TE ORUMU,
EAST COAST,
NORTH ISLAND, N.Z.
11th March, 1911.
MY DEAR DICK:
The Merry Marauders Dramatic Company, after a varied season in provincial towns which, while remote from city life are yet within railway reach of it, have turned their backs on the steel road that keeps us in touch with civilisation to tread the track which leads into the primeval fastness of the New Zealand bush. In other words, we have left the railway route far behind us to dive into the heart of the Bay of Plenty district, where we hope to turn the election excitement to profitable account.
It was necessary to break down our company going across from Rotorua to Te Orumu on account of the great expense of coaching, so I left the three utility men to follow us with the bulk of the scenery in a covered van. They were to rejoin us at Te Orumu, which is the largest seaport town on the East Coast, and my regret at having to take them off the weekly share-sheet for that brief period was mitigated by the knowledge that they had plenty of food and good, if portable lodgings. Mr. Baker, whose services in advance would not be required till we reached the East Coast, was to come with us and play their parts at our three stopping places on the way, so far as one man could take the place of three.
Coaching in the glorious New Zealand climate, through country whose scenic grandeur is second to none in the world, as the author of the New Zealand guide-book finely remarks, is an experience which is never forgotten by the soul susceptible to the charms in nature. I do not doubt the truth of these delightful words, but I must frankly admit that I did not enjoy the earlier part of the journey, owing to a most peculiar incident that occurred at the start.
I had hired a special coach from the landlord of the hotel at which we were staying, in order to make a detour from the regular coach track to play at Kaei, a partly Maori settlement, that night. Barney and Mr. Baker assured me that the Maoris were very fond of a theatrical show, and that they and the few white settlers would make up an audience sufficient to pay our expenses and perhaps a trifle over. It was not necessary to advertise a show in these remote hamlets, they told me, as the mere arrival of the coach would arouse the curiosity of every brown and white person in the place, every one of whom would patronise the show as a welcome break in the monotony of their isolated existence. They were a critical audience, too, it seemed.
“I played ‘Hamlet’ to ten white men and about thirty Maoris, of the blue-blooded Ngati-Pihi tribe, going through this way some years ago,” said Mr. Baker, “and the intelligent appreciation of those brown children of nature would have done you good to see. Indeed, after the performance, an old chieftainess of royal blood, named Te Pihoihoi Mokemoke, which in English means ‘The Lonely Sparrow,’ made honorable proposals of marriage, and offered to settle the lands of the whole tribe on me. When I gently declined this flattering offer she pressed on my acceptance a greenstone ornament that had been in her family for more than a thousand years. I forget what it is called by the Maoris, but it is a distinguished honour to receive it, and one of the conditions of the gift is that you must tie it to your leg by the band of human hair that is fastened to it, and reveal it in position to the giver whenever you meet. I took the gift and put it in my box and soon forgot all about it. But the gift and the conditions attached to it were destined to be brought back to my recollection years afterwards in rather embarrassing fashion. I had the management of a new picture house in Auckland, and had arranged for the opening ceremony to be performed by the mayoress of that city, in the presence of a large and fashionable audience. On the night in question, just as I was introducing the mayoress to the audience, Te Pihoihoi Mokemoke suddenly appeared from the wings, rushed up to me, and started eagerly to roll up my right trouser leg. I shall never know how she got down to Auckland from her lonely forest home, for the poor soul died soon afterwards.”
