One day I was resting against a tree by the track. I was on my way to Wellington, to reply personally to an advertisement that offered a good salary to a violin dance player. It was a long, weary road and I was very tired, but happy, for I had about a sovereign in my possession. I had been reading my Byron and Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale, to which I had written music, notwithstanding that the ode was the utterance of music itself, for when we are young we rush forward to paint the cheeks of the gods and teach wise old “bush-fallers” philosophy. I was feeling lonely and poetical, which, in the worldly sense, means slightly insane. The world seemed to have a glamour of poetry about it after all. The grandeur of the sombre forest bush seemed a part of me as the old gnarled giant trees stood silently in the gloom, like wise old friends staring at me, who would protect my homelessness if they could. The sun was blazing hot, and, just as I was thinking that I only had the silent butterflies for companions in a magic world of bright flowers and wise old trees, a tired-looking girl came round the bend of the track. As she was passing me she looked quietly into my face and smiled. I had never seen her before, so you may guess a good deal about that smile, and not be far wrong in thinking that Mrs Grundy’s unprivate opinion is a correct one.
It was a wan smile, and as weary looking as the feet of the owner of the smile as they dragged along the dusty bush track as though they cared not where they led the wretched body. I looked up and returned the smile, for the eyes of the girl were brown and earnest-looking. She came straight up at once and sat down beside me! “I suppose you haven’t a shilling or so to spare, sir?”
I looked at her kindly, I am sure, and, with the quick intuition of her sex, her manner immediately changed. She saw that I returned the smile in a spirit of woeful fellowship only. She was a good-looking girl, about twenty-four, two or three years older than I. Her hair was glossy and thick, and to this day I remember her fine brow and the look that lighted up her face. She had a pretty, yet weak, mouth, but the star shone on the dim horizons of her eyes. As she looked long and earnestly at me, I got up and said: “I’m off; I’ve got to get to Wellington”; and away we went along the track side by side. I asked her a lot of questions about herself and she answered me truthfully, telling me that she was a three-quarter caste Maori girl. I should never have noticed it if she had not told me so. Her father was an engineer and had been killed in an accident, and her mother had taken to drink and gone to the devil. I saw by her manner and by all she said that she wanted to impress me with the disadvantages she had had in her brief career; also that she regretted that first familiar tell-tale smile. I looked much older than I was, for I was tall, well made, with thick bronzed hair, grey eyes and sensitive, curved nostrils and lips. Indeed I possessed all those physiological defects that have made me what I am! For to get on in this world one should have square nostrils and a protruding, bull-dog jaw, and eyes with a mental squint that can scan north, south east and west of one’s world of prospects all at once.
Yet I was happy enough, untrammelled, and out of the grip of conventionality—that relentless old man of the sea could not cling to me. My soul roamed at will, like a riderless wild horse, across the plains of life. And as I was romantic, and the glamour of Byron’s gallant corsairs sparkled in my head, attuned to the tenderness of Keats, I spoke of the beautiful sunset and the goodness of God, and gazed down on the frail derelict beside me trudging along in her dilapidated shoes. How I remember her earnest eyes as she looked up at me! Most assuredly the great poets are really the sad, truthful Bibles of this world. For the tenderness, the atmosphere, of their inspired minds still sighed out of their graves into my heart, like the scent of the flowers growing over them. Her voice became soft and sighed with mine, and, God knows it’s true enough, I was never so proud and religiously happy as when that “bad woman’s” eyes gazed up into mine with admiration—my eyes indeed! Oh, we men, who write as though she would do that which we would never do!
Presently we saw the wooden houses of a township ahead, and as we entered the little main street, ignoring the curious looks of the stragglers who were leaning against the verandahs of the few shops, sheltered by their big-rimmed bush hats, I took her into an eating-house, where we ate together. She became very silent, and when we started off again, down the main road, I noticed that tone of respect in her voice that we give to those who we think we realise are better than ourselves. So I started to sing cheerily and made her laugh.
We arrived at the outskirts of Wellington at dusk and stood under a lamp-post. I gave her several shillings; she refused to take them at first, until I said: “That’s all right, I lend it to you.” She clutched my hand, looked up at me quickly and then hung her head and cried like a child. I soon cheered her up and made her promise to write to me, saying: “I am a musician and can make plenty of money!” “I thought you were something great like that; you’ve got the look in your face,” and she looked at me as though I was some wonderful being. We were standing outside a third-rate theatre, and I asked her if she would like to see the play. As she said she would, we went in, the “loose street woman” and I.
When we came out I said good-bye to her, and she got on a car to go to some friends. She seemed so happy as she looked back at me. She did write to me, and I gathered that she had obtained a situation in a boot factory. They were neatly written letters, and ah! how I recall the soul, the woman part of those letters, and what they really meant; but suddenly they ceased. How I pray that her life after that was a happier one than that of the gallant corsair she met on the bush track in New Zealand long ago.
As I look back I see again the weary face of that neglected girl; her eyes are looking at me. I did not love her then, but, strange as it may seem, I love her passionately now. Her shabby skirts and the bit of dirty coloured blue ribbon round her throat are sacred memories to me, and the old dilapidated shoes are shuffling a dusty song on the weary track, a song so unutterably sad that I think Christ must have composed it. I think God gathers all His beauty from grief; that, enthroned in loneliness, He gazes eternally across His stars and across His dark infinities and sees some Long Ago! For not in the vastness of things, or the mighty ocean of space, can we see or feel so much of Infinity as we can see in the derelict eyes of the friendless; as I saw, and see now, in the tramping Maori girl of my spiritual passion.
Ah! how I love the memory of those imaginative boyish days. I often wonder if many boys were, and are, as I was, and see the strange things that I saw. My earliest recollection is of the little bedroom at the top of the house where I slept when I was six or seven years of age. On moonlight nights I could see the poplar-trees swaying to the wind outside my window as I lay alone in bed. Just beyond the trees was a stable, and its chimney had a large cowl on it. That cowl was shaped like a helmet and had ribbed marks on it, like deep wrinkles on an old man’s throat, and as the wind blew it turned slowly and majestically round. I used to peep from the sheets out on the moonlight night with frightened, awestruck eyes; for my childish brain firmly believed that it was God’s head moving against the sky—watching me whenever it turned towards my window!
I told my mother about it, and they all assured me that it was only a chimney cowl, but still I did not like the look of it, and I was delighted when they shifted my bed into another room. At another time I stole some green apples off a tree in our garden and got very sick and ill. My dear mother made me promise to steal apples no more; and she said to me: “Though I cannot always see you, God can, for He is always walking about everywhere.”