Colour Scheme

‘Twelve years and they are still amateurs!’

‘They try so terribly hard,’ Dikon said. He wandered out on to the verandah. Someone was walking slowly round the warm lake towards the springs.

‘Hullo,’ Dikon said. ‘We’ve a caller.’

‘What do you mean? Be very careful, now. I’ll see no one, remember.’

‘I don’t think it’s for us, sir,’ Dikon said. ‘It’s a Maori.’

It was Rua. He wore the suit he bought in 1936 to welcome the Duke of Gloucester. He walked slowly across the pumice to the house, tapped twice with his stick on the central verandah post and waited tranquilly for someone to take notice of him. Presently Huia came out and gave a suppressed giggle on seeing her great-grandfather. He addressed her in Maori with an air of austerity and she went back into the house. Rua sat on the edge of the verandah and rested his chin on his stick.

‘Do you know, sir,’ said Dikon, ‘I believe it might be for us, after all? I’ve recognised the old gentleman.’

‘I won’t see anybody,’ said Gaunt. ‘Who is he?’

‘He’s a Maori version of the Last of the Barons. Rua Te Kahu, sometime journalist and MP for the district. I’ll swear he’s called to pay his respects.’

‘You must see him for me. We did bring some pictures, I suppose?’

‘I don’t think,’ Dikon said, ‘that the Last of the Barons will be waiting for signed photographs.’

‘You’re determined to snub me,’ said Gaunt amiably. ‘If it’s an interview, you’ll talk to him, won’t you?’

Colonel Claire came out of the house, shook hands with Rua and led him off in the direction of their own quarters.

‘It’s not for us after all, sir.’

‘Thank heavens for that,’ Gaunt said but he looked a little huffy nevertheless.

In Colonel Claire’s study, a room about the size of a small pantry and rather less comfortable, Rua unfolded the purpose of his call. Dim photographs of polo teams glared down menacingly from the walls. Rua’s dark eyes rested for a moment on a group of turbaned Sikhs before he turned to address himself gravely to the Colonel.

‘I have brought,’ he said, ‘a greeting from my hapu to your distinguished guest, Mr Geoffrey Gaunt. The Maori people of Wai-ata-tapu are glad that he has come here and would like to greet him with a cordial Haere mai.’

‘Oh, thanks very much, Rua,’ said the Colonel. ‘I’ll tell him.’

‘We have heard that he wishes to be quiet. If however he would care to hear a little singing, we hope that he will do us the honour to come to a concert on Saturday week in the evening. I bring this invitation from my hapu to your guests and your family, Colonel.’

Colonel Claire raised his eyebrows, opened his eyes and mouth, and glared at his visitor. He was not particularly surprised, but merely wore his habitual expression for absorbing new ideas.

‘Eh?’ he said at last. ‘Did you say a concert? Extraordinarily nice of you, Rua, I must say. A concert.’

‘If Mr Gaunt would care to come.’

Colonel Claire gave a galvanic start. ‘Care to?’ he repeated. ‘I don’t know, I’m sure. We should have to ask him, what? Sound the secretary.’

Rua gave a little bow. ‘Certainly,’ he said.

Colonel Claire rose abruptly and thrust his head out of the window. ‘James!’ he yelled. ‘Here!’

‘What for?’ said Dr Ackrington’s voice at some distance.

‘I want you. It’s my brother-in-law,’ he explained more quietly to Rua. ‘We’ll see what he thinks, um?’ He went out to the verandah and shouted, ‘Agnes!’

‘Hoo-oo?’ replied Mrs Claire from inside the house.

‘Here.’

‘In a minute, dear.’

‘Barbara!’

‘Wait a bit, Daddy. I can’t.’

‘Here.’

Having summoned his family, Colonel Claire sank into an armchair, and glancing at Rua gave a rather aimless laugh. His eye happened to fall upon a Wild West novel that he had been reading. He was a greedy consumer of thrillers, and the sight of this one lying open and close at hand affected him as an open box of chocolate affects a child. He smiled at Rua and offered him a cigarette. Rua thanked him and took one, holding it cautiously between the tips of his fingers and thumb. Colonel Claire looked out of the corners of his eyes at his thriller. He was long-sighted.

‘There was another matter about which I hoped to speak,’ Rua said.

‘Oh yes?’ said Colonel Claire. ‘D’you read much?’

