Samuel told the tohunga to take Taketu to the dispensary and care for his wound himself. “Your skill is as great as mine now,” he said to his enemy with a courteous bow. And the tohunga returned the bow with equal courtesy and went away with the boy.
It was a good hour before Tai Haruru had finished with Samuel and he was free to go to the dispensary. The tohunga and the boy were still there, and nothing had been done.
“He refused to let me touch him,” said the tohunga suavely. “Only in the white healers has he any trust.”
“You should have trusted your tohunga,” said Samuel to Taketu.
The boy grinned and shook his head. “He bound up the arm of Tiki,” he said, “and from his heart there flew a devil into the arm of Tiki, and swelled it up like a gourd. Had the white healers not come and slit the arm and let out the devil, Tiki would have died.”
“There was no devil in the arm of Tiki,” said Samuel patiently, for the hundredth time. “It was merely that dirt got into the wound. Wash your wounds, cleanse them well, and there will be no swelling.”
“I have here the warm water and the antiseptics,” said the tohunga in a voice like silk. “All is ready for the white tohunga.”
Nothing had been forgotten, not even the small dose of cordial that Samuel sometimes administered at the end of a painful dressing. He had only to cleanse and bind up the wound. “In three days you will be well,” he said to Taketu.
But three days later both boys were dead. Te Turi of his mortal wound and Taketu in an agony of pain that could not be accounted for. Both deaths had been shocking and distressing, and the tribe had lost the two young men who, after Tiki, were their most promising tuas. The funeral rites were inaugurated amid a wailing and grief that were deafening, and the two white men were forbidden to attend. The tohunga was profuse in his apologies for this exclusion. “The people will have it so,” he explained. “It seems that for the moment, for the moment only, they have lost their faith in the skill of the pakehas.”
That night, when Samuel was alone in his little hut, courting a sleep that would not come, Tai Haruru came and sat in the doorway, leaning against the jamb, smoking his long pipe. Samuel lay and sniffed the strong, pungent tobacco and looked at the eagle features, dark and clear-cut against the moonlight outside, and was as comforted as a child who wakes from nightmare and finds his mother beside his bed.
“You’ve been a fool, Kelly,” said Tai Haruru.
“You think that in caring for Taketu’s wound I should not have used things prepared by the tohunga?” asked Samuel humbly.
“You played straight into his hands,” said Tai Haruru. “There was poison in the water, or the cordial, or both. What these tohungas do not know about poison is not worth knowing. I warned you of it.”
“I am a great sinner,” stated Samuel with grief.
“Sinner? Merely a fool.”
“It is a sin to serve the most high God with foolishness,” said Samuel.
“Then are all the saints steeped in sin,” said Tai Haruru. “For I’ve never met a real downright good man yet who was not also a real downright god-damned fool.” He sighed, but without bitterness. There was resignation, and even a hint of affectionate amusement, in his deep voice.
“You must get out of this, Kelly,” he said. “Tonight. The funeral rites will go on for another day, and tomorrow night the tohunga will hold a spiritist séance and raise the ghosts of the dead boys to speak with the relatives. This tohunga is especially gifted in the calling up of spirits, and if he stages a really effective séance, his mana will be sufficiently restored for him to consider administering one of his little potions to you without stirring up any resentment from the tribe. . . . But you’ll be a couple of days’ journey away by that time. Have you your things packed? I’ve got your horse handy.”
He turned to knock out his pipe, but Samuel checked him. “And you?” he asked him.
“I’ll stay a while longer,” said Tai Haruru. “I’ve not brought down upon myself the hatred of the tohunga to the extent that you have, for I’ve not cast aspersions on his precious gods. And I know the Maoris. I can handle ’em. To quit now would be to do the mana of the white man no good at all. When I’ve restored it, I’ll go—eastward. No point in staying here indefinitely. My work’s done.”
“Which is more than can be said of mine,” said Samuel.