It was while I was musing over this romantic passage in Mr. Baker’s career, and watching from the window of my room the preparation of our coach in the hotel stable-yard beneath, that the incident I refer to as spoiling my drive—or the beginning of it—commenced. One of the coach team, a big black horse, played up while being harnessed in a way that absolutely terrified me, for I had been told by Barney that the road to Kaei skirted a dangerous gorge for some distance, where the slightest false step on the part of the horses would precipitate the coach and its occupants over a precipice 500 feet deep. The black horse was eventually subjugated and bound into his place with kicking straps and other equine paraphernalia, but not until he had savagely kicked several of the volunteer helpers, and severely bitten one of the stablemen as the man was stooping to disentangle the reins, which the brute had got under his fore-feet in the struggle. Feeling much alarmed for our safety, I finished dressing with all possible speed and hastened downstairs intending to remonstrate with the landlord, but when I got down the coach was outside the hotel, with all the members of our company in their places, impatiently awaiting my arrival. As it would have been in the last degree imprudent to frighten the girls, I clambered up on the box seat alongside of Mr. Baker and the driver without saying anything, comforting myself with the reflection that the driver was hardly likely to have been there if there had been any great danger, for even if he were indifferent to the lives of his passengers, he doubtless set store on his own.
My surprise was great, as I settled in my seat, to observe the black horse, with his head turned round, regarding the driver with an intense stare which, beyond all possible doubt, had a note of interrogation in it. I glanced at the driver, and to my added astonishment, he was returning the look with equal intentness. I thought at first that the driver might be hypnotizing the beast to prevent it’s jibbing during the journey, but it seemed improbable that a man possessing the gift of mesmerism to a degree capable of bending the brute creation to his will, would be occupying a menial position in the New Zealand back-blocks. My cogitations on the problem were interrupted by the driver demanding the stipulated amount for the coach. This sum I had in readiness, and as soon as I placed it in his hands he bawled out “Yes!” The black horse bowed his head as though the exclamation were addressed to him, and took the team off down the road at the rate of fifteen miles an hour.
I sat in my place with dazed senses, wondering whether the mysteries of the Arabian Nights were possible in the twentieth century, or whether Swift’s Houyhnhnms had been rediscovered in the New Zealand bush.
“Will you tell me the meaning of this remarkable occurrence?” I asked the driver, when I had recovered some measure of self-possession.
“What remarkable occurrence?” he demanded, surlily.
“The meaning of this mysterious business with the black horse,” I replied, slipping half-a-crown into his hand. “I saw him going on this morning like a devil possessed. Now I’ve just seen him and you gazing earnestly into each other’s faces, and when you said ‘Yes’ just now he starts off as though he had never heard of such a thing as jibbing. What does it all mean?”
“Well, I don’t suppose there’s much harm in letting you know now that you have paid me,” replied the driver with a broad grin. “That there black hoss has gone through that bit of business ever since he was one of a team that took a lot of theatricals across to Kaei wot slipped up the boss for their coach fares when they got there. The boss was so wild with Bill Borrell, who was drivin’, for not getting the fares, that he sacked ’im on the spot, and then took it out of the hosses’ hides. The black ’un, in particular, got such an awful larruping, that he has never forgot it. He’s ’ated the sight of theatricals ever since worse than poison, and whenever any comes into the ’ouse there’s no catchin’ ’im for the coach nex’ morning. The pint that puzzles me is ’ow he knows theatricals from other folks, but ’e’s never made a mistake yet. Then when ’e is caught nothing will indooce ’im to start till ’e knows the money is right. He looks round at me askin’ as plain as ’e can in ’is dumb way: ‘’ave you got your fares, Bill?’ and never takes ’is eyes off me till I tells ’im I have. I tell you, it would be a smart theatrical wot’d get a free ride out of old Prince now. Ain’t it wunnerful to think that some dumb animals know as much as me and you, only they carn’t speak?”
I was too much insulted by the driver’s explanation to feel impressed with the marvellous proof of sagacity in the brute kingdom it afforded, and Mr. Baker’s angry assertion that he knew the horse of old as a jib who evaded capture in order to do as little work as possible, seemed rather to darken the cloud on our financial reputation than give it that silver lining which the horse insisted on seeing before he would start. A fine thing, indeed, to be regarded with contempt by a horse, and a bush-bred horse at that. I declare that the sight of the sneering beast completely robbed me of most of the pleasure of a glorious drive, and I was small enough to thrill with secret pleasure whenever the driver had occasion to give him a cut with the whip.
