Tramp Royale (45 page)

Ticky and I were standing at the taxi rank at the Waverly, which is just outside the Waverly Bar. We were waiting for a taxi and minding our own business, when simultaneously an empty cab drove up and the drunks started pouring out of the bar. Before I knew what was going on I found myself faced with a fist fight simply because Ticky and I had started to get into the cab.

I avoided the fight simply by accepting insults, obscenity, and by surrendering the cab. I am no hero and I do not relish facing a judge on a street-fighting charge in a strange country, and I relish even less the broken nose, broken glasses, and so forth, that may be picked up in such a brawl-and still less the prospect of Ticky's getting involved in such a useless, silly, and dangerous business . . . which she would surely do if she saw me getting the worst of it. So I crawled.

Much later, after all the drunks were served, we got a taxi. I was still shaking with rage and so was Ticky. But it turned out that she had not realized what had almost happened-because the notion of grown men fighting on a sidewalk was foreign to her experience. In thinking it over I realized that the last time I had seen anyone really drunk-fighting, mean drunk and not just happy-was over twenty years earlier and in a Central American banana port at that. For all the liquor consumed in the United States, drunk and disorderly on the streets is something one reads about in the newspapers but hardly ever sees in the flesh.

In New Zealand they do not warrant a police-court news item. So far as I know they are never arrested, for they are common as lamp posts. Nor are they limited to six o'clock in the evening; that is simply the time when the sidewalks are literally crowded with them. But you can see them at any time of day on the streets of Auckland, staggering, too drunk to navigate. Nobody pays any attention, not even the bobbies.

On Monday the weather was much better, although still overcast with some rain. After breakfast I told Ticky I intended to go at once to see Mr. Gunning. "Better get out of this hole and come with me. And say-where is that Auckland guide? Not the little one, but the big one the Chamber of Commerce puts out."

"Over there under the wash stand. What do you want it for?"

"What's it doing on the floor? And-good grief, what have you been doing with it? It's all messy."

"Swatting cockroaches."

"But why use the Auckland City Guide?"

"I had to use something . . . and it seemed appropriate."

"Mmmm, maybe you have a point." I opened it gingerly. "I want to look up the American consul. It is just barely possible that he might be able to help us get a ship back home."

Ticky had been standing at the window, looking down at the grim and antiquated buildings of Auckland. She did not say anything for a long moment, then she turned rather suddenly.

"Bob-"

"Huh?"

"Don't bother."

"Eh? What do you mean?"

"Don't try any further to get us a ship back to the States. Let's go down right now and buy an airline ticket home."

"What?"

"Let's fly home."

I said slowly, "Honey, I thought you were the girl who would put up with anything rather than fly over the ocean? I thought the very idea frightened you?"

"I was. It does. It just scares me speechless. I'm almost sure we'll be killed. But-" She began to cry. "B-b-but I'm just so homesick and miserable that I'll do
anything
to get home. I just can't stand this filth and the dirty food and, and everything. So let's fly."

I put an arm around her. "Take it easy, honey. All right, if that's what you want. Let's go over and tell Mr. Gunning and have him cancel the tour. Then we'll make a reservation."

"Oh, let's!"

It turned out that we could not possibly fly for four more days at the earliest; Ticky decided that such being the case we might as well make the tour around North Island and leave immediately on returning, a week hence. The notion of the tour did not upset her nearly as much as the idea of four more idle days in Auckland. So we spent the rest of the day happily, in a holiday spirit, making preparations for the tour and buying our ticket to San Francisco. We had a party at the Hi Diddle Griddle that night and let the Waverly do what it liked with the dinners we had already paid for. What Ticky suggested that they do with them was more appropriate than eating them.

When we checked out the next morning we found that they had charged us for one extra day and two extra meals. I called it to their attention with a minimum of comment, waited while they corrected it, and returned my key-ten shillings deposit. But they had the last laugh anyhow, for they gave us less than the established exchange rate for our dollars and I was too much in a hurry to go out to a bank for the correct rate. As we climbed into a taxi I shook the dust of the place from my shoes and did not look back.

