The Luminaries (29 page)

How was it that his memory was so distinct upon this point? Well, upon setting the type, Löwenthal had discovered that two inches square (the standard size for a column advertisement, and the size for which the scarred man had paid) was not enough to contain the
message
: the advertisement was one word too long to fit in the column space available. Unless Löwenthal shuffled around his repeat notices and changed the format of the paper altogether, he would be forced to create what typographers call a ‘widow’: that is, the final word of the advertisement (which was ‘Wells’) would be marooned at the top of the third column, producing an undesirable and even confusing effect in the reader’s mind. By the time Löwenthal discovered this, the scarred man had long since left his office, and Löwenthal was disinclined to venture out into the streets to find him. Instead he looked
for a word to remove, finally deciding to excise the man’s middle name, Francis. This omission would prevent the creation of a ‘widow’, and the format of his column would not be spoiled.

The
West Coast Times
was published early the following morning, and well before noon, the scarred man returned. He insisted—though he did not give a reason—that it was of the utmost importance that his middle name was included. He resented very much that Löwenthal had altered his advertisement without his knowledge, and expressed his displeasure with the same
plainspoken
gruffness with which he had first entreated the editor’s assistance. Löwenthal, apologising profusely, printed the notice again—and five times after that, for the man had paid for a week’s worth of advertising, and Löwenthal thought it prudent, under the circumstances, to offer him a seventh printing for free.

Therefore, as Löwenthal explained to Moody, he was certain both of the date of the event, and of the man’s full name, Crosbie Francis Wells. The event stood out in his mind: it is always his first mistake that an entrepreneur remembers, looking back upon the origins of his enterprise, and the displeasure of a patron is not easily forgotten, when one takes one’s business to heart.

This only left the question of the man’s description—for how could Löwenthal be sure that the man in question did in fact
possess
a scar upon his cheek, as the ex-convict known as Francis Carver certainly
did,
and as the hermit known as Crosbie Wells certainly did
not?
Upon this final point, Löwenthal conceded that he could not be sure. Perhaps in remembering the event he had
overlaid
a different memory of a scar-faced man. But he wished to add that his powers of recollection were typically strong, and he could picture this man very vividly in his mind; he remembered that the man had been holding a top hat, and that he had pressed it between his palms as he spoke, as if he meant to compress the thing to a single sheet of felt. This detail, surely, could not be false! Löwenthal declared that he would be willing to wager a decent sum of money that the man he remembered
had
indeed possessed a scar, shaped like a sickle, upon his cheek—and that he had possessed, also, a birth certificate that bore the name Crosbie Francis Wells. Löwenthal did
concede, however, that he had never known the hermit, Crosbie Wells, in life, and had no way to imagine his features, because no image or sketch of the dead man had survived him.

This new information, as one can well imagine, gave rise to a veritable cacophony of interjection and supposition in the smoking room of the Crown Hotel, and the narrative did not resume for some time. But we shall leave them in the present, and bear onward, in the past.

The ferry service that ran between Kaniere and the mouth of the Hokitika River had not been interrupted by the inclement weather, though their custom had slowed; the ferrymen, with no one to escort and no chores outstanding, were sitting about in the open warehouse adjacent to the quay, smoking cigarettes and playing at whist. They looked none too happy to abandon their game and venture out into the rain, and named a fare that reflected this displeasure. Mannering agreed to the sum at once, however, and the ferrymen were obliged to put away their cards, stub out their cigarettes, and set about carrying the boat down the ramp to the water.

Kaniere was only some four miles upriver, a distance that would be covered in no time at all on the return journey, when the
oarsmen
no longer had to pull against the current; the journey inland, however, could easily take up to an hour, depending on the river’s motion, the wind, and the pull of the tide. Diggers travelling back and forth between Kaniere and Hokitika usually covered that distance by coach, or on foot, but the coach had been and gone already, and the weather disinclined them to walk.

Mannering paid the fare, and presently he and Frost were sitting in the stern of a painted dinghy (in fact it was a lifeboat, salvaged from a wreck) with the collie-dog Holly between them. The
stroke-side
oarsmen pushed off from the bank with the blades of their oars, and pulled strongly; soon the craft was on her way upstream.

Sitting with their backs against the stern, Frost and Mannering found themselves face-to-face with the oarsmen, rather like a pair of outsized, well-dressed coxswains; the distance between them
closed each time the oarsmen leaned forward to take another stroke. The two men therefore did not speak about the business they were about to perform, for to do so would have been to invite the oarsmen into their confidence. Instead Mannering kept up a steady flow of chatter about the weather, the Americas, soil, glass, breakfast, sluice mining, native timbers, the Baltic naval theatre, and life upon the fields. Frost, who was prone to seasickness, did not move at all, except to reach up periodically and wipe away the drips that formed beneath the brim of his hat. He responded to Mannering’s chatter only with clenched noises of agreement.

In truth Frost was feeling very frightened—and progressively more frightened, as each stroke carried the craft closer and closer to the gorge. What in all heaven had come over him—in saying that he was not yellow, when he was as yellow as a man could be? He could easily have pretended that he was expected back at the bank! Now he was lurching around in three inches of brown water, shivering, unarmed, and unprepared—the ill-chosen second in another man’s duel—and for what? What was
his
quarrel with the Chinaman Quee? What was
his
grudge? He had never laid eyes upon the man in all his life! Frost reached up to wipe the brim of his hat.

The Hokitika River threaded its way over gravel flats, the stones of which were uniformly round and worn. The banks of the river were fringed darkly with scrub, the foliage made still darker by the rain; the hills beyond them crawled with shifting cloud. One had the sense, peering up at them, that distance was measured in stages: the tall kahikatea, rising out of the scrub, were silhouetted green in the foreground, blue in the middle
distance
, and grey on the crest of the hills, where they merged with the colour of the mist. The Alps were shrouded, but on a fine day (as Mannering remarked) they would have been quite visible, as a sharp ridge of white against the sky.