We reached Kaei, a pretty village on the bank of a noble river, shortly before dusk, and had some difficulty in finding accommodation owing to the smallness of the place. We were refused at the wretched little hotel by a slatternly, half-caste Maori girl, on the plea that they had no room for boarders. Eventually, the girls were taken in by a settler’s wife. Mr. Baker and I left Barney and the pianist to hire the school-room—the only public building in the place—for the evening’s entertainment, while we returned to the hotel to see if we couldn’t persuade the landlord to give the male members of the company some sort of a shake-down for the night. Mr. Bunne and Mr. Morrissey (now completely reconciled, I am happy to say) had gone to a neighbouring farmhouse on a similar mission.
We found the landlord asleep on the counter of the bar, with his head pillowed against a half-barrel of beer which stood at one end. From one hand dangled an an empty pint pot, and with the other the hotel-keeper held his huge black beard over his face as a protection against flies, which buzzed about him in myriads. His great form was simply clad in a dirty suit of old pyjamas, which doubtless in that primitive hamlet was considered suitable and seasonable masculine attire on a hot day.
“He’s been his only customer to-day,” said Mr. Baker, as he eyed the sleeping giant dubiously.
I thought it possible that the poor man had been overtaken by the excessive heat, but the trouble we had in arousing him from his slumber inclined me to Mr. Baker’s opinion. After repeated shakings he sat up with a start, and regarded us angrily with bloodshot gaze. I deemed it prudent to conciliate him by asking if we could be served with a drink.
“Drink!” he said, in a deep, gruff voice. “What kind of a drink?”
“Beer?” I suggested.
“Yes, you can have some beer,” he said, clumsily climbing down behind the bar. “How will you have it—hot, or cold?”
“Hot or cold?” I repeated, stupidly.
“Yes,” he continued, in the same deep tone. “You can have it hot as the hobbs of h—I, or cold as the Jew’s reception to the pig.”
We chose the latter, and he drew some beer from the keg into two sticky glasses, but it was by no means so cool as his strong recommendation would have led one to expect. I asked our host to join us, but he curtly refused, so I put down a shilling on the counter.
“What’s that for?” he growled.
“For the drinks—isn’t it enough?” I mildly asked.
“A shilling!” he said, eyeing the coin gloomily; “two sixpences, four threepenny bits, twelve pennies, twenty-four ha’-pennies—and I owe the brewery £400! No, by——, it is not enough! Give it to the first man you meet as ugly as yourself, and have these with me!”
He flung the coin from him with great force, and it struck Mr. Baker in the face as he was in the act of drinking. Mr. Baker put down his glass with a startled cry, and rushed from the bar. Left alone with the landlord, I endeavoured to open a conversation with him on the subject of accommodation, but I discovered to my amazement that this extraordinary man had gone to sleep standing up. While I was pondering in some perplexity as to the best course to adopt, he awoke again with a loud snort, and profanely demanded what I wanted.
When I was finally able to make it clear to his wandering comprehension that we desired a place to sleep that night, and were not particular, he opened the door behind him and yelled, “Ngate!”
The slatternly half-caste girl responded to the call, and asked what was wanted.
“Room for six men is wanted!” roared the landlord. “Room, rest, and beer, to say nothing of food!”
“There ain’t no room,” responded the girl.
“Girl, it is for me to command here!” replied her employer. “Room there is, or room there shall be. Six men—one on the table and three underneath, and remove the nursing cat off the stretcher to the attic, or give it to some of your black relations to fatten for Christmas. For food, the game end of a Maori boar, whose decomposition was arrested just in time by a brine bath. High, yet not bad!”
“I daresay we shall manage all right so long as it is not bad,” I answered, as cheerfully as I could.
“And what if it was? Aren’t we all bad to the core?” And with this scathing indictment of humanity he got back on the counter, pillowed his shaggy head against the beer keg, pulled his beard over his face, and sank into heavy slumber again.
