The Pacific Triangle Part 9

I had set out to see the world without any definite notion of whither I was drifting. I had bartered the liquid sunshine of Hawaii for Fiji's humid shade, and twisted a day in a knot between Suva and Apia so that I hardly knew whether or not Fiji was more devilishly hot than Samoa. And then for four days I endured the stench of ripening bananas in the hold of a resurrected vessel which, if ships are feminine, as sailors seem to believe, was decidedly beyond the age of spinsterhood. I was headed for New Zealand. Little wonder, then, that when I found that we had finally arrived with our olfactory senses still sane and were about to land in a real country with real cities and a social life dangerously near perfection, I felt as though I were coming to after ether.

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There, the wheeled traffic having been withdrawn, the people leaving church flooded the wide way, coursing up and down in what seemed to me an utterly aimless journey between the monument at the upper fork in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 s.p.a.cious business fronts, and the ma.s.sing 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; plat.i.tudes 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?

There are only boiling fountains and snow-packed ranges and wild-waste places to which neither man nor beast go willingly. Yet an unknown urge pushes one on, that urge which from time immemorial has impelled saint in search of salvation, and age in search of youth, as well as youth in search of adventure, to the most inaccessible reaches of the world. All of us bring back accounts of what we've seen, but which of us can answer why we went?

First impressions in older countries are generally confusing. Ages of acc.u.mulations pile up, covered with the dust of centuries which has gone through innumerable processes of sifting. But the stranger in the Antipodes is plunged into a bath of youth. Every aspect of the country is young. The volcanoes are mostly extinct, but about them lurks the warmth of the camp fire just died down. In mountain, bush, and plain something of the childhood of Mother Earth is still felt; at most, an adolescence, rich in possibilities. One almost feels that the very rivers are only the remnants of the receding floods after the rising of the land from beneath the sea. There is nothing old anywhere. Instead of being disappointed at the apparent paucity of man-made products, one is greatly surprised that so little and young a country should have so much. There is room, much room, ample acres which lie fallow, the winds of opportunity blowing over them, wild with abandon.

New Zealand, as I said, was a kind of resting-place. It was the point where the lines of interest in the native peoples of the Pacific, and those of the efforts of the white men, intersected, just as later I was to find a point of intersection between the white men and the Orientals at Hongkong. For here the new social life of the South Pacific, and the remnants of the old races of the Pacific equally divide the attention.

I had some little difficulty locating Auckland from the steamer, so many suburbs littered the forty miles of irregular bluff which surrounds the harbor. The homes upon the hills seemed reserved and unambitious. There were no streams of smoke from factory and mill. One felt, at the moment of arrival, that were it morning, noon, or night, whatever the season, Auckland would still be the same, and New Zealand would continue to be proud of the resemblance the youngest of its cities has for its parent.

All seemed quiet, restful and inactive.

If all these were inactive, not so the human elements. Their rumblings on localisms were to be heard even before we landed. As a new-comer, I was made aware of Wellington, the capital, and its winds; of the city of Christchurch and its plains; of prides and jealousies which provincial patriots acclaimed in good-natured playfulness. Dunedin's raininess was said to have been a special providence for the benefit of the Scotch who have isolated themselves there. The wonders of this place and the beauty of that broke through the mists of my imagination like tiny star-holes through the night.

2

I had returned to civilization, and though all my instincts settled into an a.s.surance which was comforting, a feeling that dengue fever was no more, that damp and moldy beds and smell of copra would not again be mingled with my food and slumber, still, I knew I was not a part of it.

Almost immediately my mind began moving spiral-like, outward and upward, to escape. I was to do it all in a month. I was to see Auckland, with its neighbor, Mt. Eden, an extinct volcano; I was to visit the other large cities,--vaguely their existence was becoming real to me,--I was to penetrate at least some of New Zealand's dangerous bush, to see the primitive-civilized lives of the native Maories. But, strange to say, return to civilization had the identical effect on me that return to primitive life is said to have on the white man. It entered my being in the form of indolence. I did not want to move. I wanted to rest. To stay a while in that place, to make myself part of the life of the city, to remain fixed, became a burning desire with me. And days went by without my being able to stir myself on again.

The life in the Dominion was conducive to ease and dreaming. n.o.body seemed in any hurry about anything, least of all about taking you in.

Every one went upon a way long worn down by the tread of familiar feet.

