The Man in the Sun.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20221, 3 February 1934, Page 12

The Man in the Sun.

A Sketch

Expensive Possessions of the Poor. 'J'HE SHABBY LITTLE MAN of leisure whom one may so often see in the sun in the Public Gardens letting its warmth filter through his sleeve, was standing on tip-toe rummaging in the wire rubbish basket, and the peculiar intensity of his search might have made anyone curious. His actions were explained when in a moment he moved over to the lily pond and began to break up little bits of crust and apple core for a late brood of ducklings. He had other friends here, it seemed, for a little while later he was discovered loitering in a sheltered spot in the native section talking to a very inquisitive bird with sounds, not words, and the bird appeared by the curious dippings and sideways motions of its head to give an air of wisdom to the conversation. This frequenter of the gardens was not as remote from feeling then as he sometimes seemed, when his eyes slid away for half the afternoon in contemplation of the bending treetops. The little man may have other haunts, but if he has they are quiet places too. The movement of his presence would not disturb a living thing, he steals about so quietly in old soft worn shoes and a bigger man’s coat and trousers. He has a silent face, that shrunken silence of the poor, and he walks as no other man walks. His feet feel the ground, they cling to it from heel to toe like a rotary rubber stamp drawn down by suction but leaving no impression. All the summer he sucks up the sunshine on a garden seat the way black cloth swallows up light, and at first sight one might think he had *shut his soul away from others in the shadowy recesses beneath his faded coat. But there must be wisdom there. I used to pity him, but now I envy the rich -old man. He has made the gardens hijS. He shares them with the poor. Surely he has learnt all the configuration of the trees, their grace and fragrance in the garden paths. Their very sounds he knows by heart. The sighing and soughing of poplars and firs rises and falls away like crumbling breakers flooding and ebbing on the wide sea’s margin. The drift of the wind through fuchsia and broadleaf comes like gusts of rain on a window, but among the flax and reeds the margin of the lake it stirs with the rustle of silks stiff with age. He shuffles around these paths in as farqiliar possession of the expensive plants as a landed proprietor on his own estate. But the Domains Board, you will say, foots the bill for his pleasure. Yes, and Nature pays too. She is a prodigal spendthrift in the production of a new species. The results of a million experiments are gathered into this small compass. All the olearias so plainly labelled in the newest portion of the native section show the range of her resource; and the diversity of other plants from,New Zealand bush and mountain might fill one with wonder. But there is a great lack here—a want that must be felt alike by the man who can lgve a tree with stronger sentiment if it is one of the stalwarts of the bush, and by the city-bred who aches a little with longing for the knowledge of native things that he has missed.

Certainly the slow-moving brain of the faded unemployed enquirer pauses bewildered before the long botanical names that make New Zealand trees seem strangers to him, where the common name, the hint of Maori association, would bind them to his heart. The kowhai even, “ flung for gift on Taupo’s face,” is called a long incomprehensible something. Yet how a familiar word, in brackets even, on those wide white labels would speak to him in his own language. The layman rarely grasps the scientist’s Latinised version. Nor is it the poor man’s tongue. B.E.S.