The craft bore on. They were passed by one canoe, travelling swiftly downriver, conveying a bearded surveyor and a pair of Maori guides—who lifted their hats, cheerfully enough, and Mannering did likewise. (Frost could not risk the motion.) After that, there was nothing; only the riverbanks, jolting by; the rain lashing at the water.
The gulls that had followed them from the river mouth lost interest and fell back. Twenty minutes or so passed, and the craft turned a corner—and then, as a lamp suddenly illuminates a crowded room, there was noise and motion all around them.

The canvas settlement of Kaniere was stationed as a midpoint between Hokitika and the inland claims. The land around the
settlement
was fairly flat, rutted by a veritable lattice of gullies and streams, all of them bearing stones and gravel down from the Alps, towards the sea; the sound of moving water was ever-present here, as a distant roar, a click, a rush, a patter. As one early surveyor had put it, on the Coast, wherever there was water, there was gold—and there was water all about, water dripping from the ferns, water beading on the branches, water making fat the mosses that hung from the trees, water filling one’s footsteps, welling up.

To Frost’s eyes, the camp at Kaniere made for a very dismal
picture.
The diggers’ tents, terraced in crooked rows, bowed low under the weight of endless rain; several had collapsed altogether. Ropes ran back and forth between them, heavy with flags and wet
laundry
. Several of the tents had been bricked with a makeshift siding made of schist and clay, and were faring better; one enterprising party had thought to hang a second sheet in the trees above them, as an auxiliary fly. Nailed to the tree-trunks were painted signs advertising every kind of entertainment and drink. (A man needed no more than a canvas fly and a bottle to open a grog-shanty on the diggings, though he would suffer a fine, and even a gaoling, were he to be sprung by the law; most of the liquor sold in this way had been fermented in the camp. Charlie Frost had once tried the Kaniere rotgut, only to spit out his mouthful in disgust. The liquor was oily, acidic in taste, and thick with strings of matter; it had smelled, he thought, very like a photographic emulsion.)

Frost marvelled that the rain had not driven the diggers indoors; their spirits, in fact, seemed quite undampened. They were clustered at the riverside, some of them panning, knee-deep in the water, others rattling their sluice boxes, still others cleaning their pots, bathing, soaping their laundry, plaiting rope, and darning on the shore. They all wore the digger’s habitual costume of moleskin,
serge, and twill. Some of them sported sashes about their waists, dyed the brightest scarlet, in the piratical fashion of the time, and most wore slouch hats with the brims turned down. They shouted back and forth to one another as they worked, seeming to take no notice of the rain. Behind this shouting, one could hear the
conventional
hubbub of industry—the ringing chop of an axe, laughter, whistling. Blue smoke hung in the air and dispersed over the river in lazy gusts. The sound of an accordion drifted up from deep in the trees, and from somewhere further off came a roar of applause.

‘Quiet, isn’t it?’ said Mannering. ‘Even for a Saturday.’

Frost did not think that it was quiet.

‘Hardly a man out,’ said Mannering.

Frost could see dozens of men—perhaps hundreds.

The panorama before them was Charlie Frost’s very first
impression
of Kaniere—and indeed, his first impression of Hokitika’s environs at large, for in the seven months since he had crossed the Hokitika bar, he had never once ventured inland, nor once along the beachfront further than the high terrace of Seaview. Although he
frequently
bemoaned the smallness of his circumstances, he knew, in his innermost heart, that his spirit was not well suited to adventure; now, as he watched a man haul a branch onto a puny fire at the river’s edge, and deposit the thing bodily onto the dark bed of ashes,
causing
a
whuff
of smoke to engulf him, blackly, so that he began to cough in the terrible, lung-wracking way of a man not long for this world, Frost felt thoroughly justified in his conservatism. Kaniere, he told himself internally, was a wretched, God-forsaken place.

The ferry pulled into the shallows, and the lifeboat’s keel ground on the stones. The forward oarsmen jumped out and dragged the boat clear of the water, so that Mannering and Frost could
clamber
out of the craft without wetting their boots—an unnecessary courtesy, for their boots were very wet already. The collie-dog leaped over the gunwale and flopped, belly-first, into the water.

‘My word,’ said Mannering, as he heaved himself onto the stones, and stretched his back. ‘I ought to have changed my trousers. Not a day for fine dress—eh, Charlie? Makes a fool out of a dandy. My word!’

He had perceived that Frost was out of sorts, and was trying to be cheerful. For although he felt that it would do Frost a great deal of good to bear witness to a bit of rough and tumble (Frost’s composure had a priggish quality that aggravated Mannering extremely) he wished to remain, all the same, in the boy’s good opinion. Mannering was competitive by nature, and among the many hypothetical
trophies
for which he competed daily was one engraved with the names of every one of his associates. Were he ever to be forced to choose between another man’s betterment and another man’s compliance, he would choose the latter, no matter the cost. He would not go soft upon Frost, who was soft enough already, and he would ensure that the boy knew his place, but he was not too proud to extend a hand of kindness—not least because kindness was so patently desired.

But Frost did not respond. He was appalled to see an A-frame calico tent, barely big enough to fit three men lying side by side, sporting the hand-painted sign ‘Hotel’; he was appalled still further to see a digger unbutton his trousers and relieve himself, in full view of his fellows, onto the stones at the riverside. He recoiled—and then, to his alarm, heard laughter. A pair of diggers, sitting beneath a timber-framed awning not ten yards from the ferry landing, had been observing the lifeboat’s approach. They evidently found Frost’s horror very amusing; one of them tipped his hat, and the other gave a mock salute.