Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Check to Your King

Chapter Twenty — The King Declines An Offer

Chapter Twenty
The King Declines An Offer

Modern science has done us the service of making all war vile and intolerable. A war today is no place for any honest man, horse, dog, ship, vivandière, or artist; and these should draw in their horns, leaving the others, who will not be missed, to fight it out.

But a hundred years ago there were still some good touches. One could find something to recommend, here and there. I shall always approve of Hone Heke's herald, who appeared among the startled whites to inform them that Heke would not think of disturbing the Sabbath, but would begin his war punctually on Tuesday morning. What a lot that young chieftain could have taught some of the rough-necks let loose in Europe today!…

And there was the time – in '48 – when a regiment lay encamped in the newly fortified settlements of Wanganui. The fact was, the Maoris outside so outnumbered the red-coats, and the latter knew so little of the lie of the land, that they were not enthusiastic about a sortie, and played cards instead. For weeks and weeks, large brown men kept appearing out of the horizon, to sit on their haunches and loll out their tongues like patient dogs waiting to be taken rabbit-hunting. Steadfastly, the red-coats declined to come forth. The chiefs at last conferred and sent a message under flag of truce. They must now withdraw, as they had to go fishing – a seasonal occupation; but they would gladly return and fight the regiment, any time, any place, given one week's notice.

Heke's war, compared with the later Waikato wars, was a mere flash in the pan, almost a one-man show. The young chief was handsome, showy, chivalrous, domineering. In the north he reigned like a bronze Robin Hood, permitting no traders to do page 184 business near his territories without milking them. His activities annoyed H.M. Customs Office. They had as much control over the wind as over Hone Heke, who now declared he had never liked the Treaty of Waitangi, and intended to do as he pleased. He had many admirers among the smaller northern fry; a redoubtable enemy in Nene, whose great prestige Heke both hated and feared; and a grand, fire-eating, beaky-nosed, leather-hided old general in Kawhiti, who backed him up, not because he was a prey to any high-falutin' notions or cared much who won, but because Kawhiti would go anywhere for a fight.

In time to keep Christmas of '43 on New Zealand soil, Captain FitzRoy arrived to take up the duties of Governor. It might be written on the grave of this sailor, “He aimed to please.” Hobson had wrecked both health and popularity by his habit of saying “No”. Governor FitzRoy simply reversed the process. Land-sharks swarmed, growing fatter and fatter. Whole forests passed overnight into a single and inelegant pair of hands, and were at once hacked down or burned off, leaving the land deteriorated for the next hundred years.

From Auckland's main streets blew an appalling reek of horse-dung, beer and carcases, the latter dumped by the stockships, which unloaded right at the gates of the town and thought nothing of leaving dead beasts in the roadway. These roads were nothing but tunnels of mud, triumphantly bridged by one tavern-keeper with empty barrels, sawn in two and placed end to end, like a series of fantastic Japanese bridges. Yet there were livery stables, carriages, flutter of fine ladies… a bloom of quickly grown beauty, an orchid thriving on a dung-heap.

Other ladies, quite as fine in their own way, with their lavish bosoms and long feathers, leaned bawling from the red-and-white brothels in Fort Street and Chancery Lane. Should the passer-by seem curt, they emptied their chambers on his stove-pipe hat, and thus had the better of him either way. The taverns had beautiful, lusty names: the “Fortune of War”, the “Naked Indian”, the “Spread Eagle”, the “Black Joke”.

Miser Annersley's son came into the fortune which his father could not take with him to the grave, though the old man groaned enough at parting with all those golden jimmies. The lad hired a four-wheeler, and drove past the red-and-white houses, flinging handfuls of gold from his silk hat, his young face bright-flushed and excited. The girls from Black Julia's ran out in their shifts, to scramble in the mud for his bounty. He made a denunciatory speech to them, came sprawling down, to be picked up by Black page 185 Julia in person. Against that immense bosom, he wept that everybody misjudged him; he was no miser. “Yas, dear… yas, Honey,” soothed Black Julia, rocking him like a doll, while her girls went through his pockets.