Tai Haruru eyed him with benevolent exasperation, and then looked away to where the moonlight lit the distant snows. “After what has happened, you’ve about as much chance of converting this village to Christianity as of removing that mountain and casting it into the sea,” he said.
“We have had a conversation much like this before,” Samuel reminded him. “Granted that what I am trying to do seems humanly impossible, nevertheless my work goes on until it is no longer possible for me even to make the attempt.”
“Do you ever consider Susanna?” asked Tai Haruru suddenly.
Samuel flinched and was silent. “She is my wife,” he said at last. “She is the complement of myself. If I fail in my duty, she shares my shame.”
“The complement of a murdered man is generally a heartbroken widow,” said Tai Haruru angrily. “And I wish to God I’d never set eyes on you. I wish to God I’d never brought you here with me.”
“I was under the impression that it was I who had brought you,” Samuel reminded him drily.
Tai Haruru laughed. “So it was, little parson,” he conceded. “Yet you’d scarcely have found your way here without me. You owe me a debt of gratitude, and you’re not the man to deny it. Will you repay me by the death of my friend?”
This was an aspect of the matter that Samuel had not yet considered, and he considered it, together with the picture of Susanna that Tai Haruru’s remarks had conjured up.
“I will wait for another couple of days,” he said, “and then I will give you my decision.”
“You may wait a couple of days too long,” Tai Haruru cautioned him.
“I will wait another couple of days,” said Samuel, with so gentle yet tough a stubbornness that Tai Haruru knew he had gained the utmost that would be conceded at present. He knocked out his pipe, took the Maori blanket that hung over his shoulder, and spread it out on the ground beside Samuel. “At least I do not leave you while you consider of the matter,” he said, and lay down on it across the doorway.
Samuel opened his mouth to protest, then realized that he also was halted. The figure of Tai Haruru, stretched beside him, had taken to itself such a look of reposeful stolidity that it might have been made of iron. Nothing short of an earthquake would remove that figure from that doorway that night. . . . And in a moment the man was asleep.
Samuel remained awake, pondering that everlasting problem of the knights of God—how to forsake all and follow Christ without bringing too much desolation upon friends and relatives. “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.” Yes. But on the other hand, “Son, behold thy mother.” The chief puzzle of life always had been, was, and always would be, the right striking of a balance.
In the end, though he prayed and pondered for an hour, he saw his way no further than that spiritist séance of tomorrow night. He must be there, of course. Recalling the witch of Endor, he was convinced that the attempt to call up the dead was contrary to the will of God. He must therefore attend the séance and make his protest. He had no doubt whatever about that. Wherever the Christian warrior saw the command of God abrogated, there must he take his stand and cry aloud. And unknown to Tai Haruru he had specifically been invited by the tohunga to attend. “Come if you have the courage,” had said the tohunga, “and if the friendship which you have shown toward me was true friendship and not assumed. Upon your appearance or nonappearance will I judge your friendship.” In other words, by his choice of weapons he had told good news of the nature of his God, and now he was invited to set the
seal upon his statement—if he had the pluck. It was a challenge which could not be ignored.
And the next day things happened with an inevitability that surprised him. It had so often been like that with him in his life—just when he had expected the carrying out of a resolve to be beset with difficulties, the way became suddenly clear, as though resolve had power to blast a clear path for itself.
The day passed much as usual. No patients had attended the dispensary since the deaths of the two young tuas, but there were still a few patients in the hospital who had not lost their faith in Tai Haruru’s power to heal. He was busy with them most of the morning, while Samuel cleaned out his dispensary, as though he expected a flood of patients next day, prayed at the usual afternoon hour in his little church and preached to a congregation composed of two old women, five pigs, a nanny-goat and, for the first time, Tai Haruru. He had finished with his patients and was afraid to let Samuel out of his sight, for he had been told by an obstinately loyal Tikí that the tohunga, who had some reputation as a soothsayer, had predicted that before the next day’s dawning the Maori gods would have shown what they thought of the white tohunga. “He will perish, and yet not perish,” had said the tohunga, making his prediction, like most tohungas, in words of doubtful meaning, so that whatever happened he could scarcely be proved wrong.
