We were playing croquet, I remember, some half a dozen people. The ladies had been bathing, I think; at any rate, they wore their hair flowing loose. I never saw anything like it. She, my partner in the game, had a complete mantle of dark-brown silky tresses. Her hair fell in volumes round her, and actually trailed on the ground when she stood upright. What an advertisement she would have been for a "hair-restorer!"
You know that at croquet one sometimes kneels to place the balls at a lady's feet, in order that she may have them in proper position for striking. That envious wind! It would blow my partner's beautiful long hair about. And, when performing that kneeling operation, the hair would come fluttering about one, and getting entangled round one's neck somehow. And then, dark tender eyes would look down with a sweep of velvety lashes, and gaze mockingly through the silky meshes of unruly floating hair, and one would be asked in caressing tones—
"Oh, dear! I'm afraid I've caught you! Have I, really?"
That game was a dreadfully embarrassing one, yet quite too delicious and delightfully utter.
Anglo-Maori may be said to be divided into two distinct classes—those whose education has been chiefly or altogether English, and those who have "tumbled up" in the kainga, in all respects like Maori. The first are very much the fewest. A small number have been thoroughly well educated, perhaps in Sydney or in England, and are in all respects ladies and gentlemen of the English pattern. Some of these ladies have married well, into the best Australian or English society. I am told that two or three have even secured titles. Their beauty and sprightliness would cause them to be an ornament to any society. But the bulk of the Anglo-Maori are more like my friend Henere Tangiao, not appreciably different from the pure Maori among whom their lot is cast, save in a more Caucasian physique and a lighter complexion.
Intermarriage between the races is generally considered to be a very good and desirable thing by the Maori. Not that they hold themselves in any degree inferior to the Pakeha, or think a Maori girl elevated by wedding one; but they are aware of their own coming extinction as a race, and they think that intermarriage might serve to perpetuate Maori blood. It will be remembered that our native neighbours in the Kaipara are strongly inclined to this view.
Settlers look upon mixed marriages with different feelings. I think that most of us are in favour of them theoretically, but perhaps a less number care to regard them from a nearer point of view. There are some, of course, who are violently opposed to them in any case. But there is here none of that caste feeling which prevails in India against the Eurasians, or in America and the West Indies against negro admixture.
Nearly all such alliances have been between Pakeha men and Maori women. There have been instances of Englishwomen marrying men of the other race, but they have been very rare, nor do I recollect any such case myself. An Englishwoman, even of the lowest class, would find it difficult to reconcile herself to the life of the wharè and to the abject servitude, which is the lot of even the helpmate of an ariki. The condition in which they keep their wives is even yet little better than it used to be in former days. Moreover, there would always be the fear of polygamy.
Polygamy is not often met with now among the Maori, yet it is not entirely extinct, though it has become somewhat unofficial in kind. The missionaries set their faces against it from the very first, and made the putting away of his superfluous wives the condition of a convert's acceptance for baptism. They seem, indeed, to have carried their opposition to polygamy to rather too great a length, forgetting that a new phase of thought, when it operates practically, should be a gradual growth, if its effect is to be deep and permanent.
Under the first strong influence of conversion the Maori readily gave in to missionary insistence in this matter; but after awhile the old habit reconquered them. Then came individual relapses into barbarism, individual antagonism with the missionaries, and much division and heart-burning. It would have been better, in my humble opinion, to have ignored polygamy, or at least not to have pointed at it so particularly. It would have been better to have allowed things to remain as they were, in this respect, and to have relied on bringing up the young generations to the Christian observance of matrimony. Indeed, some few missionaries did adopt a line of action something like this, and found it the wisest in the long run.