Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles). Katherine Mansfield
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as far as Alligator Head, even — he might have appeared, ghostly and white, from the sea-cave beneath the rock Kaimahi, to lead the ship, beyond Pelorus Sound, as far as French Pass — Te-au-miti,”The Licking Current.” And as they clung to the rail, thrilled and tense, half expecting him to be incarnated from every white wave, they must have heard from some sailor or old traveller the mariner’s tale of how Pelorus Jack was “discovered” in the 1870’s by the master of The Southern Cross, and of how he barely escaped being harpooned because they thought he was a white whale-calf. It was not until later that he was classified as Risso’s dolphin, and eventually protected by a special Order in Council of the New Zealand Government.
The day came when they actually did see him. They were taking a cruise with their family and the Seddons. The ship swung out from Lambton Harbour, north-west across Cook Strait toward “The Brothers” and the lighthouse. Here was where Captain Cook’s Endeavour was so nearly lost in the 1770’s. No ten-second flash winking then from Ngawhatu-kai-ponu, the Stinging Rocks which had long ago been made tapu by the Maoris, who veiled the eyes of strangers with three karaka leaves strung together “in deference to the mist-wreathed spirit of the rocks.”
They sailed past the quiet Queen Charlotte Sound to the labyrinth of capes and headlands. They skirted the archipelago of rocky islands scattered along the rough outer coast; through the funnellike Straits down which the wind pours everlastingly to Wellington. As they reached Alligator Head, the Captain strolled by with:”You can expect Pelorus Jack in ten minutes.”
The grown-ups laughed, but before five minutes had gone they were standing behind the children, leaning tense and credulous over the prow.
“Here he comes!” somebody called.
Rolling like a disc over and under the waves, darting through them, leaping straight into the air like a porpoise, flashed a huge bluish-white dolphin tinged with purple and yellow. He made straight for the steamer’s bow, rolling round about and under; sometimes flashing ahead so swiftly that he was lost in the foam of the waves; then appearing magically at the ship’s side.
Darkness came on, dropping, as it does in those islands, quickly without twilight, with only a queer distortion of images. Through the shimmer of phosphorescence at the boat’s prow plunged the white dolphin; and like the sea-creatures in that other sea — so different, so becalmed — his every track “was a flash of golden fire.”
The Pa Man put a pin into this pretty bubble of legend. Jack was a grampus griseus who had left his school further south. Probably he was infested with lice. He rubbed his itching back against the prow of the ship as a flea-bitten cow rubs her shanks against a byre post to scratch herself.
2
Cradock was a brother of Arthur Beauchamp; his daughter Ethel was second cousin to the three little girls. She was an extremely tall, angular woman with fine warm blue eyes, and an expression so naturally sweet that even false teeth could not stiffen it. She had been engaged to Grimsdale Anderson for several years, but a series of unexpected misfortunes falling upon this young English pioneer had prevented their marrying. Yet Ethel Beauchamp seemed only to grow more gracious with misfortune. Like all the Beauchamps, she had an almost inexhaustible supply of courage.
Her sister, a plump little fantail, had married Mr. Greensill, explorer and prospector of the Malay States. In one raid while he was away fighting, she had stayed alone to protect the household goods, even under the knife of a Chinese. She had been shipwrecked many times. When she was asked:”Weren’t you frightened?” she said,”I never have time to think about that. I have to be wondering what’s going to happen.”
Cousin Ethel, noticing that Kass was treated as “the difficult child,” made special efforts to interest her or tell her a little story. She told her how Mahakipuna, between the Sounds, was named “The Smoke Goes up Straight,” when the tall plume indicated fair weather and a propitious place for the Maoris who had just dragged their canoes onto land. She told her how Captain Cook had released the first pig in Queen Charlotte Sounds in 1773.
She took the child down to the old pah by the hill behind the homestead. Maoris had lived there when Cradock Beauchamp first settled, but now on the hill by the pah there was only the Maori burial ground. The rough wooden slabs were rotting under the trees.
Old Armena, who worked for the Anikiwa Beau-champs, was the last Maori left. She had been a tribal chieftain’s daughter, of the best native blood; and she was devoted to the English. To hear her speak, one would believe that she had no use for Maoris. Yet when the cemetery had caught fire, she begged the Beauchamps to save it.
“But you have no interest in it, Armena,” Cousin Ethel said in her gentle, solicitous way.
“Armena have seven husbands there,” said the Maori.
Kass liked to talk to Armena while she ironed the children’s pinafores. She ironed beautifully; and especially she liked to iron men’s shirts. When they asked her where she had learned, she said,”Down in the city.” She had paid five pounds to learn. Her last husband had been an Englishman, and she was very proud of him. When he died he left her a bit of land which she treasured and called in Maori,”The Wedding Dowry.” She was fond of “Maggie” — as she called Ethel, whose name she couldn’t say — and she wanted to give her the title-deeds. But Cradock Beauchamp had the strictness of a prospector who never jumps his neighbour’s claim.”You can’t take it from them, Ethel,” he said sternly. So she returned the deeds to Armena.
One morning Armena came crying down to Anikiwa. Her whare had burned, and the deeds with it.
“Now the dirty Maoris will get my bit of land,” she cried in Maori, forgetting English in her despair. She had wanted it — the gift of a white man to her — to return to the whites. The land became valuable long afterwards — worth a fortune — when the Anikiwa homestead had to be sold for taxes.
3
One afternoon the three children had been catching “cocha-bullies” and “tiddlers” in a stream. They followed it through the paddocks, down the ravine, to the Anikiwa beaches. Kass wandered away by herself, dragging the leather doll Hinemoa. She was finding little tiny shells. There was something very special to her in these — so perfect, so small and delicate, and yet in every detail like the big ones. Her love for little tiny things — exquisite, minute flowers and shells — poised on the very lintel of a faërie world, scarcely to be known except through these, and very deeply, very secretly her own — was poignant all her life.
She knelt by small pools along the beach, and gave herself up to this silvery world. Flowers no bigger than a pin prick on those trees waving beneath the water. Tiny silvery toadstools. Another world-within-a-world. She raised herself up and looked about, for a moment, longing for Uncle Cradock’s spectacles. But as she gazed down into that crystal country, she seemed to have become tiny, too — down beneath those flowery trees, beneath the silvery umbrella, to a world like the world within a drop of water.
After tea that evening she remembered Hinemoa. The leather doll was sitting in a tree by the ravine, half a mile away.
She began to cry. The grandmother called her sharply:
“Kass! You’re a silly little thing!”
“I know it’s still hanging from a tree in the rain,” she sobbed. Cousin Ethel tried to talk to her, but she wouldn’t be consoled. She only cried and cried.
Finally the cousin heard the rain splash on the eaves. She called one of her brothers, a boy of about ten or twelve, and persuaded him to go down for the doll.
He came back from the half a mile in the wet, with a red face, dragging the leather doll by an arm. Though her cheeks were still stiff with the dried tears, Kass was sitting up by the fire.
4
When — like Fenella in The Voyage — Kass went to visit