The Luminaries (19 page)

‘At least you’re neutral,’ Pritchard said. ‘You’ve given none of them cause to judge you one way or another—have you?’

‘The celestials?’ Nilssen sucked on his pipe; the leaf was almost ash. ‘No.’

‘You say it with an
Ah
in front—Ah Quee. It’s their way of saying Mister.’ Pritchard paused a moment, regarding the other man, and then he added, ‘Think of it this way. If
we
are being framed, then perhaps
he
is, too.’

As he was speaking, there came a knock at the door: it was the clerk, bearing the message that George Shepard was in the outer office and waiting to be received.

‘George Shepard—the gaoler?’ Nilssen said, with some trepidation, and a swift glance at Pritchard. ‘Did he say why?’

‘Matter of profit, he said, mutual gains,’ the clerk replied. ‘Shall I fetch him in?’

‘I’ll take my leave,’ Pritchard said, standing immediately. ‘So you’ll find him—the fellow Quee? Say you will.’

‘All the way to Kaniere?’ Nilssen said, remembering his
luncheon
, and the barmaid at the Nonpareil.

‘It’s only an hour’s walk,’ Pritchard said. ‘But make sure you get
the right fellow: the one you’re after is a shortish chap, very thin, clean-shaven; you’ll know his cottage by the chimney that issues from the forge. I’ll wait your message,’—and he was gone.

Nilssen’s office seemed much too small to accommodate the
massive,
rigid bow that George Shepard made upon his entrance. The commission merchant felt himself shrink back a little in his chair, and to compensate for this he leaped up, thrust out his hand, and cried,

‘Mr. Shepard—yes, yes, please. I haven’t yet had the pleasure of receiving your business, sir—but I do hope that I can be of
service
—in the nearest future—if I may. Do sit down.’

‘I know you, of course,’ Shepard replied, taking the chair that was offered him. Seeing that Nilssen’s pipe was lit, he reached in his pocket for his own. Nilssen passed his tobacco pouch and lucifers across the desk, and there was a short pause as Shepard filled and tamped his bowl and struck a match. His pipe was shallow, made of briar, with a smart collar of amber set between the bit and the stem. He puffed several times until he was satisfied the leaf was lit, and then sat back in his chair with a calculated glance first to his left and then to his right, as if he wished to square himself with the planes of the room.

‘By reputation,’ he added, being the kind of man who always finished an utterance once he had set his thought in motion. He breathed out a mouthful. ‘That fellow just leaving,’ he said. ‘His name again?’

‘Jo Pritchard is his name, sir—Joseph. Runs the drug hall on Collingwood-street.’

‘Of course.’

Shepard paused, forming his business in his mind. The pale light of the day, falling slantwise across Nilssen’s desk, froze the eddies of pipe-smoke that hung about his head—fixing each coiling thread upon the air, as mineral quartz preserves a twisting vein of gold, and proffers it. Nilssen waited. He was thinking:
if I am convicted, then this man will be my gaoler
.

George Shepard’s appointment as governor of the Hokitika Gaol had been met with little opposition from the men who lived and dug within the bounds of his jurisdiction. Shepard was a cold, formidable character, slow moving in a way that seemed constantly to emphasise the breadth of his shoulders and the weight of his arms; when he walked, it was with long, deliberate strides, and when he spoke (which was seldom) he intoned in a rich and august bass. His manner was humourless and not at all likeable, but
severity
counted as a virtue for a man of his profession, and it was to his credit, the voters agreed, that no charge of bias or prejudice had ever been laid at his door.

If Shepard was the subject of idle rumour, it was of the conjectural sort, and nearly always concerned his private relations with his wife. Their marriage was to all appearances conducted in absolute silence, with a grim determination on his part, and a fearful inhibition on hers. The woman referred to her own self as Mrs. George, and
this
only in a whisper; she wore the bewildered, panicked aspect of a
tortured
animal, who sees a cage where there is none, and cowers at every sudden thing. Mrs. George rarely ventured beyond the
gaol-house
door except, on rare occasions of civic display, to trip red-faced down Revell-street in Governor Shepard’s wake. They had been at Hokitika four months before anyone discovered that she did in fact possess a Christian name—Margaret—though to speak it in her
presence
was an assault so dreadful that her only recourse was to flee.

