Free Colour Scheme by Ngaio Marsh Page A

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 recognizable 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