The conflicts of pioneer aggressiveness were over. The differences between the aboriginal and the foreign elements were lost in the overpowering crowding in of the alien. The stone and wooden structures, the railways and the piers, the homes wandering along over the hills as far as the eye could see, completely concealed that which originally was New Zealand.

I spent one month wandering up and down Auckland's one main street, and I can a.s.sure you it was like no other main street in the world, except those of every other city in New Zealand. There were the carts and the cars by day, and the clearing of the pavement of every vehicle for pedestrian parades by night. There were the carnivals and the fetes on Queens Street, and on every other royal highway during the summer months; and during the two hours which New Zealanders require for lunch, there was nothing to be done but to lunch too. And then on Sunday nights there was the confusion of cults and isms each with its panacea for spiritual and social ills. n.o.body was expected to do anything but go to church; hence the street cars didn't run during church hours, and the bathing-places were closed. And after ten o'clock it was as impossible to get a cup of tea outside one's own home as it is to get whisky in an open saloon in New York to-day.

On the _Niagara_ I had been a.s.sured by a young lady from New Zealand that we Americans didn't know what home life was and that she would show me the genuine thing when I got to her little country. She did, and I have been most grateful to her for it. It was sober and clean and quiet, and I accepted with great satisfaction every invitation offered me, because it was a thousand times better than being alone on the deserted streets. But the good Lord was wise when He made provision for one Sunday a week, as His human creation could hardly endure it more frequently; and that is what one might say of New Zealand home life. It is all that is good and wholesome, all that is necessary for the rearing of un.o.bstreperous young, but red blood should not be made to run like syrup, though I quite agree with my New Zealand friend that it should not be kept at the boiling-point, either. Our evenings were usually spent in quiet chatting on safe generalities interspersed with home songs and nice cocoa; and at ten o'clock we would separate. I hope that my New Zealand friends will not feel hurt at what I say. Let them put it down to my wild-Americanism. But home life on a Sunday evening was not worth going all the way diagonally across the Pacific to taste.

Hence, a month in Auckland was quite enough for me. By that time the call of the mountains and lakes had come to me, and in natural beauty New Zealand can rival any other country of its size I have ever been to, except j.a.pan. In answering that call I accepted the swagger's account of how life should be lived and took to the open road. In the year that followed I filled my memory with treasures that cannot be cla.s.sified in any summary. From Auckland in the North Island to Dunedin in the South Island I journeyed on foot through three long months, zigzagging my way virtually from coast to coast, dreaming away night after night along the great Waikato River, holding taut my soul in the face of the mysteries of the hot-springs districts, and quenching feverish experiences upon the sh.o.r.es of placid cold lakes and beneath snow-covered peaks of mountain ranges thirteen thousand feet high; gripping my reason during long night tramps in the uninhabited bush (forests) or in Desolation Gully, forty miles from nowhere. I know what wild life in New Zealand is, as well as tame. It is not all that it used to be when men left their home lands for that new start in life which Heaven knows every man is ent.i.tled to, considering what our notions of childhood are and the eagerness of man to pounce upon any one who has not reached insurmountable success.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DUNEDIN, NEW ZEALAND From the belt of wild wood that girdles the city]

[Ill.u.s.tration: BRIDGES ARE STILL LUXURIES IN MANY PLACES IN NEW ZEALAND]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE FIORDS AND SOUNDS OF NEW ZEALAND The pride of the Dominion Post Card. J. B. Series No. 205]

[Ill.u.s.tration: LAKE WANAKA, NEW ZEALAND]

In between I saw the courageous struggles these selfsame men have gone through and are still enduring in order to make of the whole of New Zealand what it is as yet only in parts. Those parts are rich farm lands, with swiftly scouting motor-cars used by great capitalist-farmers who have more than one station to look after. It is a strange phenomenon of New Zealand life that the small farm towns are generally much more alert and progressive than the big cities. The New Zealanders build houses that look like transplanted suburbs from around New York, and bring to their villages some of the love of plant life that the city-dweller is soon too sophisticated to share. They draw out to themselves the moving-picture theaters, which are now the all-possessing rage in the Dominion as elsewhere, and read the latest periodicals with the interest of the townsman. There are over a thousand newspapers in the Dominion, which for a population of a million is a goodly number, though one cannot regard this as too great an indication of the intellectual advancement of the people. Yet literacy is the possession of the farmer as much as and frequently more than the city-dweller in New Zealand. His children go to school even if they have to use the trains to get there; free railway pa.s.ses on these are accorded by the Government. And on the whole the farmer's life in New Zealand is richer than that of most rural communities. But the struggle is still great. I have seen some who do not feel that the promise is worth it.