The nanny-goat, the property of one of the old women, did Samuel great service. It lamented with many lamentations, and so did the old woman, making so much noise that Samuel was obliged to break off his discourse to ask what ailed them. With the help of Tai Haruru he made out that the goat had a kid, a piece of valuable property to the old woman, and that it had pulled its stake up out of the ground and wandered off into the forest. The old woman herself was too infirm to retrieve it, and the rest of the village too much engrossed in the still-continuing funeral rites to do it for her.
“I will find your kid for you, Mother,” Samuel assured her, and continued his discourse to a somewhat quieted congregation.
In the afternoon he set out to look for the kid, Tai Haruru dogging him like an obstinate shadow. “Looking for a kid in the primeval forest is like looking for a needle in a haystack,” he said, laughing, as they waded through the fern.
“The walk is a delight,” said Samuel quietly, and then said no more, awed to silence by the majestic curtains of green shade that fell sheer about him, suspended from the blue ceiling of the world, motionless until the statuesque lines of the trees softened imperceptibly into the faint sway and rustle of the fern.
“We’re traveling eastward,” said Tai Haruru. “Odd. I chose no particular direction.”
“You followed tomorrow’s sun,” said Samuel. “And so, apparently, did the kid.”
They stood at the edge of a small dell carpeted with flowers, with a stream running through it. There was a break in the forest roof above, for the curtains of green shadow stayed themselves upon the edge of the dell, giving free passage to the sunlight that poured down from above, lighting to a pearly whiteness the body of the little kid lying among the flowers beside the stream. It had caught one hoof in a twisted root and was bleating pitifully.
It was the first time in his life that Tai Haruru had not gone quickly to the aid of a creature in distress. He stayed where he was, in the shadows that surrounded the dell, and watched the other man perform the office that was usually his. For the life of him he could not have moved. He was oddly shaken as he watched Samuel go down through the sunlight to the stream, kneel among the flowers and gently free the small hoof, lift the kid to his shoulder and turn back again, his figure bent over by the weight as he toiled up the steep side of the dell. The exquisite circle of flowery brightness, the bent figure, awoke in Tai Haruru confused memories of a lost childhood. . . . Waters of comfort. . . . The lost sheep. . . . The good shepherd. . . . Lovers, living together through long years, sometimes grow to resemble each other. . . . Samuel Kelly seemed to Tai Haruru something more than a man as he toiled up the side of the dell.
Yet when he had left the halo of light and was once more beside his friend under the trees, he was merely a comic figure of a little man, panting and perspiring beneath a load too heavy for him.
They had come much farther than they had realized, and when they drew near to the village again it was quite dark.
“The recovery of the kid may restore your lost mana,” said Tai Haruru. “We found it with the help of your powers of divination, of course, not through a sheer fluke. You’ll remember that, won’t you?”
But Samuel was not attending to him. “Is the village on fire?” he asked. There was a smell of smoke in the gloom, and a fitful light showing between the trunks of the trees.
Tai Haruru stopped, then strode quickly forward, Samuel following him. But it was not the village, it was only Samuel’s little church and dispensary. When he saw the fire, a chill of sadness took hold of him, for it was as though his own hopes were going up in smoke and flame. Then he passed from sadness to passive acceptance.
But there was no passivity about Tai Haruru. He was taken hold of by a fury such as had not visited him for years, and he was nearer hating his beloved Maoris than he had ever been. Couldn’t they have left the harmless little man’s harmless little church alone? What had he ever done to them but good? Surely it needed only a rudimentary intelligence to lay the blame of Taketu’s death where it belonged—at the tohunga’s door? They were fools and worse, and he’d teach them a lesson they’d not forget in a hurry.
“Here, take the kid,” he said to Samuel, heaving it back to the little man’s shoulder. “Take it to the old dame and then stay in her hut with her, out of harm’s way.”
