When I suddenly found myself alone on the streets of Auckland, a sense of the icy chill of reserve in civilization came over me. The weeks in the tropics were of the past. There, though the faces were more than strange to me and the speech quite unintelligible, there was a sense of human kinship which stole from man to man through the still air. There was the lali thumping its way across the valley; the chatter of voices by day, the mutter of voices by night when the people gathered beneath their thatched roofs; the gradual infusion of native melody with the swish of palms and the hiss of the sea; call answering call across the village; songs with that deep, primitive harmony which effects a ferment of emotion not in one's heart, but in the pit of the stomach. In such a place, the word alone has no meaning. One cannot be a stark outsider. Everything is done so freely and sociably that even the stranger, despite thousands of years of restraint in civilization, merges into an at-one-ment known to no group in our world.
Social life in New Zealand (as in all white communities) contained no such admixture. Not even on Sunday, on which day I landed, did the crowds that sauntered up and down the street, present any kindred closeness. People just sauntered back and forth across the three or four business blocks known as Queens Street. The sweeps and curves and windings which were its offshoots made a short thoroughfare look picturesque, but they were just flourishes. They did not lead to anything. And one immediately returned to Queens Street.
There, the wheeled traffic having been withdrawn, the people leaving church flooded the wide way, coursing up and down in what seemed to me an utterly aimless journey between the monument at the upper fork in the street and the piers at its foot. As a white man's city goes, in the three-story structures and spacious business fronts, and the massing of architecture tapering in an occasional turret, there was stability enough in the appearance of things.
There were jolly flirtations, girls singly and in pairs, some mere children in short skirts, gadding about with eyes on young men whom they doubtless knew, and of whom they seemed in eternal pursuit. Groups gathered for political or religious argument; platitudes and pleasantries were exchanged, some interesting, some dull, seldom truly cordial. A vague suspicion one of another was manifest in every relationship.
Suddenly the crowd vanished. A few persistent ones hung about the lower extremity of the street or lurked about the piers, spooning. The street became deserted. Not a sound from anywhere. No joyous singing under the eaves, no flickering lamp-lights beneath thatched roofs. Blinds drawn, doors locked. Sunday evening in civilization! I had returned.
CHAPTER VI
THE APHELION OF BRITAIN
1
There are no holy places in New Zealand, none of the worn and curious trappings of forgotten civilizations to search out and to revere. There are no signposts which lead the wanderer along, despite himself, in search of sacred spots; no names which make life worth while. Whom shall he try to see? Is there a Romain Rolland or a Shaw, or an Emerson to whom he could bow in that reverence which invites the soul rather than bends the knee?