Though each of the big cities in the Dominion has its own special characteristics, they are all considerably alike. The three chief ones are all port cities of about 80,000 inhabitants each, and except for the fact that Dunedin in the far south is essentially Scotch and somewhat more stolid than the rest, and Wellington in the center is the capital of the Dominion and therefore suspicious, one may go up and down their steep hills without any change in one's social gears. The colonial atmosphere is at once charming and chilling. There is a certain sobriety throughout which makes up for lack of the luxuries of modern life. But one cannot escape the conviction that regularity is not all that man needs. Everything moves along at the pace of a river at low level,--broad, s.p.a.cious, serene, but without hidden places to explore or sparkling peaks of human achievement to emulate. One paddles down the stream of New Zealand life without the prospect of thrills. One might be transported from Auckland in the north to Wellington or Dunedin in the south during sleep, and after waking set about one's tasks without realizing that a change had been made.

Every city is well lighted; good trams (trolley-cars) convey one in all directions, but at an excessively high fare; the water and sewerage systems are never complained of; the theaters are good and the shops full of things from England and America. There are even many fine motor-cars. But there are few signs of great wealth, though comparatively big fortunes are not unknown. It is rumored that ostentation is never indulged in, as the att.i.tude of the people as a whole is averse to it.

On the other hand, neither are there any signs of extreme poverty, though it exists; and slums to harbor it. While the usual evils of social life obtain, the small community life makes it impossible for them to become rampant. Every one knows every one else and that which is taboo, if indulged in, must be carried out with such extreme secrecy as to make it impossible for any blemish to appear upon the face of things.

In these circ.u.mstances, one is immediately cla.s.sified and accepted or rejected, according as one is or is not acceptable. Having recognized certain outstanding features of the gentleman in you, the New Zealander is Briton enough to accept you without further ado. There is in a sense a certain navete in his measurement of the stranger. He is frank in questioning your position and your integrity, but shrinks from carrying his suspicions too far. He will ask you bluntly: "Are you what you say you are?" "Of course I am," you say. "Then come along, mate." But he does not take you very far, not because he is n.i.g.g.ardly, but because he is thrifty.

As a result of this New Zealand spirit I found myself befriended from one end of New Zealand to the other by a single family, the elder brother having given me letters of introduction to every one of his kin,--in Hamilton, Palmerston North, Wellington, Christchurch, and Dunedin. And with but two or three exceptions I have always found New Zealanders generous and open-hearted. Wherever I went, once I broke through a certain shyness and reserve, I found myself part of the group, though generally I did not remain long, because I felt that new sensations could not be expected.

My one great difficulty was in keeping from falling in love with the New Zealand girls. Rosy-cheeked, st.u.r.dy, silently game and rebellious, they know what it is to be flirtatious. For them there is seldom any other way out of their loneliness. Only here and there do parents think it necessary to give their daughters any social life outside the home. In these days of the movies, New Zealand girls are breaking away from knitting and home ties. But even then few girls care to preside at representations of others' love-affairs without the opportunity of going home and practising, themselves. Hence the streets are filled with flirtatious maidens strolling four abreast, hoping for a chance to break into the couples and quartets of young men who choose their own manly society in preference to that of expensive girls. I have seen these groups pa.s.s one another, up and down the streets, frequent the tea-houses and soda fountains, carry on their flirtations from separate tables, pay for their own refreshments or their own theater tickets; but real commingling of the s.e.xes in public life is not p.r.o.nounced.

At the beaches! That is different. There the dunes and bracken are alive with couples all hours of the day or night during the holiday and summer seasons. Thence emerge engagements and hasty marriages, nor can parental watchfulness guard against it.

3

The most difficult thing in all my New Zealand experiences was to reconcile the latent conservatism of the people with their outstanding progressiveness. It would be easy to a.s.sert without much fear of contradiction that notwithstanding all the talk of radicalism in the matter of labor legislation there is little of it in practice in the Dominion. The reason for this is twofold. First, New Zealand, unlike Australia and America, was not a rebellious offshoot of England, not a protest against Old-World curtailment. Quite the contrary, it was made in the image of the mother country, and natural selection for the time being was dormant. Furthermore, it was simple for labor to dominate in a country where labor was to be had only at that premium.

