GODKEEP Ye. Merrie Gentlemen

New Zealand Illustrated Magazine, Volume V, Issue 3, 1 December 1901, Page 167

GODKEEP Ye. Merrie Gentlemen

"^■Hto AIL Caesar ! Those about to " Hfe^ " y ou ou * ' Hold him off, iliD Cress> wiU you? That ' 8 the lot *|§^M of you bar Ted. Come on, Teddy. ' This house shall fly from its firm base as soon as I.'" Keene sat on the floor and grinned, with his iron-wood walking stick across his knees, and the four, vanquished in fair fight, girded at him in heat and baleful scorn. "Under what law should mankind be required to make a special idiot of himself at Christmas time ?" demanded Teddy, working his hands over the stick uncertainly,

11 hi titrated hy

Trevor Lloyd.

" I'm willing to take the conceit out of you, old chap, for the public good, but if you want us to play ' Fox and Geese ' or ' Kiss in the Ring ' I'm off home. D'you hear ?" Power chuckled. He had a shocking Irish accent when he troubled to remember it. " Bedad, an' yell git that tu-morrer, me bould buoy. Orme has come to the Big House wid a tremenjous haul this noight. Did I not see the fure-in-hand as I came over ?" The red ran up to Keene's forehead. According to the laws of all dreams and

portents and earnest single-minded purpose, there was abiding joy coming to him with Orme's return to the Big House.

Teddy said nothing, but his knuckles turned white on the stick beside Keene's, and his muscles were as steel, while Keene drew him slowly, steadily to his feet. Then he fell upon his host in sudden onslaught, and Oressiton removed the little table of glasses and decanters to a better world beyond the mild-eyed Rettau. Rettau had been an army man before he started nursing a flax swamp, and carting its green succulent youth to a mill thirty miles away. Therefore, it was to be expected that he should execute a rear attack which flung the combatants to the hindermost ends of the room, aud left Oressiton in the centre to scathe them with words. " And you needn't go thinking you're a Sandovv either, Keene. You wouldn't have bested Ted over that trick if you were not taller." "He isn't," panted Teddy of the long loose-knit limbs, and the reliant set of the jaw that comes early to men who tread out their own paths through the earth's strange places. "He only looks it 'cos he's so highshouldered." Keene was prompt at the retort courteous. " My dear chap, you've got the shortest neck in the room, 'cept the whisky jar." "I've got a longer head than you, any way." Teddy cast himself into a cane chair, strong in the knowledge gained as indubitable owner of a nine-by-fourteen scd ivhare, and a two thousand acre run many miles. down the river. " Who bought a type writer for his itnpots ?" chanted Rettau suddenly, " Who made half a town and six policemen run for eight miles and three days, by bolting down a street yelling 'Thief,' and then going home to bed? Who ?" But Keene disliked these unseemly reminiscences, which were only Teddy's to tell, and his to deny, for they belonged to a school time over seas in which these others had no part. "Take him away," pleaded Rettau,

making himself into a windmill as Keene loomed threatening through the blue tobacco reek. " Take him away, Joss, and give him some music. Make him homesick, make him seasick, only for mercy's sake, make him quiet." " Grot one of those Indian drums in town the other day," cried Keene. "It does give out a loathly noise when you bang it. j " "You'll shut up," said Cressiton with his back to the door, "or I'll bang you till you give out a loathly noise. Man, will neither heat, nor exhaustion, nor the knowledge that you have killed each one of us at least once to-night, take the madness out of you? Now — sit down — d'ye hear? And let Joss-stick get to work." " What kind of a thing do you want ?" demanded the Joss-stick opening the piano, which was a luxury Keene had acquired in conjunction with a billiard-table and a bathroom. The Joss-stick and Power grubbed a bare living and about ten acres yearly out of the bush on a lean flank of the mountain outside the front door and over Old Man's Gully. They had a square tent, and gelignite for blasting, and unswerving deligence". Moreover, the Joss-stick had a remedy for the heavy hours that sat round them in long evenings, when their limbs ached too consumedly for sleep. He picked up the remedy now with his finger ends, ar.d the name of it was Music Teddy removed his lips from a pipe-stem, and spoke. " I will not have Mendelssohn's sing-songs to-night, Joss — no, nor ' Daisy Bell' neither. Give us something seasonable." Teddy had worn pinafores in Australia, wide collars in England, and dungarees from one end of New Zealand to the other ; and he had tasted the Christmases of each after their kind with a freedom beyond his youth. "I— cr — only 'member one." The Jossstick slid into an old hymn that brought Keene to his feet and across the room. " That's good enough, whack it out,

Joss," and he took up the bui'den with what four years of cattle and sheep work in a dusty land had left of the first tenor of Cam's in his year. " ' Pe — ace on earth and mer — ' chip in, you fellows, if you want to keep it."