When did our troubles begin? It was when we were told that the White Queen was to be our mother.”

But Auckland was a white town, divorced from the wilderness, as Russell with its leaning hills, Hokianga with its wooded valleys, could never be. The Maori was a legend here, an ornament. Nobody was afraid of him. Native canoes came from the Bay of Islands, offering loads of huge golden honey-peaches at a penny a kit. Town Maoris, their clothing grotesquely Europeanised, squatted under little calico tents, selling anything and everything from flax kits. Delicious rock oysters were sixpence a kit of three hundred.

Governor FitzRoy and his friends did not make any comprehensive study of the secret societies forming among northern tribes – societies whose flax-paper messages were replacing the old and conspicuous means of the korero* as a call to arms.

Population flowed steadily to Auckland, its movement facilitated by FitzRoy's system of land exchange. Auckland was to be a town, a safe and flourishing settlement, though to effect this might drain the outlying districts of their sparse holdings.

A value of £1 an acre was put on all lands held by country settlers. This was paid for, not in cash, but in Government scrip, and the scrip then auctioned in Auckland, where the buyers were mostly investors who could afford to hold remote land purchases until the day came when they were safe territory, and their value worth mention. Meanwhile, with the proceeds of the scripauctions in their pockets, smaller settlers from Hokianga and Bay of Islands farms drifted down to the seat of Government.

Driven for money – not precisely a new situation for him – Charles put his lands in the auctioneer's hands, only to find that, owing to the fear of native disturbances, Government scrip in the Hokianga district was fetching a miserable price. So the plans of migration were abandoned, and the family stayed on at Mount Isabel, with a bundle of more or less worthless scrip – which was none the less, what Charles used for money when he could persuade people to accept it – and a mortgage over the farm to cover the auction proceeds. The wattle-and-daub house was falling to pieces, into the bargain, and its large three-block structure had outlived its usefulness, now that not a single courtier, labourer,

* Native gathering

page 186 or admirer – except “my faithful Margaret Neilsen” – remained at the Court of the Baron de Thierry.

At this opportune moment, when the rest flee the land as if the Devil were in it, Charles determines on a new castle.

“In September 1844, I purchased from Mr. Russell 23,000 feet of board, for £50. For this he took £333 in scrip.”

The carpenter, having demanded that he should be paid in advance for building the new house (because the natives are raising such a dust that the Hokianga is no place for honest workmen), puts the scrip in his pocket, turns tail, and disappears, heading for Auckland, pursued by the laments of the family.

Do you remember Chief Tiro? (“O my friends, rejoice with me.… He is coming to civilise our country and make it reputable.”) Out of the past comes Tiro now, eloquent as ever, and bursting with information for the authorities in Auckland, which he demands that Charles shall at once communicate to Governor FitzRoy. Tiro then sits down on the doorstep, and awaits an official reply with beautiful red lions in sealing-wax. Alas! Governor FitzRoy is lacking in any sense of the picturesque. He never summons Tiro to a private audience in Auckland, nor even condescends to take notice of his information about the war-parties. Tiro, in a huff, turns north, and joins the rebels, taking with him his family and all his adherents.

The Long Bush is closing softly, with the little crumpled hands of bracken and long tendrils of creeper, over the clay roads leading from Mount Isabel. This invasion is harder to resist than all the others. The house, unable to execute a strategic retreat, stands on, with a perpetually surprised look on its staring window-panes. They are such small shields to bear up against such immense and overpowering sunsets.

In this year of its isolation, many chiefs, and natives of lower caste also, drift around Mount Isabel. A nervous man might compare them to the troops of Midian, but Charles thinks they have come to ask his advice. He asks them indoors, and makes Margaret give them lemonade, which is, in its way, a superb insult.