Nowhere in the whole Dominion did I come across concrete evidence of awakened consciousness on the part of the ma.s.ses to their opportunities.

None of that feverish haste to raise monuments of achievement to accompany the legislative enactments which have given New Zealand an ill.u.s.trious place among the nations. True, the country is young; true, there are not enough people there to pile creation on creation. But that is not it. It is that they are not keyed up to any great notions of what they ought to expect of themselves, but are content with what freedom and leisure of life they possess.

Throughout the length and breadth of the two islands, islands more than two thirds the size of j.a.pan, there isn't an outstanding structure of any great architectural value; there isn't a statue or a monument of artistic importance; there is hardly a painting of exceptional quality; nor, with all the remarkable beauty of nature which is New Zealand's, is there any poetic outpouring of love of nature that one would expect from a people heirs to some of the finest poetry in the world. Even British India has its Kipling and its Tagore. With all the excellence of their efforts to solve the problem of the welfare of the ma.s.ses, New Zealanders show no excessive largeness of heart in the sort of welcome they extend to labor of other lands. Here, it would seem, is a land where the world may well be reborn, where there is every opportunity for the correction of age-long wrongs that have become too much a part of Europe for Europeans to resent them too heartily. Yet what is New Zealand doing and what has it done in seventy-five years to approximate Utopia?

This is not meant as a criticism of New Zealand; rather is it meant to let New Zealand know that the eyes of the world are upon it and expect much from it. Possession may be nine points of the law; but the utilization of opportunity which possession entails is the tenth point toward the retention of that which one has.

Babies are cared for better in New Zealand than any other place in the world, yet boys and girls still receive that antiquated form of correction, corporal punishment, and thought of letting the youth find his own salvation, with guidance only, not coercion, is still alien to the New Zealand pedagogic mind. Women have had the vote for over twenty-five years, but the freedom of woman to seek her own development, to become a factor in the social life of the community apart from the man's, is still a neglected dream. And young women are dying of ennui because they aren't given enough to do. The country is fairly rich, with its enormous droves of sheep, great pastures full of cattle, its cooperative capitalistic farming-schemes; but the human genius for beauty and self-expression must find opportunity in Britain or America.

And even the old romance of pioneer life is virtually of the past. In all my wanderings I came across only one home that made me throw out my emotional chest to contain the spirit of the pioneer life of which we all love to hear. It was a house as rough as it was old, laden with shelving and hung with guns, horns, and lithographs, and cheered by a blazing open fire,--an early virility New Zealand has now completely outgrown. The house must have been fifty years old, to judge from the Scotsman living there. He was keen, alert, and quick, a most interesting opponent in discussion, most firm in his beliefs without being offensive. Here, in the very heart of one of the earliest of New Zealand's settlement districts in the South Island, he lived with his family; and something of the old sweetness of life, the atmosphere of successful conquest, obtained. And ever as I dug down into New Zealand's past, I found it charming. The present is too steeped in cheap machine processes to be either durable or really satisfying.

Discouraging as this may sound, he who has lived in the little Dominion and has learned to love its people and their ways, hastens to contradict his own charges. For in time, as one becomes better acquainted, one finds a healthy discontent brewing beneath that apathetic exterior. Just as the Chinese will do anything to "save face" so the Briton will do anything not to "lose face." He loses much of his latent charm in so restricting himself, but when a.s.sured that a new convention is afoot and that it is safe for him to venture forth with it, he will do so with a zest that is itself worth much.

Furthermore, there is in the atmosphere of staid New Zealand life a pa.s.sion for the out-of-doors which is worth more than all the Greenwich Village sentiment twice over. Girls are always just as happy in the open and more interesting than when indulging in cigarettes and exposing shapely legs in intellectual parlors. Given twenty million people instead of one New Zealand would blossom forth into one of the loveliest flowers of the Pacific.

4

In the Auckland (New Zealand) Art Gallery hangs a picture representing the coming of the Maories to New Zealand. Their long canoe is filled with emaciated people vividly suggesting the suffering and privation they must have undergone in coming across the mainland some four hundred years ago. Venturing without sail or compa.s.s, these daring Polynesians must have possessed intrepid and courageous natures.