The trip around North Island was very pleasant, in spite of hotels almost as bad as the Waverly and food that was just as bad in most cases. We used the hotels just to sleep in and were on the move, out in the open country, all day long. New Zealand is truly a beautiful place; once away from the eyesores they use for towns and cities one could easily fall in love with it.

The first jump was to Waitomo, by bus. The bus had been described as a "luxury bus" to distinguish it from their ordinary cross-country buses, which are known as service cars. It was not bad, but the seats are so narrow and close together that they are really suited only to married couples still in love-so Ticky and I happily held hands the entire trip. Brazil could tell them something about luxury buses, however.

The first stop was at the Waitomo Hotel, by itself in beautiful country. There we had the only decent hotel accommodations in all our stay in New Zealand. It was just a simple room and bath, but good, clean, new, and comfortable-say an $8 room in a decent commercial hotel in America. But it looked like heaven to us.

The Waitomo was the only good hotel we found in New Zealand, and even it had oddities which would not be tolerated in America-the habit, for example, of paging a guest by loudspeaker: "Mr. Tompkins, room twenty-five, report to the desk!" We had run into this army-barracks procedure first in the steamship
Monowai;
if the purser wanted to see a passenger, he ordered him, by loudspeaker, to report to his office, instead of sending a messenger with the message couched as a request. This rude practice is common throughout New Zealand. The peremptory knock in the early morning, even on Sundays, the lack of room service, and the boarding-meal hours and style of serving are common to all hotels that we saw; New Zealanders apparently do not mind being strictly disciplined on their holidays. But, allowing for these customs of the country, the Waitomo was a good hotel. Even its cooking was markedly better than that of the Waverly-not good, but edible and usually clean. By contrast it seemed wonderful.

After dinner, during an unusually long wait for coffee in the lounge, we met the manager, Mr. W. F. Swift. I had remarked that the two pages serving coffee were doing it in such a back-handed, steps-retracing fashion that they seemed unlikely ever to finish, whereupon the gentleman next to me introduced himself as the manager. It became evident that he knew his job and wanted to run the best hotel possible-and his efforts showed.

He asked us what room we were in; Ticky answered, "Number three." He nodded and said, "Ah yes, the Royal Suite."

Ticky said, "Why do you call it that?"

"Eh? Because it is. The room you have was the Duke's room; the one connecting with it, number four, was the one occupied by the Queen-let me see, uh, just four weeks ago today."

I looked at Ticky and she looked at me. We managed not to laugh until we were safe in the "Duke's room"-then we got slightly hysterical. Not that there was anything wrong with the room; it was in all respects comfortable, proper, and decently furnished. I am sure the Duke of Edinburgh was comfortable in it, even though you could have lost it and never missed the space in the incredible "room" we had enjoyed in the Raffles. But the notion that we had had to acquire the Royal Suite to enjoy accommodations adequate but less luxurious than those of any of thousands of motels in America hit us, in our weakened state, as riotously funny.

The bathtub in the Royal Suite was exceptionally long and I suspect it was specially installed in consideration for the Duke's height-certainly all the fixtures were new. I know I found it a luxury even though I am two inches shorter than the Duke. But it had one oddity which I learned presently was characteristic of New Zealand plumbing: they do not revent drain lines and consequently, when a drain is thirty-five feet or more above its discharge, the drain hole will show a full fifteen pounds per square inch of vacuum, enough to be startling and moderately dangerous. I found this out by stepping on the drain hole in the tub, to my great surprise and moderate pain. I wrote a story once about a man who sealed off a vacuum leak by sitting on it; I really should rewrite that story since I did not know at the time just how absorbing a trick it is.

I managed to pull my foot loose with nothing but a large strawberry mark to show for the mishap. I hope the Duke did not step on the drain.