Hone Heke, the paramount war-chief, once puts in an appearance. About this Charles narrated an incident which might have come more appropriately from the Baron Munchausen than from the Baron de Thierry. Heke, he says, came unannounced, and made himself a little fresh in the kitchen where nobody knew his name. There was a fine musket over the door, the pride of Charles's heart and the admiration of the Maoris. Heke, after examining it, indicated that he wanted the gun for himself. Charles said “No”. page 187 Heke retained his hold of the musket, while sitting on a three-legged stool. Charles grasped the butt, and pulled with such vigour that the stool gave way, precipitating the war-lord to the floor.

Charles, regaining possession of his weapon, was a little disconcerted – but not too much – to learn when one of his sons came home that it was Heke whom he had thus bowled over. Heke, however, took it all in excellent part, suddenly bursting into a shout of laughter. “He sprang to his feet and shook my hands,” says Charles.

No other white family remains in the neighbourhood. He must have engendered immense curiosity – he and his empty flagstaff, his open hand, his homilies – among the restive tribes, padding about on their flax-paper errands. Perhaps they grew fond of him in the end… “wild things out of the wet, wild woods”. Perhaps also, he talked too freely of his sympathies with the brown man's losing fight for national identity. That got him into a pickle.

There were shouting and singing of a tribe on the march, one misty day, with the little nectarines and apricots just sufficiently green-ripe for the wax-eyes from the bush to be interested. Charles got home in time to open his door to heavy knockings. The women, used to alarms, stayed in the background. Papa did the arguing for everybody.

William Repa, who came that day to Mount Isabel at the head of his tribe, has already been mentioned for his religious vagaries – Wesleyan one moment, then Roman Catholic, good High Church of England next, and, at the time of this social call, plain, polygamous “devil”.

William Repa was the only chief who had ever pestered Charles for strong liquors, though all the natives liked light wines. Repa was a drunkard; yet he was not unimpressive, and not a revolting figure. A strange, bitter-mouthed, lonely man, feared for his outbursts of temper, avoided by the white men, Repa had been one of these who helped to install the de Thierrys at Mount Isabel.

He was by no means the species of penny ogre who lives by terrorising the weak. Something smouldered in him… a distortion of Nene's deep love for the race, Hone Heke's love of a fight, without that young warrior's clean-run chivalry. An old scar slashed his cheek, marring the blue tattoo-pattern. Repa eschewed European dress, but the bloodshot eyes showed how pakeha vices had caught him far more securely than any open surrender to pakeha authority. There was something pitiable about him – pitiable and frightening together. He spoke in a blurred voice. It page 188 was some time before Charles could make out what he wanted. Behind him, the murmured approval from the listening Maoris was like a wind rising among the trees.

William Repa wanted the flag of the de Thierrys, the flag that had flown from the empty flagstaff. A flag is something sacred to the native. Because the White Queen's flag had flown at Russell, her power was mighty there. Because the English flag was set in Maori soil, the land belonged no more to its people. The hoarse voice rose in bitter eloquence as Repa reminded Charles of his coming.

“You promised that you would be our father. You said you would lead us, and do good for us. You said that all would be the same together, Maori and white man. Then the White Queen sent her ships; your flag was taken down. Have you, too, eaten the White Queen's stir-about? No, no, it is not so. I, Repa, say now that you are a good man, you are Repa's father. We are going to drive the White Queen's people into the sea; the land will be ours again. Give us the flag, to take with us into battle.”

The hills seemed locked in silence, though the oration went on and on. There was nothing in Charles de Thierry's mind but an empty flagstaff, a kingdom non-existent outside of a dream. Trial by jury of whites and natives . . roads, hospitals, schools… teach English, all English, nothing but English; would they be so easily cheated, then?… If any white settler marries a native woman, he must in every respect treat her as his wife… for every acre you have now under cultivation, I will give you freehold of three more.… It seemed very clear, in the waning light, the kingdom unbuilded.

