. Until they fall to pieces, let there be kept for those who still like it a ghostly haven where music is real, even the tiny undertones lost when you mechanise a melody: where the shadow of Pavlova sways in the wings, and the faces on the other side of the footlights are still flushed with a very human triumph as the curtain falls.
Chapter VIII.
Here Comes the Duchess
“Oh, my dear paws and whiskers… . here comes the Duchess.”
—The Rabbit, in “Alice in Wonderland.”
I don't care what anyone may say, a youthful journalist whose first encounter with the vicereine of her native land is when partially submerged in a mud bath remains, for the rest of her natural life, under a somewhat severe social handicap. She feels a wild desire to shriek with mirth at inopportune moments.
To be absolutely candid, it wasn't a full-length, nudist-cult sort of mud bath, but it was quite bad enough. Lavish display of mud-plastered anatomy, in that nightmare cellar beneath the old Bath Buildings at Rotorua. And, of course, in showing
Years later in Wanganui she was guest of honour at an evening arranged for a very varie-gated collection of British farmers… delightful folk, they were, all talking in their own “shire” dialects to keep the unsophisticated colonial both puzzled and amused. In walked she, looking very stately… aquamarines, I remember, delicately blue as the water of cave-pools against her black gown. And, like the dormouse, my faint longing
I felt much happier when I learned that as a girl, one of the Earl of Glasgow's gay young family, she broke her leg attempting to ride a cow in the neighbourhood of Auckland Government House. Moreover, when the vice-regal party paid state visits to lovely, lonesome little Opononi, on the Hokianga river-opening, she was the despair of the unadventurous, for ashore in normal fashion she would not go. She used the hawsers as a tight-rope: walked them with intrepid calm.
I wasn't the only person to feel some slight embarrassment during that long-ago visit of Sir Charles and
Now, whilst everyone wants to be a journalist except the journalists (and they, poor dears, would rather be writers or, failing that, receive pay that would satisfy a navvy), I never yet have met
Of course, some of the social “buds” themselves think that writing chatty paragraphs about their fellows is one way of earning pin-money, but the trouble with the social bud editress is not merely that she can't spell, but that she has positively no small talk. Moreover, a few weeks after she has started she begins to feel the chill draught of unpopularity… and the desk thereof knows her no more.
Which explains why the “social whirl” (you must talk in cliché when writing about this depressing subject) is usually left to quite unassuming and hard-working professional women, who as a general rule like dogs and gardens, only care for talk in a discreet moderation, and at nights probably shed briny tears into their bolsters over the bitterness with which Mrs. Browne has complained to the editor on discovering her name, minus the all-important E. in the social column.
The American Consul's Fourth of July receptions are the only New Zealand social ceremonies at which I have noticed something like the Australian custom of press segregation… . and there, of course, nobody ever minds, because the main item on the programme is always a complex American dinner, pies in profusion, demanding the devil of a lot of concentration. After that there are musical items and the Star-Spangled Banner, none of which is conducive to a wild yearning for the society of your fellow-creatures.
Thing to do, should Fate definitely decree that a social reporter, in the sweat of your brow, you must be until times get brighter, is to look out for the funny side. Almost invariably there is a funny side, and if you can't see it at the moment, later you may.
First garden party: it was 'way back in the dark ages; I was still on the Dominion, but an Auckland paper, desirous of one of those swollen circulations, had appointed a Wellington social correspondent. I was It.
Out at the Hutt, it was.… An old house, peak-gabled, dreaming in a garden whose wide green lawns were streaked here and there with copper and rose glory of zinnias. Kindly, world-worn, health-worn, the hostess looked. But in phalanxes and legions, in trumpeting droves and madding herds, down the driveway advanced the cars—long, sleek, shiny ones. It was a very important garden-party. Coates was Prime Minister then, majestic in top-hat: women drifted by, the young ones magically slim as flowers, and clad in soft, dark hues: the older ones were more interesting. But it became evident that normal procedure was to do one of two things.… If you were a man, you sneaked to the whisky buffet. If you were a woman, you sauntered to the fortune-teller's tent. A fortune-teller will go down anywhere and at any time, because whilst all women are not fools, all women are eternal optimists.
There were brighter moments even in social reporting. Always and always, the smell of macro-carpa will bring back to me an amazingly muddy autumn day, a point-to-point meeting near Marton, and the sheer good-hearted admiration with which country folk, the obviously poor ones too, spoke of “The Old Master” (one of the Riddifords).
See him coming over the last and stiffest fence .… white-haired, white-moustached, his once gorgeous canary-coloured coat mud-splashed… . But they cheer as he goes by. And I hope there will never be a day when they don't cheer someone as undaunted and upright. Laughter, good-humour, the mud-splashed horses who started out so glossy and self-satisfied… they do tend to break up the
I don't agree with the stupid dictum that post-war youth must be inevitably in the wrong. We've something of a national inferiority complex; therefore we suppress individuality with all haste, therefore we make the same ungraceful motions to the same really hideous musical discords, therefore we all look more or less alike. (Speaking as a “social writer” of long and painful experience, I can conscientiously say that the bright young things do look to me very much more alike than would a similar number of Chinese, similarly placed.)
But I do love the old places and old things, haloed by the graciousness which was before all this inferiority complex business began.
There is a terraced garden I wrote of once (the late Sir Edward Mitchelson's, in Auckland). It may be true there is sometimes winter and bleakness here, but among late summer's roses you would never believe it, for the sunshine has settled down like a golden-winged bird. Little paths are followed past the roses, each flinging out her snare of “wild scents and subtle essences,” until you come to the bush border-line, and hear a bellbird chime far away in the pensive green caverns.…
But the place I love is the vinery. Its grapes, huge pointed clusters, are turning amber or near blood-red.… Its vines were planted in Auckland's early days, and like gnarled, roughened arms the great vines twist up the wall, coil across the glass roofs.…
He built and planted, made a garden that can't possibly die. If I were allowed just one sentence in which to give advice to an inoffensive grandchild or some such innocent, I'd say: “For God's sake, don't build a suburban bungalow.” For so doing is to end
The number of mistakes you make when writing social gossip is only rivalled by the number which you miraculously, and through no fault whatsoever of your own, avoid making. Sometimes you don't.
We're modern, and all that: yet when I rang up an Auckland lady to discover if it were truth that her husband had initiated a vogue for Highland dancing, and when she retorted blithely, “How should I know, I don't live with him?” I think a little confusion on my part was more or less excusable.
I've only once been threatened with a libel action. That, in Christchurch, came out of a clear sky. Friends introduced me to the pride of their bosoms .… a woman farmer, young, pretty, plucky, who had salvaged a bankrupt holding, vetted her own cows, brought up a family, and still looked pretty as pink may, singing old Hebridean songs at a more or less toothless piano. Heroine of the 'waybacks. … It was explained, almost with diagrams, that just like that she was to figure in a future issue of the Christchurch Sun. She did. Everyone else said it was a rather nice article, but she and a lawyer sent me a letter. My first impulse was to commit suicide: my second was to invite her to use her sense of humour, if any. That was that.
In a country town, lady editing has complications more and murkier, and you have to go very, very canny with the ultra-religious sororiety: the ones who want to prohibit everything and everyone, and who in middle life develop, as a rule, into broad-minded social workers who bring birth control memos. before women's organizations.
There was a country dance at a little place near Wanganui. It was a jolly sort of dance. That place seemed, by some skilful means, to have produced a bumper crop of really attractive lassies and lads. Their refreshment consisted of claret cup, which was in vogue in the wicked city when I was a child at
nothing over-stimulating in the claret cup, severely demanded the writer, why then did young girls have recourse to it? As a matter of fact, stimulants were unquestionably present: and did not this increase susceptibilities… but here the matter became so delicate that none but the pure-minded if anonymous letter-writer would have ventured to deal with it.
The boys and girls were annoyed. They tracked the writer to her anonymous lair. There were tears and an apology. She was secretary to a branch of an organization which makes “temperance” the most intemperate item on its not very well-considered programme.
I often wonder if these women have been told too much or too little about the Facts of Life.
As a matter of fact, having trailed wearily from one cabaret to another during a period of years which I hate to think about, I can't honestly say that I've seen a single youth or maiden in a condition which, were I a police sergeant, I would unhesitatingly docket as “Soused.” This though I was present at the police raid which broke up the Aero Club Ball at the Peter Pan Cabaret in Auckland a few years ago.
That occasion was rather fun. The humour was made all the more pointed by the fact that Auckland's Mayor, Mr.
Names were taken after the raid. Only one of them, an inoffensive stranger, of male sex, was ever charged in court. But names were taken, and not all of them were those of males or of strangers.
My own opinion is that the raid practically made the reputation of the cabaret. The Police Ball that year was said to be marked by an unusually heavy mountain-dew fall.
I only ever met one Aucklander who supplied liquor in what I should describe as the grand manner to his comrades at a certain red-letter cabaret night. It was a fancy dress ball, and he made a magnificent Mephistopheles. Just as magnificent in its way was his suitcase, containing champagne, burgundy, cocktails, stiffer liquors for the menfolk. Need I add that he is not merely a newspaper man but the proprietor of a well-known Auckland periodical?
The usual thing, however, is the discreet appearance of a few cocktails which bear no slight resemblance in strength and flavour to one of those mouth-wash concoctions. The young 'uns will do anything to follow a fashion. Only God can explain how their digestions continue to fight on manfully: I don't mean against liquids, but against solids. A little cafe, all-night affair and of allegedly “Bohemian” characteristics, became highly popular. No party was complete without bacon-and-eggs, steak-and-onions, or saveloys here, in the small hours. I went once to write it up. The restaurateur liked that, and was hospitable… the hospitality taking the form of yards of steak and miles of onion. Next day I was down with a slight touch of ptomaine poisoning. I lie not, and can prove it. Well, it only increases my absolute veneration for our young people's insides.
One of the fashions which has, oddly enough, become very popular among “society buds” since the depression started is the idea of a professional career. Perhaps it isn't so odd. Many of their
Auckland now boasts society girls, some of them the children of very wealthy men, in almost every branch of trade. Auckland does not yet, however, boast any provision of the barest and commonest decencies of life for unemployed women who haven't wealthy parents to back them up.
In Auckland for a while, since my paper though illustrated boasted no camera-man: and since freelance camera-men who went forth to races invariably returned hopefully smiling and laden with pictures of the most incredible women in yet more unbelievable millinery: I was either amateur photographer or camera-man's aide-de-camp myself. Photographing women at Kennel Shows, with or without dog: photographing women in the great open spaces, on horse, partly on horse, or abruptly and entirely off horse: photographing sunbathing beauties, as nearly in the nude as might be, at Auckland bays suddenly popular with the “crowd”: it was all in the game, and some of it was amusing, though I think women should be entitled to bring libel actions about photographs just as they may about the printed word.
One of the quaintest little items of duty was visiting houses, writing them up, taking snapshots of anything from Japanese cut velvet to the unusually nude row of bronze statues boasted by one
It was lovely, at times: lovely just to wander down into gardens where every harshness of landscape had been conquered, and roses laughed, and great fat gold-dusted bees made themselves at home in the delicate penstemons, and sundials counted none but the happy hours.
There was a little Rima, a child with folded hands, looking down thoughtfully into the clearnes of water faintly tinted with the cool broken green of mosaic. At the very bottom of that garden is a grove of silver birch trees: they are the priestesses of the tiniest white temple place, a ridiculous little temple; no doubt its proprietors mistake it for a summerhouse. But when a thin knife-edge moon cuts through the shadows, and sharpens in silver against the delicate madder rose twigs, there can be little doubt as to what office it actually serves. Inscrutable Dian above, ringed silver birch trees and little temple below, have their own understanding.
The oldest house in Christchurch is uninhabited but still survives. It was put together with wooden pegs, because the Deans brothers, who brought out its every other requisite from their native Scotland, somehow failed to remember a little thing like nails.
Even modern “Riccarton House,” where Mrs. Deans lives with something of the stateliness of pioneer days, is seventy-seven years old. Queer little wooden steps and stairs lead down abruptly from one ground level to another. There have been Nimrods among the Deans' clansmen, and the hall is bedecked with hunting trophies—from tiger to New Zealand moose, from a wicked-looking Captain Cooker to a forlorn little black bear, who was probably having a wonderful time in the Canadian heights until he stayed too long at his blueberry patch, and the wily huntsman added him to the collection.
Outside are the broken greens and grey-blues of the queerest old garden. It is lovely in two ways… a little with the steadfastness of green lawn and English trees, but far more with the keener, fiercer fragrances of the New Zealand bush. Between these two camps of the forest there is open warfare, and the shy native things are, alas, in retreat. The Deans' bush is the only unspoiled haven for the trees and birds of Maoriland anywhere near Christchurch .… . what little glory of trees brown-plained Canterbury ever had was ruthelessly shorn away by the early comers. But here, a little stream meandered under cream-plumed shimmer of huge toi-toi bushes, crimson-billed pukekos with thoughtful expressions waded downstream, and a dart of wings meant riri-riro, the Maori's little bird of laughter, adventuring in the sunlit spaces. Once, when the estate was larger, it had boasted a rookery. There are only two in New Zealand: when the great turnip-lantern moon glowed yellow against misty Christchurch evenings, low on the horizon, I used to pass by the big bluegum trees that shelter the rooks, and listen for the funny conversation of their black legions.
English people grow to love the native bush very dearly…… the clean poignancy of its smells, rotting leaves and trodden purple berries and tiny manuka leaves combined, and perhaps the heavy sweetness of wild honey: and the amber of little deep pools, and golden mosses under slender grey trees: and most of all the flickering companionship of the native birds, whose song is half laughter, the sweetest and clearest on earth. Coming out from his English home to die in Auckland, the old Earl of Orford would never allow cats or dogs to invade his bush-surrounded home at Manurewa. For though he was an old man when he saw Auckland first, he made friends with the native birds.
It was in Christchurch, and by accident, that I found out I was bee-immune (i.e., proof against all
Afraid of bees? She treated them with a motherly mixture of severity and contempt. And to my own amazement, I found myself draped in an inadequate sort of bee-veil, but with no gloves or other weapons of defence, brushing bees from the great golden combs with a macrocarpa bough. The bees took no notice. Then, unsealing the combs, straining the honey, seeing it come up clear and dark gold… . it was all rather delightful, and I still think that to retire and become a bee-farmer is a quite dignified outlet for any woman's energies. I carried home a vasty golden comb. This was awkward. It occupied practically all the shelf-space in my tiny flat, and eat as I would, bestow it on inoffensive neighbours as I might, I couldn't keep up with its melting moments. Finally the horrid remains, done up with as much care as an inconvenient corpse, found their way into the dustman's tender care.
Manuka honey… dark, sweet, gathered by the droning wild bees whose nests are high up in rimu or manuka… . is the best of all. You can smell Australia in scented boronia, the little brown-cupped sort that grows wild. You can taste the New Zealand bush in manuka honey. They collect it and use it at Chateau Tongariro, which is an unusually discerning sort of thing for any Government enterprise.
Another occupation of some dignity and much entertainment is that of turkey-girl. The Countess
On Puketutu Island, the turkeys flourished exceedingly, and to their shining regiments were added magnificent gobblers from Canada, Indian braves in full warpaint of crimson wattles and bronze and blue chests. Turkey chicks, hundreds of them, at all stages from the incubators to the cheeky friendliness of the youngster who has discovered the world to be a pretty good place, ran the island's green dales to their own liking. I believe Puketutu Island, which grows almost everything known to the needs of man, has a corner in the turkey market hereabouts… . and deserves it, for the lady of the turkeys puts her good-humoured heart into looking after the big flocks.
