A Canoe In the Mist (5 page)

N
ews travelled fast at Te Wairoa.

Lillian woke with the glow of yesterday upon her. The fairy staircase, the jewelled dragonfly, the luxurious bath, the water birds, the singing as they crossed Lake Tarawera in the sunset, and Mattie beside her—oh! She simply must see Mattie before they left.

She sprang out of bed, washed, dressed, brushed her hair and polished her boots as fast as she could before going into the kitchen. Mr and Mrs Humphreys, with no travellers to worry about, were finishing their breakfast with leisurely cups of tea. Mrs Humphreys looked pleased as Lillian held out the comb for her mother to plait her hair.

‘You look neat and tidy this morning,’ she said. ‘A real example to the Maori children.’

‘She looks that good, she must be after something,’ teased Mr Humphreys. ‘Come on, out with it, Lillian.’

‘Mumma, can I go and see Mattie before school? They’ll be off on the coach,’ said Lillian.

‘No they won’t. They’re staying on,’ said Mrs Perham.

‘True?’ Lillian gave such a jerk that the comb flew out of her mother’s hand. ‘What for? Did Mattie make them stay?’

‘Hardly,’ said Mrs Perham.

‘Mrs Hensley slipped on the boat landing and she’s in bed with three ribs broken,’ said Mr Humphreys. ‘Eh, Lillian! The poor injured lady and you looked as pleased as Christmas.’

‘I don’t want her to be sick, but I do want Mattie to stay,’ Lillian said.

‘You’ll only have her for a few more days. Dr Ralph saw to Mrs Hensley and says she won’t need him again. He’s off this morning—says he’s not waiting round for any more disasters,’ Mr Humphreys ended with a grin.

‘What did he mean by that?’ said Lillian, rather puzzled.

‘He swears he saw a canoe yesterday—’

‘Charlie!’ interrupted Mrs Humphreys in a warning tone.

‘So he did. We all did,’ said Lillian. ‘But that wasn’t a disaster. It went another way, that’s all.’

The stove crackled in the silence. All three grown-ups
were looking at her strangely. ‘Why, what’s up?’ said Lillian.

‘Tell us what it looked like,’ said Mrs Humphreys.

‘A big canoe with carvings back and front and a lot of men in it. Guide Sophia called it a waka wairua.’

‘You didn’t mention this last night,’ said Mrs Perham.

‘Oh Mumma, there was so much to tell! What’s all this about?’

Mrs Perham looked at Mr Humphreys, who said very seriously: ‘Lillian, Mr McRae says there’s no carved canoe on the lake. A waka wairua means a ghost canoe.’ He paused, looking intently at Lillian’s startled face, but she was too surprised to say anything; so he went on. ‘We all know that ghosts aren’t real, so what you saw was something that looked like a canoe. Mr McRae says it was a trick of the mist.’

‘It wasn’t in the mist,’ Lillian objected. ‘It came out of the mist. It came as close as anything, and Dr Ralph called out, and Mr Fazackerley whistled.’

‘Did they answer?’

‘No, they didn’t.’

‘It could have been an ordinary canoe loaded with flax or firewood. It could have been further off than you thought. It’s hard to judge distances over water. I’m not saying you’re fibbing, Lillian. You must have seen something that looked real to you—but it couldn’t have been a carved canoe like the old times. The thing is, we
don’t want people getting worked up about ghosts and spirits.’

‘If anyone asks you, tell them it was only the mist,’ said Mrs Perham. ‘Don’t you go feeding any rumours. Mind now! I mean it.’

‘Yes, Mumma,’ said Lillian. ‘What should I say to Mattie?’

‘Oh goodness, look at the clock, there’ll hardly be time.’ Mrs Perham reached for the pot to dish out Lillian’s porridge. ‘All this talk, you’ll be late.’

‘We’ll let Mattie know you’ll be over later,’ said Mrs Humphreys.