There was nothing for it but to accept his dubious offer of hospitality, so I asked the girl to show me the room with the table; which she did, unwillingly enough. Then I went outside and told the others of the arrangements I had made. All but Mr. Baker gratefully accepted the scanty shelter and food. Mr. Baker steadfastly refused to accompany us, saying that if he could not find somewhere else to sleep he preferred to be tortured by Maori fleas in the open rather than trust himself under the same roof with a drunken maniac, as he harshly termed our eccentric host.
Our performance that night in the little school-house paid our travelling and hotel expenses, which was as much as we had hoped for and more than I expected. Out of deference to our Maori patrons we staged a very old piece entitled, Blood for Blood, or The Pirate’s Revenge. Very few of the company knew their parts, but that did not matter, for they had plenty of time to look at the prompter’s book while the Maori interpreter was conveying the meaning of the dialogue to the natives. So thrilled were these children of nature by the revival of the stirring days of the Spanish Main that they grew more and more excited as the play proceeded, and in the third act they gave vent to their feelings by the extemporaneous execution of a haka—a species of Maori wardance, performed to the accompaniment of distorted features, flashing eyes, and weird guttural cries. Irving Morrissey, who had the centre of the stage at the time in order to call down the vengeance of heaven on the pirate who had carried off his sweetheart, was much alarmed when the haka started, but when the reason for it was explained to him he informed the dancing Maoris that they had paid his acting the greatest compliment ever vouchsafed to mortal actor. The dance was, however really a tribute to Mr. Baker’s powerful delineation of the bloodthirsty, ferocious pirate, whose sanguinary deeds of violence appealed strongly to the fighting instincts of the descendants of a race which even the British Army could not conquer. At the conclusion of the play Mr. Baker, as a signal honour worthy of so mighty a warrior, was introduced by the interpreter to the stalwart brown descendants of the royal Kaei clan, and was then carried off in his pirate garb to be the honoured guest at a Maori supper, consisting of pipis, poultry, kumeras, and watermelons. The rest of us sought our repose.
I was awakened from a fantastic dream of trying to teach a Maori troupe of actors sufficient Scotch to enable them to appear at Glasgow in a dialect drama, by pitiful screams for help. Barney, who was sleeping on the top of the table with me, was also awakened by the sounds, which seemed to proceed from just outside the house. Luckily we had only partly undressed in our rough quarters, and we were up in a moment. But before we could get outside the screams were followed by some blood-curdling objurgations hurled at somebody’s ghost in a roaring voice that we had no difficulty in recognising as our landlord’s, which set the Maori dogs barking all over the place.
When Barney and I did get outside the first thing we saw, by the light of a waning moon which shed a clear light on the picturesque landscape, was the gigantic form of our landlord stalking round and round a tall rata tree, gazing intently up into the thick foliage as he prowled. While we watched him he uttered again the bellow that had startled the dogs, and his roar of rage was followed by more screams from the tree.
“By Jove, he’s got somebody treed all right!” whispered Barney. “A queer kind of possum, though, by the noise it makes. Hark! There it is again!”
“Hogan’s ghost! Hogan’s ghost!” roared the landlord. “Ye’d haunt me, would ye, ye bog swine? By the powers, I’ll lay you for good and all.”
With these strange words he sprang into the tree, but as he did so a heavy body plunged headlong through the branches to the ground with a loud cry. The landlord immediately fell on this postrate figure and attacked it with impetuous ferocity. Barney and I in turn threw ourselves on our misguided host, and strove to tear him from his victim. His strength was astonishing, but fortunately some of the settlers who had been aroused by the noise arrived while the struggle was in process, and with their assistance we secured him. We then saw that the Hogan’s ghost of his imagination was none other than our Mr. Baker. He presented a sorry contrast to when I had last seen him, the terror of the Spanish Main. His pirate garb was torn, his stage wig back to front, and the property cutlass that a few hours previously had slaughtered four mutinous sailors in as many strokes, had been doubled in two by his fall.
“Don’t let him loose! Don’t let him loose!” he cried, as he watched his foaming-mouthed assailant making superhuman efforts to break the ropes that bound him. “Take the madman down to the river and chuck him in!”