‘I come to you on business, Mr. Nilssen,’ Shepard began. He held the bowl of his pipe in his fist against his breast as he spoke. ‘Our present gaol-house is little better than a corral—a holding pen. There is scant light, and insufficient air. To ventilate, we prop open the door upon a chain, and I sit beyond the doorway with my rifle on my knees. It is untenable. We haven’t the resources to cope with—more experienced criminals. More sophisticated crimes. A murder, say.’

‘No—yes, yes,’ Nilssen said. ‘Of course.’

There was a pause, and then Shepard continued. ‘If you will
forgive
my pessimism,’ he said, ‘I believe that Hokitika is about to meet a darker time. This town is at a threshold. Digger law is still
the creed of the hills, and here—why, we are but a backwater of Canterbury still, but soon we will be the jewel in her crown. Westland will split, and Hokitika will prosper; but as she rises, she will have to reconcile herself.’

‘Reconcile—?’

‘The savage and the civil,’ Shepard said.

‘You allude to the natives—the Maori tribes?’

Nilssen spoke with a touch of eagerness; he cherished a
romantic
passion for what he called ‘the tribal life’. When the Maori canoes came strong and flashing through the Buller Gorge—he had seen them from a distance—he was quelled in awe. The
warriors
seemed terrible to him, their women unknowable, their customs fearsome and primitive. His transfixion was closer to dread than to reverence, but it was a dread to which he sought to return. In fact Nilssen had been first spurred to make his voyage to New Zealand by a chance encounter with an able seaman at a roadside inn near Southampton, who was boasting (rather improbably, as it turned out) of his own encounters with the primitive peoples of the South Seas. The sailor was a Dutchman, and wore his jacket cut short above his hips. He had traded iron nails for cocoa-nuts; he had permitted island women to place their hands upon the white skin of his chest; he had once made a present of a knot to an island boy. (‘What kind of knot?’ Nilssen begged, coming forward; it was a Turk’s Head; Nilssen did not know it, and the seaman sketched the looping floral shape upon the air.)

But Shepard shook his head at Nilssen’s interjection. ‘I do not use “savage” in the native sense,’ he said. ‘I allude to the land itself. Prospecting is an ugly business: it makes a man start thinking like a thief. And here the conditions are foul enough to make the
diggers
still more desperate.’

‘But the diggings can be made civil.’

‘Perhaps—after the rivers are spent. After the prospectors give way to dams and dredges and company mines—when the forests are felled—perhaps then.’

‘You do not have faith in the power of the law?’ Nilssen said, frowning. ‘Westland is soon to have a seat in Parliament, you know.’

‘I see that I am not making myself clear,’ Shepard said. ‘Will you allow me to begin again?’

‘By all means.’

The gaoler began immediately, without altering his posture or his tone. ‘When two codes of justice are available at once,’ he said, ‘a man will always use the one to inveigh against the other. Consider a man who thinks it just and right to bring a complaint to the Magistrate’s Court against his own whore—expecting both the exercise of the law, and his exemption from it. He is refused, and perhaps he is even charged for consorting with the girl; now he blames the law and the girl both. The law cannot answer for his digger’s sense of what is due, and so he takes the law upon himself, and throttles her. In former days he would have solved his quarrel with his fists, at once—that was digger’s law. Perhaps the whore would perish, or survive, but either way his action was his own. But now—now he feels his very right to demand justice has been threatened, and
that
is what he acts upon. He is doubly angry, and his rage is doubly spent. I am seeing examples of this kind every day.’

Shepard sat back, and replaced his pipe in his mouth. His manner was composed, but his pale eyes were fixed very intently upon his host.

Nilssen never refused an opportunity to provoke a hypothetical. ‘Yes, but—to follow your argument,’ he said, ‘surely you are not suggesting a preference for digger’s law?’

