GIVE BALM TO GIANTS

Evening Post, Issue 149, 20 December 1935, Page 14

GIVE BALM TO GIANTS

EYRE CHALLENGES

, / /~1 ALM yourself, Eyre! Perhaps you would ■ \_j like to take a turn in the open!" Grey spoke with complete suavity, but his eyes had changed suddenly from blue to slate, always a sign that he was angry, and the blood mounted in billows and shocks under his clear skin. Eyre almost spat. "You know that the local governor has no power when the Governor !is in residence, and so you come here just to humiliate me. And for what? Just because I sent one dispatch Home without submitting it through you. Power! You'd eat power—you'd gorge on it!" "I—■=*-L' began Grey, but Eyre was.in spate. "Oh, yes! I know you pride yourself on your democratic principles. • Damned hypocrisy! It's like this talk of serving, the Queen. Your ancestors were aristocrats and one of them, I 'hear, signed the warrant for Charles I's execution. You boast.of your draft of the Constitution'and who> held lip the Charter? Who told Earl Grey the. country wasn't ready for self-Government? You' did— You! A Crown Colony was more'to your liking. Where there's a Parliament a governor has less power. And what have you brought? Taxation and more taxation! I hear the complaints. • They say you grabbed for the Government the sole right to trade in land and you have reduced land Values, making a feast for the iand-stiarks. That's at* pretty kettle of fish! It's not my business—but no wonder there are groans." "The voice," said the Governor, "is the voice of Eyre* but the words were the words .of the Company." His voice, always a little reedy, rose and fell in a small, frosty tintinnabulation. . "I am not .speaking for the I'm telling you what is said of the finances of the colony." -Eyre was aware that the other was relishing his. own calm as an actor gets zest from a pose^ "There were folk in South Australia who spoke in that vein—l have bankers for ancestors'as well as lords." ' * , "It was copper and not you that made South Australia solvent." "Unfortunately for ypiir argument the solvency came before the copper." He spoke as one who instructs an innocent but ignorant child, but there was menace in his quiet. "You can't browbeat me as you browbeat-Kawiti and Heke"—and, in his anger, Eyre said a violent thing—"l sometimes think it would have been as well for the country if some Maori had earned the hundred Heke offered!" . "For my head, you mean?" said the Governor, as though studying the suggestion dispassionately. "Well, I saw the humour of it, arid I'm glad now that no "one got the hundred I offered for his.'.' "Pah! Because he ate put of /your hand after. You have no animosity to any one who crawls to you. Only a Maori would, anyway." Grey's eyes went .flinty. "I enjoy up to a point your abuse of myself—up to a point, I. said . '. . but you shall not revile the Maori. He is beyond your mouth, Eyre. I wish you had his\ nobility. Perhaps you would add to your diatribe that I have stopped the trade with him in liquor and firearms. That must be another grievance, against me." "If the Maoris had their senses," said Eyre, "they would see the result of your policy. You make them Christian; I've no quarrel with that, but half their power goes at one clap because a chief is priest as well as head. Then you take the rest of it. You must be the big chief yourself always. Oh, I know you're popular with them—you put on a mat and you know the value of a hongi—but when you : go your influence goes with you and what is left? There will be no authority when the chief's gone. There will be chaos." Grey rose with the suddenness of a bowshot. His slight figure stiffened into a dire rigidity. "As God is .my witness," he said, "I have meant well by the Maoris. If I have, tried to make them Christians I know what God has meant.to myself —and tb my mother. She was sitting on a balcony in Lisbon, talking, to .some .other officers' Wives, when my,.father's death ,was j; called out. in the street.-; I was born, in a storm.and. born .too soon, but she never grudged me to danger because she had faith." ."•''. 'V ..,- ;:. Eyre tried to speak; but he.bore him down. "And where would I hays been without it? When our shell of a craft was nigh flung on the rocks at Gantheaume Bay it stood to. ;me. ■' When Kyber, and I ate our last bit of damper-after crossing the Arrow,smith,, when. we. had to suck dew from the bushes, it stood to me.- And since I have begun I will answer you "on all. It is my honest belief still that New Zealand was not ready for a Parliament. The country was too raw, too ufi-