There was the strawberry-finch house, in Remuera somewhere… . its mistress had begun her aviary ages ago, and lo, the backgrounds of a huge old house given up to the glory of scarlet-plumed cardinal birds, to the devotions of blue and pale green lovebirds, to strawberry finches, about as big as the toy ornaments of a dolls' house garden. Hundreds of them, and to minister unto their comfort, this house was the purchasing end of a rather quaint industry. It imported and reared meal-worms… . bird gourmandizers find them a toothsome mouthful… . . to me it seemed a very curious destiny to be born, carefully transported thousands of miles across the ocean, and raised in mealy luxury, merely that some pert hussy of a strawberry
Just here and there, one finds New Zealand women who have resolutely refused to “stay put.” Whilst no doubt doing their duty in that state of life unto which it shall please God to call them, they do a little more into the bargain. I did like my lady gardener, the first professional one in New Zealand. Her name was Mrs. Henry Fisher; she was slender and white-haired, and she had been a private person, to wit, the wife of a schoolteacher, until something told her that she had the gardener's cherished gift, “green fingers.” She didn't start out as a fad or a capitalist. She took hedge shears and hied herself forth into the wilderness, seeking little professional tasks. In between times, she read and dreamed and planned about gardens. Now she makes them, and the ones I have seen are very beautiful…… soft colour-masses, iris and flowering creeper, shading against crazy paths or wise-looking little old sun-dials.
I have also met lady vets., lady members of the nurserymen's association, even a lady builder who had completed her own abode with the quaintest of lych gates.
It's all such a queer matter of contrasts. Lady Yule, third wealthiest woman in England, complaining bitterly of the exorbitant charges made by our Russell launchmen, more bitterly yet of the fact that her two poodles were not allowed to land either here or in Australia: sailing away, a defiant figure arrayed in gorgeous pyjamas, with the local Tourist Department murmuring plaintively about a small account not yet settled.… .
And a great house of stone in an Auckland garden, a house whose hall rose darkly through the two storeys, in the English fashion. You think that at the top of the stairs you can see a laughing, running girl in primrose, but she is only a painted ghost, a picture. The wireless is concealed in a
If society consists of a body of individuals with some real tie of feeling between them, we have no society in New Zealand as yet: there are ties of prejudice and self-interest, but of genuine feeling, no. However, there are some lovely gardens, some very nice dogs, and the sun shines here as elsewhere.
Chapter IX.
Menfolk
I have read about an age of chivalry in books, but there, unfortunately, my journalistic knowledge stops dead. Scratch a man and you find a martinet, a Merry Andrew or a Mrs. Grundy, as the case may be.… But in journalism, there is much entertainment to be gained if one concentrates, more or less, on the funny side of the sterner sex. On the staidest journal, there are usually incidents not altogether without their quaint and appealing side. There was the episode of the drowning man and the sausages.…
It wouldn't be fair to mention his name, but he had dined and wined not wisely but too well. Before him loomed a trip on a Wellington ferry boat. He made the first stage gamely, did it in splendid shape, and began to feel a dutiful husband once more. Hadn't he remembered the family marketing, all three pounds of sausages? First off the boat, too… . only he departed not by the gangway, but stepped unceremoniously off the side, disappearing with an appalling oath between wharf and ship. Bystanders began to compose epitaphs: they were a bit previous. From the jaws of a “demned, moist, cold, unpleasant” death was fished up a pathetic little man with the sausages coyly twined, like a wreath of seaweed, about his neck.
“The glory has departed.… .” Sometimes, in the sunset ways, one meets a man who has known all the excitement of popular success but a short time ago. I remember little Pirani, of the Dominion, who
Departed glory doesn't much worry the greate number of our veteran politicians.
I only know of one politician who wept in public .… . crocodile tears or otherwise… . . that was the redoubtable “Bob” Semple, now re-elected to the House. His rejection at an earlier contest certainly did have that startling emotional effect upon him, but both his mana and his political backing have been rejuvenated, and the Semple of to-day might almost be described as a polished speaker.
The late Sir John Luke was one who struggled and went down hard, dying at last in the over-heavy harness of a political combatant. I remember him on the balcony of the Dominion office, after the landslide election of 1928… . . trying so hard to make himself heard at his farewell speech. They (the packed, highly-amused crowd in the jammed streets below) admitted no such courtesy. An old man, furious, fighting to speak, losing his temper, departing at last, disconsolate and unheard… . that is my last memory of a man who had been more than once Mayor of the city of Wellington, and who, however wanting he might be found among the glib tongues, at least had the interests of his city very closely and honestly at heart. He died game.…
The Hon.
I always have a vague and quite unjustified glimmering of an idea that by trying to keep a British eye fixed in all fairness and goodwill on Russian happenings, some of the parlour Bolshevists have a notion that they are serving the Empire, and may, in these changing times of ours, eventually produce some little Sir Oswald Mosley, served up cold on toast. But even should one wish to do so, can one doublecross forces of nature?
The most thoroughgoing Communist I have ever met was a little Jewish pawnbroker in Auckland. He was in earnest about Russia. More, he very definitely wanted to go and live there, and had written to the very highest authorities, endeavouring to get permission. He showed me, rather dismally, the letter he had received in reply. It began, “Dear Comrade,” which was promising enough, but concluded by saying that Russia was overburdened with professional and clerical workers, and that he could best serve the cause by keeping away from it. The spider seems to be pretty fly about what it invites into its parlour.
The others are mostly talk. (Everybody, including the police, seems to be rather fond of little “Daddy” Schofield, who still busily sells the Red Worker and much literature “prohibited” but easily obtainable).
The Christchurch City Council has probably the only official room in any British Dominion fully equipped with spittoons. This I know, having been allowed a glimpse at its maroon-leathed opulence by
“Dan” has an absolutely amazing capacity for work—and can work in team as well as playing a lone hand. His story reads like a “Log Cabin to White House” romance: as a boy, he was a barefooted newspaper-seller, which would in America almost have sufficed to win him an option on the Presidential seat. He discovered a journalistic gift, was allowed to run a column putting the Labour point of view in good, plain English for a Christchurch daily. Then politics opened the gate.…
Once in Christchurch, I had the awful experience of interviewing prominent business men and shining lights of politics on the impossible subject, “What I would do, if I were eighteen again.” I had been formerly aware that all men are liars, but never until that day realised just what liars they are. What they would do, if they were eighteen again, sounded like a Methodist parson's idea of the shortest cut to Heaven: it also sounded to me like an attempt on the part of the financially successful middle-aged to extract a lot for a little from aspiring youth.
“Dan” was the only human being amongst the lot. When asked the fatal question, he thought for a moment. His eye brightened. “I'd do the same again,” said he, with a seraphic smile.
One of the most fascinating haunts in Wellington is the Turnbull Library. If it weren't that really valuable editions are well-known among bibliophiles,
The keeper of the treasure-house is
In the really good old days of some five years ago—days when we were hypnotised into thinking ourselves financially solvent—the great white chief of one of the nicest offices in Wellington was
In the Messenger and Money heydays, one of the best-drilled squadrons of camera-men that heart could desire was in constant attendance at this office, and New Zealand was sending overseas “silents” as artistic as most issued by the publicity offices of other countries.
It was largely a matter of training and enterprise, for no backdrops are needed with the marvellous and varied panorama of New Zealand scenery as the camera-man's playground. These lads were keen, and since their little troop was disbanded most of them have found success overseas.
Incidentally, whilst in the aforementioned good old days I once rejoiced in a commission to do fifty articles for the Publicity Office, and worried through them quite successfully, I met my Waterloo trying to write screen titles for the silent films. It sounds easy enough… but I'd rather try to write a second Gray's Elegy, and I think that the title-writers of Hollywood deserve their prominent place in those interminable name-preludes which make most talkies so much more boring than they need otherwise be. The films, all in one marathon piece, were run off in a little private cinema on the Lambton Quay premises. Rather a comfy little place was this — the only cinema in New Zealand where visitors were encouraged to smoke. This was because many of them are portly and plethoric tourists, out to catch a screen glimpse of Mount Cook or the wild West Coast before definitely making up their minds to book through. It was considered tactful to put them at their ease.
Talking of films reminds me of the alleged—but only alleged—collection of one erstwhile film censor. It was whispered, more in envy than in anger, that the bits snicked out of films for the good of public morality weren't simply cremated. They were salvaged and formed the censor's “rogues' gallery” —used, no doubt, merely to demonstrate to members of the Purity League how efficient is the local watch on our behaviour.
This story is probably a canard. Not so, however, the possession of banned books among our M's.P., for I was in the House when with simple and manly dignity, the late Mr. second consignment of “The Well of Loneliness” was turned back, like an undesirable alien, after arrival in port.
The volatile
Marky, as far as the future has yet unfolded, seems to have been another flash in the pan. He spent four years roving around New Zealand, mostly in Rotorua district, but this did not invariably turn out as expensive—for Mr. Marky— as might have been anticipated. There was, for instance, the occasion of his visit to a charming but isolated little bit of the far north. An ex-M.P., and
In the lounge of Hotel Cargen, I had the pleasure of getting the first real interview that
Harkness, who had designed Enterprise II. and knew her inside out, was already uneasy and unhappy about the ill-fated venture. His cherished cooling system was the butt of Smith's criticism. That he, at all events, was genuine in his hope that the car might put up a world record cannot be doubted. Long before the marathon debate as to whether “Wizard” would even give his audience a show for their money had really started, Harkness, who had brought over his own handsome green Vauxhall car and was prepared to take events seriously, had packed up and departed for Australia in sheer disgust.
Ninety Mile, under the reign of Smith, became a joke which will live in New Zealand history. Elaborate—a little too elaborate—privacy was observed. “Wizard's” frantic efforts to create a sort of “odour of sanctity” around the car and its doings were at first respected, and the A.A.A. officials joined whole-heartedly in cold-shouldering outsiders. “Wizard” was waiting for the right sand conditions… “Wizard” was all set to go next ebb-tide… “Wizard” was telling the toheroas bedtime stories.…
On his first Ninety Mile spin, when he did put up a wonderful exhibition of driving and made the New
Toheroas made newspaper headlines during the months of his second vigil, whilst hopeful cameramen arrived by 'plane or attempted to get through in disguise. The last is plain fact. Believing that a serious attempt would be made to smash the world's record, believing yet more fervently that all screen rights had been unfairly sold out to an American movie company, a free-lance camera-man, big, burly
Smith's libel action, on his return to Australia, against the paper which made such pointed comment on the yellow flag passed over to him at the wharf, was successful. However, he has not since figured as a world or local record-breaker … and Ninety Mile Beach is still hopefully waiting for something that might headline both “Wizard” and its own shining sands once more.
I shall never forget the first aeroplane ascent in Wellington. It happened before the war. The 'plane, as a novelty, had collected a mighty crowd, who had paid to see the ascent. Weather conditions were, to put it mildly, adverse—a rising wind, a sky greyed with the torn fleece of clouds. The pilot didn't want to ascend under such conditions. He wasn't let off, for the
Later, I remember seeing the pathetic remnants of the 'plane stuck high up in a Newtown Park pinetree. By almost incredible good luck, the pilot had escaped well-nigh undamaged. Yet there was something tragic and mocking about those torn wings…
If toheroas helped to ruin the reputation of Ninety Mile Beach, they are good stock in the London market—thanks to H.R.H. The Prince of Wales, on his visit to New Zealand, became enamoured of the wily toheroa, which burrows deep in the sand, is dug up and makes its first social appearance in the form of soup. The toheroa taste has spread among members of the Royal Family.
“The little Duchess of York,” whose smile, hat and sweet-pea complexion were imitated throughout the length and breadth of New Zealand for years after her visit, had her happiest New Zealand day in Rotorua regions. Slipping out by a back entrance, the Duke and Duchess entered a private car, and, with the hotel manager's car acting as rear bodyguard, made for the famous “Blackberry Patch,” near Wairoa. The blackberries hereabouts are not the ordinary waifs and strays which move the New Zealand farmer to such expressive oaths, but resemble the American blueberry. Half an inch long and bursting with sweetness, they are worthy of the most scornful philospher's consideration. Autumn brings a rich harvest of them to this lonely old road, where not far away are the skeleton remains of wrecked huts, stranded articles of furniture — casualties of Mount Tarawera's awful day of volcanic wrath. Like a grey ghost the deadly mountain, its rent craters still plain on its denuded sides, stands bare amid the rich wooded purple of friendlier Rotorua hills. It still seems to me a most ominous place, its steeps a pale threat of death over the shining lake waters.
But the Blackberry Patch is all autumn's sweetness and ripened virtue. How on earth this special
One of the main ordeals of Kingsford Smith's visits to New Zealand has been the never-ceasing flow of “inventions,” poured in at every hotel where “Smithy,” the most popular Australian ever welcomed in New Zealand, may spend a night. Since he became Sir Charles—whilst remaining so whole-heartedly and insuperably “Smithy”—the hero of the Tasman flight has appointed his brother,
“Smithy,” with the eternal Australian grin never far away from his lean face, is refreshingly frank about the usefulness of hard cash. “The only place in the world,” said he, referring to New Zealand, “where I've taken their money away, and they've thanked me for it.”
Joy-riding in the Southern Cross or in the Southern Cross Junior, was certainly an excellent financial speculation. The mana of those great wings seems never-dying, and “Smithy's” personal popularity in New Zealand has held. It was frankly admitted that twenty-minute rides up aloft were considerably shorter in actual fact, and ten-minute ones but a flick of a white wing up and down again: this, however, was due to the appalling length of the “waiting list.” In the 'quake towns, Napier and Hastings, every evidence of a signal financial recovery was given by the fact that hundreds of pounds were paid in by joy-riders on a single day. “Smithy” had a lady nonagenarian for his first New Zealand passenger.
Had “Smithy” won the Melbourne Centenary Air Race, I believe the applause would have been louder in this land than if one of the New Zealand entrants should have achieved the seemingly impossible… . and certainly highly improbable. This is all the more curious as there is a quite distinct difference of life and opinion between New Zealand and Australian types, and not infrequently this develops into rivalry. When Jardine's highly unpopular eleven made their exit from Australia, plus the Ashes but minus any great social success, the civic welcome the Englishmen received in Wellington must have been an almost embarrassing change in temperature. Jardine, the austere captain, broke his vow of never smiling again, and unbosomed himself as to how ill continual Australian reference to “the English team” had made him—he being no Sassenach, but a true-blue Scot. The little English-New Zealand entente
It's not always the famous, the fortunate, that one best remembers.
High up in the Cashmere Hills there was a little garage. At least, that had been its builder's intention, but things had evolved otherwise. It was a cabinetmaker's home and workshop, and he lived there with none but a very lordly white cat to keep house for him.
I heard about him, because a few Christchurch people were beginning to invest in furniture about which there was something extremely odd: the oddity of real beauty. Sometimes he followed the lines of the old masters. Sometimes he found ways of his own.…
I remember climbing up and hopelessly tearing perfectly good stockings in the brambles of a very wild and wicked garden… . a garden which lay back in the sunlight and laughed at law and order.
How indignant he was with the modern craftsman's trick of joinery, the french-polishing which was half done and paid no heed to the grain of the wood. And such base uses had the poor wood come to… . but not in his workshop. For fifteen, twenty years, old planks of beech and rimu had lain maturing.…
The cleanest of all smells in the world is the smell of cut wood. It has the forest's heart in it, and white sunlight. I remembered an old Italian book called “Pinocchio.” The aged carpenter in that fairytale carved out an astounding puppet who, after many strange adventures and sad ones, came to life and was a human being.
Perhaps a New Zealand cabinetmaker could do as much, provided that he matured his beech planks long enough, kept in the good books of the white cat and understand all the ancient craft of joinery.
In College Street, Christchurch, the china collector lived. He was old, too. He has since died, I have heard, and I know that his all but priceless collection was to go to the Museum.
