In a hundred ways timidity would have been criminal, but when one sees in what direction courage and hope have led the way, and to what effort they have prompted, a little over-confidence looks pardonable. Everywhere the colonists have worked for the future. They have made railways and roads which will not be fully used for many and many a day. Their public buildings are made to last, and are of dimensions nobler than present needs can ask for. Generations to come will laud the wisdom and the generosity of the men of the last fifty years. In certain places there is an admirable spirit of emulation amongst private citizens who have set themselves to beautify the towns in which they live. This is very notable in Ballarat, where it has grown to be an excellent fashion to present the town with statues. Should that fashion continue and should the same spirit of local patriotism prevail, Ballarat may grow to be the Athens of the Southern Hemisphere. The plan is a little large perhaps, but it is in the colonial fashion, and one would willingly believe in the chances of its ultimate justification.
The unborn generations will have to thank their predecessors for some of the loveliest blessings of the world. Every town has its gardens, the property of the citizens. Those of Brisbane, Sydney, and Adelaide are extensively beautiful. But more beautiful than the grounds themselves is the inscription which I found at the gates of the loveliest of them all. I wish I had the ipsissima verba of it, for it seemed to be characterised by an admirable simplicity and directness. The sense of it is this,—
These gardens belong to the public and the owners are
requested to protect their property.
There to my mind speaks the true voice of democracy, and that inscription afforded me the pleasantest spectacle I saw in the course of my two years pilgrimage through the Australias.
CHAPTER XIV
Mr Rudyard Kipling and Bruggksmith—New Zealand—Its Climate
—People—Fortune—Ned's Chum—Sir George Grey.
Whilst I was in Australia I found in the pages of the Melbourne Argus a very remarkable poem and an equally remarkable prose story which had originally appeared in one of the great Anglo-Indian journals. They were alike anonymous, but it was quite evident that they came from the same hand. A few months later they were known to be the work of Rudyard Kipling; and when I returned to London the new writer was at the zenith of the literary firmament and was shining there like a comet. For the first few years of his career he looked inexhaustible, and whilst he was still at his most dazzling best, he produced a litde masterpiece of roaring farce which, for sheer broad fun and high animal spirits, surpasses anything else I know in English fiction. The story is called Bruggksmith. I myself read it and still read it with intense enjoyment, dashed with a very singular surprise, for the principal episode in that story had actually happened to me some years before Mr Kipling told it, and I had related it scores and scores of times in public and in private. I have a theory about this matter which I shall here make it my business to unfold. But I must first relate my own adventure. It was between Christmas Day and New Year's Day, and I was dining quite alone in the Grand Hotel at Dunedin, when a stranger entered and took his seat beside me. I paid no heed to him at first, but by and by he laid a hand upon my sleeve and said: “I believe that you are Mr David Christie Murray?” I pleaded guilty and turning round to my companion found him to be a person of a sea-faring aspect with a stubbly beard of two or three days' growth. He was smartly attired in a suit of blue pilot cloth with brass anchor buttons, and there was a band of tarnished gold lace around the peaked cap which he nursed upon his knees. His accent was of the broadest Scotch and his nationality was unmistakably to be read in his sun-tanned, weather-beaten face. It was pretty evident that he had been drinking, though he was by no means drunk. “I'm proud and delighted beyond measure to meet ye,” he began. “I hope ye'll do me the honour to shake hands with me.” He went through the ceremony with great apparent enthusiasm, and I had, indeed, some difficulty in recovering my hand from him. “I'm a ship's engineer,” he went on, “and I can tell ye, sir, that for years past ye've been my treasured companion; through mony and mony a lonely nicht on the rolling ocean yer books hev been my treasured friends, and mony and mony's the time I've laffed and cried over ye. Mon, but I'm pleased and proud to meet ye—pleased and proud.” I expressed my gratification at this statement as well as I could and he said, suiting the action to the word: “Ye'll not mind my ringing for a glass of whisky? I shall esteem it an honour to take a glass with ye and to be able to boast hereafter that ye once stood a drink to me.” He got his drink and absorbed it gravely, with a wish that I might enjoy long life, health and prosperity. Now there was never a man who was better pleased than I am to learn that he has given pleasure to another by his work. I dare imitate the candour of Oliver Wendell Holmes and confess that I am fond of sweetmeats, but one can have too much even of sugar-plums, and I was getting a little weary of my friend's ecstatics when he began to change his tone. “Perhaps,” he said, “ye won't think me impertinent if I say that your work is sometimes curiously unequal. Ye've written a lot in yer time that's very far from being worthy of ye. D'ye know that, now I begin to think of it, I'm inclined to fancy that ye're aboot the most unequal workman I've ever made myself familiarly acquainted with.” He maundered along on this theme for two or three minutes and at last he clinched the nail. “A lot of what ye've done,” he told me, “is the merest piffle, and if ye were to ask me for a candid judgment, I should say that ye've never written but one work which has really expressed your genius. I can't mind the name of it just at the moment, but there's nae doot at all about it; there's real power in it, there's plot, there's construction, there's style, there's knowledge of character. Mon! it's a great book; I'll mind the name of it in a minute. Ay! I've got it—it's the only thing ye ever wrote that maks ye worth your salt as a literairy mon and the title of it is Lady Audleys Secret!”