Then he ran toward the blazing church, and the Maoris who were dancing and yelling and gesticulating round it. The flames were licking up the walls, but they had not yet reached the wooden cross over the lintel. The cross meant nothing to him, but it meant a great deal to Samuel. Careless of the fire, he leaped and pulled it down, then jumped back, scorched and singed by the flames, to tell his Maoris what he thought of them, and his bellowings of rage were like the bellowings of waves crashing on the rocks. “Sounding Sea!” they cried out in fear when they saw him. They were many and he was one, but yet they were afraid of him. A pole supporting a totem was not far from the burning hut, and Tai Haruru wrenched it out of the ground as though he had the strength of ten men and laid about him with all his strength. He did not care how many crowns he broke. Serve them right.
Then a deeper cry of alarm arose. Some flying sparks had lit the thatch of the chief’s house. Now the village was alight in good earnest.
Chapter IV
1
Samuel thrust the kid through the doorway of the old dame’s hut and without waiting for her thanks walked away from the village, down the path that Marianne and the others had followed when they fled from the pa to the torere. It was the foot of the great rock that contained the torere that the spirits of the dead were to be conjured up at nightfall, and it was that now. The curtains of green were now curtains of ebony and silver grey, with broken blue lights overhead. The sound of the tumult in the village died away as he went forward, and he heard instead the rustle of the night wind in the trees. He had no fears for Tai Haruru, for the man had great power to dominate his surroundings, and the Maoris left behind in the village were not those who had been embittered by the deaths of the two young tuas—those were ahead of him at the foot of the great rock—but he had great fear for himself, that he might not set down the seal upon that statement as he should. The tohunga had invited him to set the seal “if he had the courage,” and he was more physically afraid than he had known it was possible to be. Physical fear had never been one of his disabilities, and he was therefore all the more horrified and shamed by the exhibition he was making of himself as he walked along the path. For the sweat was pouring off him, and he was panting like a scared rabbit. His mouth was so dry that he could scarcely sw
allow, and his knees seemed folding up beneath him, as though they were no longer a part of his body. Just fear? Just animal, craven fear, but it brought him at last to a standstill. He stopped dead upon the path, physically unable to go on. He could do no good in this condition, he told himself confusedly. He would bring shame, not honor, upon the cause of his master. Better turn back, take Tai Haruru’s advice and return to Wellington. He owed it to Susanna. And he had useful work to do in Wellington. Far better to continue a useful ministry there than to die in the wilds a death by torture that would do not the slightest good to a single living soul. He turned round, his face to the village again, stumbled a few steps, tripped over a root in the path and fell headlong.
The shock of the fall, coming upon him when his body was so wrenched by fear, stunned him for a few moments. As he came to himself again, he unconsciously pulled himself up a little, so that he was crouching forward on his knees. The chance attitude, and the instant mechanical response of his mind to that attitude, saved him. For years he, had been kneeling to pray, for years twilight and the murmuring of the night wind in the trees had brought certain words to his mind. He said them out loud now, not of intention but as a mere reflex action of the muscles of throat and tongue. “If this cup may not pass away from me except I drink it, Thy will be done.”
Yet he heard the words, and slowly and inexorably they dragged him to his feet and turned him about on the path again. He went stumbling on as before, in the same despicable condition, incapable of reasoned thought or action, merely blindly obeying an example.
Yet as the path rose steeply toward the great cliff where the torere was hidden, he found that his physical distress was lessening. In spite of the slope of the hill he could breathe more easily, and his body felt co-ordinated once again. He had the sensation that he was not alone, that some unknown prayer sustained him, and the sense of companionship brought its corollary of a sense of doubled strength. Presently, as he climbed over the boulders that were beginning to appear in the path, he was smiling. He was thinking to himself that if it were to be his lot to join the company of the martyrs, he would have to slink in at the very tail end of the procession, for he would be martyr not from choice but because he had tripped over the root of a tree.