‘Digger’s law is philistine and base,’ Governor Shepard said calmly. ‘We are not savages; we are civilised men. I do not consider the law to be deficient; I mean to point out, merely, what happens when the savage meets the civil. Four months ago the men and women in my gaol-house were drunks and petty thieves. Now I see drunks and petty thieves who feel indignant, and entitled, and speak righteously, as if they have been unjustly tried. And they are angry.’

‘But—again—to conclude,’ Nilssen said. ‘After the whore is throttled, after the digger’s rage is spent. Surely the civil law then returns to condemn this man? Surely he’s punished justly—in the end?’

‘Not if his fellows rally round him, to preserve his digger’s rights,’ Shepard replied. ‘No man holds to any code as strong as he does when his code’s affronted, Mr. Nilssen, and there’s nothing more brutal than a gang of angry men. I’ve been a gaoler sixteen years.’

Nilssen sat back in his chair. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I take your point; it’s this twilight that’s the danger, between the old world and the new.’

‘We must do away with the old,’ Shepard said. ‘I will not suffer whores, and I will not suffer those who frequent them.’

Shepard’s autobiography (a document which, if ever penned, would be rigid, admonishing, and frugal) did not possess that necessary chapter wherein the young hero sows his oats and strays; since his marriage, his imagination had conjured nothing beyond the squarish figure of Mrs. George, whose measures were so
familiar
, and so regular, that he might have set his pocket watch by the rhythm of her days. He had always been irreproachable in his conduct, and as a consequence, his capacity for empathy was small. Anna Wetherell’s profession did not fascinate him in the least, and he had no boyhood memories of tenderness or embarrassment to soften him towards the subtleties of her trade; when he looked at her, he saw only a catalogue of indiscretions, a volatile intelligence, and a severe want of promise. That a whore might attempt to take her own life did not strike him as a remarkable thing, nor a very sad one; in this particular case, he might even call a termination
merciful
. Miss Wetherell lived by the will of the dragon, after all, a drug that played steward to an imbecile king, and she would guard that throne with jealous eyes forever.

It is fair to say that, of the seven virtues, Governor Shepard inclined towards the cardinal four. He was well apprised of the Christian doctrine of forgiveness, but only as a creed to be studied, and obeyed. We do not mean to diminish his religion by
remarking
that forgiveness is a thing that one must first be obliged to ask for in order to know how to give, and Governor Shepard had never in his life met any imperative to ask. He had prayed for Miss Wetherell’s soul, as he did for all the men and women in his
keeping
, but his prayers were expressions of duty rather than of hope. He believed the soul to inhabit the body, and consequently, that the
body’s desecration was an assault upon the soul: a common whore, when judged by this substantive theology, fared ill indeed, and Anna Wetherell was malnourished, mistreated, and as wretched a picture as any he had seen. He did not wish her damned, but he believed, privately, that her salvation was impossible.

Miss Wetherell’s spiritual fate, and the method by which she had sought to determine it forever, did not interest him; her corporeal merits did not interest him either. In this Shepard was set apart from the majority of men in Hokitika, who (as Gascoigne was to remark to Moody some seven hours later) had been talking of little else for a fortnight. When they exhausted the former subject, they fell back upon the latter, an arrangement that kept them in
conversation
for a great while.

Nilssen’s pipe had gone out. He rapped the bowl against his desktop to empty the ash and then began to refill it. ‘I believe Alistair Lauderback means to make a change,’ he said, unlacing the strings of his tobacco pouch with his free hand. ‘If he is elected, of course.’

Shepard did not answer at once. ‘You’ve been following the
campaigns
?’

Nilssen, busy with his pouch, did not notice the other man’s
hesitation
. When the gaoler had first entered Nilssen had been fearful of himself, even guarded, but he rarely dwelled long in a state of embarrassment. Shepard’s theory of law had roused his intelligence, and gratified it, and he again felt master of his faculties. The absorbing rituals that attended the filling of his pipe—the worn thinness of the leather strings, the dry spice of the tobacco—had restored a kind of order to his senses. He replied, without looking up, ‘Yes indeed. Reading the speeches every day, and with keen attention. Lauderback is here now—in Hokitika—is he not?’