I smelt the freshness of the sea-water and tar when we dropped anchor in Oriental Bay. After the first old loafer who is always waiting in every Colonial seaport to say “This is God’s own country” had said it, I looked about. Oh! the splendour of those days, the glorious homelessness and the thrilling uncertainty of everything! I stood on the wharf with my violin in my hand, and, though I was almost penniless, I felt like a monarch gazing on his multitude of toiling subjects. Ships of many nationalities lay alongside discharging their cargoes, and the crews mingled with the crowds of embarking or disembarking passengers, arriving from, or bound for, Australia, China, Japan, India; in fact everywhere wealth and poverty massed together. I saw white faces, black faces, yellowish faces, mahogany faces; glittering eyes, blue eyes, black eyes, bilious eyes; Dantesque profiles, turbaned heads, thick, black lips, expressing carelessness and humour, and thin, cynical lips; also self-exiled, broken-down, sardonic-looking poets, authors and musicians from the British Isles. It seemed that the drama of life was being enacted on that wharf, with its hubbub of uncouth voices: Hindu men, and women with rings in their ears, multitudes from the Far East, South and West. A kind of miniature parade of existence, ere Time’s hand swept the whole lot like pawns off the board, it seemed to me as I watched them embark on the ships to go seaward.
I eventually secured a position as violinist in the orchestra of the opera house in Wellington, and I had comfortable diggings with an English family. I think I should have settled down there, but, just as I got to like my landlady and her family, the old father made up his mind to go back to England again. This unsettled me, and I started off on my wanderings again. I got to know a man who hired concert halls. I played at many of his shows, performing Paganini’s Carnaval de Venise, also De Bériot’s and Spohr’s concertos. I was received very well indeed, and I should have stopped on at the game, but I was very unfortunate. I could not live on the applause which I received through being billed as “The Sailor Violinist.” I wore a cheesecutter cap, at the request of my employer, who indeed tried to go on the same lines as in London, where foreign prodigies of twenty, with baby collars on, appear! I barely got any wages; my employer secured the profits.
I never knew a man who could promise so much and give so little as that particular employer of mine did. And what he did give he gave with such an air of munificence, as though he was conferring a favour on me that I had never expected, or earned, that for the moment I was completely disarmed and my protest died on my lips.
So one day I started off with my violin “up country.” The turmoil of the crowded city streets, and my commercial inability, had sickened me of trying to do well. When I got on the lonely roads the old knight-errant fever gripped me. As I stood on the bush track I saw the primeval forest trees all brightening in the sunlight, while singing winds, bending their tops, blew through them, and wings glittered where, overhead, flocks of cockatoos sped across the sky.
At midday, tired out, I came across a small bush town. It was by a river where, on the banks, Maoris camped. I stopped there only for a day and night, and I lodged with two old men who lived in a small wooden house by a paddock. They were grizzled, retired shellbacks, not from the sea, but from the trackless bush-lands. I unfortunately paid them for my lodging in advance, and they at once bought some rum and sat at their little wooden bench table yarning away till their mumbling voices seemed deep down in their dirty beards.
As the rum fumes got more and more to their brains they ceased telling me their experiences, grew argumentative, and, with fierce eyes, glared at each other till they fell asleep at two o’clock in the morning. The next day I heard from the farmer who lived in a shack just across the flat that they were always drunk, and that the whole bush town thought I was some relative of theirs who had come from abroad to see them, otherwise they could not think anyone would lodge with them. Once more I tramped off, and after doing about ten miles I “put up” at a homestead in which an Irishman and his wife lived. I was getting short of cash and was half inclined to sleep out; but though it was very hot by day, a cold wind had blown for several nights. I have quite forgotten the name of that little bush village, but I easily recall the picturesque Maoris who lived by a creek in their pah (stronghold), a beautiful spot, sheltered by karri trees.
I played the violin to them; and two old Maori chiefs, aged and wrinkled, squatted, with delight beaming in their deep eyes, listening to me. They were tattooed with dark blue curves from their lips to their eyebrows, and some of the girls were also decorated with tattoo. The Maori women were very cheerful, and brought me food, fresh water, fish and vegetables. An extremely beautiful Maori girl, dressed in picturesque Maori style, sat on the grass beside me and sang as I played the violin. The surroundings were wildly romantic, and I must confess that I almost fell in love with her. I kept thinking of her eyes as I lay sleeplessly on the extemporised bed that the Irishman’s wife had made up for me in a shed adjoining their homestead. I went across to that pah several times; indeed I stopped at the Irishman’s all the next day and night. When I went my Maori girl bade me good-bye, and then, with some little Maori children, she came to see me off, and crept by my side along the track till the pah was almost out of sight. Her eyes gazed earnestly into mine as she looked up to me; the wind fluttered her blue frock; in her wealth of hair were stuck crimson and white flowers. I seemed to live once again in the romance of my faded dreams of boyhood. How beautiful she looked as sunset deepened the mystery of her eyes. Gallantly I kissed her and then, on the top of the hill, waved my hand back to her, and she faded away, and mad Don Quixote, carrying his violin, faded away also.
Before it was quite dark I sat down on the bush grass and played the song she had sung to me on my violin. I half wished I was a Maori and lived in the old days. I am sure I should have gone with a tribe of warriors and attacked that pah and ridden off into the forest with that pretty Maori girl!
I slept out that night. I did not fall asleep till midnight, but I made a small fire in my forest bedroom and managed to keep warm; for I opened my violin-case out and with some bush grass made a good shelter, though the slight trade wind on the weather-side blew cold. In the morning I got up without bother as I had slept “all standing,” had a wash in the stream just down by the gullies, and then tramped across the hills to where the smoke arose from a group of homesteads. I counted my money; I hadn’t much, I know; but people in the New Zealand bush proved as generous to me as I had found them in the Australian bush a year or so before.
As I emerged from under the gum-trees I saw that the village was a decent-sized place of some fifty houses. A main road separated wooden shop buildings, and just behind were the small homes of the population. I had slept late, and the sun was blazing over the forest trees and shining on the tin roofs of the township.