He began to speak, hardly knowing what he said, about the flag which they wanted.…

“When the Queen's flag was hoisted in New Zealand, the sovereignty of the land belonged to her, and only to her. It was the word of the Maori people. When I flew my flag, here on Mount Isabel, none of you would listen to me. You would not take part in the things I had planned, you let the lands I had bought be taken away. When you gave over the country to the White Queen, all my power to help you was gone, and I was forced to take down my flag. I am a white man, my flag can never be raised in battle against other white men. If you fight against the white man, you will be lost. The White Queen's ships will come from Sydney.”

All the while the words on his lips meant precisely nothing. Deep and formless, that love of the native races which had been the keynote of his spirit since youth struggled for some means of page 189 expression. Greenstone against guns, bravery against organisation. … I am a white man; to betray that could not help. … Too late now for a militia of friendly forces; even Tiro, poor, vain old Tiro, they never troubled to take any notice of him, and his loyalty's dead and gone. A man can't make speeches with his heart torn in two.

He looked up and saw Isabel on the other side of the door. For the moment the girl looked at him like a shadow, like a ghost, her hair was so black, her eyes so wide and dark in the peaked face. She was silent and obedient. Somehow he had contrived to fail her, like the others, but she understood him now, and without words. That look between them, and she slipped away into the house. For five minutes more, Charles strove to hold the natives with the lamest speech he had ever made in his life. Then Isabel came out of the house, white as death, and smiling. She nodded to him.

Charles said: “You cannot have the flag, William Repa. There is no flag in my house any more. While we were talking, my daughter went to the place where it was kept and cut it to pieces.”

“It is true,” said Isabel, watching Repa. “I have cut my father's flag into tiny bits.”

The chieftain talked rapidly to the men behind him. There was that hideous shout, and their line surged forward. Repa's face was distorted with anger.

“We will kill her now,” he said; and Charles saw Repa's two hands close on the white line where Isabel's print dress was drawn over her shoulders.

She was terrified at his touch, and cried out, “Kill me yourself, kill me yourself! Don't let them touch me!” Then she burst into bitter sobbing. He knew that she was alienated from the normal world, so much so that it seemed strange to see Isabel frightened at last. It was only the other day that Colonel Wakefield had sent her the green-and-yellow mannikin from the Tory. Now she was grown up, almost seventeen, and the Maoris were going to kill her.

“Why, Repa, you knew her as a child,” he said, feeling very old.

Then, quite suddenly, it was over. As once Richard de Thierry, leaning over a native whose bonds he had just cut, had thought, “Those were a man's eyes,” Charles now saw something in Repa's look which, for all his continual idealising of the native race, he had never seen in any Maori face before. Repa took his hands, enormous brown hands, away from Isabel's shoulders. There was a look between them, as of people who have met suddenly and strangely in a wilderness, and greet one another quietly, knowing that in a moment they must part again. And no greater jungle could have surged around them than that tangle of errors and page 190 misapprehension in which they stood. White man, brown man. The hostility of race to race; two quick prides drawn like swords against each other; disease, warfare, and death - a tangle in which the human being stands utterly bewildered. It is only for an instant that men can meet one another so. But that instant is never forgotten, and no matter how obscure its circumstances, it is cast in immortality.

Some few words, and then Repa, with his tribe at his heels, went off into the Long Bush. Charles lifted Isabel, and carried her to the couch in the room whose wide windows looked over the wooded valleys. All that afternoon, as he moved about the house, he could hear her sobbing. She was too utterly a part of his dream. He had dedicated her to it, shut her up in it, under the streaming colours at Panama, in the sweet groves of Nukahiva, here at Mount Isabel in the secret flax-roofed temple where none but the two of them had ever come. As the dream, from its original fair lineaments, had become puzzling, violent, and distorted, Isabel suffered as even he could never suffer. For it was he who made the dream, but Isabel was its fabric.

Tiro came on the next day, to turn the knife in his heart. He begged for the flag, even in pieces, even a shred of it, to bring luck in the wars. He was the same light-hearted, friendly creature as of old, and went off after dinner, full of the heroic deeds he was about to perform.

A day later, Nene himself came to Mount Isabel, with the news that meant “War Declared”. Hone Heke had cut down the British flagstaff on the hill at Kororareka.