Chelsea, with its beaten gold and deep rich blues, is the king of porcelain. But he was proud of the tall Sevres vases, too, a pair, knee-high and gay with the wanton dance of the little shepherdesses.
And the queer old beasts on blue and white Spode… and the secret glazes, the apple glaze of the Rockingham porcelain, which none can ever copy… and the tiny flowers inside Bristol glass, which was a sideline, but fascinating enough… and the quite good, courageous and interesting work of the earthenware factory which for a little time in New Zealand patterned plates with the staunch canvas of the old sailing-ships… . these were all the commonplaces of his kingdom. I drank China tea out of a little fluted Rockingham cup, apple-green, and consumed apple shortcakes which were the
It is so very delicate, contact with the old. A thing like light through a stained glass window, or an autumn flower, frosty-brittle and deep-coloured. You know it can't possibly endure for long. But it is more beautiful than youth.
“Just when you think you're safest, comes a sunset touch.”
Trees in Christchurch.
Chapter X.
The Miracle Men
When “The Miracle Man” was screened in Wellington, sometime in the Dark Ages, as a silent film, I can remember weeping about it. When they rehashed it and served it up as a talkie, a couple of years gone by, it was strangely and hideously wrong. This, for once, may not have been so much the fault of Hollywood, as that a slight malaise had been occasioned by a surfeit of Miracle Men. They find New Zealand an easy mark. As a nation, we seem to be too repressed, and consequently seize on almost any pretext for making communal fools of ourselves.
Worthington, of the Temple of Truth, one-time idol of Christchurch, was well before my time. Christchurch, though the most reserved of New Zealand cities, has something of a weakness for the cranky and spectacular in religion. The Temple, with Worthington as prophetic a figure to the outward eye as one of the old Mormon patriarchs, was for a brief while a sort of Mecca among those who can swallow the raw stuff of evangelism neat.
It was Worthington's latest wife, a strange and beautiful woman, who had been led by the prophet into the blackest misfortune, who brought about his downfall. The side of the prophet's character which was not made apparent at public meetings, but which was apparently responsible for an unexpected increase in the population of the city, ended up in a prison sentence for him in Australia. But his partner did not win much happiness out of the ruins. She died, by her own hand.
The late
It is only fair to say that there are perfectly honest New Zealand people who received genuine benefit in health after the Hickson mission, and who, moreover, have sustained this improvement.
There were numerous other alleged cases of “healing” after another evangelist's visit. Recovery from blindness and deafness were among the minor claims. I was investigating them for a paper. There seemed to be a good deal more “touch” than healing about, when one got down to cold facts. And the tissue of lies and exaggerations hopefully put forward by the faithful was extraordinary. None of them had anything to gain by lying—except the momentary excitement of the limelight. That was sufficient incentive.
The coldest-blooded and most astonishing “clean up” I have ever seen worked in the name of “healing” was not brought to New Zealand by a man, but by a woman. Some six years ago Sister Phoebe Holmes, American in accent and technique, shone on the Wellington horizon. They fell for her like lead.
I have met fabricators, amateur and professional, and many of them were very good indeed, but to
For instance: she was American, she talked American, she would have been singled out as an American had she been mixed up with a panorama representing the League of Nations. Yet from her headquarters, the Midland Hotel, was wafted a rumour that she was really an English lady of title.
Interviewing Sister Phoebe, I asked her point-blank if this were indeed the case. A shrewd glance. .… Sister Phoebe weighed the pros and cons of the soft impeachment, then decided that a newspaper confession of her titled estate was too good a thing to miss. She explained that the title was there all right, but was not used on her present campaign.
Sister Phoebe and a woman companion, who was invariably known as “Darling,” lived in some state, and the fresh-complexioned, sharp-eyed healer, whose masses of beautiful snow-white hair may or may not have been authentic, dressed like a femme du monde. Herplatform appearances were picturesque. .
She made the mistake of renting her hall in the same building which sheltered a certain rather sceptical political office. Some of her “psychology” classes were intended for the strictest privacy, only initiates being permitted to enter. But there was a tiny gallery, from which those connected with the afore-mentioned office could and did see everything that eventuated. Moreover, one young lady, who seemed to dislike the coining of easy money by a miracle woman from afar, and whom I met at the above-mentioned office, took some trouble to go through a waste-paper basket after Sister Phoebe's meetings, at which written questions were invariably handed up. Delicate question: “Dear Sister Phoebe, I have taken your herb mixture for two nights. No use. May I take a pill?”
The business end of this mission was adroitly
It might be said that psychology advances no extravagant claims of physical healing. Sister Phoebe informed me that she was able to cure miners' pthisis and cancer.
At least one member of a most important Wellington municipal body was among the devoted little band who, at Sister Phoebe's mandate, removed their coats and walked shirt-sleeved, at a smart trot, round a public hall, repeating the following little slogan:
Words were accompanied, not by music, but by a really weird process of arm-flapping. It made the shirt-sleeved devotees look, to an innocent bystander, very much like intoxicated roosters: but I suppose it brought them spiritual comfort.
for women only on “The Psychology of Love,” and packed the Town Halls at 6/- a seat. She then read extracts from the poems of
Another woman evangelist—or “psychologist”— more things are done in psychology's name than ever that much-abused science dreams of—was a big, immaculately-tailored woman, and with her everywhere she toted a minute, well-behaved husband. I heard a rather lovely comment on these two. “She,” said a member of one audience, “was such a perfect gentleman—and he was such a little lady.”
The classic example of evangelism, plus healing powers, as far as this country is concerned, is Mr.
A rather good-looking man, in early middle age, and with fine blue eyes in a clean-shaven face, Dallimore has childhood associations with New Zealand. He lived in the Taranaki district, then went to America, far up in Alaska spent years connected with the timber industry, drifted down to an American city, fell on hard times, was converted, and forthwith roped in as a sort of spare part in a wellknown evangelist's crusade.
Dallimore claims to have raised the dead, both human and animal. His resurrected corpse—
An early Dallimore meeting was described, in fair and quite friendly fashion, in an Auckland weekly publication. Nobody could have foreseen that as a result a neap tide of curiosity was to set in, sweeping the evangelist into a central position in the Town Hall, where meetings eventually became such burlesque and tragedy combined that the City Council was obliged to refuse further use of the hall.
From a few weekly paper articles Dallimore was accepted as a fitting topic for columns in both the Auckland daily papers, neither of which can very well go so far as to claim originality for a strong point. The little hall in East Street was a thing of the past. St. James' Theatre, with its garish red and blue Neon lighting, alternated with the Town Hall as the setting for amazing scenes.
In the body of the Town Hall I have watched whilst men and women, old and young, smeared on the forehead with “sacred oil,” in which the evangelist had dipped his fingers, crashed backwards, apparently unconscious, to the floor. Some lay still for hours. Others jerked and twitched hysterically. A young girl, whose head had hit the uncarpeted wooden platform, sobbed so bitterly as she lay there that, much to the annoyance of a bodyguard of ushers, I insisted on making sure that she was
Dallimore was the first New Zealand “healer” to institute long-distance “cures” by means of blessed handkerchiefs. The process was simple. Tackling any complaint, from a cold in the head to rigor mortis, he blessed a handkerchief sent in, returned it, instructing the bearer to see that it was laid on the seat of the trouble. The vogue for blessed handkerchiefs is still quite popular.… The real glory of the Revival Fire crusade, train-loads of white-robed pilgrims coming to Auckland for baptism, Mr. Dallimore in white “ducks” immersing large ladies in the Tepid Baths, Auckland's senior magistrate, Mr.
Religion didn't always enter into the ken of the miracle men-though, unfortunately for God, it is
Very tall, very dark, very black of eye and excitable of manner is Mr. Kimbel. His hypnotism was without tears. A little row of subjects, mixed as to age and sex, were one by one led into another room, put under the 'fluence. The hypnotic process consisted mainly in looking Mr. Kimbel straight in one eye: then in gently closing one's own orbs, and standing in an attitude of patience whilst Svengali breathed stealthily in one's ear, “You can't open your eyes… . You can't open your eyes.” Seeing that the opening of eyes was obviously not what was wanted at this juncture, I was obliging, and passed on as a good subject: but an unsophisticated girl friend, who had come along too, had far less self-control, and, on being told that she couldn't open her bonny brown eyes, instantly winked at Svengali. She was turned down for flippancy. I, on the other hand, was engaged on promise of remuneration 5/- a night, increasing to quite imposing sums in the event of a platform appearance. The hypnotic tests, selecting articles blindfold, telling cards out of a pack, were of the simplest: anyone who has bothered to try out the most elementary experiments in telepathy would get through with flying colours… . but none the less, I won special commendation. The dream of Mr. Kimbel's life, so he wistfully remarked, was a platform display of hypnotic rites, with a woman subject as the pièce de resistance. He claimed that astonishing feats of surgery could be
Mr. Kimbel may have been in grim earnest: not so the excellent “Raymond,” who appeared as a star hypnotic turn in the Plaza Theatre, Auckland. Raymond put on a fairly good show. The main items were the wandering of a blindfolded damsel through the darkened theatre, where she selected apparently unknown members of the audience on demand, then made her way with amazing surety down difficult flights of stairs, and the marathon “hypnotic trance” of two youths, whose comatose forms were on view, steeped in slumbers sweet, in the window of a Queen's Arcade shop.
It was these two youths who finally removed Raymond from Auckland's ken. They dropped into our office and explained.… . Raymond, doing quite well as a hypnotist, had spoiled his ship for a ha'porth of tar. Apparently a rather covetous little man—fat, urbane, oily in appearance, and a barber by profession—he had recruited two unemployed lads as his accomplices in the “trance” ramp. But, once the show had been given, he forgot to pay them. He continued to forget; made threats of police action when their demands became insistent. Even a hypnotist's labourer is worthy of his hire, especially when he has gone without food in the said hypnotist's interests for a period not likely to meet with approval in a civilized country. Feeling much that way about it, Raymond's two dupes made their statement. Both were little more than boys, and both out of a job. They had been offered
The marathon trance in Queen's Arcade was to have been broken by refreshments at opportune moments. As it turned out, a youth lay there for 48 hours, sustained by one smuggled saveloy and a hastily-swallowed cup of tea. Either curiosity was a little more on the watch than Raymond had anticipated, and so the hypnotist had shunned the unnecessary risk of feeding his apparently dormant lambs; or else the omission was an early sample of Raymond's economic habits. The “subject” was given sedative tablets before being taken into the window, simply commanded thereafter to lie still. The resurrection of the seemingly dead was due to take place on the Plaza stage. It went off without a hitch—but in the very wings of the theatre, the ravenous subject had threatened Raymond with exposure unless food of some kind should be promptly forthcoming.
Raymond's later suggestion of a five-days trance was received with the thermometer 'way down at zero. Demands for the wages promised became more insistent. Raymond used the convenient word “Blackmail.” The two youths told their tale of woe. It was quite convincing, and when asked for an explanation the alleged “hypnotist” made no serious attempt to disprove it. Nor would he give any demonstration of genuine hypnotic power. The position was complicated by the fact that he himself was no derelict, but a man in a perfectly good and well-paid profession, and attached to a large store which—as its owners were old friends and advertisers—our paper hardly wished to bring into any difficulty.
Raymond's parsimony cost him dear. He was given an opportunity to pay out what he owed to his unfortunate “subjects.” Failing that, a plain statement of the case was to be put before his employers. He chose the latter alternative, without so much as
But still, and for ever more, healers, hypnotists and “haves” can count on a first-rate audience in little New Zealand. I have only seen the crowd thoroughly annoyed on one occasion, and then healing didn't enter into the question, though hypnotism and a contravention of the laws of Nature did. The unfortunate victim was a Chinese, usefully named Ah Sin. (This was, however, a stage alias. His real name was Smith.) Ah Sin claimed to be an expert in “levitation.” His demonstration was at the old Wellington theatre then used for Fuller's vaudeville shows. He “levitated” his lady, a fair young European maiden, all right. But the invisible wires stuck, leaving the maiden in mid-air. Frantic gesticulations from the Chinese sorcerer.… It was no use. She wouldn't go up, and she wouldn't come down. The curtain fell, and the crowd demanded their money back.
Personally, I'd have paid double on request: for none of the others, beginning with Sister Phoebe, concluding with Brother Dallimore, has ever provided sheer, unadulterated mirth for the mere price of a theatre ticket.
Of course, Ah Sin was stupid. He should have done it all in the name of the Lord. Then, when his damsel got stuck in mid-air, he could quite easily have explained that her faith had failed her at an awkward moment.
Chapter XI.
Cross My Palm
In the beginning, there was a coloured lady who on one occasion, being exasperated beyond all reasonable bounds, pursued a Wellington police matron with a knife. In the end (following upon a long succession of old women who peered in tea-cups and crystal balls) there was
But having more or less run the gamut of New Zealand's “psychics”—known to the police as fortune-tellers—I can't honestly say that I ever met one who wasn't, in greater or lesser degree, a fraud.
Truth had the idea of an article about Wellington fortune-tellers. It was to be called “The Road to En-dor”: cribbed title, but sounds well. Naturally there had to be a little murk and mystery thrown in, for which the coloured lady was handy.
She lived in a funny little side-street, advertised herself, Madame What-Not, Psychic, by a cardboard notice outside her domain. Most fortune-tellers who really make the thing a serious profession do the same. There are police and magistrates and fines, but even in New Zealand the police have to go big-game hunting sometimes, leaving the coast clear for the small fry. There's an occasional round-up, a fine now and again, but New Zealand boasts numerous old ladies who have practically grown up, undisturbed, in their occupation.
I have never elsewhere seen so many black cats congregated together under one roof as in the abode
Madame would interview only one at a time. The door of the inner chamber was locked. Mysterious mutterings went on. She was a tall, grim-looking person of a violent purple hue, with wildly frizzled tresses and an opthalmic goitre. However, she administered “spiritual healing” to others less gifted.
When I went into the chamber of mystery, I was very favourably impressed. I mean, it did have the makings of a good story. The blinds, dusty Venetian ones, were closely drawn, and heavy curtains plunged the room into a darkness perfumed with the awful reek of some cheap incense. In the middle of the floor smouldered a little old-fashioned charcoal brazier. Feeling rather like a subject for the attentions of the crematorium, I advanced, and sepulchral tones bade me be seated and give Madame my hands. She seized them in a mouse-trap grip, went straight into a trance. If you have ever gazed into the whites of a coloured lady's eyes, with a charcoal brazier smouldering viciously alongside and strange words—I don't mean improper ones, merely that “gift of tongues” business again—bubbling up in the darkness, you will quite understand that the age of adventure is none so dead.
Madame told me that I would secure my divorce without difficulty and obtain custody of the children. A wedding ring and a worried look were responsible for this bit of information.… The fortune-teller's idea of marriage is much like the French epigram-matist's: “Matrimony is to most people like a well to frogs: those who are out are trying to get in, and those who are in are trying to get out.”
Madame was an enthusiast on the subject of that
I'm afraid that the black witch's parlour wasn't so charming a setting for the works of the Messiah. It was entertaining, though, and I saw it again by grotesque flickering light in the eventide, for Madame gave her spiritual healing classes after nightfall.
Moreover, they were crowded.
You were expected to hand up some little personal article… a handkerchief if you were discreet, a ring or watch if you were one of those lily-white
but Madame could, and gave you messages. If you couldn't recognize Fred, Annie, Lulu or Bettina among the corpses of your acquaintance, they were docketed “Ancient friends of the family,” and gently ushered back into oblivion.
The spiritual healing consisted largely in a very awful commentary on the “stummick”: the human interior is not at all a nice thing when handled as Madame handled it.
But curiosity, boredom, gullibility, a morbid appetite for the mystic, keep these parlours full, and, as each entrant pays from half-a-crown upwards per visit, and overhead expenses are restricted to an occasional police court fine, there's a living in it.
