In the bush a very little is accepted as an excuse for amusement. The public festivities of our district are confined to two events in the year—the Otamatea races and the Pahi regatta; so that any addition to these is received with unanimous pleasure and applause. Our present intention had met with a hearty reception.
On the appointed evening, just about sundown and after, there was a grand gathering at the township. All along the beach boats lay drawn up, and the number of people walking about made the place seem quite populous. Of course, everybody was there from our own river, and from Paparoa and Matakohe besides. There were people, too, from the Wairoa settlements, from the Oruawharo, even from Maungaturoto and distant Mangawai. Our hearts sunk into our boots when we saw the prodigious audience that was assembling to hear our crude attempts at minstrelsy.
Our Maori friends were there in full force. Rakope, Piha, Mehere, and the rest of the girls, a blooming band of native beauty, escorted by a large contingent of their male relatives. All the married settlers round had brought their wives, and—theme of all tongues!—there were actually as many as four young single ladies! This was evidently going to be a spree on a most superb scale. Dandy Jack fairly beamed with rapture, and the gallant O'Gaygun almost burst with the overflow of his exuberant feelings.
The scene of the spree was, of course, to be our Assembly Hall, although every citizen of Te Pahi township kept open house that night. The Assembly Hall has been already mentioned, but must now be more particularly described.
Although the township is all parcelled out into town and suburban allotments, yet, for the most part, it remains in its original bush-covered condition. There is a piece of flat land round the base of the bluff, and this is all under grass; the half-dozen houses of the citizens, with their gardens and paddocks, being here. But all beyond is bush, with a single road cut through it, that leads up and along the range to Paparoa and Maungaturoto.
When it occurred to us as advisable to build a hall, and when we had subscribed a sum for the purpose, a site was selected further along the beach up the Pahi. Here there is a little cove or bend in the shore, and, just above it, a quarter-acre lot was bought. This was cleared, and the hall built upon it. All around the little patch of clearing the bush remains untouched. A track connects it with the houses on the flat, about a quarter of a mile off; and the beach just below is an admirable landing-place for boats.
The hall is simply a plain, wooden structure, capable of containing two or three hundred people. The Saint, when describing it in a letter home, said it was "a big, wooden barn with a floor to it." However, we voted this statement to be libellous, and cautioned the Saint on the misuse of terms. The Pahi Town Hall is not to be rashly designated with opprobrious epithets. Such as it is, it serves us well, by turns as chapel, court-house, music-hall, and ball-room.
On the night in question the hall was brilliantly illuminated with candles and kerosene lamps. The benches were filled with an eagerly expectant audience, brown and white, who applauded loudly when the Pahi Minstrels emerged from a little boarded room in one corner, and took up their positions on the platform at the end of the hall. Then, for two mortal hours, there was a dismal and lugubrious travesty of the performances of that world-famous troupe which never performs out of London.
But our audience were not captiously critical, and received our well-meant but weak attempts to please them with hearty pleasure and vigorous applause; and when we finally took ourselves off down to the river to wash our faces, every one declared we were a great success, as they busied themselves in clearing the hall for the dancing that was to follow.
It is not my purpose to describe the entire spree. I have merely alluded to it in order to record one of its incidents, which may fittingly conclude this brief account of our Maori neighbours; moreover, it is an illustration of something I said once before about caste and class prejudices.