Waitomo is a limestone-cave resort. There are three caves, all quite good, but I am not going to describe stalactites, stalagmites, and such. If you have seen limestone caves anywhere in the world you have seen much the same thing; if you have seen the Mammoth Cave or Carlsbad Caverns you have seen much more. I am not running down the Waitomo Caves; I love limestone caves anywhere, never miss a chance to go through them, and these are excellent examples. But if you have seen one, description is unnecessary; if you have not, description is almost worthless-it is time you treated yourself to the experience.

But there is one aspect of one cave there which is unique, to be seen nowhere else in the world: the Glow-Worm Grotto. It is a surpassing emotional experience which may well be worth making a trip of thousands of miles to see and worth even the indignities of New Zealand hotels. The glow worm referred to in the name is the larva of a small fly,
Arachnocampa luminosa,
whereas our glow worm is the larva of a beetle-but the difference is important only to another glow worm or an entomologist; it is a worm that glows by the same biochemical process which makes our fireflies light up. The larvae, an inch to two inches long, live on the ceilings of Cave Waitomo, where they spin threads like spider webs to catch other insects.

We went through Cave Waitomo the evening of our arrival. The first part of the tour is the usual limestone-cave trip, beautiful and impressive but not unique. Then the guide explains that he is about to turn off the lights, as the glow worms shut off their light if disturbed by light or sound. We are enjoined to keep absolute quiet. In the darkness we are led down to a big boat in an underground river; each visitor is handed into the boat in darkness, seated, and given whispered orders to sit still, keep quiet, and show no light.

With no sound but breathings and the water lapping gently against the side of the boat we are pulled along in pitch darkness, the guide moving the boat by means of steel rope let into the rock walls. The boat makes a turn to the left, following the course of the underground stream.

There is a chorused gasp, muffled at once. The ceiling of the cavern we have just entered is covered with many, many thousands of tiny blue lights, so many and so bright that we can now see the awed faces of our companions in the boat, enough light to read newspaper headlines. The sight is most like that of the Galaxy spilling across a clear desert sky on a moonless night, the gasp from the boat like that one always hears when the "stars" first come out in a planetarium show. It does not feel like a cave; it feels like open sky and glimmering stars.

The above is correct, as far as it goes. I am afraid I cannot convey the eerie emotional experience of the silent walk through darkness down to an underground river, the spooky, River-Styx feeling of that black and muffled voyage. It is good that the glow worms are shy, for a single gaggling word would blemish the awesome spell of that unearthly place.

We went from Waitomo to Wairakei by train and bus, stopping overnight at the Chateau, their best-known resort hotel in the middle of National Park. Their trains are good, but smaller than ours; their goods wagons look toylike compared with our freight cars. The Chateau would be comparable to the hotels in our own national parks if it were well run. It is not. Poor food, a sickening stench in the dining room, and more of the army-barracks spirit in handling the guests. We were bawled out for daring to sit down at an empty table in the dining room-cold, dirt, and tongue-lashings are routine for the visitor to New Zealand; you must harden yourself to it while there.

The bus ride from the Chateau to Wairakei was one of the most interesting parts of the tour, even though it was scheduled simply as a means of getting us from one tourist attraction to another, for the reason that it took us intimately into New Zealand farming country and let us see a little of how the New Zealand countryman lives. The bus traveled much more than twice the road distance, wandering around through small villages and up side streets, delivering newspapers, picking up mail, stopping at a hail to pick up a note from a farmer's wife and deliver it to some farm farther up the way. We could see clearly for the first time that the whites and the Maori actually did live intimately together in the country, with no apparent color line. The countryside is fertile and has a feminine beauty, the paddocks and fields being separated by hedge rows rather than fences, English style. The back roads are poor, the houses small and rather grim, the cross-roads stores very poorly stocked; the much-vaunted high standard of living is not evident. In several places there were kennel-like housing developments, with whole families living in cramped boxes that made the worst of company towns in America look like well-planned suburbs. Housing is New Zealand's most acute shortage, but it is hard to see what obstacles prevent solving it, other than those they have deliberately placed on themselves through legislation. But even the best houses are uniformly dreary, made more so by an all-prevalent use of drab yellow paint, and even new houses are built in the same nineteenth-century style which accounts in part for the 1890 overall impression the country gives one.