Lillian was glad she was getting to school late. She would rather have Mr Haszard punishing her than children questioning her on the way. How could she keep up a lie all day long? But she had to, they had ordered her. Maybe she could manage not to talk to anybody until after school, when there’d be Mattie! And Mattie
knew
.

Four-year-old Mona Haszard was balancing on the picket fence, as usual, to watch the children. It was her daily entertainment. ‘You didn’t come yesterday and today you’re late,’ she said. Pert little Mona missed nothing, but Lillian didn’t stop to explain.

The one big schoolroom was attached to the Haszards’ house. All the Haszards were part of the school. Twenty-two-year-old Clara was on the payroll as sewing teacher, but she really helped with the lessons, while her mother
and Ina, who was fifteen, taught the sewing and knitting without pay.

This morning Lillian was in trouble not only for lateness, but for inattention. But how could she concentrate on sums when her head was full of fairy staircases and carved canoes? Besides, an unusual muttering filled the room. At playtime it swelled to a bubble and a hiss like a human imitation of a thermal spring, but all in Maori. Lillian didn’t go outside. She stayed in the classroom reading a book, and got away promptly at lunch-time, running fast all the way home. And she managed to get back just as the bell was ringing, having talked with no one.

But by now Mr Haszard, who spoke Maori, had caught up with the mutterings.

‘Kira, stand out in front, please,’ he commanded. ‘I want you to tell the school what your father saw yesterday when he was rowing the tourist boat.’

Eight-year-old Kira, shy at being singled out, put up with various pokes and jokes as he pushed his way up the aisle, and shuffled nervously from one foot to the other.

‘Speak up, Kira,’ said Mr Haszard kindly. ‘Tell us what he saw.’

‘They saw that canoe on the lake,’ said Kira. ‘That ghost canoe. It go to the tapu mountain. That means we all going to die.’

A trembling and a gasping rippled through the room as Kira said aloud what everyone knew already—except
Lillian. Disaster. Dr Ralph had said he wasn’t waiting round for any more disasters. Mr Humphreys had said they didn’t want people getting worked up about ghosts and spirits. That’s what they meant. The Maoris thought the canoe was an omen. Lillian shivered. Her insides were in turmoil.

‘A ghost canoe,’ said Mr Haszard calmly. ‘Hold up your head, Kira. We are not all going to die. We are Christians here at Te Wairoa. God in Heaven takes care of us. We don’t go in fear of those old superstitions. We know our lake very well and how easy it is to see things in the early morning mist. Lillian, you were in the boat. Come forward, please.’

Flabbergasted, Lillian threaded her way through the crowded desks to stand beside Mr Haszard and Kira.

‘Now, Lillian, give us the truth. Tell the school if you saw a ghost canoe.’

Oh, it wasn’t fair! He didn’t really want the truth any more than the Humphreys did. Groping for words she said, ‘We thought we saw a canoe and one of the tourists called, “Haere mai,” but they didn’t come near, and the mist came down and we couldn’t see anything then.’

‘What did it look like?’ sang out one of the children.

‘A big canoe with people in it, but it was all misty,’ she faltered.

‘You see,’ said Mr Haszard. ‘It was all misty. You can imagine all sorts of things in a mist. I’ve seen my own shadow cast upon a mist and I looked like a giant.’

The children laughed, partly because it
was
funny to think of their schoolmaster as a giant, partly because a laugh made them feel better.

‘You’ll have seen things in the clouds. Huia saw a dragon chasing a horse, didn’t you, Huia? And then the two clouds joined up and made a pile of foam. You must learn to tell the difference between what is real and what is not. Do you all understand?’

The Maori children looked at him with solemn eyes. No one ever contradicted the schoolmaster.

‘Yes, Mr Haszard,’ they chorused. Only some said ‘Harata’ because they couldn’t get their tongues around that Z.

Lillian went back to her desk. She’d given Mr Haszard the answer he wanted—but the children would be after her when school ended, and would they be put off so easily? If only she could find an excuse to stay behind for a while…Yes! Brainwave! She could talk to Mr Haszard about Mattie.