Without any guide or initiate to help you along, you can find out Wellington's crystal-gazing sanctums for yourself. Many of them are round about the Chinese quarter—near, if not in, the streets where at nights you can hear the Chinese fiddles wailing with the queer toneless, tuneless zest of a music old and strange. I've never met a Celestial mystic: the Chinese in New Zealand are singularly good at minding their own business. Should such a man of mystery ever arise among them, he'd make a fortune and his prices would be prohibitive. But the Chinese quarter in most cities suffers from its hangers-on. Auckland's pakapoo dens receive such loving care from the police for much the same reason. No harm in a friendly all-Chinese game of fantan or pakapoo — and ninety-nine games out of a hundred are “on the level”—but the drawing of the tickets induces whites of the very worst class to make the site thereof their little home away from home.
Most of the fortune-tellers are harmless enough. Not all. A few are ambitious swindlers. Others, in the question-and-answer game which is part of the performance, naturally collect interesting information. At least two women (neither of them Wellingtonians), were known to combine abortion with their lighter professional duties.
Sometimes there's a tragic touch in this queer game, as in most others. There was one woman, a rather smart little parlour her locale, and a deftly-shuffled pack of cards her means of foretelling the future. She had an abrupt manner and bright orange hair.… . She wasn't “written up,” though, for her particular interest in the risky profession was to keep a son, dying of consumption, in every comfort. He was not aware of his mother's means of livelihood.
And some of them are rather dears: ancient, graceless, ready for a friendly chat over a cup of tea: and so lavish with the number of “young men” the future offers you, served hot on toast! You come to scoff: you remain (well, I did, once), playing sentimental Irish ditties on a piano in shocking need of artificial dentures.
They have, when you get them on the public platform, absolutely no faint, far-off glimmering of a sense of humour. His Majesty's Birthday Eve: scene, a little Spiritualistic hall in Wellington: the medium, in a tone of awed veneration: “Ladies and gentlemen, we 'ave distinguished company. 'Er Majesty Queen Victoria is with us to-night.” Can't you hear poor Queen Victoria's agonized: “We are not amused?”
It was whilst prospecting that I found Dolores, far out in Sandringham, Auckland. His house was distinguished by a gold-lettered, glass-covered plate, and he arrived in a motor-car—“Lizzie” by genus, and about 1924 vintage. Still, it went.
I had heard of him only by rumour. 'Twas said that passengers from the Mariposa and Monterey,
Dolores' favourite method of “reading”—5/- a time—was to invite his clients to write questions inside an envelope, seal it down, place it on a table before him. He then answered the questions.
(If you want to do this as a parlour trick, you can, with the aid of the spirits… Pure alcohol is best, though benzine is equally efficacious if rather potent of smell. A cottonwool pad, soaked in the usual lotion and held in the palm of the hand, renders an envelope transparent. The alcohol evaporates quickly enough. The medium naturally handles the envelope for a few minutes in taking it from the client and placing it in position. Added to which, Dolores' first breakaway from “the trivial round, the common task” was in childhood, when he made platform appearances acting as assistant to a conjurer, so palming was not exactly outside his province.)
I have, however, met people who have written their messages in obscure foreign languages, and received intelligible and intelligent answers from Dolores. And more people who have locked their sealed envelopes up in safes, opened them to find mysterious communications pencilled therein. Others, again, have seen Dolores floating in mid-air —levitation, this is called—and have carried on prolonged conversation with him whilst he rested against the ceiling. At least one Auckland woman
However, herewith regarding Dolores the plain statement of one of the believers (female): “If he and He ever done that Dolores can't?” A unique viewpoint.
The first little afternoon session was entertaining enough, especially when Dolores discovered strong indications of psychic power in my innocent self, and suggested an immediate course of lessons, himself as instructor. (He does this to every woman client, and not a few of them fall for it.) The quaint part of the proposal was this: I was, as a spiritual sacrifice, to hand over a £5 note. Dolores was to burn it in my presence, thereby demonstrating that I had given up something in order to become a seer. He, of course, would make nothing out of the transaction!
Even before I had ascertained the bit of his history connected with conjuring, this little detail seemed to have a very, very ancient and fishlike odour about it. However, not having so many £5
Everyone in Auckland was not so hard-hearted. There was the lady of the diamond ring. Dolores, beholding it at a seance, informed her that it was too tight: the spirits would stretch it for her if she handed it over. She did. The spirits were in a frisky mood. It took a threat of legal action to get back the diamond from the etheric plane.
There is a good deal that is pathetic in the history of the lad who is described, according to taste, as an expert plucker of pigeons, and as New Zealand's great “physical medium.” (The latter opinion is not simply that of the credulous and ignorant. Dolores had many others on his visiting list, and one of his staunchest champions was connected with the celebrated French Society of Psychic Research.) His home, a little poorly-furnished and highly odoriferous house in Belgium Street, was not exactly a paradise for any young man of ambition and imagination.
He was tripped up by the police for a rather callous fraud practised on a woman — neither his first nor his last effort in this direction. Though she prosecuted him in the end, it was only as a last resort, and he was given every possible opportunity to refund the money. Though, curiously enough, his years as an established “medium” in the Sandringham haven seemed quite lacking in interest to the Auckland police, he was not a “smash hit” with
The next phase of the Dolores epic should properly be named “A Macpherson to the Rescue.”
Dolores had never been without sympathetic advisers, but Mrs. Macpherson made a stout effort to take him in hand. Moreover, I am certain that she herself believed in his gifts. She has remarkable business capacity, got in touch with societies and celebrities overseas, and in Auckland put Dolores through his paces at a much smarter trot than that nonchalant youth had ever attempted before.
Some of the last Auckland seances took place in my own abode—then a tiny dug-out in a Princes Street boarding-house. Mrs. Macpherson and her youthful sculptor son were the only two guests known to me personally, and, needless to say, these particular demonstrations were experiments, not occasions for the raking in of lucre, filthy or otherwise.
Unlike his clumsier confreres, Dolores certainly didn't come laden with butter-muslin “tricks of the trade.” His only cabinet was a curtained wardrobe, thoroughly inspected by all present before he there deposited himself. Two stalwart males grasped his wrists. He demanded that the light be switched off for a second. When it was turned up, lo, a coatless Dolores. It wasn't a trick coat, and the bodyguard swore that never for one instant had they relinquished hold of his arms …. which you may believe or not, according to taste.
One girl who attended a Dolores seance had the rather nice experience of being showered with flowers from the unseen. No bouquets were scattered in my domain, but I still have a little brass bell (material value about 1/6) which likewise appeared
Dolores boasts a spirit control, name of Carlo. (Carlo is bad enough as a name, but better than the Red Indian, Persian and Thibetan ones hurled at you at most spiritualistic conclaves, especially as these Lost Tribes all speak in such damned bad Cockney.) Carlo, considered as a spirit, could have been worse. He was jovial but not vulgar. He did a bit of cheekpatting to demonstrate his ectoplasmic presence, and, much to my relief, was neither soapy nor slippery—to all appearances a perfectly normal hand.
The star turn of the evening, from the spectacular point of view, was the matter of the wet plaster and the imprinted hands.
The plaster came from the Elam School of Arts and was rolled out, wet and smooth, in the presence of all in the room. Then it was placed, not in the cabinet with the medium, but at the other end of the room. The lights were switched off for a moment. When they were turned on again, the plaster bore the imprint of several hands—one large, obviously masculine, one a child's.
I would be prepared to swear that Dolores could not possibly have touched the plaster. To do so, he would have had to emerge from the wardrobe, pass a circle of five people, crawl either under or over a bed without being seen or heard, imprint hands, neither of them his own, in the plaster, and return to his original position — all in the space of two minutes.
Some may know a scientific way of doing it: I can't claim to be among them. I merely say that the thing, stated exactly as it happened, was extraordinary and interesting, and that on this account alone I am exceedingly glad that Dolores has departed from an Auckland slum to a city where he may at least subject his gift— or smart footwork — to investigation.
There was one other thing: coincidence, as everything is in these odd byways of the shadow world.
“Carlo,” who, by the way, conversed in a gruff voice and the usual broken English (but, yes, we had all heard of ventriloquism), was in festive mood and started throwing things hither and thither. That damage wasn't done to my landlady's priceless old late Victorian bric-à-brac was more by bad luck than by good management. Just one book out of hundreds, a slim little green one, had the signature on its fly-leaf of a friend dead years ago.… It was that book that “Carlo” removed from the bookshelf, laid on my knee. Dolores was in high fettle. He intended to give a demonstration of levitation next time.… He would produce photographs of the dead out of the void.…
When next I saw him, he was most undeniably pickled. He invited me to attend a levitation display, at which flashlight photographs were to be taken, at his own home in Belgium Street. I accepted with the high resolve of she who will try anything once.… Came the dawn — apparently. Came also a telephone ring, and a much-subdued little Dolores at the other end explaining that he didn't feel quite up to levitating. I never saw him again, though I was tempted to wave good-bye when the English boat drew out, carrying a twenty-one-year-old conjurer, fraud, ex-convict, and, yes, unexplained puzzle, away “to find a name or a grave. He will find one soon, no doubt.”
Mrs. Macpherson had worked the oracle—an oracle not unconnected with the name of one of the famous Northcliffe journals. Herself voyaging to England, she sought out journalistic powers-that-were and explained all about the need for removing the New Zealand bushel from the Dolores beacon. She secured for him a £1,000 contract, with an additional allowance of £250 for travelling expenses. I have seen this document—relic of a brief but bright run in London.
On the morning before he sailed, Dolores was again charged in the police court, this time over a matter of an unpaid debt. His old acquaintance, Mr. Hunt, ordered him to pay up or spend a further rest-cure where “no telephone communicates with his cell.” The young medium's protests about his English prospects were unavailing.
But somebody paid his debt and he departed, Mrs. Macpherson's young son with him as travelling companion. His first London seances were promising, though given in appalling circumstances, in the noise and clatter of a metropolitan newspaper office.
The first lap on the way to fame and fortune passed, he was caught out in trickery. Mrs. Macpherson not only admitted that her protegé and his “Carlo” were alike unreliable, but, on returning to New Zealand, wrote him up in most adverse—and, to my mind, frankly disloyal — terms. Not unnaturally, the failure which put the £1,000 contract, and others even more promising, once and for all out of the question, were most disappointing to a champion who had worked hard and long for him, and also for her own interests.
That Dolores tries to fool all the people some of the time is not to be questioned: yet—like many others—I have the tiniest entering crack of a doubt as to whether he tries all the time. His friends say that London air agrees with him, and that in the old fortune-telling way of grubbing along, he does well enough. They ask and expect no more. That seems to me a little unfair. But for the time being, at all events, Dolores disappears into the limbo of forgotten stars.
Three lawyers were his last Auckland clients, paying £1 apiece, at the wharf itself, for a “reading.” Indeed, the general incapacity of that excellent profession in New Zealand seems to indicate the need for a little supernatural assistance now and then.
The promising name
Spiritualistic temples and churches are exceptions to the rule which (except in the Unitarian Church) disbars women from leadership. A fat lady who went into trances (if a medium shuts her eyes and wobbles, you are supposed to accept that as a trance, though your spirit may long to try what would happen if you stuck a pin in her), presided on the platform. I do think the way the mediums, when in trances, can remonstrate with the public about the scanty collections handed over is too touching for mere words.
It would have been endurable, had not the dead husband of one unfortunate lady appeared and sung bass voice songs in a husky contralto: likewise had not my aged aunt, appearing in ectoplasmic form, refused to say so much as a kindly word, merely nodding vigorously in response to questions. And at that, my aged aunt was a most frightful liar: she nodded in all the wrong places, acknowledging the existence and good wishes of relatives about whom
She was an unpleasant-looking old party, with cheesecloth draperies swathed in the latest shroud effect round a tallow-coloured face. It was not impossible, after the meeting, to discover a door leading put of the cabinet used by the medium. Useful either as a fire exit or a spook escape.
The odd thing was that precisely the same apparition was claimed by various other sitters as husband, child, or friend. Theoretically, one inspected only one's own apparition. But an advantage of the inky darkness was that one could move without being seen—although after a time the “spirits” possessed the stoutish trance lady again, and complained bitterly of restlessness not acceptable in the best, or even in the worst, spiritualistic circles. We all had to sing hymns, and did, much out of tune. This “helps the spirits to come through.” God help Beethoven, should anyone ever see fit to summon him out of the vasty deeps.
Personally, I found the
Type questions: “Is that you, Elsie?” “Well, Mother, are you happy over there?” It gives a spirit so little scope for originality.
It would be quite unfair, by the way, to say that
I know a little Englishwoman, wasted with illness, with the long unhappiness of a tragic life indomitably borne. Her one solace and the key to her
But that is no part of the “Cross My Palm” story. It is a secret quest, on which the spirit must travel alone. Perhaps there is a light at the other end of the tunnel. At all events, I know some very courageous people who believe so.
The Message.
Chapter XII.
Mathematical
Could you,” she said eagerly, “edit a paper about Douglas Credit?” Being at the moment a free lance journalist—and few indeed are the free lance journalists in New Zealand who would not jump at the slightest opportunity to run a paper about anything from Angora rabbits upwards—I replied that anyhow I understood the A plus B theorem.
This was a lie. Nobody, not even God, understands the A plus B theorem, on which Douglas Credit principles are more or less based. I had however made speeches about it, which is as good if not better.
She was a woman journalist who made a fine art of impartiality. A contributor to Douglas Credit publications, she seems to have definite affinities with the New Zealand Legion, knows the inside workings of the New Zealand League of Youth. At first I wondered if she could possibly be in earnest, or if it were another of those multiple personality cases. But no, she was quite sincere. The facts were simply that she was prepared to listen to anyone, and hadn't the faintest idea what she herself was talking about. And our conversation in re editorship of a Douglas Credit journal took place in Wellington, where a little paper of this persuasion was perishing by the wayside. She returned disconsolate an hour or so later. “No use,” she replied, “I saw the wretched man who owns the wreck. He told me that the paper wanted £200 if it
And thus slipped by my one chance of acting as a finger-post to the promised land.
Of course, theoretically speaking, journalists never take any part in politics. Those who do come to a sticky end, such as a seat in the House of Representatives. Correct and tactful journalistic procedure is to curse all schools of thought with a quite impartial earnestness, smoke a pipe, devote leisure hours to badminton and dogs, always preface the word Government with the adjective “bloody,” but become definitely unprintable when talking of Trade Unions. I know more than one young journalist who, despite inconspicuous talents, has won a reputation for “soundness” by no bolder tactics than these.
But politics and economics — Scylla and Charybdis—are to-day becoming New Zealand's national vice: personally I think it a better one than bridge, though it may work out just as expensive in the long run. It was, I think,
“It's a bug,” said Mr. Fairburn, with his usual thoughtful yet guileless smile; “sometimes it bites you, sometimes not.”
Personally I think the Douglas Credit bug an interesting and effective one. Nor were the meetings in the little hall (which soon focussed enough of the genuinely interested and also the born-tired and born-talkative to need new seating accommodation), at all burdensome to the spirit. In fact, it was all rather good fun, if rather poor mathematics.
Fairburn was a principal speech-maker at
I forgot to mention that at my first Douglas Credit meeting I was once again overpowered by the atavistic desire for speech-making and acted accordingly: I was instantly put on the committee.
Douglas Credit's New Zealand headquarters were technically in Christchurch, where most of the fun began. Its full blossoming forth as a nation-wide movement began under canvas at Okoroire, some four years back, when a constitution—later hacked to pieces by criticism from all quarters—was drawn up, and local executives began to take shape.
