Get them together, and they begin to draw sectors on the table-cloth, to the ineffectual fury of the good women who have been optimistic and married them.
And in these storm-driven days—oh, storm-driven as much in our obscure little New Zealand as in countries that can go bankrupt with more of a splash, I assure you!—the link is stronger. The faces of the men I have seen coming and going in Starkie’s house have sometimes been pale and shadowy faces. None of the owners possesses any great margin of security. They catch their suppers off the end of the wharf, they work three days a week shovelling bits of coast in the relief gangs, for whom award wages are a bright and sweet dream from a dead generation. They cadge vegetables and coal at relief depots and welfare departments, ruled over for the most part by crisp young men and old ladies who are alike in their supreme inelasticity of mind and their surprising interest in the private affairs of their fellow creatures.
Some of the shadowy faces have a furtive air. More than one wanted man has had brief respite here from the assiduities of the police—I mean, ‘The Villains’—his wants ministered to by Bunny, Margaret, Norman, Josephine, and Sonny—who, ranging from the age of ten to that of one year, represent the oncoming generation of Starks. Nevertheless, once upon a time a French general kissed Starkie effusively on either cheek—to his shame—and his Colonel informed him that his V.C. recommendation had gone through—though, as he was on probation from a military prison at the time, it was highly improbable that he would ever see the colour of it. The Colonel’s doubts were well-founded. Starkie took nothing home from his war but his tattooed captaincy stars, a record of nine courts martial, a total of thirty-five years’ penal servitude in military sentences—all cancelled for gallantry in action—and a conviction that the world hereafter could not be too martial for his liking. He has only one ambition—to go to South America, where they have a war on all the time. It is his conviction that he would there have become a General, and I think he is right.
There was once a story of a Zulu impi, trapped beyond escape, and they cried: ‘If we go forward, we die. If we go backward, we die. Let us go forward.’
In Starkie, in the wraith-like, unwanted, and continually humiliated men who haunt his little house from cellar upwards, I have sometimes thought to see the set faces of that impi. The returned soldier is a social problem in every country today. These men lived or died, as the luck had it, without getting into war novels, talking the language of the trenches, bothering very little about their own psychology, remembering horror and fear only in the loneliness of their own sleepless nights. They were neither knights nor machine soldiers. They were that most unknown of soldiers, the ordinary man.
In New Zealand they are scattered, and many of the best among them are too shabby and too harassed to attend R.S.A. ceremonials. Yet, potentially at least, the returned soldier’s desperate desire to fit in again, to go forward and die, is one of the most valuable things remaining in our world; as the link, the friendship between scattered and shabby men who congregate around a thousand little homes like Starkie’s, is one of the most honest.
WHEN the third Stark baby was born, they didn’t have to travel far to wet its head; the father, Wylde Stark, having by that time come into possession of the old Governor Grey Hotel, which stands white and square in the dusty plainlands of Avenal, near Invercargill town in the far south of New Zealand. The baby, a boy, arrived with no small inconvenience to its mother and some to itself at the hour of 1.30 in the morning. Down in the parlour, Wylde Stark’s guests and sympathizers had kept themselves awake to celebrate the event, a feat which called for a fair amount of refreshment. Technically, Invercargill may be a dry district; but there never yet was a time there when a man was ashamed by lack of good liquor for his friends. If the liquor consumed had really been bestowed on the baby’s head instead of on their own capacious gullets, James Douglas Stark would have started life with a head like a little seal’s. However, contrary to the practice of the new-born, he fell asleep almost immediately and took no interest whatever in the celebrations, which concluded only when dawn put a white finger of light to her lips and her stealthy winds said, ‘Sssh!’ very reproachfully to the company.
Though the same could not have been said of every man among his guests, Wylde Stark at five in the morning still looked as straight as a gun. He stalked upstairs, never touching the oak banisters with their carved Tudor roses, waved the sleepy-eyed nurse out of the way, and entered his wife’s bedroom. A gas-jet still spluttered blue and sulphur-yellow above the bed, for the baby had chosen July’s black midwinter for its arrival. His wife was awake, lying with her black hair and her paleness like sea-wrack against the crumpled pillows, her dark eyes watching him sombrely. He bent over the wicker cot where his second son had been bestowed, and inspected him without any show of sentiment. The baby slept on, unwhimpering. The tall man straightened himself.
A faint voice came from the pillows.
‘What is he like?’
‘Black as the ace of spades,’ said Wylde Stark briefly; and as though that should satisfy both his own curiosity and his wife’s, without another word he left the room.
Wylde Stark’s description of his third child was only correct among those who divide humanity into white men, yellow men, black men.
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