A DREAMER PASSES

Otago Witness, Issue 4028, 26 May 1931, Page 65

A DREAMER PASSES

THE MAN WITH THE PACK.

By

Mona Tracy.

(Special for the Otago Witness.) Wondrous as had been the Westland day, the Westland dusk was even more magical. It spread itself like a soft blue mantle over the tall rimus and kahikateas that stood, sentinel-wise, above the slumbering armies of the undergrowth. It brought the indescribable scents of the most fragrant forest of the world; of jasmine-like parsonsia flung across the creamy panicles of putawetaweta, of damp inoss and fern and aromatic olearia, of whiteflowering kaikoniako, from whose wood Maui taught his people to make their fire. Away, beyond the cleared land that fronted the gracious old house at Ferguson’s, the bush was like a dark rampart guarding the fortress of the evening star. The tuis had blown their last golden bugle notes of the day. As far as sound went, the querulous moreporks had the world to themselves; unless there could be counted the distant, lazy murmur of Tasman’s sea and the whirr of the big, erratically-flying moths. I sat on the high veranda watching the dusk’s slow merging to darkness, a darkness that would be lit only by th2 stars and a slim little lamp of a moon. Such was the enchantment upon me that I did not hear the approach of a cyclist pedalling his way southwaids along the sanded road. It was not until there came a determined assault ou the gate that I was aware of the presence of a fellow-human; and it was with some amazement that I heard, above the complaints of the moreporks, a nian s voice, speaking with a marked foreign accent. The gate having been successfully stormed, there advanced towards the veranda a figure which, while it might have gone unremarked in city streets, appeared more than bizarre in the exquisite loneliness of a South Westland evening. Imagine a square-shouldered little man in the neatest of navy suits, the coat double-breasted, the trousers tucked into short leggings; the face tanned to gipsy hue, the forehead broad and thoughtful, the dark eyes alight with humour; the manner at once pleasant and persuasive. Stooping eVer so lightly beneath the weight of *1 heavy pack on his back, the little man halted by the veranda. He gesticulated, bowed, burst into speech aud gesticulated again. Satisfied at length that hs could not be mistaken for other than what he was—no tourist, but a plain wayfarer seeking rest and refreshment —he mounted the steps and was led, still smiling and bowing and gesticulating, into the cool dimness of the house. Later, when the matter of his lodging for the night had been arranged and the hunger and thirst of the road had been appeased in the )ng house s hospitable kitchen, I determinedly followed him thither. Without, the moreporks and the erratically-flying moths might have the night to themselves. Like Kiplings Kim with the lama I felt that the wayfarer was my trove, and like Kim again, I proposed to take possession. I was consumed by a great curiosity to discover what had brought the little man with the foreign accent and the heavy pack to pedalling his way through the tiny settlements dotted so sparsely about southern W estland.

He was a traveller, of course. In the kitchen, warmed by an excellent meal, he was already launched into enthusiastic eulogy of his wares. And presently, warmed further by the sunshine of the interest shown in him, he expanded into further smilings, further gesticulations —and we had his story. It began with the poorest of boys, born of peasant stock in a romantic but unfortunate land of the Old W orld —one of those unhappy little subject nations which, having been drawn into the insatiate maw of a greater power, were swept willy-nilly into the Great War and bled in a cause uncomprehended by their peoples. But this particular lad had his wretched boyhood in days long before the Juggernaut of militarism was drawn over Europe’s millions of victims. All that he and his kind knew was that there were some fortunate lands of the earth in which few people went hungry, in which mast was not a staple of food, in which misery and cold were not the bedfellows of little children. Small wonder that they dreamed of those lands, to them more remote than Paradise! There was an uncle who had been to America and who had come back to the romantic and unfortunate land on a visit to his pcpole. Departing, lie left behind him a little, worn travelling bag. Can you see the hungry peasant boy creeping up to the attic to gaze on the bag, and imagine his clutching it to him as something infinitely jprecious, a thing fashioned of dreams? If not, I wish you might have seen the man with the pack gesticulating his way through the story in the lamp-lit kitchen at Ferguson’s. The bag had been over the sea, that sea which was only a word to the peasant boy. Vision, then, how for him the bag became a symbol of hope—the beacon which was some day to light him over the sea to One of the bright, fortunate lands of the earth, one of the new lands in which men found fortunes. Out of its enchantment for

him came the ambition that grew through the starved years of his youth, even to the day when a pathetic saving of pence enabled him to journey to Westphalia and there to do a man’s work in the deep coal mines. For another, one upon whom a dream had not set its spell, the man’s work might have sufficed; but not for the lad whose dearest, nay, whose only plaything had been an old travelling bag. ’ He was beset by visions of -the sea and of the bright, lovely lands beyond the sea. In those lands men spoke English, a difficult tongue. He began to study English. then came the inevitable spring, and with it the young man’s fancy that turned, not lightly, to thoughts of love. Picture her, if you will, as some yellowhaired Gretchen, pink-checked and blue of eyes, a very blossom of maidenhood. But the passion to go far, and still farther, held him; and besides (a practical. touch here!), did he not know English, that difficult tongue? The pity to waste so much learning, so much that would help him to his desire, to fortune, maybe! The farther away from troubled, tangled Europe, where big nations swallowed small ones while the world looked on, unpitying (thus said his instinct), the greater the freedom, the more immense the fortune. In the Transvaal, for instance, men found fortunes on the streets. That was far .across the sea. Yellow-haired Gretchen was sacrificed, not unrcgretfully, to the realisation of an old, hungry dream. To the Transvaal he would go.

But here there intervened—an atlas! Working his painstaking way through its continents and countries and seas, the young man found a land that lay even farther away than the Transvaal.” Australia was its name, and the fact that no one of his intimates -could tell him a single thing about it—for all that the atlas showed it to be the world’s fifth continent —proved it to be more fortunate than the Transvaal. And then. . . .

What was that lying, away beyond Australia, across a sea called Tasman? Just two queerly-shaped islands which lie had not noticed before. Their prodigious distance from Westphalia fascinated him. Straightway the young miner sent to London for a book about New Zealand; and in time there arrived the glorious, intoxicated moment when the last lingering regret for yellowhaired Gretchen was forgotten in the excitement of discovering that the steerage fare to New Zealand was little more than that which would take him to the Transvaal.

He carried his dream to the coast, gazing on the turbulent North Sea with rapture and with awe; took it aboard ship with him, and knew the day of miracle that found him, for the first time, out of sight of tangled Europe, out of sight of any land. Though the vessel, a notoriously bad one, met with storm after storm off the African coast, never a Diaz sighted the Cape of Good Hope with more cestacy than he. Though icebergs were encountered when the ship was driven far off her course, and though, later, in the Indian Ocean the pitch started from the seams of the deck, he was all the time uplifted by the heady wine of hope. Sighting Australia, his was the spirit of the adventurer. Away, away beyond that dim, blue coast-line, across the sea called Tasman, lay the wondrous isles to which his dreams had been driving him since the days of starvation on mast in that romantie but unfortunate little land of the troubled Old World.

To-day? He goes pedalling his way through Westland, the pack on his back,

the smile on his lips. He tells you, with laughter and gesticulation, tliat he is no richer than he was in the days when he hewed coal in the deep Westphalian mines. But in that he errs. He is the richer by the friends, recognised or otherwise, whom he must have gained in his wanderings up and down New Zealand. And he is rich, rich, that he can still speak so rapturously of that early dream of his; and that he can hug his arms to his breast when he talks of the little, worn travelling hag that he fondled in the attie of his boyhood’s home.