That the greater part of the Auckland Farmers' Union membership should plump for a gospel of plenty, and plenty to pay for it, is natural enough. The most interesting thing that the Association has really accomplished in New Zealand lies in this, that for the first time in New Zealand's history country interests are to some extent welded with city leadership.
There are, of course, farmers who differ.
Douglas Credit has had its papers, unofficial and otherwise. Plain Talk, run in Auckland for a time by an ex-advertising canvasser,
Respectable little papers have done their mild best to command as big a circulation as did the more flamboyant Plain Talk, but it has been stiff going. The circuses popular with the public just now don't seem to be those boasting tricky white rabbits as their star turns.
The Association made valiant efforts to use the powers of existing but disrupted organisations. On one occasion, hundreds of letters were posted off to the clergy of every denomination in the Auckland district, leaving out only Spiritualists, Mormons and “Brother” Dallimore (who would perhaps have been the likeliest prospect of any). I think eleven clergymen turned up, including a Salvation Army officer
The Association has, however, since that rather forlorn little meeting, attracted the friendship of such prominent clerics as the Rev. A. J. Greenwood and the
Despite the fact that he hasn't so much as a bench-mate to back him up in debate, Captain Rushworth's is a commanding figure in the House, and when in form he is a fine speaker, of the simple and sympathetic persuasion. He reads American technology publications for the more impressive side of his discourses, then follows up with good hard batting on the human interest wicket. He can inspire unusual interest in other Parliamentarians. There is, for example, the case of the
Seconding a vote of thanks to Captain Rushworth, after the mass meeting of enthusiasts in the Avondale Town Hall, Mr. Stallworthy became first poetic, then went into superlatives. “The gallant Captain,” cried he, “all honour to him—the gallant Captain!” The gallant Captain looked distinctly taken aback.
The veteran Member for Nelson,
In 1934, Major Douglas, Scottish engineer and economist rather by thought and popular acclaim than by the stout-hearted support of some fatherly banking institution, came out to New Zealand. Though well received at public appearances, he failed to register a bull's-eye in the hearts of local economists or the yet more susceptible bosoms of our Parliamentarians. Asked for practical details of the application of his scheme here in New Zealand, he wobbled a little. Though he himself probably has a clear vision of Canaan, he is unable to elucidate his ideas in such a way that their practical application becomes plain to the simple-hearted… anyhow, not quite as plain as the “Will take £4000” cable said to have arrived from an optimistic management before the finalisation of the Major's visit here.
But although Major Douglas was instantly labelled “Flop” by New Zealand dailies and other strictly disinterested parties, the fact remains that in a few years the Scottish engineer has made thousands of people in this one small country alone think, talk and argue on economics. In Australia— where twenty Douglas Credit candidates appeared at a 1934 election, to the simple astonishment of the English nation—his progress has been even more phenomenal. He can claim to be the man who made
Undoubtedly, too, the Major was more or less unfortunate in that his New Zealand visit clashed with those of and a literary Mephistopheles at one and the same time is an almost impossible task for a mere human being.
I met
Part of the secret was that the Legion had already five ultra-private branch bureaux in Auckland alone, complete with typistes. I thought at the time that “The Five Secretive Stenographers” would be a lovely title for an Edgar Wallace.
I have heard
I am going, very humbly, to ask for membership in the first political league, society or kabbalah which gets away from this shirt-tail racket. Why not, if we must be distinctive, pants?
The League of Youth (popularising pacifism) was indirectly started by
And indeed, the restless, questioning spirit of to-day, asking the whys and wherefores of relief works, pauperism, Ministerial jaunts overseas, is infinitely preferable to the dull self-satisfaction of six years ago. “For your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.”
Chapter XIII.
Fairy Rings
The place where the fairy rings first broke into the newspapers as a subject for criticism and debate was Christchurch. Puck o' Pook's Hill, evidently infected with this see-the-Antipodes bug, must have stowed away on one of the handsome grey steamers that draw in at New Zealand wharves, proud in the consciousness that they know all about the other side of the world and can instruct our ignorant insular seagulls. Puck, seeing English trees lone and bright-leaved and stately in the Christchurch parks which were planted by incurably English pioneers, must have left a souvenir… . . from which seed sprang “fairy rings.”
There is a plague of them in the Christchurch Botanical Gardens…… white circles of tiny toadstools flung down in the exact design necessary for the fairies' formal dances.
Behind is the sea-blue shimmer of a million lupins, brief-lived as the dragonflies, for they are not officially recognised as flowers at all. Soon Gardener Time, that brown calloused-palmed old man, will dig the blue petals into the soil, and go away hopefully muttering about the prospects of his roses.
But in the meantime, here is a garden of blue undaunted lupins, honey-brimmed: and all over the smooth green turves, the little hillocks under old sleepy pine trees, circle and twist the fairy rings. In a very ancient and neglected-looking lotus pool, its few pale flowers glimmering up, half-vacant, half-sinister, like the faces of the water nymphs who stole away a brown handsome lad from among Argo's
A tiny white fountain bubbles up in a jet of laughter. And the trees whisper, there's a soft dim shuffle of poplar leaves on the pavement, the first of the brave fallen: but the little golden lime-blossoms still smell richly sweet.
The portals and stone doorways of the Museum, which is at one end of the Gardens, are enchanted too. It's not a very good Museum; inside you'll find things dusty and dreary and far too orderly. But someone many years ago had the impudence to carve, among the stone oak-leaves of this entrance, tiny hidden faces, human and goblin and animal. Here there's a stone squirrel concentrating on his acorn. Here a fox looks slyly over his shoulder, listening to the far-off sound of the hunting horn.… There are tiny running animals, the things that part the grasses and twigs of the old-world forests: and tiny grimacing faces, such as you see sometimes half-dreaming, in the folds of a heavy curtain through which the sunlight streams.
The old municipal rooms and offices are just as bad.…… You traverse incredible flagged passages, in corridors where the light falls from old bronze lanterns. You might quite well be going by a secret way to keep some important political appointment with the lord of a medieval castle. Nor is the hall into which you finally emerge disappointing. High-galleried, it is painted in bright, bold colourings, azure, or, gules: carved wooden hands thrust up from the walls.…
Once in Christchurch I went gargoyle-hunting. Now this is a perilous sport, in its way as dangerous as the quest of the tiger, for it follows that you have
It was also in Christchurch that I saw the “Golden Hind”: just as when Drake set sail for the Spanish Main.…
There is, it would seem, a Royal Society for Nautical Research. Christchurch has a Fellow of it, a bronzed seafarer deft with his hands and with paint-brushes and little carving implements. And out of the pictures of far-away years, he built the Golden Hind from stem to stern, from rigging to high gilded cabin, just as an English sailor once fancied his sweetheart ship.
I have seen, moreover, green lawns sloping down quietly through the folds of dusk to the Avon, which is a most ridiculous little stream and has no right whatever to call itself a river… . except that the shadowed trees and the wild duck with their pointed wings make a fuss of it. The green lawns, which are the hidden part of gardens in plutocratic regions where you may not build a house unless prepared to spend at least £4,000 on it, have no truck with the Colonial curse of fences or palings. Over their low fluted balustrades of stone lean the peering, laughing faces of geraniums, and the still water just beaneath is full of orange and cinnamon and dusky red reflections.… .
It is not any great wonder that Puck thought it worth while to sprinkle fairy rings in Christchurch. Yet I have seen other places in New Zealand where, if the little white toadstools have not yet carried out their plans for invasion, magic enough goes on.
There is a grubby old steamer which hoots piercingly in the coldest hours of Wanganui morning. Wanganui has frosts that pierce like steel splinters into the marrow, and getting up at 5 a.m. is an ordeal as fierce as the knight's vigil. But you must… . and if you have brought rugs a-plenty, then it isn't so bad to sit curled up on the little river steamer's deck, listening to the soft slurred speech of old Maori women who wear black shawls over their heads and smoke clay pipes: by way of variety you may give ear to the wild screams of Maori pigs, who are swathed, very much alive, in nets, and flung unceremoniously into the hinder parts of the boat.
Maoris make an art of dolce far niente. Nobody else, not in all the world, can sit and dream like an aged Maori woman whose pipe is full. In the larger cities, traffic and other abominations somewhat disturb the practise of leisure. This is a crime. But in Wanganui, Maoris, sometimes with fat twinkling-eyed phlegmatic babies tucked into their shawls, sit everywhere and for ever. If they should like you very much they may give you a present, as much as a piece of greenstone: you are then expected to make them a long sequence of gifts, each far more valuable than your own souvenir.
They are very nice, though, and have the most charming manners.
Upstream, where the broad silvery-grey, toi-toi-plumed sweep of the river narrows into inlets edged with russet-leaved, prick-eared English trees, you come upon slender unpainted canoes, hollowed out from the single log in the days before the white men came. The years of slipping through river waters have polished them until they shine like straw, and they are the perfect shape of seed-pods. Some of them are hundreds of years old, and have run red with blood in ancient times.… . A long one, an erstwhile war canoe, fitted up with a racketty engine, spluttered desperately and broke down as we passed.
A half-caste girl of thirteen, her bronze hair tied with a blue ribbon, rides her pony down to the water's edge.… Lissome, bold with the taut perfect grace of an unspoiled thing. For how long? The eyes of every white man on the boat watch the swing of her body.
A pure-blooded Maori woman (there are few enough left), proudly exhibits her three-months-old twins. They are Plunket babies, and their absurdly plump little brown cheeks nestle on snowy starched white pillows.
The poplar trees are gold-casqued, straight and tall, knights in burning armour. The river waters are shallower. Ahead is Jerusalem, in its golden cloud of trees.…
A few years ago died in Wellington the Reverend Mother
Pipiriki, where the great rowan trees are loaded with scarlet berries, is named after the Epicurean decease of a chieftain. Pipis, on his death-bed, he desired, pipis (a small shellfish similar to the English cockle) he must have: his gourmandising evidently had an impressive effect on the minds of the chief mourners.
Everywhere in the Maori world there is the haunting touch of memory—echo half-heard, shadow swiftly withdrawn from the white man's pathway. See the tiny rock island in mid-Wanganui, its lone-liness only emphasised by its rusty tufts of trees. Go past this safely enough in your steamer. But if you travel by canoe, you must lay a green bough here, for Taniwha, monstrous legend of the river, is still to be placated. And in the forest depths, beyond the slopes where the red deer show themselves on the skyline, still roam the woman and man maeroro, the huge ogres of Maori legend.
Is it all lost, in European clothing, European music, European disease? I think not. The Maori is very nearly an unexplored territory. He has a quaint and naive way of interpreting white men's ideas, such as appeal to him, after his own fashion… . . witness the bloody devilment of the Hau-Hau creed, directly and simply developed from the Christian mystery of the Body and Blood of Christ. Witness, too, in the deeps of the King Country, the homage paid by sky-god Rangi to pakeha fashions. Rangi, greatest of gods, adorns a comparatively new Maori meeting-house… . . one whose idols were chipped out by the carvers in the days when whaling vessels and their occupants were a pleasing novelty. There must have been a dandy among the ship's company. For behold Rangi, naked as any god might condescendingly come into the world, but adorned with a high starched collar and a bow tie.
Captain Cook heard the song of the tuis in New Zealand groves, and found it sweet enough. But this did not stop the old gourmet from dishing the poor songster up in pies, which he declared to be “mighty sweet eating.”
Through the green sunlit shimmer of New Zealand bush, the great trees rearing their proud heads quaintly coiffed with huge nest-like creeper parasites, flop the heavy startled wood-pigeons, too fat and lazy to volplane in correct bird fashion. They have gorged on purple berries. Once on a day, this would have meant sudden death for them, for the
Once, far up in the Waipoua Kauri Forest, there was a place which bore the name the Vale of the Birds. And this was sacred, for the pagan mind is not one to miss beauty, and the splendid confidence of all the wings that yearly bore down on the thick-berried trees seemed a marvellous thing. It became a tohunga matter, and on a certain day of the year, there were rites and ceremonies in welcoming the berry-eaters. Then, with all due courtesy, a sufficiency of the birds to feast the tribe was ensnared.
But this happens no more, for a European used his shotgun in the Vale of the Birds.
And Hotu is dead too, who was in some sort the hereditary guardian of the kauri trees, and carried the little tomahawk with which, it is told, his fore-father struck down a pakeha who insulted the tree sacred to Tane Mahuta, god of the wildwoods.
Tane's tree still stands—superb, living, defiant, the emblem of a magnificent race. To see it you come by little muddy tracks, and the leafless trunks of the kauris around you are like the masts of ships that have journeyed farther than Argo.
You can eat the tawhara in the woods around. This is the fleshy cream flower of a great green palm —sweet as honey and water-melon in one.
And all along the desolate roads that lead to this end of the ordinary world, little peach-coloured clouds of dawn have come down to earth. This is the pink manuka. The little brown and white flower-cups of the pungent-smelling trees are piquant enough, but the pink is soft and lucent—a
All this is the unknown territory where a journalist drifts, on holidays, on strictly business missions.… Turn a corner from your city street, and you stumble into the old stone-carven world of white men's magic, into the demilunar world of brown magic, potent still. Sometimes they join forces and march triumphantly through your little cardboard cities of materialism.
Opononi dreams in the sun. Clear, pale honey-colour, its sands are swept up in drifts and dunes by the sparkling blue outlet of the Hokianga. All night long, in a little blue-painted sleeping porch that thrust out like a shaggy eyebrow over the quiet edge of the sea, I heard the little waves talk of moon-tracks, of the ancient and completely fabulous marine monsters belonging to its pre-pakeha days, of sunburnt white girls who played mermaid in these parts now.
I was awakened by a dusky and delicious lady of rare vintage—part African negress, part Maori. She looked like the coal-black Mammy of Virginian films, and made such coffee as nobody could ever have expected on sea or land.
Half-asleep in the sun, luxurious warmth of baking yellow sand creeping through a tired body, I saw the stone wall and the queer old pieces of ordnance that proclaimed the dignities of one antique wooden house.
An “old identity” of many adventures had settled there, and a fame not entirely unconnected with his remarkable cellar had spread concerning his hospitality.
Until Lord Ranfurly's day, every Governor paid state visits, by sailing-ship, to this old house. Old Jack received their vice-royalties in style. His crazy collection of cannon—all different sizes—was brought over from Australia. He trained Maori lads as his
Just over the hill, one descends by steep roads to the fields where the Maoris still live in flax huts or, at the very best, in tiny wooden shanties without chimneys. The need for ventilation has never yet become apparent to the Maori mind, and probably never will. Besides, how can conger eel be dried and fish smoked without the goodly puffings of the chimney?
I hate to say it, but the predominant feature of the little Macquarrie huts hopefully erected near Spirits Bay is bugs: and such bugs. The ordinary Maori bug is infamous enough for his odour, but the Spirits Bay bugs are of a size, a speed, a feminine curiosity, quite unparalelled in my poor experience. Most people end up curled under blankets, sleeping à la belle ètoile. And an excellent way of spending a night, too.
But the magic has never really died, has it? And the newspaper man who regretfully feels that nothing new intends to happen under the sun or the electric light, that for ever and for ever the same politicians will continue to bleat the same inanities, that always women's clubs will talk like women's clubs and expect somebody to pay attention to them, must break away and head for the hinterlands. If need be, he must, as did one long-suffering Wellington scribe who had written the same column daily for upwards of fifteen years, throw the inkstand at his editor. But whether this turns out to be
That is what all the beauty and the magic and tradition of the hinterlands whisper always, against the little steel-tracked conquerors.
When the scribe in due course returns to his desk, his difficulty will be not in producing new achievements, but merely in persuading somebody to pay for them.
Chapter XIV.