We led the discomfited pirate inside, and after several copious draughts of brandy he recovered his nerve sufficiently to give a coherent account of what had occurred. The Maoris, it appeared, had exhausted their hospitality to the great white warrior with supper, and as Mr. Baker had neglected to make arrangements for a bed elsewhere, he determined to come to the hotel and try and awaken me quietly in order to share my shake-down. Unhappily, this plan was upset by the hotel dog, and the animal’s yelps brought forth the landlord to ascertain the cause of the uproar. As soon as the landlord saw Mr. Baker standing in the moonlight in his pirate’s garb, he let out a yell that split the heavens (according to Mr. Baker) and chased him to the rata tree, where we fortunately arrived just in time to save him from destruction.
“Why didn’t you explain who you were when he first saw you?” asked Barney.
“Explain!” cried Mr. Baker, tremulously. “I’d have been killed if I’d stopped a second. I tell you there was no time for explanations. The pirate rig-out must have completely upset the old lunatic, for he yelled out something about Hogan’s ghost, and came at me like a lion. I just beat him to the tree by a neck, and there I hung till the branch broke, with that madman underneath swearing I was Hogan’s ghost, although I give you my solemn word that I don’t know Hogan or his ghost any more than a cradled babe.”
Mr. Baker refused to retire to rest in case the landlord managed to break loose from his confinement, so he sat up the remainder of the night sustaining himself with brandy. But when we had left Kaei behind us the following morning he became his natural self again, and, in talking over the strange affair with me, he said that if the landlord had been a younger man he would have taken the law into his own hands and chastised him as he deserved. I remarked I was glad he had not done so, for we might have all been detained in Kaei over an assault and battery case. Mr. Baker said that was another consideration which had stayed his hand. I thanked him for his self-restraint.
We continued a sinuous course to Te Orumu to play three other small hamlets for expenses, and when at length we safely reached the starting point of our Bay of Plenty itinerary we were staggered to find no sign of the utility men. Their instructions had been to proceed straight across country, so they should have arrived at Te Orumu before us. It was a great relief to me when they turned up late that afternoon in a badly damaged condition, the result of some stupid mishaps on the journey. While camped at a little wayside settlement the first night they had accepted the invitation of a brother Thespian (as they called a travelling Australian showman) to witness the performance of a fighting kangaroo, which the man was taking round the country in a tent, and one of our foolish fellows (who imagines himself a Hercules because he once took a few physical culture lessons by post) insisted on boxing a bout with the beast. The kangaroo proved the victor in the first round. The animal showed so little mercy for his vanquished foe that he caught him in a close embrace with his front paws, and was proceeding to rip him up with his sharp hind hoof, as if he were opening a tin of jam with a tin-opener, when the proprietor of the beast luckily interfered—but not before the infatuated man was partly uncanned, so to speak. It will be fully a week before he is able to act. Another of the utility men will be laid aside for the same period through a piece of even worse folly. In the heat of a pot-house argument he officiously volunteered to subdue a savage dog owned by the landlord of an hotel where they had stopped for a drink. His process, taken from an article on the humane treatment of dogs in a children’s magazine, called ‘Aunt Fanny’s Little Pets,’ was to grasp the animal by the jaw and smile at it till it wagged its tail. His hand slipped at the critical moment, and it took six men to pull the dog away. As if this were not enough, the foolish fellows had picked up—heaven knows where—some dreadful old derelict who had imposed on them with a preposterous story of having played Shakespearian parts with Wilson Barrett in the old country, and brought him along on a board and beer salary to play their parts while they were incapacitated. I took a dislike to this old Bohemian from the moment I set eyes on him. The offensive familiarity with which he insisted on addressing me as ‘Mr. Bugleface’ had nothing to do with my objection to him, which was based on practical and prudent reasons. He doubtless had been connected with the profession in some menial capacity in the remote past, for his conversation showed a thorough knowledge of stagecraft, and he had all the mannerisms of the decayed actor, but he had reached such a depth of rickety, drunken, unshaven Bohemianism that his association with the Merry Marauders in any capacity would have brought discredit on us. I was determined to get rid of him before we opened in Te Orumu, but how to do so was a difficult matter, for he seemed to think that he had rescued the company from disaster at a critical time, and he looked for a corresponding show of gratitude from me.
