A Ceiling of Amber

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 543, 21 December 1928, Page 1 (Supplement)

A Ceiling of Amber

By

ORTH, east, west, rippled the blackness of the sea washed vTWiU*IPU with opal where the moon touched it. Behind was the narrow, jagged chain of rocks, at the seaward end of \9 Which the lighthouse stood. (■’- Behind, again, the looming bulk of the Taniwha Mountains. He had christened them so from some whimsical jargon picked up from the beach Maoris who told of a huge, floundering thing that wallowed in sea-darkness, crawling forth at times to shake the flimsy raupohuts of the village with terror. Perhaps the taniwha, god-devil of the ocean, would be merciful and make his meal of some slim, round-breasted slave girl, a nothing in the village, a bone to be flung to any dog that growled. But perhaps, in a cynic spirit, he would choose for prey the young son of a chief, tall, with the light of his first battles and first loving in his eyes. • Darkness and the constant society of old Geoff Dawlish played strange tricks with Peter Verne s mind. From time to time, one of the hunchbacked mountains would seem to bear some likeness to the floundering bulk described by awestruck natives. First he would be amused, then uneasy, a whiff of the old prickling terrors of his childhood sharp in his nostrils. So he called the mountains after their monster, and by day hated them for their brown, monotonous infertility, and by night cursed them for the leaden weight with which they crushed his spirit. But to-night, they were very beautiful, for the stars had flung a long, branching chain of silver just above them, and constellations opened out into blossom after blossom of brilliance, until it would seem that Taniwha was being led in chains of flowers to the triumph of some more beautiful god. The round glass of the huge light made a turning roof of gold over his head. “A ceiling of amber, a pavement of pearl—” So ran one flashing line in some verses by the new poet, Matthew Arnold. Geoff Dawlish had stood a greasy candle, stuck in a whisky bottle, on the slim, green-bound volume that Dayrell had sent I Dayrell . . . she had waded more quickly and lightly than most women of her day through the morass of clumsiness and horsehair virtues which had swamped all but the last few years of the nineteenth century. But how green and blue had the century candle flared up, just before its extinction! There were poets —wine of Swinburne, salt of Wilde. There were women like flowers and women like flames —women who, like Dayrell, possessed the graces and impertinence and affectations that Queen Victoria had so suppressed. But Dayrell wasn’t the product of any fashion. She was one of those women at whose burning hair the torches of Rosetti and Wilde had caught alight. Thinking of Dayrell made him ache a little, particularly when he remembered that it was his own monstrously swollen sense of duty which had kept him from her these six months and more. Why should he, alone in the country, have seen the reef chain beyond the pretty fishing village as the biggest danger in the North Island to the little coastal steamers which were plying a bold and blundering trade under skippers used to smoother waters? Why should he have beaten and kicked and reviled those in high places into building a lighthouse! Above all, why, when the very salient point was raised that no man could be found to stop in so lonely a place, had he volunteered to take care of the lighthouse himself, until a man could be brought from England? The God who does not always deal gently with fools might perhaps know. Geoff Dawlish was his second-in-command, picked up, for want of a better man, from the Maori village. He had been a seaman once, on a little blue boat engaged in the trade of dried Maori heads which, for a time, established almost a fashion in Sydney. The ship was wrecked. Some of the crew were disposed of by natives in the customary manner. Geoff Dawlish was not. According to himself, his stubby red hair, knotted purple fingers and twisted nose had found favour in the eyes of several ladies of high degree. He had been hidden away until all real excitement was over, and since then had lived a fairly comfortable existence as a “pakeha Maori.” Dike most drunkards, he was a sentimentalist, and would weep, in moments of emotion, over the thought of a possible return to England. Harping on this string, Peter had secured his services; for whatever other commodities the raupo huts might provide, hard cash for the fare to England was wanting. In the little white rooms of the lighthouse, Peter had believed —almost with sympathj—that he might win the old man back to some state of health and decency. Between them and the shore were two miles of grey, broken waters, interspersed with bared fangs of rocks, over which