Silver Sheet
Myra was a beautiful and intelligent young woman with hair done in fat sausage-like ringlets after the manner of a well-groomed nag's tail: in normal circumstances I have no doubt that she could have held her own against any man, but one could never tell what the Iron Claw would be up to next. Sliding stairways, horrible oubliettes under carved Chinese chairs, formidable crucibles emitting clouds of poisonous vapour, gorillas stationed in expectant attitudes and with loathsome smirks on their faces — these are but casual details of the many dirty tricks the Iron Claw kept up his sleeve.
We all loved him, we of the Star Theatre's gallery. It still stands in Wellington, still serves its same old purpose as a cinema, but I haven't had the heart to go there for the past ten years. I don't believe the rising generation could bring itself to such a pitch of honesty that it would be able to sit still… . well, more or less still…… and watch an instalment of a screen serial, with the fatal words, “Don't Miss Next Week's Great Episode” flickering on the screen just when Myra landed in the toughest spots.
The first picture ever shown in New Zealand was a French film called “A Trip to the Sun.” Other very early films were “The Great Train Robbery,” with was the train robbery heroine. Names of stars weren't published in those high and far-off times. If you developed a soft spot for an actress, you just had to slink into the theatre hoping that “the little jumpy girl” would be on again.
“Living pictures,” quaint enough little sideshows but the ancestors of the opulent talkie of to-day, were at first treated as very minor entertainment at the theatres, where the platform artists, tenderly known as “hams,” absorbed all the dignity, all the limelight, all the well-matured tomatoes. In one house, where the walls were too grubby for the “living pictures” to be reflected thereon, the lantern was turned on the ceiling, and the audience patiently suffered the first agonies of a complaint later to be christened “aeroplane neck.”
A little company called “The Brescians” came out to tour New Zealand.
An auction mart wasn't by any means the worst that the cinematograph pioneers must needs face. In Christchurch there was a horse bazaar; an old garage did service in Dunedin. But the full New Zealand tour of this first little company was a coincidence in thirteens—started in Dunedin on the 13th of a month, drew a house of 13 the first night, and cleared £13,000 before the four was over. By the way, New Zealand developed one of its unexpected little spurts of progress over the matter of the movies. Whilst America still released its films in dime stores, we of the Antipodes could boast honest-to-goodness picture houses. And isn't the simple fact that the rear of the New Zealand anatomy could sit out an evening on those vicious little wooden seats a proof that there, at least, we were made of sterner stuff than the new generation?
Not many screen celebrities ever departed from the deserts and log cabins for long enough to set eyes on the Antipodes. Tom Mix visited New Zealand, long after his real glamour had slipped into the limbo where the dead stars twinkle still. He declared to the press interviewers: “Millions adore me,” which I think was rather game of him. The Dominion wrote him up under the caption “Modest Tom Mix.” Another exception to the steer-clear-of-New Zealand rule was
For the most part, we had to content ourselves with an occasional publicity man from Hollywood.
A Whangarei showman, a few years ago, just missed the full weight of that city's judicial wrath for the natty way in which he “tied up” a few buckets of whitewash, the King's highway, and Ruth
The first “Miss New Zealand”: we all knew intimately somebody or other in the finals of that contest (the world's first epidemic of beauty queens having just broken out), and one and all, we cried, “Oh, but I'm better-looking than that!” Some of the screen tests were definitely grim. In the end, Miss New Zealand No. 1 was
Not half-a-dozen full-length films were made in New Zealand. The Publicity Department turned on “Glorious New Zealand,” of which one could at least say that it was not inglorious. In another publicity film, “Under the Southern Cross,” the hit of the show
So far New Zealand has contributed but few stars to the talkies: principal among them are
The first talkie shows were good. Hollywood had done things well, though why “The Singing Fool” should have figured as the first real talkie success is quite beyond understanding. And of course
With the beginning of the talkies came midnight matinees. They were damnably dull and chilly, began at 11 o'clock, and continued until after two in the morning, the all but unendurable tension relieved only by cups of black coffee. I remember hearing “The Desert Song” under these trying conditions in Wanganui. John Boles was taking the part of the famous Red Shadow, and, it being a particularly cold night, those men who had brought rugs along were at a premium. Before the hour of two sounded, the most unlikely people were dimly to be discerned nestling together under one another's coverlets.
Tactlessness brought about really vigorous opposition to the American block-buying system, which ended in a Film Commission set up by Parliament, hit Hollywood hard by quota, for a time threatened to bring about a sort of strike and
expectation of this star film is sold twice over.
The astonishing discovery that England can be just as improper as America sank deep into the Colonial heart after a few films such as “Blackmail” and “Frail Women.” Lord Bledisloe was one who found this out for himself, and was, to the horror and amazement of the showman concerned, deeply and most publicly shocked. A British film called “Rich and Strange” was screened at the Regent Theatre, in Auckland. The theatre manager was only too happy to be able to advertise “under vice-regal patronage,” when his Excellency signified his
As a general rule, any film at which vice-royalty is to be present is as carefully censored as a baby's new breakfast food. In this case, things were complicated by the fact that the film only arrived from Wellington on the day before its premiére. Even so, bits considered a little too close to the torrid zone were hastily scissored out. It was labour in vain. The party-Lord and Lady Bledisloe and attendants were courteously received and seated in the comfiest corner of the dress circle. The film (I was in the audience on that historic occasion) was really very mild. A husband and wife, suddenly coming into money, go for a steamer trip, and each falls in love with somebody else. The scene nearest to any particular impropriety depicts them in a more or less inebriated condition, but the picture was so tame compared with much that has gone before and come after that the vice-regal thunderbolt of disapproval was quite unexpected. After the show, his Excellency expressed grave displeasure to the showman: moreover, on returning to Government House, he instantly sent a message to the morning daily (the New Zealand Herald) demanding that not only should the “Under vice-regal Patronage” clause be withdrawn instantly from all “Rich and Strange” advertisements, but that the newspaper critique of the film should expressly state how much overdone was the richness and strangeness thereof.
The Regent Theatre has always been an excellent newspaper advertiser. It is stated on good authority that the Herald's big business men refused to use the mailed fist on the show, and furthermore rang Government House in the stilly watches of the night, demanding to speak to his Excellency in person. No mere aide would suffice. Although his Excellency is credited with answering the call, it is understood that no palliative was offered. That the same week
His Excellency, however, is something of a stickler for the proprieties. On presenting a cup at an Auckland trotting meeting to one theatre-owner who also goes in for horse-flesh, he publicly expressed pleasure at being able to award a prize where it was well deserved, as the winner “showed pictures suitable for children.”
It is quite true that the white-headed boy of this little episode does make a specialty of children's holiday matinees, and that Mickey Mouse is a big man on his theatre circuits. Apart from this, his shows contain quite as much adultery per mile as do those of the unlucky Regent—at a conservative estimate. However, Lord Bledisloe can hardly be expected to stumble over every improper film that comes to New Zealand. In “silent” days the Regent, Wellington, once put on a British film week. The first film was about cocaine addicts, the second about somewhat complicated immoralities.
Two outstanding events, since the beginning of the talkie era, are the fall of the old theatre orchestras, and the drama that centred around the Civic Theatre in Auckland.
Wellington's outstanding theatre orchestra was to be heard at the De Luxe. Its star turn was little swarthy
There have been several valiant attempts to revive theatre orchestras in Auckland. A suburban house, the Tivoli, boasted one when the depression was in full swing. It was killed because the musicians, who were getting 30/- a week, demanded union wages. The Civic has tried revivals, and the St. James Theatre is now in the thick of one.
The Civic Theatre was an astonishing business. Nobody has yet elucidated whether its construction originated in a desire to give New Zealanders a picture house well beyond their income, or simply in a rather neat little scheme to dispose of building sites at a figure profitable for some, if not for all. The adventurous
Its ballets, in the first instance, were also very diaphanous. Much of the glory quickly departed. New Zealand Truth, a journal whose keen interest in some business deals is only surpassed by its clam-like reticence over others just as fascinating, had a good deal to say about the disappearance of this early “groundbait,” and the justifications of so costly an edifice. The Civic was dogged by ill-luck, in any case. In choosing its pictures, it missed on what turned out to be the film of the year—“Gold-Diggers of Broadway,” colour-toned in beautiful flesh-pink tints, which was to run for eleven weeks at the St. James', whilst the opening of the Civic's palace over the way slipped by almost unnoticed.
Though New Zealand takes no notable part
oil, which caught fire. Unlucky shareholders in this land's few oil ventures greeted the film with wild peals of hysterical mirth. But the most outrageous libel ever perpetrated on this country — that of an American company which prefaces its every film with a glimpse of a spinning globe on which there is no such place as New Zealand — is becoming less justifiable every day.
Chapter XV.
Sunset and Auckland Star
Tragedy is an inevitable interlude in all the fun, the hard work, and the romance of the newspaper world. There are papers in New Zealand whose proprietors have dug their toes in so deep that it will take more than a depression to shake them. Unfortunately, the best-capitalized ventures are by no means always those which the newspaper man likes best—the enterprises of originality, of keen insight, of trenchant criticism cutting like a knife-blade through all the swathings of policy dictated by financial interests.
The independent-minded newspaper is even more of a fiction in New Zealand than in other countries. It is true that all hands in the newspaper world have combined to treat the Coalition Government with some contempt—when there was nothing to lose by it—but this is merely because nobody has believed that such a shoddy makeshift could conceivably last.
The attitude of most New Zealand dailies on questions of any political importance is a foregone conclusion. Money-bags need never open his morning paper with the presentiment that the New Zealand Herald, the Wellington Dominion, or the Christchurch Press will have anything to say that could possibly spoil the flavour of his breakfast bacon. Nor is all the narrow-mindedness on one side. It would be even more stupid to look for an honest criticism of Trade Unionism, for instance, in the Labour organ,
There are exceptions: until the depression became really acute, the Christchurch Sun was one of them, and it still exhibits a ghost of its old-time independence when really important points of policy are not under discussion. But “Sun Newpapers Ltd” went under a cloud that has not yet lifted, when, on September 20, 1930, the big white building of reinforced concrete which showed to Wyndham Street, Auckland, the proud crest of a risen sun, was stricken with the news of a premature sunset.
There have been other newspaper disasters in the last few years—notably the passing of the New Zealand Times—but no other newspaper enterprise of the past twenty years has been started with hopes as high, or conducted as ably, as was the Auckland Sun, younger brother of the Christchurch journal.
The first of the New Zealand Sun newspapers, the Christchurch Sun, fought for its popularity and won it during war days. Its success revealed something that nine New Zealand dailies out of ten blandly ignore—the fact that you can't have good journalism without good journalists.
Newspapers whose staffs cannot be termed brilliant thrive often enough in New Zealand: they rest on old-time prestige—and their youth has generally been far more turbulent and enterprising than their sedate middle-age. They have made themselves indispensable to party interests, build up big circulations in the farming districts—for your farmer
There is no such thing in New Zealand as a daily free from the dictation of advertising and party interests.
The Christchurch Sun has consistently followed a policy of catching its reporters young—but not of treating them rough. Until recently, its editor,
Concentration on local interests seems to me to have put the Christchurch Sun head and shoulders above its evening rival, the Christchurch Star. Where the rest of the world screamed Hitler or Mussolini, the Christchurch Sun would raise Hell in large headlines concerning a bridge, harbour or art gallery site the question of which was smouldering in the Canterbury bosom. All Sun reporters were “bush-rangers”—wandering hither and thither to pick up local incident, tint with local colour, and present in “snappy” style. There was no such thing as stereo-typed and formal reporting. Everything printed in the paper was original — with the exception, of course, of its cable services—and the consequence was a success hardly looked for in its first days.
It was up against a big thing in the Auckland Star, later to be incorporated with New Zealand Newspapers, Ltd., capital £1,000,000, when it was finally decided to float the Auckland Sun. But bigger things still were hoped for on the Sun's part.
The make-up of the paper was characteristically English—cable news on the front page, whilst every other newspaper in the Dominion was plugging away with front and back pages a weltering mass of advertisements, in which you could locate corncures, theatrical notices and the addresses of phrenologists, but nothing of further importance.
Why in the name of all newspaperdom's gods and idols this particular type of make-up should be considered dignified and conservative I simply cannot see: but it is so. It's a freakishness of mentality, ingrown with the passing years. The Auckland Sun put important things on the pages where they might reasonably be expected to catch the eye… and thousands on thousands of times, during its brief but bright existence, I heard the complaint, “But you can't find anything in the Auckland Sun.”
However, not lack of circulation, but lack of advertising, was the ultimate cause of the crash.
During the short years of the Auckland Sun's existence, the Auckland Star might roughly have been described as a good paper, though the same could never truthfully have been said of its Christchurch satellite, the Star, which seems to exist mainly because its parent company has a lot of money and is ambitious of making a lot more.
It is common newspaper axiom that four Christchurch dailies—Christchurch Press and Christchurch Times in the morning, Christchurch Sun and Christchurch Star at dewy eve—cannot all continue to exist. The Press is impregnable: the real tussle is between the two evening papers. It is, in my opinion, a test of strength between good money and good journalism, though, since the litigation which finally let New Zealand Newspapers, Ltd., in for heavy costs over the great empty Auckland Sun building in Wyndham Street, things have been brighter financially for the Sun's supporters.
There are reasons why the Sun papers inspire
A common cry is that as soon as a New Zealand writer has made good, he or she takes a lifebuoy and strikes merrily out for another and a better shore. When
And on hearing the usual Sun rate, the writer of this intelligent and encouraging screed promptly offered payment for original contributions — at a figure just a little more economical.
The Christchurch Sun inaugurated literary competitions which must have cost the company hundreds yearly. Its Christmas supplement was by far the most brilliant thing that any New Zealand daily has ever contrived, and its collapse, after the Auckland Sun's downfall, was something of a tragedy to New Zealand scribes.
After a brief spell of Marris editorship, the New Zealand Times was sold at an excellent figure and as a thing to be taken seriously, to the Dominion newspaper, which, of course, once having obliterated its newly potent rival, went ahead blandly in its same old way, bestirring itself no more.
Then, with the help of
When Marris departed from the Christchurch Sun, “J.H.E.S.,” otherwise Mr.
The news editor of that day was “Mac” Vincent, Christchurch Sun editor now—a little Irishman with grizzled dark hair, twinkling brown eyes and a sense of humour that would by no means be repressed. He was famed as the man who shot Lord Kitchener. This occurred when “Mac” was a very junior member of the military reserves, and the severe war lord was in Christchurch looking over Colonial discipline with an eagle eye. Military manoeuvres on the grand scale were arranged, and cadets armed with blank-loaded
An ardent mountaineer, “Mac” Vincent has had more than one adventure in the Mount Rolleston regions—less publicised than Mount Cook and its soaring Alpine brothers, but offering hazardous climbs for those who care to undertake them. On one occasion, “Mac” achieved a winter climb which he believed to be the first successful snow-season attempt on a particularly stiff peak. To his rage, on descending, he found that an eighteen-years-old flapper had nipped in ahead, conquered the minor Everest just a week before. Girls will be boys these days.… . Another climbing expedition was rather more disastrous. “Mac” and his companion, another Sun man, Frank Hinton, cables editor, disappeared gracefully from view over a precipice. That broken ribs and bruises were the only souvenirs was a signal proof of the fact that Somebody—no matter whom— takes care of journalists, who are of course all his very own.
Other figures of interest slipped in and out of old Christchurch Sun days. Under
However, in the Dominion's old days, when politics were politics and scribes were glad of it, there were different reports of the “Early Bird”: one being that he used to stalk through the sub-editorial domain, murmuring, “Well, boys, plenty of Blood and Guts in it this morning, I hope?”
The Auckland's Sun's brilliant rise and its early constancy in the heavens was watched with natural interest and anxiety by the Christchurch brethren.
