He had retired, in England, from the sea many years before, and was the father of our host, who had sent home for him and paid his passage out to New Zealand. He was a jolly old fellow and, though over eighty years of age, danced a hornpipe and sang, in spite of being quite blind. How his white whiskers and red beak nose tossed as I played the fiddle and he shuffled his feet and sang, and the boys from the next homestead, a mile over the slopes, watched with delighted eyes.
“Avast there! Turn to!” he would say, as he asked for a bit more of anything at the table to eat; and he loved to say that his rheumatism had given him a twinge on his weather-side, or on his starboard-side or his stern, as he moved his sightless eyes about and swayed, as though he walked a rolling deck, across the shanty floor.
The last I saw of my travelling comrade the bushman was when he was sawing poles in two and carefully measuring them with his little rule. Several new outhouses were being built, and his friends gave him a job for a few days. When the job was finished I have no doubt he went off once more on the track, with his home on his back. I never heard why he lived that life, or who he had been away back in the “has been” past, but I took good care after my experience with him not to try and talk philosophy or teach shabby-looking old men.
Very soon after I bade the New Zealand “bush-faller” good-bye I went off visiting various townships with my violin and became a wandering troubadour. I grew so well off that I was able to go on, devoid of all worries, and see a great deal of New Zealand’s romantic scenery.
CHAPTER XIII
Matene-Te-Nga—A “Bush-faller’s” Camp—A Maori Village—The Canoe Dance—Song of the Night—Mochau’s Tale—An Open-air Concert—Violin Solos—The Brown-eyed Girl—Boyhood—Onward to the Past!
I VISITED many places during my wanderings in New Zealand, among them the beautiful Bay of Akaroa, and many other romantic scenes. The New Zealand bush is wild and grand enough, and the Maoris deeply interested me. I visited one aged Maori warrior, called Matene-Te-Nga. Samoan tattooing was nothing compared to the engraving on his big frame. He spoke English perfectly, but said little. He had kind, deep-set eyes and a wrinkled face that was also deeply carved; indeed he looked like a stalwart bit of brownish Greek sculptural work, covered with hieroglyphics, when he moved with majestic precision. Curves of artistic tattooing joined his stern, straight nose to his chin and upward to his eyebrows. He was the one surviving warrior of a time when New Zealand was a real Maori land, when the beautiful legendary lore of to-day was poetical reality to the land’s original race. Matene had fought with the tribes while fleets of canoes were ambushed in the gulf.
At Rotorua too I interviewed Maoris in their native pah. They wore but few clothes. The girls and women had good-looking, stoical faces.
The Maoris strongly resemble the islanders of the Samoan and Tongan Groups; indeed so pronounced is the likeness that one cannot help thinking that the two races are allied by blood ties, and probably drifted from New Zealand to the Pacific Isles, or vice versa, ages ago. For several weeks I went off on my wanderings, accompanied by my beloved comrade—my violin. I had still a pound or so in my possession, which I intended to keep for the rainy day that would be sure to darken the blue sky of glorious vagabondage. So, while the skies were bright, I made my bed in the bush, and by the light of the moon read Byron’s Poems. I had bought a paper-covered edition of them in Wellington and carried them in my violin-case. Oh! the romantic splendour of those days and nights, when I drank in the Byronic atmosphere. The glorious illusion of youth, the rosy glamour that is not what it seems and seems what it’s not, hung about me, as I sat under the giant karri-trees by the track, or approached the Maori stronghold with Don Juan sparkling in my eyes.