Ihe balance followed, hesitatingly, then boldly, as the long-forgotten words came back with the familiar tune. And it mattered not at all that they had learnt these words in far sundered corners of the earth. The great plains and lonely hills of New Zealand had called them together, and bound them by disappointments and struggles shared ; and the silent understanding of a young land, strong in desolation, promise and sandflies, was theirs by virtue of the years they had given it

Keene sang tunefully, and beat time upon the Joss-stick's indignant head until the concert fell suddenly to pieces. And it was only after earnest persuasion that the musician consented to remember something about " While Shepherds Watched their Flocks by Night," which went well with Power's bass to help out the dumb piano notes. " Play this," said Teddy, and whistled a few bars. The Jossstick dashed and baulked at them blindly, and Keene stooped over his shoulder to hammer out the tune with one finger. " That's it ! Ah ! Teddy, how many centuries since we sang

that last? Put some more notes to it Joss. Who told you it was a mazourka, eh ? Slower. Now, tfive 'em a lead, Ted "—

' God keep ye, merrie gentlemen, Let nothing you disma — uy.' "

The white night took the words from the open window, and flung them into the

heathen heart of the stern hills, and out across the hot stillness of tho .stretched plain. Keeno grinned at Teddy across tho crowding heads. "Plum pudding," ho said, "and snow, and the waits coming up from the village to sing it through purple noses, and twiddle it with red fingers. J remember, so docs Tod."

The remainder of the visible nation turned to stare, while Kee»ie ruminated a brokenwinded accordion out of ii cupboard, arid laid it on the table with a penny whittle which the Joss-stick hated more than many things on earth. "Is it a funeral pyre?" he asked, and

struck a match hopefully. Keene blew it out. "It's a preparation," he said. "It's a Wait party. We're going over to the Big House to sing 'em into Christmas morning, and we're going this minute. Joss, you can have the whistle. It's not more cracked than your voice." The Joss-stick took it, and lost it for ever in the black patch of manuka beyond the creek. And the six came through divers

ways into the moist warm divineness of the scented garden, where the twenty-eight yellow eyes of the Big House winked at them broadly. "Perhaps," said Teddy to his tottering common sense, " Perhaps she won't be there." Then his tongue went stiff in his mouth, and the back of his throat was hot, for among the cluster of heads in the light circle was tbe smooth dark one which had held his very undivided attention for nine wonderful months.

Keene saw it too, but he had known — by word of mouth. He kicked Teddy without haste. " This is my Wait party, an' I won't have it spoiled because you think you're a time fuse lit on damp powder. Will you sing out, Teddy ?" So Teddy sang out, and two glorious hours went by, to send them back in utter contentment under the sickly stars of false dawn with the heavy smell of dew-wet

koraris and trampled bush in the still air. Teddy smiled inanely, in perfect bliss, and Keene, in a disgracefully jubilant and heterodox state of mind, sat on the foot of Teddy's bed, and heard the Indian drum go down the passage in care of Cressiton the powerful. " They're a rowdy crew," said Keene virtuously, " and we'll do it all over again next Christmas as ever was. I say, Ted, she — they thought it was ripping!" " ' Glad Tidings of Great Joy I Bring,' "

murmured Teddy, half-asleep and wholly reverent. " Goo' night, old chap."

And the two went to di'eams about one girl, who looked down from the Big House on the uplifted plateau, to the shield of untarnished gold that was Teddy's window in sunrise, and cried, " Oh, I can't ! I can't ! But if I only could !"

And the reason for the breaking of this desire was made clearer to her when she went with Keene out of the fiery sun glitter that lay on the slope behind the Big House into the dank, still greenness of the bush. For on the sheer edge of a far-below gully set with cabbage tree tops and toi-toi spears, Keene showed her the wide eastward roll of yellow tussock to blue horizon, and the distant glint like sun on a rifle barrel, which was the bight of the river by Teddy's hut.

" We might make a party and ride down some day. It's only a sod whare, but Ted would give us post-and-rail tea and damper. Did you ever eat damper, Miss Derring ?"

" No. I— l don't think I want to," and an oppressive silence came round them with the tangle of tree fern and sky-touching birches, and careless bird songs quivering through the hazy scented heat.