She spent the rest of the short afternoon thinking it out and then spun out her interview until the older children had gone. They were in a hurry to go, anyway. They wanted to know what their parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles had to say about the waka wairua.

Lillian didn’t go straight home as she should have done. When she saw Mattie waving to her frantically from the upstairs verandah at McRae’s, she didn’t pause as she rushed through the hall and up the stairs. The two girls hugged one another, bursting to talk.

‘Oh Mattie, I wish you’d been with me at school today, it’s been so weird up there!’

‘Here too. Everybody’s acting peculiar. Mama gave me lessons to do, but I couldn’t put my mind to it.’

‘They made me tell lies all day. Well, no, I didn’t lie exactly, but they wouldn’t let me tell the
truth
.’

‘Was it about the big canoe we saw?’

‘Yes it was! Mattie, what did they say to you?’

‘Papa sat me down for one of his father-caring-for-daughter talks, about how people were saying the canoe wasn’t real, and the Maoris think it’s a ghost.’

‘So they do! Though Mr Haszard told them there’s no such thing as ghosts. He made me stand up in front of the school and tell them what I saw. I had to say it was all misty because Mr Humphreys laid down the law at breakfast-time.’

‘But we didn’t make it all up, did we? We all saw that canoe as plain as day and it wasn’t in the mist.’

‘No, it wasn’t.’

‘Mr McRae doesn’t want us to talk about it either. He says rumours are bad for business. And Mama says he’s being so good to her, he’s lending her books and gets her everything she wants, we mustn’t go against him. I wish I knew what they’re covering up, because it
was
a real canoe.’

‘Mattie,’ said Lillian, wondering if she dare say it in the face of such certainty, ‘I think…I think…it
might
have been a ghost canoe.’

‘You don’t believe in ghosts, do you Lillian?’ Mattie sounded quite shocked.

‘I don’t know what to believe. All the Maori children do, and in England, don’t they have old castles with knights in armour walking round with their heads under their arms?’

‘Oh, sure!’ said Mattie scornfully. ‘Papa says no castle is complete without an ancestor who met some dreadful doom, but you never meet anybody who’s actually
seen
a ghost. It’s all talk, to keep up a story of something that happened a very long time ago.’

‘But Mattie, if that was a ghost canoe, it’s not about something that
has
happened. They say it’s an omen of something that
will
happen.’

‘We don’t believe in omens either. Papa says you can always find an event to fit a prophecy. D’you know what I think? I think it was a real canoe and they’ve got some reason for saying it wasn’t.’

‘What sort of reason?’

‘Oh, smuggling perhaps, I don’t know enough to guess. Mama agrees with Papa, there’s a reason for everything. The reason she slipped on the landing-stage was she was watching us, and the boards were wet.’

‘Some say one thing and some say another and I’m all
muddled up,’ sighed Lillian. ‘We’d better watch out what we say at school tomorrow, that’s all.’

‘What was that? Did you say
we
, Lillian?’

‘Jumping jellyfish, that’s what I came to tell you! Mr Haszard says you can come, if your mother doesn’t need you to look after her. How
is
she then?’

‘It isn’t painful as long as she rests, and Bridget’s in and out all day. Oh, if I can, if I can!’ Mattie took Lillian’s hands and whirled her round in a circle. ‘I’ll go and ask Mama now.’

‘Come and tell me what she says. I’ll be in hot water if I don’t get home,’ said Lillian, rushing out with the same speed as she’d rushed in.

Mrs Hensley was doubtful at first, and asked for Mr McRae to come and advise them. ‘Isn’t it classed as a native school?’ she said. ‘You don’t send your own daughters there.’

‘Only because a state school is more advanced, not having two languages to deal with,’ said Mr McRae. ‘Mr Haszard is an excellent teacher. He’s made a big improvement in his eight years here. He teaches in English as much as he can. It’ll do the lassie no harm to see another side of life.’