p— -By EILEEN DUGGAN

SIR GEORGE GREY

in his life would he be able to take criticism lightly. He felt it from his subordinates; he felt it from the Home Government; he felt it from his wife; and often he suspected it when it was not there. Even in this matter of subduing Eyre, though they knew at Home that Eyre was a poor administrator, they had intimated to him, as a subtle rebuke, that, of course, he would preserve the courtesies of his office. -An old book that he had ordered he opened eagerly, gloating over its old-fashioned S's, and, with a little cuddling gesture, he slipped it into his pocket and strode to the door. Once out he made towards the hills and stood on a spur above the beach. It was a strange, passive day on the brink of spring, with a calm almost; uncanny in a settlement next .to Tibet for wind.. The sky had a dull, transfused glow instead of the sharp sunshine to which this country had accustomed him. He had seen sunlight in the north' so active that the angles of houses lost their line and forked and quivered in the vision like licking silver. Today the hills were mirrored in iiie water, • but this seemed a ;. matter of sullen Compulsion, of some' deep, elementary attraction welcome to neither and moodily obeyed. Their reflected flanks had a rigidity that /locked them against allurement and struck the senses with an actual-shock as though one had run against basalt. Farther out still, the glow caught one of the Tararuas till, isolated by light, it brooded like a monolith. Its top reminded him of Mount Fairfax in West Australia, which, working only by a Kater's compass, he had mistaken for Wizard Hill. Stokes, coming after him, had corrected, his mistake. Strange that every memory today; was daunting! : He wandered on and on, walking himself into calm again, crossing'hill after hill, spur after spur, until the fall of the sun brought him to himself. He felt mechanically in his pocket and started. No compass! He had not thought of walking that day until Eyre had lit that bonfire of anger in him. ' He scanned the hills from side to side and bit his lip. "I believe I'm in Ngatitoa country." The sky was a chill orange and the hills were dappled with those lavenders that presage frost. He could almost sense the dew crisping on the bushes around him and he felt that pleasure which winter always gave him, a sensation .of inner cleanness, as though he, with earth, acknowledged the value of austerity and by this rime he paid in full for the languors of summer. It seemed a sternness made visible, a discipline self-chosen and , self-applied. The very stars seemed to whiten, to control their harvest blaze, and this, too, marched with the human rhythms of feast and abstinence. I He knew that summer was as much for his taking as winter,, but by the one he discharged the other and kept his year solvent. ■ Swinging down a spur, he came oh little wooden whare crouching in the bracken. The door was opened to him by a lithe Maori woman who recognised him at sight. She swept back an . old woman and a little boy as though even a glimpse of him mi#ht blast them. "Go!" she spat. "Go!" "Who is it?" croaked the old woman. "The Kawana," she hissed, "who stole Te Rauparaha, who flung him on the big ship and locked him up." "He was joining with Kangihaeata. He could have cut my force to pieces from the rear." For the second time that day he justified himself, to an inferior. "You had no proof. Mamaku said it and Rauparaha denied it when you asked him.". The women, young and old, began a moan, a wail, a lament, that, honed to an arrowhead by anguish, flew through the very roof, spiring up to meet the few stars that pricked the darkening sky. He stood, forgetting his errand at that hostile door, seeing only Rauparaha's classic, vulpine face and deep, restless eyes 'hat, like* an animal's looked, past you;. Rauparaha:.*whQ :had\ not -moved even a lid. when-shown the letter he was supposed tp; have signed; ;R.auparaha, whom He; had seen with,tiis-mat over.'; his head in a still, but awful " acceptance-of-his loss of caste when, he had returned tOihis.trib!e:and founds not honour but pity. Even then, in his ruin, he had outkinged kings.. As far-back as 'the Wairau-'incident he Hadtforeseen . his^fate. He told his people, Grey, had heard. "The whites seek to fasten irons on my poor old hands because; if -they enslave me they .degrade -the ra<*e.'r He. shook himself. He would not doubt that; what he had: done in \ that crisis, had saved greater bloodshed. -He would not think of Rau-