"What kind of things do you do on Christmas Day at Home?" asked Miss Derring suddenly, because she was afraid of this silence. Then she called herself a complete idiot when she saw the mischief in Keene's eyes. " This thing, for one," he said promptly, and pulled a handful of scarlet from an over-late rata vine, and kissed her once, twice, and again, under the scattering blossoms. We always do this at Home, and I've done it heaps of times. But the red mistletoe is better than the white, dear, because " But she was very angry, for this was very unorthodox, which is a cardinal sin to a well-brought-up girl. Keene laughed at her unabashed. "You haven't done it heaps of times before, anyway. I'm glad of that. Deav heart, you are badly upset, and yet you knew "

"Will you take mo back?" she said, <; and not speak one word all the way, mid wait " "I'll wait," said Kecue, " because L know the end. You have half promised it so many times, and yon know that I will " "I know that you are an impertinent boy," she said, and Keeno hugged himself many times as ho took her back to the Big House, and kept shut lips until she ran out of sight up the darkening stairs. Then he went round to the stables, and joyously roused Orme to a cold fury of argument. Later, Miss Derring put powder over some tear marks, and went into hiding behind the window curtains in the long drawing-room, where Teddy found her. He drew the heavy curtains closer, For someone was playing solemn Sunday things on the grand piano, aud Teddy took no pleasure in publicity. Then, being straight and truthful in all his doings, he told Miss Derring that he loved her. "Is' pose I've no business to tell you this," said Teddy, "but I — but Ido care most awfully, you know, and I thought perhaps if you cared just a little bit— do you — do you ?" Miss Derring's face was in the curtain shade. "I — don't know, I can't think. Oh, Teddy, give me time ! Not to-night, I don't know to-night." The red of sunset struck a white frilly thing about her shoulders, and Teddy picked a dark spot off it absently. It was a dead rata flower ; he showed it to her. " It's Christmas time," ho said, " aud, if — I shouldn't have told you, and whatever comes after, still — may I dear?" " Whatever comes after," she said slowly, and knew very clearly what would come after. But she would not t forego this kiss for the many that Keene might give her — after. And a minute later she laughed at him while he tucked the dead thing away in the innermost part of his pocket-book. " It's only a custom, Teddy, and the same Christmas never comes bock, you know."

" I'll chance that. Dear, you'll tell me, I have to go back to-morrow, there are sheep and things—and, tell me now." The deep roll of music was like a restless prayerful sea, and the light was gone from the sky. Miss Derring broke up Teddy's world with a sudden pulling apart of the curtains, and looked at him over her shoulder. " Next time," she said, " and, shrive me befoi*ehand, Teddy, if I do you harm." "You'll never do that," said Teddy, with faith, "and next time will be Sunday — {Sunday morning." The wire fences that held Cressiton's block in place between Teddy's land and the hills, dripped with dew when the sun pushed above the edge of the plain on Sunday morning, and made Teddy black as several demons against the blue mist of the hill line. And it was still disgracefully early when the grey pony halted before the blank stare of the Big House, and Teddy learnt from a stableman that the house was empty again. Power heard the grey pony coming up the steep cutting through the half-cleared bush, and flung down the week-old paper thankfully. " What was it brought you this early, Teddy, and Keene away and all ? My faith, but it's smoking hot this day ! And don't talk to Joss, he has the devil of toothache on him." Teddy had the devil of sudden fear on him, and shied from direct questioning. " Any news ?" he asked, and backed against the canvas doorway,' where the clearing gave out on dim muddled distance of bush. " Plenty," said Power, sucking his pipe, " plenty. Rettau has bought a new horse, and— what d'you think o' this, Ted ? Keene is to marry that black- headed Derring girl with the long neck. Fact ! He went to town with the lot of 'em last night. " When," Power cut a fresh pipeful meditatively, "the last trumpet calls us, Keene'll be there with a cock to his hat aud a joke in the mouth of him. He's mad !