‘Another new experience,’ nodded Mr Hensley. ‘Mattie will do better going to school with Lillian than hanging around the hotel, don’t you agree, my dear?’

So that was settled.

O
n the way to school next day, Mattie and Lillian worked out how to dodge any questions about the big canoe; but they were never asked. The tension was still in the air, the nervous excitement, the fear, the secret conversations. Every child had talked it out at home and come with a story to tell, but knew better than to say anything to Pakehas who wouldn’t understand. Besides, there was a new wonder: a rich tourist girl coming to their school!

‘Ooo-hoo, who are you?’ sang out little Mona Haszard from her favourite place on the picket fence.

‘Her name’s Mattie,’ said Lillian, without stopping. Six-year-old Edna Haszard, who was in the primers, came running out and slipped her hand into Mattie’s, gazing silently up into her face.

‘Mattie!’ repeated half a dozen giggling voices behind them.

In no time the girls had Mattie inside a circle while they admired her button-up boots and her blue-and-grey checked dress with its princess waist and flared-out skirt. They were not in the least jealous. Who would want to be cased up in such close-fitting clothes?

They bubbled with curiosity. ‘Your mother has ribs all pakuru?’ ‘How many?’ ‘Where you from?’ ‘What kind of school in England?’

Mattie couldn’t explain to them that select, girls-only school with its spacious classrooms, any more than she could have imagined what she saw when the bell rang and they marched inside. The desks were so tightly packed that the pupils had to squeeze between them and sometimes into them too. Some of the pupils were hefty adolescents who hadn’t come in from outlying villages until they were nine or ten.

How was it possible to teach so many classes in so small a space? Books and stationery were piled on shelves in one corner, sewing materials in another. In front were two big tables, a blackboard and an easel, a ball-frame for counting and a globe on a stand. On the wall were large maps of the world, of the Pacific Ocean and of New Zealand. It seemed they were keen on geography.

Lillian and Adolphus Haszard, who had progressed past the usual top class of Standard Four, sat to one side, but there was no place for Mattie. ‘I expect you’re ahead of them all,’ said Clara Haszard as she led the newcomer to a vacant desk.

Miss Haszard was as neat and pretty as any teacher in a city school. She brought Mattie one large sheet of drawing paper, one sheet of writing paper, a pencil and crayons. ‘You can draw a map of New Zealand,’ she said, ‘and mark in the places you’ve visited, and write down what you know about them. Please be careful with the paper. We never have enough. I’ll come back to you later.’

Mattie set to work. Copying wasn’t easy when she had to crane her neck around so many obstacles to see the map on the wall. The children behind her were working on slates. The squeaking of slate pencils was painful to her ears, but nobody else was bothered. They were quite wrapped up in whatever work they had to do. The girl across the aisle was the only one who gave Mattie a glance and she did it often. ‘I’m Kanea,’ she whispered when the teachers had their backs turned. She was a big girl with a lumpy figure and thick, wavy hair.

After a while, the squeaking and scratching were drowned in a burst of song. The juniors were singing with Mr Haszard, ‘a for apple, b for baby, c for cat, d for dog…’ They laughed when they stumbled over letters unknown in Maori, and tried again, and sang the whole alphabet twice. After that another class sang their tables: ‘Two and two are four, two and three are five, two and four are six’, in both Maori and English.

‘How is your map coming on?’ Miss Haszard asked in her ear. ‘Oh, you haven’t finished the North Island!’

‘I can’t help listening to
them
,’ said Mattie.

‘You’re not used to it yet,’ said Clara, smiling.

At playtime Mattie was fascinated to watch a kind of knucklebone game played with small pebbles, and at lunch-time the two girls ran down the hill jumping for joy because they hadn’t been asked about the canoe. In the afternoon there was a surprise. The schoolroom rippled with excitement as Mr Haszard called all classes to attention and produced a large parcel. Ooohs and aahs came from all over the room as he carefully untied and rolled up the string and folded the wrapping paper. ‘It’s that England book,’ Kanea whispered to Mattie.