Saturday, September 20, was the day of the deluge. Notice appeared without warning at about a quarter to twelve. The confidential secretary who typed the notice had no warning of the impending tragedy, and wept as she typed out the last dread “writing on the wall.” Neither the editor nor the editorial staff knew what was pending. One or two
Huie was the butt of much criticism at the time (the disaster was first cleverly but rather cruelly worded “Ship gone down, all hands lost but the captain”), but looking back one recognises his iron nerve and self-control in times of difficulty and personal humiliation. He had staked all his energy, skill, and judgment on the Auckland Sun's prosperity, and had failed.
A farewell leader was prepared by Huie himself, and was fitted into the leader page after the bomb had been dropped. An earlier leader, written by the assistant editor, was shelved, and never appeared in print. Likewise a good editorial that went down with the Sun was the leader-epitaph dealing with the death of His Majesty King George V. Written when His Majesty was gravely ill, it was shelved when he recovered, and kept for future use. (This is quite usual journalistic procedure, and many prominent people might be a little nervous if made aware that already, in journalistic annals, they are “meat” for obituaries, and can have their epitaphs in print at a moment's notice.) Ultimate fate of the King George V. obituary: melted down, which is one up for His Majesty.
In the luncheon room on the third floor, Huie addressed the staff a day or two after the crash. (It was still intact for a week.) Some reporters were rebellious, and there were murmurs of dissent during Huie's address, for the youngsters who had been. kept so utterly in the dark felt that they had been badly treated. It is an ordeal for any man to go through, and Huie was profoundly affected, showing for the first time just how hard he had been hit. Even the rebels felt sorry for him on that disastrous day. They knew — or considered — that the fight against the Sun had not always been fair, and that important advertisers whose support would have spelt the difference between success and failure had been influenced by strategies which were less like war with the gloves off than like a chunk of lead comfortably concealed in the opponent's boxing-glove. And the depression was well under way… . Two months earlier, the staff had been asked to swallow a ten per cent. cut. Only one man, the associate editor, refused, and he took three months' notice instead.
Among the Sun staff that day, it was recorded that the Star people celebrated their success with a
Stanbrook, the chief Sun reporter, is now with the New Zealand Herald, which paper has also gathered unto its bosom
Although it ended so tragically, most of those who participated in the glorious adventure will look back on the three and a half years from February, '27, to September, '30, as the happiest time in their
But more than success, scoops, prosperity, was the camaraderie which has always attached to the Sun papers, and the spirit of adventure which was encouraged there as in no other journalistic sphere. There was a genuine feeling of literary effort, too. … The famous Sun competitions have been dropped altogether since a Sun advertising man, Davies, first strolled by the great empty building, flourished his hat and quoted in a loud voice.
For a time, litigation over the value of the building which was taken over by New Zealand Newspapers Ltd. looked like putting the Sun company on a desperately precarious footing in its last stronghold, Christchurch. The purchasing company appealed against the valuation: they lost their case, and the judge was a little terse with certain aspects of the appellants' way of putting facts under his notice.
The facts were that the Star was to buy at valuation land and building — cost £43,341, government valuation £32,625. Mr.
Maybe the survivors of the Sun's wreck didn't drink champagne that night, but there was probably a convivial round or two, anyhow.
Curiously enough, it is an Auckland Star man,
Political developments of the next year or so will probably mean that New Zealand journals will take up a far more definite stand in regard to the present crisis than is possible at present. Never was a time when straight-speaking, clearly-worded and critical journalism was more bitterly needed in New Zealand. Journals of to-day will be forced into supplying it—
The machinery that brought out Sun editions, a few years back, has found at least partial use. The 'quake wrecked Napier and Hastings newspapers, damaged newspaper plant beyond repair. A fair proportion of the Sun machinery was taken over by the Napier Daily Telegraph, which pluckily carried on despite a loss rumoured to amount to £90,000.
There was some suggestion once of moving the Elam School of Art from its deplorable old buildings to the Sun premises. It was never carried out. None but memories and shadows move in the old building where one editor thanked his staff for pewter tankards, whilst champagne glasses were filled not far away.
The present owners of the building have taken down the symbol of the glittering risen Sun. But not yet has the Sun set in Christchurch.
Chapter XVI.
Stone Walls
The first ex-convict whom I knew at all well was an exceedingly pleasant company promoter. In the good old days, company promoting was by no means the highest walk of life to which a former prisoner could apply, for, when Parliament first met in Auckland, was it not possible for a very impolite Member to refer to the Founder of English settlement in New Zealand as “that convicted felon?”
Like most of the older British overseas settlements, New Zealand has some grim memories of early convict days… . and some very ugly present survivals of them, though when I wrote a few of the latter up for an Auckland weekly (after hearing from the
Executions that were free shows for the public, who congregated above the Mount Eden stockade .… a public hanging at the bottom of Victoria Street.… jury's summing up of a convicted man's state of mind as “seduced and moved by the instigation of the Devil.…” a thousand other details, some purely tragic, some amusing in a grim way, one can find by glancing through the yellow
Anyone who thinks that we have put all the barbarism of the penal code behind us is self-deluded to an extraordinary degree. Even the Borstal establishments, for girls, as well as for young men, are a lot prettier on the surface than underneath. Careful consideration of one such would convince any discerning person that there might be a good deal of truth in the statement of an eighteen-years-old girl (kept at Point Halswell for a term of years, against her parent's wish, because she was reported to the police as being overfond of dancing and late hours), that whilst there she learned “all the filth under the sun.”
To do the Prisons Board justice, the obvious trouble with the Borstal Institute for young women is neither in its locality nor in the type of prison accommodation provided, but in the lack of classification of young prisoners. Many of the women here seem so obviously of subnormal mentality that to sentence them to any form of prison confinement is a childish waste of time and money. Others, as the matron of the Institute frankly stated, are uncontrollable.…
Yet it is not all ugliness, this strange house by the sea. Male convicts (the men's prison at Point Halswell is not far away, a very dubious advantage from the young women's viewpoint, as they are expected to do all the washing and mending for the men prisoners) have planted acre on acre of pinetrees on the sheltered hill-slopes, and below shines the great blue sweep of sea. Escape from Point Halswell is almost impossible, and the girls are
There is some attempt at both schooling and pleasure at Point Halswell… . a big, airy schoolroom, occasional dances, the music of an old gramophone, a little circulating library. The wards are christened after departed vice-reines of this Dominion, and the highest “promotion” an inmate can win is to get to the
There is a “punishment cell”—unlighted, bleak, unfurnished—a mere concrete tank in strange contrast with pretty little rooms and pretty little ideas. It is legitimate to keep a rebel here, on bread-and-water menu… but I doubt if this regime lasts for very long.
In addition to the really unpleasant and none too healthy work of laundering convict clothing, a certain amount of outdoor work—milking, gardening —is thrown in.
One of these days we may even come to treat Mother Earth with more than a perfunctory courtesy, when it comes to helping and healing the socially unfit. After all, it was in New Zealand, and with Canterbury's sweeping ranges for his inspiration of a free and noble world beyond, that
The Borstal is of course the velvet glove. The iron hand is not far away.
The eighteen-years-old child confined there for very youthful indiscretions was released on parole. A trifling action was interpreted as a breach of faith, according to the statement published in an Auckland weekly. In the prison van which took her (still against the hopeless opposition of a mother distracted with fear of the law), to Mount Eden gaol, she shared company with a murderer. In her confinement at Mount Eden, prostitutes were her companions.
She is by no means the only sufferer. Nor is there any sort of discretion used in the handling of prisoners—men or women—who are on remand, and the cells beneath the courts are insanitary to a disgusting degree.
In the year of grace 1934, month of July, a question was asked in Parliament as to the especial reasons the police might have for conveying a woman prisoner in an extremely delicate state of health in a “Black Maria” from Timaru to Christchurch. The fact that the prisoner was released, “No Bill” being brought against her, adds point to the fact that from the time of a prisoner's arrest, “manners none and customs beastly” seem to be sometimes considered quite suitable for his or her usage.
In Mount Eden, grim stone fortress patrolled by an armed sentry, women convicts wear big sun-bonnets that hide their faces away from men who may see them pass in the distance. Shapeless, shadowy, lost to identity, they live out the days of their sentence.…
There is a Discharged Prisoners' Aid Society, under the control of the
Giving Padre Moreton a “write-up” was an offence against the righteous moral code of at least two of Khyber Pass's most respectable old ladies. Into our office came they, bubbling over with wrath. It was explained that they were not merely good church-goers of the district, but shop-owners also, and that the gathering of the ex-convict clans might damage the valuation of their property……
I liked the retort my editor made on showing the infuriated church-goers out. “Madam,” said he, with perfect civility, “there are two kinds of Christians We are the other sort.”
Mount Eden suffers somewhat from age and aspect. As a prison official sadly wrote to us, after an initial article on abuses in that particular strong-hold, “Heaven knows we are not proud of the fact that the gaol looks grim.” It is generally admitted to be quite the most unpleasant berth a New Zealand convict can find.… Yet, in addition to its little difficulties and large tragedies, it has its funny side.
Even the grim confines of Mount Eden gaol have their unofficial moments of recreation. It is credibly reported that during the latter part of this year, a bookmaker inmate helped so substantially to brighten the lot of his fellow convicts (and of warders), that, on being unexpectedly searched, he was found to be in possession of several hundreds of pounds. Among other things this proves that they can pick a lock, but are not so hot on winners. Nor are warders always “the clean potato” their honourable profession calls for: a story goes that one boarder sent out (per warder) for some cigarettes, which duly arrived. But when the warder refused to hand over the change, said ex-burglar got quite nasty.
The official hangman has a hobby. He knits coloured waistcoats. He is garrulous, and not in the least averse to discussing the most ghastly details of his profession—but his difficulty is to get an audience.
New Zealand is probably one of the very few countries where women have volunteered to act as executioners. This was after the quite recent Coates murder case in Wellington, when an unfortunate young girl, still in her 'teens, was apparently buried alive after a brutal attack by her murderer, a relief worker. Several women wrote offering their services in the despatch of Coates.
The Prince of Wales indirectly saved a woman who would have been found “not guilty,” or at the very least let down very lightly, in any other country, from the unwarrantable life sentence imposed by the late Sir
“Joe,” who drove
“Strip parade” can take place at almost any time when the prisoners are in their cells. This means some difficulty in keeping one's cherished possessions concealed, but the hidey-holes of the old hands are at once the admiration and the despair of warders.
The silliest farce in the New Zealand penal code is the paper distinction between reformative detention men and “old lags.” There is indeed a distinction. One class wears a brown uniform, the other a blue one. They exercise in separate yards on Sundays. Otherwise, the distinction amounts to nothing. The boy sentenced for some trifling offence, the sex pervert, the out-of-work husband unable to keep up maintenance payments, the habitual criminal, herd together. New Zealand gulls itself with a phrase, considers itself progressive and fair because of a distinction in the colours of uniforms. The actual offence against youth is not so sickening as the cant that masks it.
The habitual criminal in New Zealand is deserving of some sympathy, none the less. A very few convictions—perhaps taking place in a brief “outlaw” period of a man's youth—may entitle him for a place in this legion of the socially damned. An habitual criminal can be arrested at any time, on cancellation of his license whether he has complied with this or not, and without further ceremony landed back in prison.
The most interesting document I ever saw, as produced by a Mount Eden inmate, was the diary of a young man convicted of murder. His sentence was commuted, but he wrote a long plea whilst actually in the condemned cell, and this was smuggled out by another convict at a later date. It was never used,
Prison advice, as brought in by an old offender:
I have never heard a word in praise of the Mount Eden diet, but I suppose you can't take a Hotel St. George appetite to this little resort.
It's not always philosophy that is brought to the outer world from the prison walls. Once, in my
His friends will never believe that there was no official fore-knowledge of his escape. For he had hardly commenced his crazy dash to the top of the gaunt stone quarry where the gang worked that day when the shot rang out… He didn't die at once, but in hospital.
However, a well-known Auckland business man, whose little specialty was fraud, went in a yellow-faced wreck and came out boosting the place as a health resort. He was the antithesis of my company-promoting acquaintance, who told me sadly that a few years of prison diet ruined a man's stomach once and for all. I suppose it depends on the standard of stomach.
The quaintest little recompense for prison cell life that exists in New Zealand is the compensation paid out by the pakapoo bankers and agents' fund to the unfortunate Celestials caught in the act.
Pakapoo provides a lot of innocent fun for the police, and meant a big money turnover a few years ago, when many of the Chinese in Wellington and Auckland were spending up to £5 a day on this recreation. Agents are as thick as blackberries even now, and trade is brisk, for £80 can be won for six-pence, whilst it is possible to break the £300 bank if you have real four-leaf-clover-black-cat luck.
Usually pakapoo (which, by the way, isn't regarded by the Chinese as anywhere near so interesting a diversion as fan-tan, dominoes or mah-jong, the real Celestial gambling games) is absolutely fair.
To prove that all is fair, it is an old Celestial custom to call in a complete stranger to draw the winning “characters”—marked down on green slips of paper—from the four bowls in which these are placed. Key numbers are drawn first, then ten out of the eighty possible characters marked down. Score seven characters you win £4: eight brings in £20, nine £40, ten £80. The agent who sells the winning ticket is in luck's way, too, for he automatically gets a prize a character below that with which his client collects.
The £300 always has existence in actual fact, and is kept in cash by the bankers. Paying out was stopped on one occasion, when it was found that an extremely “cute” European had faked the tickets. The agent was reported to the police, and went blandly to Mount Eden. He didn't have to worry. During his incarceration £2/10/-weekly was put aside for him from the bankers' and agents' fund mentioned above, and a nice little nest-egg was waiting what time he emerged from his dungeon.
Chinese only worry about gaol, as a general rule, when they are opium smokers. Opium-smoking, whilst not the omnipresent vice usually associated with the words “Chinese quarter,” goes on frequently enough in New Zealand cities. Wellington has the larger Asiatic population, but few dens have been better fitted out than the steel-doored one in Grey Street, Auckland, which had to be smashed open by police axes last year.
It is absolutely untrue that Celestials “lure” whites into opium smoking. On the contrary, the
Hindus were just as deft in one opium smuggling attempt which surprised New Zealand police officials not so long ago. They used four vegetable marrows as their receptacle.
An occasion when the Chinese turned out to help the police was rather funny. A Chinese ship was manned by two rival Canton tongs—a gross error of judgment on somebody's part. The headman of each tong acted as treasurer for his supporters: to the righteous indignation of one gathering, it was found when the ship berthed at Auckland that Tong A had got down on Tong B's money-box. The tong headman of the outraged clan joined in the police search, and an Auckland detective officer told me he would never forget the sight of the little yellow man, lithe as a mongoose, wriggling under the coolie mats which act as mattresses, delving into every secret cache and corner. The moneybox wasn't recovered, for the thieves had very sensibly dropped it overboard: but Tong B was avenged. Next trip out the police found, to their helpless mirth, that Tong A's money-box had also done the disappearing trick.
Mount Eden's condemned cell was on one occasion inhabited, not by doomed men, but by Communists… . the prison being full to overflowing
As a general rule, our amateur politicians make nothing—except capital—out of prison sentences. After the famous “Jim” Edwards had been released from the two years' sentence which Santa Claus (Mr. Justice Herdman) bestowed on him for his part in the Auckland riots, a notice advertised his next meeting thusly: “Come along and meet your pals, just out of gaol.” Jim had a continual stream of visitors whilst in durance vile, and was liked by all. He is not without a sense of humour, but can stand on his dignity too. When I wrote up the little abode in which he supported his wife and eight children (according to himself, purely on the proceeds of a cleanser of his own invention), he sent a slightly haughty letter assuring me that on leaving gaol he intended to move to a “more bourgeois dwelling.” The most striking adornments of his former abode were two near-life-size portraits—one of himself, one of Lenin. Jim, off-stage, has the pleasantest nature one could ask for, and is not averse to doing a little business with the “capitalistic” press. He sold an Auckland weekly the tale of his elusive adventures just after the Auckland riots for the modest fee of two guineas, but scrupulously refrained from giving away the names of any who had helped him. His wife, a little dark-eyed woman, whose family are well-clad, well-nourished and attractive infants (the eldest of them, a “nipper” of fourteen, has already been his father's pal on more than one “lecture tour”), also gave me a story about her pre-riot experiences, and was decidedly scornful of police agility in stalking her when she wished to communicate with her vanishing husband.