And you'd say it yourself if you'd heard him. 'Twas that gave old Joss the toothache. Sure, it's only he of all of us could afford these luxuries, for a wife's a necessity to no man." "Of course," said Teddy vaguely. He got himself to the back of the grey pony, and out with his face to the clean East where the sea was, but he took no interest in the doing of it. "That's another foolish man," said Power, mildly surprised, and going back to his paper. " Confound these mosquitoes." There is an ordinary law for a yoke on each man's shoulders. He must work lest greater pains come upon him. For this reason only Teddy worked through a yellow autumn that sunk to a dun-coloured winter with no rain in it, and it began to be understood by the adjacent universe that a drought was on the earth. The grass withered up, the dry-throated wind blew it away, and stock-sales died out in the small townships. And the drought smote the six each in their separate places, with Teddy watering his sheep from the snaky green streams that shrunk in the bleak shingle river-bed, and Keene in town, happy as a man may be only once in his life, and reading none of the letters sent him by his overseer. The Plains are not a very good place for a man in trouble, and there was a special loneliness dogging Teddy on the afternoon when the Nor'-wester tried to catch its tail rouud the whare, and nearly took the roof off. " It's a holy terror," said Teddy, as he tied the sheet-iron down with flax ropes and boulders. Then he sat open-mouthed on the spouting to stare at Keene and the lather of his horse. " Come down," said Keene, " I want to speak to you." Teddy swung himself to the level of the other" man, and knew, by some occult reasoning, that it behoved him to be careful. " What's up, old man ? Come along inside." "No," said Keene, and straightway called

Teddy by names that are not lightly forgiven. "It is you ! You meant to ! When I — when I told Rettau on the station, he said, ' Then it was Teddy after all.' By Heaven, it is your doing !" Teddy cursed the indiscreet Rettau beneath his breath. "It isn't," he said, not knowing that he

was" perfectly untruthful ; in that Miss Derring had cast Keene off, swiftly and without given reason, because of aslow-grown knowledge that she could not live within measured distance of Teddy's whare all her years. Teddy kicked the crumbling wall of it, and the dust flew. " That's very likely, isn't it?" he demanded bitterly. "You — you needn't hit a chap this season, Keene."

"You loved her, I know. Did you over tell her so ?" "Yes, r> said Teddy, curtly. " And what did she say ? What did sho say?" Teddy went white. He would havo occasion to tell lies presently if|ho answered more questions.

" She didn't ssashy — she — cared. That's enough. You'd no light to ask that much." " I had ! If you— yon " Teddy jerked the hunting-crop out of Keene's hand, and it spun away with a whirling dust-devil, and the cold earth and sky were a jeering, shrieking hell. " You'd better get out of this, Keene, or there'll be a row. Good God, man, she's

chucked us both, and there's an end ! Isn't that enough for you ?" " She hasn't chucked you. I know it. Hands off, Teddy ! I'll never touch your hand again, and I'll never speak to you again. And, by my soul, I'll never forgive you !" Then he went out into the wilderness that howled and threw stones at him, while Teddy buried his head in the sacking of his bunk, and fought through a very bad time indeed. For the snap of a long-drawn friendship hurts at the recoil. Besides, he had not hit Keene according to his deserts. Also, there was Miss Derring. Teddy looked out on the gaunt plain full of dry grey twilight to the uttermost rim of earth, and his face was drawn. " Never love a man overmuch," he told the grey pony, " nor a woman at all. And — it is better not to forget that you are responsible for your own soul either." The drought held, and it was no sort of satisfaction to the plain dwellers to learn that this thing was beyond all laws, and •consequently impossible. A sick spring opened pale lips, and shut them again before the blast of a red-hot summer. Rettau's flax swamp dried up, and Cressiton gave over sale and barter, devoting himself to loose garments and vile tobacco. There were wild tales abroad concerning the evil of Keene's ways, and his overseer implored his return on six pages of foolscap every mail night. One day a man came out of the smoke haze that rolled on the hills, left a note on Teddy's doorstep, and vanished awoss the bleached river-bed. Teddy read the note with tight lips. Then he harnessed the grey pony to a shaky daisy cart, and bumped over the seven miles of tussock to Oressiton's place. The hills were vague and formless as half-forgotten hopes, and a greasy dust cloud .overhung the leeward horizon. Cressiton's little cottage stood on the tortured plain, where hot wind rose gustfully, aud with alow resolve to hit Teddy with stray rubbish as he pushed open the door, and dis-

