“He’s something of an authority on muscular and nervous complaints, isn’t he?”
“Is that so?” said Mr. Questing. “Well, well, well. The old doctor, eh? Quite a character. Well, now, Mr. Bell, I’ve a little suggestion to make. I’ve been wondering if you’d be interested in a wee trip to the Springs. I’m driving back there to-morrow. It’s a six hours’ run and I’d be very very delighted to take you with me. Of course the suite won’t be poshed up by then. You’ll see us in the raw, sir, but any suggestions you cared to make…”
“Do you live there, Mr. Questing?”
“You can’t keep me away from the Springs for long,” cried Mr. Questing evasively. “Now about this suggestion of mine…”
“It’s very kind of you,” said Dikon thoughtfully. He rose to his feet and held out his hand. “I’ll tell Mr. Gaunt about it. Thank you so much.”
Mr. Questing wrung his hand excruciatingly.
“Good-bye,” said Dikon politely.
“I’m staying here to-night, Mr. Bell, and I’ll be right on the spot if…”
“Oh yes. Perfectly splendid. Good-bye.”
He returned to his employer.
Late on the afternoon of Saturday the eighteenth, old Rua Te Kahu sat on the crest of a hill that rose in an unbroken curve above his native village. The hill formed a natural barrier between the Maori reserve lands and the thermal resort of Wai-ata-tapu Springs where the Claires lived. From where he sat Rua looked down to his right upon the sulphur-corroded roof of the Claires’ house, and to his left upon the smaller hip-roofs of his own people’s dwelling houses and shacks. From each side of the hill rose plumes of steam, for the native pa was built near its own thermal pools. Rua, therefore, sat in a place that became him well. Behind his head, and softened by wreaths of steam, was the shape of Rangi’s Peak. At his feet, in the warm friable soil, grew manuka scrub.
He was an extremely old man, exactly how old he did not choose to say; but his father, a chief of the Te Rarawa tribe, had set his mark to the Treaty of Waitangi, not many years before Rua, his youngest child, was born. Rua’s grandfather, Rewi, a chieftain and a cannibal, was a neolithic man. To find his European counterpart, one would look back beyond the dawn of civilization. Rua himself had witnessed the full impact of the white man’s ways upon a people living in a stone age. He had in turn been warrior, editor of a native newspaper, and member of Parliament. In his extreme age he had sloughed his European habits and returned to his own sub-tribe and to a way of life that was an echo in a minor key of his earliest youth.
“My great-great-grandfather is a hundred,” bragged little Hoani Smith at the Harpoon primary school. “He is the oldest man in New Zealand. He is nearly as old as God. Hu!”
Rua was dressed in a shabby suit. About his shoulders he wore a blanket, for nowadays he felt the cold. Sartorially he was rather disreputable, but for all that he had about him an air of greatness. His head was magnificent, long and shapely. His nose was a formidable beak, his lips thin and uncompromising. His eyes still held their brilliance. He was a patrician, and looked down the long lines of his ancestry until they met in one of the canoes of the first Polynesian sea-rovers. One would have said that his descent must have been free from the coarsening of Melanesian blood. But for his colour, a light brown, he looked for all the world like a Jacobite patriot’s notion of a Highland chieftain.
Every evening he climbed to the top of the hill and smoked a pipe, beginning his slow ascent an hour before sunset. Sometimes one of his grandchildren, or an old crony of his own clan, would go up with him, but more often he sat there alone, lost, as it seemed, in a long perspective of recollections. The Claires, down at the Springs, would glance up and see him appearing larger than human against the sky and very still. Or Huia, sitting on the bank behind the house when she should have been scrubbing potatoes, would wave to him and send him a long-drawn-out cry of greeting in his own tongue. She was one of his many great-grandchildren.
This evening he found much to interest him down at the Springs. A covered van had turned in from the main road and had lurched and skidded down the track which the Claires called their drive, until it pulled up at their front door. Excited noises came from inside the house. Old Rua heard his great-granddaughter’s voice and Miss Barbara Claire’s unmelodious laughter. There were bumping sounds. A large car came down the track and pulled up at the edge of the sweep. Mr. Maurice Questing got out of it followed by a younger man. Rua leant forward a little, grasped the head of his stick firmly and rested his chin on his knotted hands. He seemed rooted in the hill-top, and part of its texture. After a long pause he heard a sound for which his ears had inherited an acute awareness. Someone was coming up the track behind him. The dry scrub brushed against approaching legs. In a moment or two a man stood beside him on the hill-top.
“Good evening, Mr. Smith,” said old Rua without turning his head.
“G’day, Rua.”
The man lurched forward and squatted beside Te Kahu. He was a European, but his easy adoption of this native posture suggested a familiarity with the ways of the Maori people. He was thin, and baldish. His long jaw was ill-shaved. His skin hung loosely from the bones of his face, and was unwholesome in colour. There was an air of raffishness about him. His clothes were seedy. Over them he wore a raincoat that was dragged out of shape by a bottle in an inner pocket. He began to make a cigarette, and his fingers, deeply stained with nicotine, were unsteady. He smelt very strongly of stale spirits.
“Great doings down at the Springs,” he said.
“They seem to be busy,” said Rua tranquilly.
“Haven’t you heard? They’ve got a big pot coming to stay. That’s his secretary, that young chap that’s just come. You’d think it was royalty. They’ve been making it pretty solid for everybody down there. Hauling everything out and shifting us all round. I got sick of it and sloped off.”
“A distinguished guest should be given a fitting welcome.”
“He’s only an actor.”
“Mr. Geoffrey Gaunt. He is a man of great distinction.”
“Then you know all about it, do you?”
“I think so,” said old Rua.
Smith licked his cigarette and hung it from the corner of his mouth.
“Questing’s at the back of it,” he said. Rua stirred slightly. “He’s kidded this Gaunt the mud’ll fix his leg for him. He’s falling over himself polishing the old dump up. You ought to see the furniture. Questing!” Smith added viciously. “By cripes, I’d like to see that joker get what’s coming to him.”
Unexpectedly Rua gave a subterranean chuckle.
“Look!” Smith said. “He’s got something coming to him all right, that joker. The old doctor’s got it in for him, and so’s everybody else but Claire. I reckon Claire’s not so keen, either, but Questing’s put him where he just can’t squeal. That’s what I reckon.”
He lit his cigarette and looked out of the corners of his eyes at Rua. “You don’t say much,” he said. His hand moved shakily over the bulge in his mackintosh. “Like a spot?” he asked.
“No, thank you. What should I say? It is no business of mine.”
“Look, Rua,” said Smith energetically. “I like your people. I get on with them. Always have. That’s a fact, isn’t it?”
“You are intimate with some of my people.”
“Yes. Well, I came up here to tell you something. Something about Questing.” Smith paused. The quiet of evening had impregnated the countryside. The air was clear and the smallest noises from below reached the hill-top with uncanny sharpness. Down in the native reserve a collection of small brown boys milled about, squabbling. Several elderly women with handkerchiefs tied over their heads sat round one of the cooking pools. The smell of steaming sweet potatoes was mingled with the fumes of sulphur. On the other side, the van crawled up to the main road sounding its horn. From inside the Claires’ house hollow bumping noises still continued. The sun was now behind Rangi’s Peak.