Unless they took refuge with the Maoris, the family could remain no longer at Mount Isabel. A struggling war-party, a torch dropped in the Long Bush, that would be the end and not a single neighbour left to befriend them. Russell was the nearest refuge. Charles set off on horse, a day later, for Paihia, near which the chief Mokatu had first fired the grass in this war by the murder of the Robertson family.

In the orchard apricots were in season, little flushed drippy fruits which the children gathered by the bushel from the long grass. There were dusky grapes coming on, soon to be purplish under the vine-leaves. The house, with its shabby, unpainted walls, stood out from the screen of the Long Bush as Charles looked back. He wondered why he had ever left the empty flagstaff standing there, a useless provocation to the natives; or if, had he been without wife and family, he would have abandoned the white races, for better, for worse. He never saw Mount Isabel again.

page 191

On March 3rd, Charles sent for his family, William Repa coming from his fortified pa to see the family through to Kororareka. The Maoris brought three horses. Old Black Aladdin had departed with Charles, and the native ponies carried Emily and Isabel, with Margaret balanced precariously on the third saddle, clutching Will, who, in his twelfth year, was finding the exodus a high peak of adventure.

The furniture was abandoned, though thirty natives trotted alongside, bearing personal belongings, bedding, and what lighter goods they could manage. Behind them bees murmured in the green-and-golden orchard. The goats and turkeys suffered the Crusoe fate so often prophesied, and remained to run wild in the bush. Little by little, the trees took back the breathing-space they had given, and the road where King Pokeno had demanded a carriage-drive complete with prancing greys was forgotten. Only, perhaps, in the springtime, snow and rose, drift the petals of foreign fruit trees, strangling among the lustier native inhabitants. Or there is a night-fountain of sweetness, where Isabel's “mossy rose” shows its pink cap through the straggle of weeds, and the double balsam opens its healing leaves secretly, to cure the hurt dream that seeks it out while the dreamer lies sleeping and far away. And where the Hokianga glitters through its yellow dunes, sickle leaves dance on the eucalyptus-tree planted on the day of his landing by Charles, Baron de Thierry, King of Nukahiva, Sovereign Chief of New Zealand.

The journey from Mount Isabel was more picturesque than perilous. War in those days was conducted along pleasantly unconventional lines. When they were sitting at breakfast with Repa, in the stone pa just beyond the Long Bush, who should appear but Hone Heke, the war-lord himself. Did he, aroused against the white man, promptly massacre these innocents? On the contrary, he had breakfast too, made himself quite charming, and pressed on them the offer of any help they needed in transport. He had been visiting friends at the little Waimate Mission Station. Right up to the outbreak of fighting, Heke was the kindest of district visitors to the young son of a missionary family, who had fallen desperately ill. Earnestly he impressed on the parents of this dying boy the necessity of resigning themselves to the will of God; and then went away, lithe as a forest animal, to put the fear of death into the entire white population of the Bay of Islands. It had no logic, but there was a queer kind of beauty about it. That is why I say, curse your machine-fighting. The blood of Nene, of Heke, of the illogical and gallant, must never be offered in a machine war, since they page 192 share none of the blood-guilt attached to the machines of destruction. Do what you feel is most becoming to you in Europe. But a ram must be found for Isaac.

Keri-Keri was white and jade in morning sun. The missionaries had settled here since early days, and among them the name of the de Thierrys was as popular as tutu poison - as Emily discovered when she knocked at the door of Mrs. Colman's* house and asked for shelter overnight.

Emily de Thierry, a lady in middle life, somewhat past forty-five, and attired in muddy riding-boots and a habit whose pristine beauty has long departed. All the light gold of her hair, no longer cleverly arranged, has become indeterminate and streaky. Her small waist, which doubtless gave her some innocent pride when in Gloucester she poured tea for her papa's curates, has disappeared owing to the efforts involved in producing five children, wandering round a world, working hard on an isolated farm, eating what she could get, and being quite unable to procure new corsets. The Archdeacon Thomas Rudge, if then alive, would have passed her in the street, never dreaming that so weather-beaten a piece of flesh could have sprung from his own dignified loins.