covered Cressiton on his buuk in the corner

" It's a howling day," said Teddy huskily, and he rubbed the sand out of his eyes. "You're a howling idiot to be out in it. Have some whisky, Ted ? But all the water's hot. What's the trouble ?" " Get some more things on, and come up to Keene's with me — now." " Teddy, have you got the sheep sickness, or is it sunstroke? Or — are you going to patch up that row with Keene ? ' Peace on earth,' eh? Next week is Christmas." Teddy was leaner, and very much more than a year older. He did not talk about his private affairs to anybody. "Eh? Yes, I know." "And it's a cause for rejoicing, isn't it? I've got one turnip off fifteen acres — ate it for dinner, too.' And the grass — you know what that's like!" Teddy grinned unmirthfully. There was a row of raw scraggy sheepskins strung on the wire fence behind his whare. " I wasn't thinking of a thanksgiving service," he said ; " but Keene's hill country is on fire, and he'll want all the help he can get. They're all in the same boat up there." " There's been a smother of smoke in the back hills for the last couple of centuries." Oressifcon was getting into his boots rapidly. " But I thought .Keene was safe. He put every hoof he had into that hill country a few days ago, Teddy." " I know. Joss says Smith is jolly sorry he »ot him back. Says Keene is rather more than nearly off his head." "He's been going the pace of late," remarked Oressiton, climbing into the daisy cart, " and when Keene does that, he's a deuced nuieance to the Universe. P'raps this'll bring him to his senses. I say, what's happened to Miss Derring ?" Teddy took command of his voice before he let it speak. " She's married a fortnight back to some English fellow. Come up, will yon ?" The grey pony took the heat- wrung track to the . bleared hills, and the acrid tang of bush smoke came down, and smote their nostrils powerfully.

"Ah — h," said Oressiton wisely; "what she did not spoil last year, the drought next season fried. The which is a truthful quotation. This'll be a sick Christmas foi' the lot of us, Ted." "We've got to take the lean years with the fat, I s'pose. Sit tight." They bumped over the dried watercourse, breasted some dusty foothills, and drew to Keene's low-built, straggling homestead with the yellow-brown mirk of smoke behind it. In his madness of soul Keene had piled

the broad verandah and the spave vooras with seed oats, and [had caused the lawn to be ploughed into v potato field. Before this devastation Teddy stood, dripping and grimed with dirt, to ask swift questions of the housekeeper. " The Panuka Hills are afire from Keene's block down to Lake Ard," he called to Cressiton. " Keene's got fifteen men at work, and the only clear path is up Old Man's Gully. Come and hunt up some horses."

Old Man's Gully was flunked with towering bluffs, bush-crested, mid led into unending billows of rugged hills. Tlio footway was stony, and choked with Spaniard and tnwhina scrub. Knowing always the ethical impossibility of riding through such places, they took it at the gallop, and came up the permanent way behind, sweating and smarting with the smoke. Some riders swept across tho frontage, and stormed a bulge on the hill to the right.

Through the brown featherbed of smoko atop a little red tongue lapped up tho scrub with a noise like the beating of many wings. " ' Follow on,' " shouted Teddy; " ' follow on, where the light of faith you see,' and by the powers, this confounded face is steep enough!" A man's daily work may include unlooked-for happenings, and these men fell into the struggle on the bluff hoad wordless and unflinching. Having foreknowledge of such things, they set their

hands against the blind smoke and the searing heat, and made no comment when the battle did not pass with the day — nor the next day either. There were white hot furies in every hill ford to be met patiently and untiringly, and battered to death again and over again. There were red-throated bush furnaces given over utterly to the fire devil, and breakneck shingle places where sheep could be harvested, and held only at unhesitating risk of an exhausted body. It ran through the district later that Keene worked in the fire line like one possessed of evil spirits, and that he hammered out his salvation on the smoking hills that lay black and shameless under the blazing sun when all was done, and the men came back, blear-eyed, and staggering with fatigue, to drop with sleep along verandahs and floors. Teddy knew more, but he never told. For they had lain in their burnt rags and exhaustion a very little minute when he woke again to hear the Joss-stick snoring in the passage. The square tsnt had gone in the flames, and Power had saved one boot from the wreck, but he slept peacefully on the seed bags. ■ ' " Hi — yah !" said Teddy, turning on the dining-room floor to sleep again, but Keene

was stooping over him, dropping pillows from blackened arms.

" Go halves, Ted, old boy," he said, and Ted grunted contentedly when sleep took them, as in their schooldays, side by side. They were bathed and clothed all in wild-fitting suits of Keene's one evening — Rettau said it was two days after yesterday, but they did not believe him. Then Keene's housekeeper, filling decanters after a long and hungry meal, told them that it was Christmas Night, and the Joss-stick looked over at Teddy, grinning under a one-sided moustache. "'Passin' the love o' women,'" he muttered irreverently. " ' Oh, carry me, carry me home !' " and he reached across to the piano. "We're all here," he said, with his hands on the keys, " and we've all been hit about equal one way and another. Now, tune up." So the five stood up, with the broken shards of their lives around them, and their arms about each other's shoulders, and sang hoarsely : " God keep ye, merrie gentlemen, Let nothing you dismay. Eemember, Christ the Saviour Was born on earth this day." And Keene's right arm tightened where it lay across Teddys shoulder.