Not Auckland but Wellington is the journalistic centre of the Soviet crusade, for there is published the little Soviet News, organ for acquainting New Zealanders with all the brightest news from Russia of the Soviets. Sad to say, the Soviet News is not infrequently faced with grave financial difficulties, and, like “Brother” Dallimore, has no hesitation in reprimanding those Comrades whose “cash is slow in coming in.”
The Friends of Soviet Union, with headquarters in Karangahape Road, a red star outside advertising its affiliations, alleges as its main object “To counteract any plans for war against the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, by means of the mobilisation of workers and working farmers of New Zealand.” Furthermore, “To expose the lies and misrepresentations of the capitalist daily papers, periodical journals and books, and also the malicious stories depicted on the stage and cinema screen about the economic state of the Soviet Republics”
F.S.U. headquarters were draped with brilliant banners, until the owners of the building (who had not had the faintest idea that their tenants would turn out so “extreme”) insisted on their removal.
There is an earnest-minded little class for learning Russian. This meets weekly. I don't know whether Stalin follows the encouraging custom of the Alliance Francaise, and presents particularly bright New Zealand pupils with medals and addresses.
Socialist Sunday Schools have flourished for years in New Zealand. Christchurch led off, and great was the indignation in the Cathedral City: naturally the institutions are without benefit of clergy, but whether they are really much the worse for that is a question which every man must decide for himself.
It is the thing to say “Comrade Chairman” when you would address a meeting at an F.S.U. assembly. Something rather clubby about it.…
The F.S.U. is, if anything, less virile than the Labour Defence League, which is a section of the International Red Aid, with headquarters in Berlin. For a time there was also an exceedingly active Anti-Eviction League in Auckland, and evictions caused more than one brush with the police. Although those evictions which caused most fuss were not necessarily those deserving a great deal of sympathy, there have been some cases of genuine hardship since the depression began. Accommodation for the very poor is in certain instances appalling—and equally appalling is the idiocy and tactlessness of the organisations whose duty it is to deal
Mount Eden's shadow has by no means encompassed all New Zealand's political firebrands, many of whom are University students. (Indeed, a lecturer at the Auckland College was cast into grave displeasure of the professorial board because he dared to preface an outspoken book on Russia.) W.E.A. lecturers are kept on a tight rein. A new Free Speech organisation was this year formed throughout New Zealand, its backbone the repressed University “politicians.” One of them, exeditor Lowry, of the now defunct Phoenix, lost every penny trying to print open-minded periodicals, and though not a member of the Communist Party, was arrested with Smith and other Red Flag-waggers as a Free Speech advocate. It is interesting to note that the Phoenix succeeded whilst Lowry ran it. He is now associated in a printing partnership with
The ancient and tragic days of public execution, of burial in the prison grounds (there are eleven graves at Mount Eden prison), seem far enough away. Sometimes the post of executioner carried high privilege with it. The convict who acted as hangman in the case of
There is a touch of grim humour even in a murder trial at times. Sir George Arney, judge when
Occasionally the law affects its own “minions.” Witness the case of a very popular official, Police Superintendent Hollis, who was presented with a beautiful shiny automatic revolver, the pride and joy of his heart. On the day after the passing of the present Arms Act (which illegalises automatics, whilst leaving the deadly sawn-off shot gun a possibility for anyone), the presentation revolver was solemnly taken back, broken to bits. A more innocuous gun was substituted.
So far, the Auckland police have not had the painful duty of pulling in their gallant comrade who, on retiring from the detective force of the Queen City (he was given a presentation and a nice little speech when he departed), promptly went into the bookmaking business.
Indeed, though an occasional waif and stray of the bookmaking world is hauled over the coals, the
Prison's comedies and tragedies . . I shall never forget walking down an old street of lime trees and gracious moonlight with a little man who for eight years had been the Government's most unwilling guest. He had a story to tell of old Mount Eden customs. He stopped, watching a great moon rise, corn-gold, over Albert Park.
“That's what I couldn't get over, when I came out,” he said simply. “The moon seemed so enormous. I couldn't believe it was real. I hadn't seen it for eight years.”
I was sorry for the little man, angry in a futile way with the enormous moon. What pity has she, or we who walk under her, for the quaint Endymions whose cramped hearts stir as they watch her, hardly daring to believe that her beauty is true?
Chapter XVII.
Old Years, Good Bye
They used to bring pipes of canary and madeira wine to New Zealand, the vast-sailed ships winging out day after day on the favouring winds from England: and there was sprigged satin for gentlemen's waistcoats, advertised a great deal more conspicuously than the materials requisite for crinolines and for the delicious pantalette.…
Shipping news was given the most prominent place in those early newspapers. What is it, the delicate frost-etching of the years, the poignancy of memories, that makes their files so much more intriguing than the stuff we write to-day? There is no modern illumination so vivid as the slender blue and gold branching of the candle-flames: there is no other scent in all the world of flowers so heart-touching as the chrysanthemum's, and that is the flower of autumn, already half lost to yesterday. There is nothing so much alive as a ghost.…
Ah, but they were gallants, those men of the earlies, with their great gold fob-watches and their sprigged waistcoats! Did not one of them, good Wellingtonian and true, issue a newspaper challenge to his contumacious enemy to come forth and “have his nose pulled”? And the New Zealand Herald had an editor, a lanky rebellious fellow, who was always waiting to fight duels. It would take all “Holy Joe's” piety, maybe a little more, to lay that swash-buckling spectre.
Methods with newspapers of the earlies were terse and direct. The now extinct Southern Cross office mortally offended some British sailor-lads.
The Southern Cross retracted.
Christchurch (I have seen it portrayed in old map-drawings still kept in the City Council offices), was a flat, depressing spectacle, its beloved Avon an ignoble little stream wandering through raupo bushes. They hadn't yet made it the lovely city of trees that it is to-day, but there at least, a vision of English greenwood and English graciousness had come over the wide seas, and great spaces were planted out with oaks and poplars that may grow tall as Sherwood's yet.
Dunedin was Scottish almost to a man. The Gabriel's Gully rush, the magic whisper of “Gold,” filled its veins with life. A hotel shoe-black stayed off the golden trail, worked like a slave, bought land at auction sales. Presently, to the vast amazement of everyone, his lands were of such importance that he could command rentals a feudal baron would not have despised.
Old John Sidey, the former “boots,” built “Corstorphine,” grey stone on grey stone. English customs were rigorously observed. Sunday meant an enormous plum duff, carried in gleaming with brandy-flames. They asked him, one day, if he would contribute something to a Presbyterian church. He shook his head.
“Nay,” he said decisively, “but,” with a bleak smile, “I'll build it for ye.” And build it he did, a goodly blue stone church at Musselburgh. All his life long he prospered and gave. His son was the late Sir
Government House in Auckland (was not Wellington, first christened Britannia, but the “contemptible little fishing village on the Cook Straits?”)
An old saying is that a house must have a wed ding, a death and a birth before it is a home. None of these events has ever taken place at Government House in Auckland, but there were, by way of recompense, two burglaries and two fires, both on a very small scale. One of the fires took place whilst Sir
The orchestras at Government House functions of to-day leave nothing to be desired: but on one historic occasion, in the earlies, the hostess presided at the piano, with the aid of a wheezy 'cello as her only accompaniment. Still, eyes were bright, military uniforms were dazzling, moustaches were magnifi cent, and crinolines spread like the delicate whorls of flowers.
Newspaper criticisms of early Governors was singularly free and easy. Sir
Parliament met in Auckland May 24th, 1854. By a majority of ten, it was decided to open session with prayers — and the need for this has never become less at any succeeding date. After seven weeks' bickering, the Governor prorogued his Par liament,
The Governor called on an Auckland baker to form a new Ministry. The said gentleman popped upstairs to don a clean shirt before calling on His Excellency, thereby providing his cabinet with the splendid title, “The Clean-Shirt Ministry.”
Sir
But there was an unforgettable gusto of living in
But the little dreaming graves, lost under wild rose and seeded grasses, are sweet with memories. One of them has on its marble slab two tiny coffins,
Nobody visits the Mission Bay grave of little
Comic incidents in high life by no means ceased with the death of Wakefield and the passing of Robinson. Lord Plunket's offspring were the small sinners who smeared jam on Government House doorknobs on one very stately occasion, so that guests were properly overwhelmed with mingled confusion and rage. Lord Plunket preserved the sort of Oxford accent beloved of comic papers and Bolshevists. “Blo,” otherwise the Observer's veteran cartoonist,
“Are you the fellah,” asked Lord Plunket, severely, “who does all those beastly cartoons of me?”
His heart in his boots, “Blo” admitted that such was the case.
“Then allow me to tell you,” cried the victim, with no small degree of warmth, “that I wear my monocle in my right eye, not in my left.” Collapse of “Blo.”
Lork Plunket was the author of the famous “Pass
It has been unofficially recorded that Lord Jellicoe was one of the few to use the com munication cord on the Main Trunk, other than in cases of murder or sudden calamity. His Excellency was leaning out of the train window, when to his horror his false teeth fell out. Acting on a loyal impulse, his aide sprang to the communication cord, brought the train to a snorting standstill. His Excellency's feelings can be better imagined than described. The Jellicoes introduced the startling modern innovation of twin beds. The Fergussons hurriedly restored the dignified four-poster, and there has been no subsequent departure from this custom.
What the streets of New Zealand towns must have been like in the wild old days—especially in Wellington, where the principal recreation ground was raised to its present level by an obliging earth quake, and several of the modern thoroughfares were at one time under the sea—is hard to imagine. But in Auckland, one high official got so entirely weary of the seas of mud that he secured empty beer-barrels from a popular hotel, had them cut in halves and sunken like bridges from Fort Street to Wellesley Street. Imagine the stiff-corseted, bonneted little ladies of those picturesque days picking their way along a main street resting on so intemperate a foundation! But they were gallant, these “lost ladies of old years.” Many a shining life gave light and laughter in a strange dark land, while still the sailing-ships were few and far between, and whole families were wiped out, child after child, by
When the candles went out.....it was long enough ago. The streets in the New Zealand towns used to be lighted by oil-lamp, and there was always a scurry of lamplighters as dusk settled down. Each hotel (and whatever the country lacked, it was not an adequate supply of hotels) had its own big lamp, and the oil blazed till morning—no "early closing plague" for New Zealanders then. When the gas was first turned on, wild rumours as to its explosive qualities flew about among the citizenry, and people of importance dashed from Queen Street to Freeman's Bay to discover if in truth the new-fangled gas main had been blown to smithereens. Government House, in each centre, was lighted by the flare of gas-chandeliers ..... under which, according to the papers of those days, gowns looked "most effective."
Ladies went driving in little basket-weave contraptions, their ponies jingling bright harness. The sinister part of Auckland was the red and white houses of Upper Queen Street, where the ladies were "not thus, but far otherwise." They had their bright moments too. The son of one of the wealthiest town identities (whose daughter drowned herself in a well after the marriage which her father had arranged by making it known that she was available as a bride for any officer who could put down a given sum), used to drive his spanking equipage here, flinging so sovereigns from his silk hat to the ever-ready camp-followers.
In Queen's Hotel, Upper Queen Street, died an old rousabout whose cherished possessions were a signet ring bearing one of the noblest crests in England, and a pair of skates engraved with the reminder that the Prince of Wales (afterwards
His tragic souvenirs were akin to more
Quoting
"The Rollicking Rams" were the most enterprising, if not quite the most respectable, men's club in Auckland of the earlies. One of their exploits was to roll an enormous kauri tree butcher block down Shortland Street, causing a mad stampede of "cabbies," and wrecking a lawyer's office, in which the block finally found its abiding place.
The first New Zealand lifts were horse-drawn, and little horse 'buses conveyed citizens to the dim beginnings of Suburbia. Penny-farthing bicycles, with their great 54-inch wheels, became popular in the 'nineties, and the founder of Auckland's first cycling club was Mr.
By the way, the first Savings Bank used to open weekly, and for a period of two hours. But New Zealand wasn't exactly an important place in those days. I remember reading in the Britannia Gazette —published in a raupo hut on the banks of the Hutt River—that among our principal industries might be accounted “stuffed birds and dried Maori heads.”
Year 1860 brought the bright uniforms of the soldiery in their full tide and glory, into the city streets. The Maoris were up and doing . . In one old Auckland house, whose grounds cover the site of the ancient barracks, glistens a great flowering damson tree, planted by the soldier-lads whose hour of camaraderie and pluck is so long forgotten. The Maori wars, the tragedy of a fine nation's passing into subject state, are full of incidents that not Cetewayo's warriors could surpass for valour. Rewi's great cry, “Friends, we will fight against you for ever, for ever,” rings eternally through the halls of immortality. And there was a humorous courtesy, too. In the King Country, a pakeha newspaper set itself against the menacing King movement. The office was wrecked, the machines broken up, the type scattered… . but the newspaper staff were most hospitably sheltered in no other place than the office of their deadly rival, the Maori paper whose name was “War Bird.”
Curiously enough, when one considers how lightly courtesy is usually entreated in the present century, there has been a consistent attempt to deal with that old Maori chivalry as it deserved. In the last decade, a film of
Men fought, endured, dreamed.… .
There is an old garden at Keri-Keri. Its pride is an English may-tree, laden with delicate lace-white blossoms every spring. The stone building behind which the garden's world of green grass and soft colours lies hidden away is a store now: but it used to be
The wings of a shapely old brick windmill turn against the Auckland sky. There was a rat-pit here, where youngsters now dead or ancient and respect able, used to lie in the fern on their stomachs, watching homeric battles. Inside the mill, old Partington, in his swallow-tailed coat, grimly watched the bullets melted and moulded for use on any dusky hides whose owners might venture against his city.
Old years, goodbye.… . We had changed enough when the war was set behind us. Four years of a peace-time struggle, a bitterness that has chosen as its battlefield the human heart itself, divided the beliefs and loyalties of every nation, have done a century's work in corroding old ramparts.
Young anarchy, even the post-war brand, is subdued: though twice Auckland university students have come perilously near to the murder of a Governor-General, for their mighty swipes on the cricket pitch have twice broken Lord Bledisloe's bathroom window as His Excellency lay a-musing on the state of agriculture.
And they of the modern newspaper world are inordinately respectable. The leaders, by morn, by dewy eve, are exactly what might be expected. One longs for some ghostly echo of the controversy between old
“Well, Bob, still trusting in the Lord!” was his unvarying morning greeting to the old hand who stabled his horses and stoked up the Herald furnaces.
“Aye, still trusting,” was Bob's meek reply— until salary cuts became the issue of the hour.
“Well, Bob, it's a few shillings off your salary, but a golden crown and glory for you up above,” was Holy Joe's comforting way of breaking the glad news.
“Damn your golden crowns up above,” remarked Bob, frank for once, “I want my silver crowns down below.” Perhaps a
And perhaps twenty years, yellowing the files in the newspaper “morgues,” will show to writers who are children to-day flashes of humour, wit that had courage and self-reliance, glimpses of the generous spirit. “Les nièges d'antan” will have fallen deep by then. There was treasure enough sown in the fields of the years that are ended. May somebody who spares the time to look back at those who have known our disenchanted years say as much of the little we have written.
Finis