She did not know, when she rang the bell-pull, whether she most wanted to take off her boots, which were mountainous with clay, or to sit down and burst into tears. It was one of the two. Emily badly needed a bosom to cry on. Mrs. Colman gave her black bombasine.

They sat in the parlour, where everything was stuffed with horsehair. Mrs. Colman had taken tea, but a servant brought the travellers cups, one each, on a tray, and a plate on which reposed four virginal-looking slices of bread. Mrs. Colman did not drink with the refugees. Her replies were monosyllabic, and in between she offered no comments. One leapt from precipice to precipice, across great chasms of silence, chasms that had never known the sun. The black china dogs on the mantelshelf looked also as if they were prepared to bark, but could not release their tiny, infuriated voices from prison.

None of the family was invited to stay the night. Emily, Isabel, and Margaret were given an attic between them in an old building on the other side of the road. The de Thierry boys Mrs. Colman refused to harbour at all, and they remained out of doors, in Repa's charge. The three women slept on shake-downs, their first New

* “Mrs. Colman” is an alias. There are many living descendants of the family mentioned by Charles, and probably, even if the lady were unkind to the notorious de Thierrys, she was otherwise a Christian.

page 193 Zealand night in civilised surroundings since Lieutenant McDonnell had sent his two Captains to escort the Baroness de Thierry to Te Horeke.

“No place,” thought Emily, lying with pale moonlight tossed through the shutters, like great blond pear-petals. Little details of the journey became painfully clear in her mind. A curve of the Long Bush road, between great banks of the ragged-barked, slender manuka. A sick child at the stone pa, lying on a heap of smelly mats, its black hair tangled over its beaky face, which was just like the face of a starved fledgling bird. Isabel sitting still as a wax doll in Mrs. Colman's parlour, a doll holding up the sleeves and high shoulders of her shabby cherry-coloured dress. “Her clothes are in rags,” fretted Emily, and then saw a worn patch on Mrs. Colman's green sofa, and wondered if this made Mrs. Colman human. Mrs. Colman's heaven would be filled with angels all in starched and laundered white. If any of them developed a worn patch, the sky would be filled with the slender, stabbing light of their darning-needles, as they stitched and stitched, endlessly, viciously… covering things up, and gossiping as they worked.

Her mind, like the worn-out, ungainly machine of her body, was aching with tiredness, but the stream of thought refused to break. She thought of the boys, and wondered what mischief they were up to with Repa. “The Bay of Islands is full of native brothels,” coldly prompted the enemy. She saw her sons, for a moment, as the strange white women of the Bay of Islands, used to neighbourhood if not to full civilisation, must see them. Big, uncouth, walking alternately, when unwatched, with the queer grace of animals, or, when eyes were on them, with a sullen, self-conscious slouch of hips and shoulders. Their hands were the broad, coarse hands of farm labourers. Though they could talk enough among themselves–dropping far too readily into Maori – with outsiders they were dumb, or sat staring. All creatures on the defensive.

“But they are beautiful boys,” said Emily to the world. “Look at them as I have seen them.” She stripped away their clumsy rags, and, to an audience of admiring mothers, showed them as they had been at the successive ages of two, four, seven – little golden-brown bodies, with deep chests, slender hips and loins, more beautiful, more beautiful than the body of a girl. Yes; Isabel belonged to her father. “He loves her so,” Emily defended herself. But her sons were her own. They were encamped in a hateful, hostile place, full of suspicion. She was their camp-follower – a ridiculous role for a woman of her age, and one for which the boys wouldn't thank her.

page 194

Something closed tight, like a small door shutting in her mind. From that night, she was other than the woman who had so often lain awake, wondering where next Charles would contrive to lead them all. That Emily was finished with, in the attic room. For the rest of her life, her reserve with the outside world was implacable. In her last years, she bore the oddest resemblance to the woman who, of all women, would have been least likely to tolerate Their Majesties of Utopia – Queen Victoria. Wearing ruffled black silks and bonnets firmly seated on her faded hair, she moved with dignity and resolution through the medley. But she was never Emily of the moonlight again.