‘My eyesight is not as good as it once was, but I can still manage clear print.’

‘Awful rot, some of these yarns,’ Colonel Claire continued, casually picking up his novel. ‘This thing I’ve been dipping into, now. Blood-and-thunder stuff. Ridiculous.’

‘I am a little troubled in my mind. Disturbing rumours have reached me …’

‘Oh?’ Colonel Claire, still with an air of absent-mindedness, flipped over a page.

‘… about proposals that have been made in regard to native reserves. You have been a good friend to our people, Colonel …’

‘Not at all,’ Colonel Claire murmured abstractedly, and felt for his reading glasses. ‘Always very pleased …’ He found his spectacles, put them on and, still casually, laid the book on his knee.

‘Since you have been at Wai-ata-tapu, there have been friendly relations between your family and my hapu. We should not care to see anyone else here.’

‘Very nice of you.’ Colonel Claire was now frankly reading, but he continued to wear a social smile. He contrived to suggest that he merely looked at the book because after all one must look at something. Old Rua’s magnificent voice rolled on. The Maori people are never in a hurry, and in his almost forgotten generation a gentleman led up to the true matter of an official call through a series of polite approaches. Rua’s approval of his host was based on an event twelve years old. The Claires arrived at Wai-ata-tapu during a particularly virulent epidemic of influenza. Over at Rua’s village there were many deaths. The Harpoon health authorities, led by the irate and overworked Dr Tonks, had fallen foul of the Maori people in matters of hygiene, and a dangerous deadlock had been reached. Rua, who normally exercised an iron authority, was himself too ill to control his hapu. Funeral ceremonies lasting for days, punctuated with long-drawn-out wails of greeting and lamentation, songs of death and interminable after-burial feasts maintained native conditions in a community lashed by a European scourge. Rua’s people became frightened, truculent and obstructive, and the health authorities could do nothing. Upon this scene came the Claires. Mrs Claire instantly translated the whole affair into terms of an English village, offered their newly built house as an emergency hospital and herself undertook the nursing, with Rua as her first patient. Colonel Claire, whose absence of mind had inoculated him against the arrogance of Anglo-Indianism, and who by his very simplicity had fluked his way into a sort of understanding of native peoples, paid a visit to the settlement, arranged matters with Rua, and was accepted by the Maori people as a rangitira, a person of breeding. He and his wife professed neither extreme liking nor antipathy for the Maori people, who nevertheless found something recognisable and admirable in both of them. The war had brought them closer together. The Colonel commanded the local Home Guard and had brought many of Rua’s older men into his division. Rua considered that he owed his life to his pakeha friends, and, though he thought them funny, loved them. It did not offend him, therefore, when Colonel Claire furtively read a novel under his very nose. He rumbled on magnificently with his story, in amiable competition with Texas Rangers and six-shooter blondes.

‘… there has been enough trouble in the past. The Peak is a native reserve and we do not care for trespassers. He has been seen by a certain rascal coming down the western flank with a sack on his shoulders. At first he was friendly with this no-good young fellow, Eru Saul, who is a bad pakeha and a bad Maori. Now they have quarrelled and their quarrel concerns my great-granddaughter Huia, who is a foolish girl but much too good for either of them. And Eru tells my grandson Rangi, and my grandson tells me, that Mr Questing is behaving dishonestly on the Peak. Because he is your guest we have said nothing, but now I find him talking to some silly young fellows amongst our people and putting a lot of bad ideas into their heads. Now that makes me very angry,’ said Rua, and his eyes flashed. ‘I do not like my young people to be taught to cheapen the culture of their race. It has been bad enough with Mr Herbert Smith, who buys whisky for them and teaches them to make pigs of themselves. He is no good. But even he comes to me to warn me of this Questing.’

The Colonel’s novel dropped with a loud slap. His eyebrows climbed his forehead, his eyes and mouth opened. He turned pale.

‘Hey?’ he said. ‘Questing? What about Questing?’

‘You have not been listening, Colonel,’ said Rua, rather crossly.

‘Yes, I have, only I didn’t catch everything. I’m getting deaf.’

‘I am sorry. I have been telling you that Mr Questing has been looking for curios on the Peak and boasting that in a little while Wai-ata-tapu will be his property. I have to come to ask you in confidence if this is true.’