ROBIN HYDE

foam gleamed like the froth between a wolf’s jaws. The dinghy was in Peter’s care and he kept the oars under lock and key. But he had reckoned without the slight, red-painted canoes, gay as the scarlet pods of a capsicum plant, which were propelled over the water by brown, singing men and women. Undoubtedly, old Dawlish had struck some queer vein of liking among these foreign folk. They chattered with him, laughed at him, brought him gifts of fruit and treasures of mako shark teeth or rough bits of jade from the South. Peter learned the meaning of an occasional flying visit from one of the brisk coastal steamers. The village, poor and sordid as it might be, was the slack-twisted mouth of a great district. If raw whisky in sufficient quantities were poured into this mouth, stuttering words might be spoken which would mean that the son’s son of a great chief had parted with his claim to valuable acres. The beginnings of land-hunger were abroad in Sydney, and no pocket was too dirty for the enterprising to pick. Hence the round-ringed stain on Dayrell’s book —hence a half-drunken, wholly repulsive Geoff Dawlish, whose very voice jarred and grated on Peter’s nerves. Perhaps, by stirring up an apathetic officialdom, he could have rid himself of the old man, but in getting the lighthouse built at all, he had established a reputation as a trouble-maker, and his round with authority had left him, though victorious, w r hite-lipped, bitterly resolved to see this one job through and thereafter forever soak himself in the lime-scented coolness of England. Dayrell . . . his mind described infinitely dreary little circles and came wandering back to her, as a child lost in a forest wanders back to some slim, moon-silvered tree. He had ridden with her, crossed swords with her, exchanged the few brief and precious flowers of intimate moments. But there had been no talk between them, when he left, of fidelity. He knew without telling that she would go on being Dayrell, proud and lovely, blown about like a flame on the winds of impulse, but never going out, because her source was the earth-fire itself. New scented woods would inevitably be cast into the flame, new swords tempered in it. And the blade of his wits, keen enough once, was getting sea-rusted. He would go back sick, taciturn and awkward. A low ripple of voices sounded under the little iron-railed platform on which he stood. That would mean that one of the slim canoes had crossed the pavement of pearl; that dark eyes were looking up at the ceiling of amber. He liked the Maoris . . . once or twice, he had even been interested in them, vaguely aware that he stood on the fringes of a wood where grew many trees of strange knowledge. But nothing on earth was real to him but the shadow of brightness called Dayrell. Nobody out the child, Meri, who could play the long carved flute so softly. It was a primitive instrument, possessing only a few notes of husky sweetness. Through it she breathed colour and darkness, the tragedy and meanness of the little huts, the shadows of things that were passing. Somehow she had come by an imagination—perhaps from the same cruel source that set dark blue eyes in her brown face. She was very small and her dress was an inconsiderable thing of dyed flax. The little shoulders were thin and bowed from bearing burdens. But that had been before old Haumia, the flutemaker, had chosen to teach her his art. Now, if her flute told them so, the tribe were silent, dreaming of confused, beautiful things. Or the old chiefs, with their hair like the plumes of the sacred silver herons, would tell stories of long ago, of the maidens and marvels who would come again no more. once or twice, she had made passion for the tribe, passion like a scarlet bird beating the thick air with its wings. The tohunga had made an incantation over the dull purple berries of the tutu, and this had been crushed out into wine for the lips of men to drink. But whatever her music might be, Meri, fifteen, was a maiden, a slip of twilight, with the eyes, like blue stars out of a cold Northern sky, still young and wistful in her face. Once she had helped him out of trouble. On one solitary occasion—an afternoon w'hose thick, grey stillness ->ored him almost to suffocation—he had accompanied old Dawlish to the »illage. Geoff had made himself drunk—mischievously drunk—and while Peter attempted polite conversation with the tohunga, had revenged himself for some afternoons of enforced respectability by hiding the oars of the dinghy. Nor could all Peter’s arguments and expostulations produce more than laughter—anu the silent natives enjoyed the joke. He watched a red-rimmed sunset come down, knowing his lamp was unlit, and that his overlords, comfortably seated at their desks, would gladly ~ on any chaim'- rui*. him on the count of negligence. Then Meri had come to him, the tattered cloak of red that she wore around her shoulders flying in the rising wind. “Me help,” she had said simply. And ten (Continued on Page 2)