Outside, the boys were having the time of their lives with the native caravanserai, digesting a huge Maori supper of mussels and kumaras while their mother and sister famished. But Repa was in a peevish frame of mind. The missionary-woman, he considered, had insulted his personal dignity by refusing his charges hospitality. He debated whether to cut her throat. The boys dissuaded him. Suddenly Repa's face relaxed in its nearest approach to a grin. He revenged himself by turning the whole tribe loose in the Colman orchard, where they stripped the trees and pelted one another with apples.

The Colmans had already dealt with Charles. The infamous Baron de Thierry arrived there with a hurricane of a cold upon him, beseeching Mr. Colman to tell the one and only lodging-house keeper in the vicinity that he was a safe tenant for the night. Mr. Colman refused, remarking that there was a native pa about four miles away. Rain came howling down as Charles and his guide – later discovered to have been a notorious cannibal – tramped the hills, only to lose themselves in a swamp where they must abide till morning.

“The native curled up under his blanket. I sat on my trunk – it contained about £250 in scrip, all I possessed in the world – with my umbrella up.” Was even the dignity of the Baron de Thierry proof against the quaintness of this occasion? If only there had been a cartoonist at hand!…

Potatoes and delicious little rock oysters were the family fare next morning. From Keri-Keri Repa launched the long, red-ochred canoes, and waves tossed bright around them for a very rough journey to Kororareka. The natives sang as they paddled, a plaintive chant with a steady rhythm.

They saw ships black-sparred against the watered grey silk of the Bay, and Kororareka growing clearer in detail of gabled houses and foreshore road. It was their first glimpse of a town since their page 195 arrival in New Zealand. At a little distance lay the old Government settlement of Russell. The sun shone brilliantly over that rounded green hill on which stood the flagstaff that Hone Heke had thrice cut down.

A mile out from shore, there was a sound like a dull start of thunder, and the water clipped up in a white column, not a hundred yards ahead. H.M.S. Hazard, seeing war-canoes making for the beach, and ready for anything on the part of an enemy whose quaint rules of fighting had already demoralised the opposition, had put a shot across the bows of Repa's canoe.

On shore Charles, white-faced, cursed all officers, military and naval, in terms deserving of prompt arrest. But they were landing now, with the quite unnecessary admonition from the Hazard that Repa must at once take his canoe and tribe out of the Bay.

Cherry frock crumpled, black curls loose and shining where the spray had touched them … she was too exhausted then for the officers to notice how pretty she was; but they discovered it later.

A word from Charles to Repa. The chief shook his head.

“We will take no pay from our father. Good-bye.”

The canoes are launched on the sleek, pigeon-plume waves. Repa sits immobile as a carved figure-head; the red prows pierce northwards once again. Good-bye, then … with a dazzle of sun on the waters, blurring the vision of him who stares after you. The man who commands those canoes is good and bad, as are most men. And he knows the meaning of friendship. And now he is gone. A week later, Repa was fighting with the war-parties.

In the sack of Kororareka, the attacking natives kept a red shirt flying … all the flag they could secure.

In the peacemeal records preserved by Charles, there is one entry scratched out, all but illegible. A few words can be distinguished.

“And if I could ask for any … would ask for certain pieces of crimson and azure … would be respected everywhere. …”

I wish he had done it. Traitor or not, he belonged with them, and with nobody else. He would have been in the way, in the hurrying lights and hurrying shadows of the native pa. However, the Maoris needed a flag, and in between rush-hours they would have enjoyed talking with him. They also are discursive, with an eloquence so luscious that it makes one almost embarrassed at first, like the too-much-juice of tropical fruits. But Charles, who understood this language to a marked degree, was their man. And over the whole of the world today, it is hard to think of a single place where the white man's game may fairly be said to be worth the candle.