My companion did not seem extremely gifted, but he was a philosophical and kind companion and never argued, only listened. He had little thought of the morrow; dead yesterday was the land of his dreams, for he was generally retrospective in his conversation. Nevertheless he was agreeable, and though I understood little of what he said, the note of the mumble in his beard sounded pleasant. I gathered that he had been tramping for several years, and was off to see some friends who lived up country on a farm of their own. We had a sad misfortune together: about an hour after we had left a cattle yard that was just off the track, we were tramping along, and the old fellow was mumbling, when suddenly his dog ran in front of us and started to whimper and yelp, and then fell down. It had evidently eaten something that was poisonous. Before sunset it died in great agony. My friend, indeed both of us, were very much upset. The poor dog had travelled with him for some years. Before it got dark we went into the forest under the gum-trees, and I dug a hole at the foot of a large blue gum, then covered our silent sentinel over, as possums leapt overhead in the trees. I did everything, for my companion was too upset. I also cut its name, “Bill,” on the tree trunk. He lent me his knife, and when he spoke his voice sounded husky. “I’m a bit of a fool,” he mumbled. “No, you’re not; I understand,” I said. Next day I gave him a large tobacco plug and some money; but still he walked along by my side, looking in front and never even speaking, as the flocks of parakeets shrieked across the sky.
We came to a river with rushing falls, and a lagoon beside it caused by the overflow when torrential rain fell in the mountains, which rose miles away, brightening behind us in the sunset. I bathed my feet in the cool water. The bushman looked on, and when I asked him to bathe also he mumbled out that he had bathed like that once before and was afraid. That same evening we came across a deserted Maori stronghold. The whares (huts) were in ruins and overgrown. Where the garden had once been, among the tall grass and crowds of everlasting flowers, blossoms like vividly coloured crimson and yellow parchment, still grew rock melons, tomatoes and other fruit and vegetables, which the Maoris had cultivated. The silent old bushman, to my astonishment, joined me in my reflections as I stood and gazed on the relic of the once prosperous pah. “I guess we’ll camp here to-night, for it’s not too warm these times,” he said; and so we went into the one hut that had withstood the rotting encroaching of time and still had a roof on. The floor was carpeted with weeds and flowers; even the hollow that had served for a fireplace had burst into bloom; and as my quiet old comrade, bending by the door, gathered dead scrub and gum wood to make a fire to boil the billy-can water, the wind moaned fitfully through the forest boughs overhead: I fancied I heard the dead Maoris’ voices calling and echoing in the forest depths, and the laughter of girls who were long-ago dead.[[12]]
[12]. I was told by my comrade that it was the ruins of a pah stronghold that had been attacked by an enemy tribe, all of the defenders having been killed.
As the shadows closed, and sunset left a gleam out westward, we sat together. In the corner of the whare the sundowner had made our beds, so placed by the bushman’s instinct that they were completely sheltered from the draughty weather-side. My comrade, who was so methodical in his habits, and had the night before pulled his boots off and “turned in” punctually at sunset, seemed wakeful and started talking to me. I understood all he said, for I had got used to his pronunciation, odd though it sounded, owing to his having lost all his teeth. I had been playing the violin to him, and as he sat intently listening, with his bearded chin on his hands, I played on, very pleased to find that he appreciated music. First I had played a commonplace jig, thinking that it would appeal to his uncultivated mind more than direct melody. But when I played a melody from some operatic selection he at once lifted his half-closed eyelids and said approvingly: “That’s right.” I inwardly said to myself: “He’s an ignorant, low old fellow, but there’s something in him; he’s got feeling anyway,” and I thought of his manner when I buried his dog. I had been reading a little book—I forget the name of it—but it quoted the philosophers a good deal, and dealt in such subjects as the human mind and the Universe as it appeared to the senses. As I looked up at the stars I pondered, and, half in earnest and half with an idea of showing the old bushman how clever I was, I said, “All those stars out there are other worlds”; and then I used such phrases as “infinite extension”—a lot of high-toned phrases that I did not understand myself. He listened silently, and that was sufficient. I felt that, though he had no imagination, he would look upon me with wonder in his eyes and think “how clever this youth is.” So I rattled on with enthusiasm about the vastness of things and how, but for man’s consciousness, there would be no big or little, sight, sound or time, and how the immensity of space was a mighty ocean of nothingness, a fungoid growth, wherein like jelly-fish universes floated in the eternal waters of darkness, and as they twirled and flashed, their sparkles were the stars!