Out came twelve copies of the
Illustrated London News
to be passed round. The small children were grouped with the bigger ones and Mattie found herself cheek to cheek with Kanea.

‘Keep your eyes on the first picture, please,’ said Mr Haszard. ‘We’ll talk about that one.’

It was a lively scene in India showing elephants carrying logs.

‘I’ve been there and seen that,’ whispered Mattie, meaning only to be friendly.

Kanea shot her arm wildly into the air, up and down and up and down and up, while Mr Haszard was asking: ‘Who can tell me what country this is?—Yes, Kanea?’

‘E p
, Mattie been there, she seen that!’

‘Have you, Mattie? Will you come forward please, and tell the school about it?’

Every face turned towards Mattie. Every tongue wagged with the wonder of it, that here in this very room was a girl who’d been in India and
seen
the elephants. And she, suddenly famous, would gladly have welcomed even a smelly geyser to hide her from view, but there was no escaping. She had to rise and go to the front through the excited mass of children. Then, just as she reached the open space around the teacher’s desk, she caught a fresh signal from Lillian’s dancing eyes. Think of
me
, those eyes were saying, yesterday it was
me
who had to stand out there, and
I
had to say what wasn’t really true, but you can tell the truth about elephants.

‘We were staying in Poona,’ said Mattie, ‘and we went out to this place to watch them cutting down trees for a house, and the elephants were working just like that.’

‘How did that man get up on its back? Too high to climb,’ came the first question.

‘Jumped,’ some humorist interjected.

‘That’s the
mahout
who drives the elephant,’ said Mattie. ‘He orders the elephant to lift him up with his trunk.’

‘The big effelan does what that little man say?’ The thought of this was so hilariously funny that the whole school rocked with laughter.

‘They train the elephants when they’re young,’ said Mattie.

‘What say it tread on his foot? A baby one big as a horse, eh?’ said a voice from the back.

‘Kaitoa, if you the
mahout
,’ said the humorist and the whole school rocked again.

‘Order, order! Only questions please,’ said Mr Haszard. But he didn’t try to restrain the laughter. The elephant was plainly the funniest animal in the world, even funnier when described in Maori. When the page was turned to a picture of white men out shooting tigers, the men in their pompous outfits became the targets of the jokes.

They hadn’t got past India when time ran out and the magazines were gathered up. ‘When we’ve studied all the pictures, the children take them home and explain them to their parents,’ Miss Haszard told Mattie. ‘Then we send them on to the next school.’

‘Don’t they get lost?’ said Mattie.

‘Never. We wouldn’t be allowed to have them if we didn’t pass on the full set, and every family knows it,’ said Clara.

Now Ina joined them for the singing lesson—if it could be called a lesson. There was no musical scale and no timing except for the beating of feet, as the children followed the teachers in the simplest of English songs: ‘One man went to mow’ and ‘My Bonnie lies over the ocean’. Baby stuff! Mattie could hardly bring herself to sing. But that was soon over and Kanea was called forward.

For a moment she stood there silent, a lumpy figure in
an old brown jumper and cotton print skirt, her long, wavy hair hanging loose around her face. Then she spoke a few words in Maori, put her hands on her hips and counted, ‘Tahi, rua, toru, wha—’ and fifty young voices burst into real singing—their own! Kanea gave her whole body to it, hips turning, feet stamping, arms weaving, eyes glowing, face alive in every muscle. ‘How could I ever have imagined she was lumpy?’ Mattie thought to herself. ‘She’s beautiful!’ And if only the others weren’t so cramped at their desks! They all entered into the spirit of it, and Mattie felt her own feet tapping and her own arms flowing as the tune took shape in her head. It was a dreamy song and after it came a funny one, but Mattie had no idea what they were singing about.

School was dismissed and she ran after Kanea. ‘Do tell me what the words meant,’ she begged.