My desire to get rid of him was intensified the first evening when the old scoundrel came round to my hotel in a disgraceful state of drunkenness, just as I was going to bed, with an offer to make the fortunes of the company and myself by playing ‘King Lear.’ He made himself so obnoxious by bellowing out passages from that tragedy in the hotel lobby that I was forced to take him home to his lodgings. I did not know where he had found shelter, but I trusted to his drunken sagacity to locate the place, and when he pointed out the house I knocked at the door and abruptly left him—to finish to himself, if he liked, a lying anecdote about a royal princess who had been so carried away by his acting of ‘King Lear’ as to pull the flowers from her corsage and throw them at his feet.
As he did not worry me next morning I congratulated myself that I had seen the last of him, but late that afternoon he burst furiously into the hall where I was superintending the seating arrangements for the evening’s performance.
“That was a low trick you served me last night, Bugleface,” he vociferated. “A dirty, shabby trick.”
I told him that I didn’t want to speak to him, and that I had played him no trick. On the contrary, I added, I had been foolishly kind in taking him home when he was unable to take care of himself.
“Home, Bugleface!” he said with a sneer. “It may be the kind of home you’re used to, but not me. It was a dirty trick, Bugleface, and you’re no gentleman.”
“Why, what’s the matter?” interposed Barney, who was helping me.
“The matter’s this,” said the old reprobate, turning to Barney. “Bugleface here pretended to do me a gentlemanly office last night and take me home when I was a bit mellow. He steers me to a house, knocks at the door, and clears off. A man opens the door and looks at me. ‘Do I live here?’ I asked him. ‘You do—tonight, at any rate,’ he says. With that he grabs me and locks me up. He was a policeman and the house was the jug! There’s a dirty low trick for you!”
“At all events, you got your bed for nothing,” I retorted—rather callously, it is true, but I was exasperated at his wretched insinuation that I had deliberately led him to the lock-up.
“Wrong again, Bugleface,” he replied, with another sneer; “for that bed cost me ten shillings, or twenty-four hours, when they brought me before the magistrate this this morning. I’d have been in gaol now if I had not thought of giving you as security for the fine. You’ll have to pay, or do the time yourself. But I’ve done with you, and you’ll get none of my assistance to help you out of a hole. Good-bye and good riddance, Bugleface!”
I willingly paid the fine when a policeman called for it, and reckoned the Merry Marauders cheaply rid of this terrible old man at the price. I subsequently learned that he got a job with a district poultry farmer postdating market eggs, in accordance with the beneficent provision of the New Zealand Government, which insists that all eggs sold in the Dominion must be stamped with the date of birth.
I regret to record that our season at Te Orumu was only moderately successful, owing to the foolishness of the architect in letting in a large sheet of glass above the door of the Mechanics’ hall to afford a good light to the daylight deliberations of the Te Orumu Town Council, who meet in the building once a fortnight to enact legislation for the benefit of this progressive district. This would not have mattered to us if the architect had not committed the additional foolishness of building the hall in front of a steep hill, from the crest of which the rabble of the town were able to see through the aforesaid glass and command a perfect view of the stage for nothing. Our first intimation of the presence of these free spectators was on the opening night when—the performance being a little late in starting—we heard from the hill-side roars of “Loafers!” “Up with the rag!” “What are we here for?” and sundry other bucolic witticisms and protests of a like nature. Barney complained bitterly that this was a shade over the longest odds ever wanted by brazen cheek from merit, but I quoted him the old philosopher—Seneca, was it, or Marcus Aurelius?—who said that the true secret of a man’s greatness was his love of getting something for nothing. But I am thankful to say that in spite of our big involuntary free-list we more than paid our expenses.
Yours ever,
VAL.