Still he listened; and with pride I again delightedly attacked his profound inferiority, striving to explain that all material and immaterial things were chimeras of the mind’s madness, that crept on shadowy feet through a vast Nothing, which was the Universe! I told him that he was not then listening to me by the camp fire, but was as the image of myself, an image that I saw at that moment in his wide-open eyes, as he suddenly looked up at me and said: “That’ll do; if there’s nothing, then your opinions, and those of all the philosophers, are nothing!” My hearing seemed to have gone wrong. He mumbled off a Latin phrase! I knew it was Latin, but that’s about all I did know. His grey, deep-set eyes looked steadfastly at me. The lightning rapidity of intuition telegraphed to my brain a startling message, which in human speech would go this way: “Tick! tick! your old bushman, whom you think you are teaching, knows more than you think he does!” Two feelings struggled within me; one mockingly laughed at my discomfiture at being such a fool, and the other smiled with pleasure to find my old man was not one. I quickly recovered, and in my heart thanked the “fungoid universe” that it was dark, so that the old man could not see my blush as I dropped my pipe and groped for it in the shadows. And then I received another shock; for he quietly picked my violin up and very quietly started to play! His fingers were stiff, and the bow once slid over the bridge, but it was very evident that somewhere, back in the past, my mumbling old bushman had been a decent violin-player. Removing the fiddle from the depths of his dirty beard, he said quietly: “That’s a French-made fiddle; not a bad tone either; you can tell that by the curve of the back and the shape. Savez?” Then he held it up in the moonlight and, moving his wrinkled finger along the fine curves of my violin, laid it down beside me. “You’ve been a good violin-player in your time,” I replied.
Old Maori, said to be 105 years old
“Yes,” he said, and not a word more did I get out of him, except, as he knocked the ash from his corn-cob pipe, “It’s getting late, chappie”; then with a sigh he lay down in the corner on his bed and almost immediately went off to sleep. He snored vigorously as I lay beside him, quite sleepless. I looked at the outline of his sleeping face, which I could just distinguish by the stream of moonlight that came through the broken wall opposite us. Whether it was because of my just acquired knowledge that he was not an uneducated derelict I don’t know, but I fancied the outline of his face looked decidedly refined, notwithstanding the grey, unkempt beard and sweaty grime.
Next morning we rose early, and the bushman cooked the breakfast on a fire which he built by the deserted whare’s doorless passage; and as he poured hot tea into a mug from his big billy can, and handed it to me, he placed in it the last remaining bit of sugar, going without sugar himself.
I noticed this; but when I remonstrated he simply said: “Never you mind, chappie; you’re not as hardened as I am.” I tried to learn something of his history, but to all my interrogations he was either silent or evasive. One thing I did learn, and that was that he was by birth an Englishman. That same day, after crossing some very rough but wildly beautiful country, we arrived at a homestead where there were several outhouses being built. It turned out to be my comrade’s destination. The owners gave him a great welcome, took us both inside and in no time had a table laid ready and a good feed of meat and pumpkin for us. They also were emigrant English folk. As we sat at that grand table d’hôte a venerable old blind man, who had been a sailor, sat at the shanty door, secured from the blazing sun by the shade of the thickly clustered grape vines, and sang: “Oh, ho! Rio! We’re bound for Rio Grande.”