‘You walk along with me. I’ve got to hurry and feed the fowls for my kuia, my granny,’ said Kanea. ‘You coming, Lillian?’

Together they walked while Kanea explained the songs and their actions.

One was a love song, the other the tale of a pig that got lost, and when everyone was searching it came home by itself. Their path was taking them away from the hotels, to reach the main road near the meeting house, Hinemihi. And there, as they came through the last clump of trees, standing in the road and looking directly towards them,
was Tuhoto. His height, untouched by age, was startling; and his gaze seemed to wrap them round with a dread of things to come.

‘I can’t go past him, I can’t,’ gasped Mattie. ‘He gives me the shivers.’

‘Not good to meet Tuhoto,’ agreed Kanea. ‘We go another way.’

They backtracked through the trees and then worked their way along the hillside above the timber house where the chief Wi Keepa lived.

‘Tuhoto hates us young people,’ Kanea said. ‘He says we’re too much for the good time. He’s old and likes to stay by the whare, but that waka wairua gets him out. We keep away from his curses.’

‘We must cross the road somewhere, though,’ said Lillian. ‘What if he’s coming this way?’

‘We watch out,’ said Kanea.

Peeping through a bush they saw him standing in the same place, but facing in their new direction. It was uncanny; as if some special sense told him where they were, and he pursued them with his eyes.

‘We run fast,’ said Kanea.

Why did Mattie feel that tightness in her throat, why did Lillian feel her heart thumping, as they sprinted across towards the track to Hinemihi? That old man hadn’t a hope of catching anyone. But they kept running until they were behind the meeting house, and Kanea pushed aside two
stakes in the manuka fence for them to squeeze through. From here they could stare at Tuhoto without being seen—and yet, distant as he now was, they could tell he was again facing towards them.

‘Ah, we trick him,’ said Kanea. ‘Tuhoto says the waka wairua mean bad things will happen, but we won’t let him near us.’

‘How will that make any difference?’ said Lillian. ‘We
saw
that canoe.’

‘And it was
real
,’ added Mattie.

‘Mr Haszard made you say it wasn’t there,’ said Kanea, ‘but we
know
. I go now. Those fowls get hungry.’

‘We’ll be late home too. We’ll go back by the river,’ said Lillian.

It was good to see the water racing past with a merry sound. ‘I feel better now I’ve told Kanea,’ Lillian said. And then, at a bend in the river, they came upon Guide Sophia sitting on a log and watching the fish make circles in a fern-edged pool.

At first she did not seem to see them or hear their greeting. Then she raised her head and held out her hands, one to Lillian, one to Mattie. The girls stood in silence, feeling the comfort that flowed from those hands, until Lillian was moved to speak.

‘Guide Sophia,’ she said, ‘the waka wairua. I know what it means now.’

‘Ae. All Te Wairoa knows. Go on.’

‘They won’t let me talk about it,’ said Lillian in a burst of anger. ‘Mumma and Mr and Mrs Humphreys, they won’t let me say what I saw, in case it scares people.’

‘Does it scare
you
, Lillian?’

‘I’m all muddled up. No, I don’t think I’m scared, but tell me: was it really an omen?’

‘Yes, it was an omen. But remember this: a disaster is foretold, but when it will come and who it will strike, no one knows. We must go on living as if life is for ever. You go to school, and I go to Hinemihi to swing the poi.’

‘We saw Tuhoto just now. He scared us. All the children are afraid of him,’ said Lillian.

‘But he has done no more than interpret the omen,’ said Sophia. ‘He thinks the people have turned away from their traditions, and he wants them to
know
, like a prophet in the Bible. You, Mattie, now that you are delayed in Te Wairoa, are you troubled?’

‘Tuhoto scares me too,’ answered Mattie, ‘but
we
think it was a real canoe we saw.’

‘Then you have no reason to fear,’ said Sophia with a smile. ‘Go now. May the Lord protect you.’

She loosened their hands and watched them run towards home, beside the dancing river.