SOME LITTLE MEMORIES.

Timaru Herald, Volume XCVIII, Issue 18084, 11 June 1924, Page 3 (Supplement)

SOME LITTLE MEMORIES.

PILGRIMS OF NIGHT AND MORN.

WHAT THE MAIL BROUGHT.

(By J.M.)

A day of the vanished ’seventies rises out of the limbo of time. It is a grouching, grizzling . April afternoon; not one sunbeam has cheered the dismal miles between Ashburton and the swirling, angry Rangitata, to which the .coach is lumbering down; Mount Peel is gray and hooded like an eremite of the desert; the raw twilight, the dark, half-seen river, •with its ill reputation, the cramping discomfort of the journey, the all-over grimness of the broken outlook —all this is a poor welcome to the Promised Land desired for tedious city-pent months by the weary children inside. At last the joggling, the jumbling, the eddying, ends in one upward lurch out of the river-bed, and the coach dodders on for another thousand miles of devious dreariness, bringing up with a last jolt that seems to cast its prisoners out in a numbed heap at a hotel door. The pilgrims of the night have done with trouble: on the thither side of Host Reuben Johnson’s friendly portal lies the peace of paradise for patient mothers and dazed children. This is Geraldine, and one stage more is Home. Sonsy faces of goodwife and maids, mellow lights, lively log fires, celestial soup and ambrosial pudding—all these melt into a delicious haze tnat will not clear even for the lure of that well-found bookshelf in the corner.

. Morning in South Canterbury, and what a morning, after the gray aridity of fihe plains! A hundred years could not dim that memory of sudden, delicious surprise—the rain-washed shimmer of real bush—a whole heavenly hill of it hanging over that friendly hospice of the night—the crowded mountains taking the morning like the noble ladies they were, each in her gauzy veil of lifting mist—the benign sun wishing travellers’ joy to all the forgiven world—and out westward—what? No chill and hooded coach this morning; clear day and lilyfluted blue all the way, as the stout waggonette, with its family freight of father, mother, four children, boy and driver, winds along heavily as Pharaoh’s chariot by the Red Sea. 'One look back at the lovely little town with its beautiful full-vowelled woman-name—a name that hitherto had been known in Dreamland only, in one haunting line about “murdered Surrey” and “tne tears of Geraldine,” keeping the fair company of lost Rosabelle and that “English lady bright” who died “that Love might still be lord of all.”

The brattling Hae-hae-te-moana, the purling Kakahu, the pipeclay cutting, steep and greasy, the execrable road, the fairy picnic nook beside a bush, that scarcely showed a trace of man’s ravage—these all melt into a fixed dream of Indian summer. And last, in cloudless midafternoon—the Happy Valley! There are few station memories so recurrently joyous as mail-day. It took one some time to realise such a bi-weekly mercy, remembering how erstwhile in the northern hinterlands the mail had been the sport of winds, waters, and the “lightly faithful” memory of wandering bullock-driver or shepherd. At eleven-forty, about, there was a tensity of expectation. When -would the first dog bark, when would wheels rattle up the long avenue? How could one endure till some meditative grown-up opened the bag of Fortunatus? It was no case of personal correspondence, for divers and obvious reasons, but what a Chinese reverence one felt for tne telepathic written-word, were it but in the most sordid of blue envelopes. But tne newspapers were treasure trove. Would there be one or two, fat, purple “Australasians,” with weird precious instalments of “Gabriel Conroy” or a moonlit chapter of Ada Cambridge? Would there be a plump “Canterbury Times,” with its “Puzzler” and its “Spocpendyke,” forerunner of the immortal Dooley? Would there be the homeopathic dose of narrative contained in the “Church News?” Certainly there would be the week’s staple in two or three thin, flat-folded “Timaru Heralds.” There was no possible reason for that mendacious namerheraids were people who inhabited the spacious past, along with Eveline Beranger and Quentin Durward. It was a far cry from these high happenings to this interminabH

jangle about Sir John and a hypothetical breakwater. How could any one break water any way? There was a Spartan severity about dailies, it seemed —no puzzler, no serial, no poet’s corner—nothing certain but the dry-as-dust columns, again mendacious in their head-ing—-how could that be called a House in which it was certain nobody mu.. No sap, no sentiment ran through these arid pages, perforated forsooth! with “Mr Stout,” “Mr Vogel,” “Mr Macandrew,” to delude the reader into thinking it some dismal sort ox a play. Yet it did not do to neglect even these infrequent means of grace, for the editor sprang surprises. Once there were some verses, weeping, indignant verses which invested the name of one Thomas Bracken with the halo of knight-errantry for many a year to come. Sometimes there were strange, true tales, about the life and death of Turgania, last of the Tasmanians—about wild battlemaids in the Balkans, or the Pyrenees—about sick men who changed souls and became heaven knows who—indeed, if they had not been printed in a newspaper, one could not have believed such marvels. Then, too, there were times when some power behind the scenes manipulated those chips and shavings one’s father called “politics” into inimitable bits of fun, sparkling allegories and what not. Why

did not people always use the blessed word Zealandia? Where was uid Zealand, anyway? Sometimes the unseen power had a duel with some snadowy antagonist in the north. There was no understanding what it was all about, but it was magnificent to hear the hail rattling. There were some minor points of commendation about the “Herald” too. It had a way of coming tied up in red tape, a perquisite which came in not unhandily for doll-garni-ture.

But the true raison d’etre of the “Herald” in those days was its war news. That was its serial; that was its living romance. The siege of Kars, the ghostly battle of the Schipka Pass, the wavering fortunes of the Christian provinces in tire Russo-Turkish war—all these were to be sought in the compact columns of the daily, not needlewise in the crowded weeklies, and mailday gloomed or glittered according to the scathe or advantage of the hated Turk. Afterwards, it all ended murkily, smokily; it was so much better in the out-and-out days when beaten Kings and Sultans grandly bit the dust and wallowed in golden chains at the foot of the elect conqueror. Any chains would' have done for Abdul Hamid.

The Happy Valley was all engrossing, allsufficing. But sometimes one went out of it. Sometimes there would be a riding up to the roof of the world, and a looking down into great shadowy canyons, where the sun hardly pierced at mid-day to the rocky bed and black witch-pools below. Far away, softly obtuse and blue, rose Mount Nimrod and the Hunters Hills. The sun-flooded Ashwick plain would lie below, only two or tnree dark, bosky homesteads breaking the yellow guard that melted northward into the deep, Hoover-like blue of Four Peaks and southward into the hidden gray of the Albyrys. Far down there would lie one small roof or two that marked the beginnings of “Fairlie Creek,” and one nearer pioneer mansion, while beyond the dark mouth of Burke’s Pass lay dimly dreamed of beauty, sublimity and terror of snow.

Which is dream and which is truth—that sleeping vista of glorious wilderness or this panorama of inland town and plain, richly dark with trees, studded with farms and hills, dotted with telephone poles, and traced out in new roads that cross the old, old silver-mazes of the rivers. One hardly knows—yet here is a token that tells. Here is the one and only “'Timaru Herald,” grown with tne years and the province, instinct with humanities, transcending artiJicial barriers of small division, dowered now with the graces and bounties that the versehungry, laughing child demanded in years gone by. The old “Timaru Herald,” still the staple of the week, and silver band, of all the interests cooped between Rangitata and Waitaki. Great and greater be your man a, old friend i Kia Ora!