ALONE WITH GOLDEN DREAMS AND MEMORIES

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23009, 9 April 1938, Page 1 (Supplement)

ALONE WITH GOLDEN DREAMS AND MEMORIES

By PYRAMUS

'pHE background of this canvas is Central Otago, a province rich with stirring legends of the early goldmining days and the living grave of those old men who have been left in the back-wash. Some of them—with pan and shovel —fossick for gold in cold creeks that rattle down between the steep ravines of the scantily-clad and wind-swept hills and mountains. It was on such an old man that I called, but his prospecting days were over. About this old pensioner I had heard enough to arouse my curiosity; and I was prepared at the worst, for decrepitude and senile decay. These kind of conclusions come of listening to second-hand information. Yet, in spite of the mid-summer sun in a cloudfiecked sky and the warm westerly lazing through the tussocks, I was aware of an atmosphere of lugubrious loneliness as 1 approached the ancient school-house in which this old man lived. After I knocked I heard shuffling footsteps advancing up the passage; then slowly the door opened. "This Is My Kitchen", "Hullo! 1 came over for a yarn." "Good-dav." Ho looked me up and down for a moment; then smiling with childish glee, and wheezing as ho spoke, he invited me inside. "Pleased to see you!" Ho turned, beckoning, and I followed him into a room.

My host was short and shrivelled with the sun and frost of the moun-

An Old Prospector at Home

tains; his littlo pale blue eyes had sunk far back beneath heavy eyebrows, reminding me of still pools far below undermined precipices; and his beard was stained with nicotine. His clothes, threadbare with age, were patched and darned with painstaking care; the hand that held his pipe was like crumpled parchment, and far from steady. "This is my kitchen," he explained. "But I haven't got much in here." • My gaze rose from the worn carpet slippers encasing his feet to the apologetic smile upon his face. Then I saw the black kettle upon a dead stove, a few clean dishes and tins of food on the bare table, a box of kindling upon the hearth, and- a solitary out-dated calendar gracing one wall. It was a bare room with a bare floor; dull, for the sun was creeping westwards and the only window faced the east, and somewhat chilly—certainly devoid of all the methodical bustle characteristic of the family kitchen. Few Visitors "I don't have many visitors—no one bothers. . . He was gazing dreamily at his pipe; then he smiled up at me. Stranger and all that I was, it was plain that he was delighted to see me. But this scarcity of visitors did not seem to worry him unduly; he seemed to realise that it was inevitable that in the busy world of industry and pleasure no one should care where he was or what he was doing—he was just the "Arab old and blind."

And as we talked on I saw, through the window, the deserted school, and fields that had had the heart cropped out of them years before and had then

been left to recover as best they could; fields grey with moss and stunted tussock, and bordered by tall scraggy gorse hedges. And" the doings of the district interested the old man exceedingly; but of the world beyond he knew nothing and cared less. "I'd make some tea for you, only the fire's out." He fumbled with his pipe while I assured him that I was not thirsty.

He fumbled in his waistcoat ppcket, pulling out a "boy-proof" watch. "What's the time?" I told him; his watch was only an hour slow —unless forsooth, he was trying to outwit time. "Isn't it a bit quiet here?" I inquired, for the district boasted more empty cottages than inhabitants, and was far from the Ranfurly-Dunedin highway. "N—no."

He seemed to be considering the question for the first time. "Come through and I'll show you some photos."

In the Front Room

We left the kitchen, went along a bare passage, and into a front room bright with sunlight that streamed through the windows. And as we entered something compelled me to walk softly, one glimpse having revealed that this was no ordinary room, nor was my host the same insignificant little man; he stood on the threshold of his world. A company of faces gazed at me from the mantel and every wall. He had also a cardboard box full of photographs and Christmas cards—dozens of them, the reminders of irrevocable years. The floor of the room was bare, there was an old card table with a blue art silk cover, and one chair, but the atmosphere was different from that of the kitchen.

"All my people live in the Old Country," he explained. "And this is my youngest niece," and reverently lifting a photograph from the mantel, handed it to me. "I have never seen her."

She had been a beautiful girl, with oval features and dark hair and eyes. 1 glanced at my host as he peered over my shoulder. His eyes looked through the photograph and far away; and he did not seem to realise that, as he had told me the photographs were not new, this girl was no longer young. Doorways to the Past "This is another." She was different, her features chubby, and impish merriment lurked in her smile. There were others: sisters, cousins, and their children. "You came from Home?" I asked. "Yes, when I was a boy. I'd like to go back, but—" he smiled wistfully. "1 only get the pension, and—" He was staring again at the pictorial doorways to the past; but there was no hint of caged bitterness, no antagonism against fate. Slowly he replaced the photographs as I told him that it was time I was on my way. "Come over and have a look at the school." So I went across with him. The desks were still there, and in a cupboard some maps and old roll-forms. Ho read over the names. Some of the people had gone away from the district, some were now married and had children of their own, others were dead —he seemed to know what had happened to them all. Ho came with uie as 1 went over to my horse. "Come again, sometime, won't you?" Looking back, as I rode away, I saw him re-entering the school-house; but he was the little old man that I had seen first—not the old man of the front room of photographs.

About him there was much that was pathetic, and yet much that was sublimely heroic. I often wonder if all those relatives of his who lived so far away knew that after all his years of toil in search for gold he lived on a small pension in a dingy school-house. But he was happy. That the few short years left for him would not turn his dreams into realities did not seem to cross his mind.