Now no man, neither Mr Kipling nor any other, could possibly have evolved from his imagination a story like that which had already, years ago, translated itself into fact. Mr Kipling is a man of such prodigious resource and experience that he is the last man in the world to accuse of a plagiarism. It is just within the bounds of possibility, of course, that he may have heard some version of my story, but the theory to which I cling is that there was, somewhere about that time, a Scottish ship's engineer who played off that particular form of humour on two writing men whom chance threw in his way, and that his victims were Mr Kipling and myself.
I was confidently assured in Australia that I might see New Zealand thoroughly in the course of a two months' trip, and when I set out to visit it, it was my purpose not to extend my stay greatly beyond that limit. In effect, I found a year all too litde for my purpose. The physical aspects of the country alone are so extraordinary and delightful that a lover of nature finds it hard to withdraw himself from the influence of their charm. New Zealanders delight to speak of their country as the Wonderland of the South. They are justified, and more than justified. The northern island is an amazement, but its gruesome volcanic grotesqueries please less than the scenic splendours of its southern neighbour. The sounds of the west coast more than rival the Norwegian fjords. Te Anau and Manipouri and Wakatipu are as fine as the lakes of Switzerland. The forests, irreverently called “bush,” are beyond words for beauty. A little energy, a little courage, might make New Zealand the pet recreation ground of half the world. The authorities are already filling its lakes with trout, and will by-and-by people its forests with game. There is a very large portion of country which, except for purposes of sport and travel, is not likely to be utilized by man. The lake trout grow to enormous size, and as they multiply, and food grows comparatively scarcer, they are learning to take the fly. It was an understood thing for years that there was no sport for the fly-fisher with the trout at Wakatipu, but that theory has died out, for the very simple reason that the facts have altered. There is no reason in nature why an acclimatisation society should not succeed in a very few years in making the south-west portion of the middle island an actual paradise to the sportsman. It is the plain duty of New Zealand to invite the outside world to enter its borders, and, for once in a way, a plain duty is recognised. I shall remember, so long as I remember anything, the three avalanches I saw and heard thundering down the side of Mount Pembroke as I sat on a boat in the glassy waters of Milford Sound. In many and many an hour I shall see Wet-Jacket Arm and Dusky Sound again with their vast precipices, luxuriant forests, and rejoicing cataracts. I shall dream, thank heaven, of the awe and worship I felt as the steamer crept round the edge of Rat's Point, and little by little, one by one, the white wonders of the Earnslaw range slid into view, until at last the whole marvellous, unspeakable panorama stood revealed, a spectacle the world may perhaps rival elsewhere, but cannot surpass. So long as I remember anything I shall remember a summer day on the banks of the Poseiden. I sat on a fallen log on the track which leads to Lake Ada; and the robins, in their beautiful fearless unfamiliarity with man, perched on my feet, and one feathered inquirer ventured even to my knee. The sunlight steeped the thick foliage overhead until the leaves shone transparent with colours of topaz and of emerald. The moss on the trees was silver-grey and vivid green, and there were fingolds of vermilion and cadmium, and scaly growths of pure cobalt blue; the most amazing and prodigious riot of colour the mind can conceive. The river ran below with many a caverned undertone.