scratching his head. (The honourable member closed his speech with the following words:
“ ‘Separation is a vexation:
Division is as bad:
The rule-of-three, it puzzles me,
And factions drive me mad.’)
“In another speech Mr. Beauchamp said he had intended to make a suggestion as to the form in which additional taxes, if necessary, should be raised, for he thought the Government had pursued a wrong course in saying that they would only have stamp duties, as it had placed many members in an embarrassment — among others the honourable member for Westland, who, after creating the Government, as it were, like Warwick the King-maker, found that, like Frankenstein, he had created a monster, which was going to stamp at him and master him. Noses had, he believed, been counted, so that perhaps it was not of much use continuing this discussion longer: but he thought the Government was like a spoilt child crying for stamps, and expecting the House to say, ‘There, then! it shall have stamps.’ (The honourable member then illustrated some remarks by telling an episode in the life of Jack the Giant-killer, and compared the similes of the Colonial Treasurer to soap-bubbles, and concluded after some further remarks of a humorous nature.)”
If Arthur Beauchamp ever had much money, he probably lost it in Picton. Few men made much there; many lost fortunes. The final blow came in 1879, when New Zealand was involved in the great world depression. Not only were the majority of Marlborough landholders ruined, but many business men also; and Picton finally relapsed into the inertia of a little out-of-the-way seaside town, where time ceases to be very important — the future too monotonous to bear contemplation: where life is “like living at the bottom of a well,” as a Picton spinster said.
Arthur Beauchamp carried on his “General Merchant Store,” and his auctioneering, for ten years there, paying his £50 per annum licence fee, a very substantial part of the town’s total annual revenue of £600. He added greatly to his auctioneer’s repertoire, during that time, and some of his mysterious jingles (“Dolly of milk no resembles”), and his verses of Maori place names have become New Zealand folk-lore: —
“Ohau can I cross the river Ohau,
O Waikanae not reach the shore?
Otaki a boat and row me across
In the Manawatu did before.”
He died in 1910 at the age of eighty-three. There is a picture of him in one of Katherine’s letters:
“My grandpa said a man could travel all over the world with a clean pair of socks and a rook rifle. At the age of 70 he started for England thus equipped, but Mother took fright and added a handkerchief or two. When he returned he was shorn of everything but a large watering can which he had bought in London for his young marrows. I don’t suggest him as a Man to be Followed, however.”
No doubt this was the large red watering can which stood on one side of the door, with the pair of old bluchers on the other, when after The Voyage Fenella went up the dewy garden at Picton. While she stroked the white cat in the dusky sitting-room, she listened to grandma’s gentle voice and the rolling tones of grandpa. Then she went in.
“There, lying to one side of an immense bed, lay grandpa. Just his head with a white tuft, and his rosy face and long silver beard showed over the quilt. He was like a very old wide-awake bird.”
7
Harold Beauchamp (who was to be the father of Katherine Mansfield) thus belonged to the first generation of New Zealand-born pioneers. It was the generation which still spoke of England as “home” (in the manner of its fathers), yet preserved a silence, very eloquent, concerning personal relation to the colony. If at heart the men still were Englishmen, they were in soul New Zealanders.
The energy of the new generation was needed in the colony now. The tireless struggle of the older pioneers at the bottom of the world, remote from any real aid (since they would not and could not look to Australia, but only to England), brought the primitive stage of colonisation to an end only forty years after the Tory had anchored on the edge of a remote and savage wilderness. By this time (1879) Harold Beauchamp had been in Wellington, the capital, for three years. At eighteen, when he started out for himself, he rode on a brief tide of prosperity. The financial courage of Sir Julius Vogel, the Colonial Treasurer, who with the colony owing seven millions, dared to borrow ten, had brought eight years of commercial success. The wool market rose, trade increased, roads, railways and telegraphs were built. New Zealand became a modern country.
“Hal,” as he was known to his contemporaries (he became “Sir Harold” forty-seven years later knighted for “distinguished public service, particularly in connection with financial matters”) began as clerk in an importing firm. He had been “privately educated,” in the usual school of the pioneer; but until he was thirteen, and his father left Picton for Wanganui, he attended the Picton dame’s school, a little house-boat standing high on stilts, taught by old Mrs. Currie — and a curious curriculum she did teach. At school he far outstripped the other six little Beauchamps, as his contemporaries at the school — Mr. Hornby’s daughters among them — well remember. He set the pace and easily held his own.
His independence was soon manifest. After leaving the Collegiate School at Wanganui (where Arthur Beauchamp had been Government valuer and auctioneer from 1872 to 1876), he went his own decided way. He chose to remain in Wellington, while his father tried sawmilling in Manaroa in the Pelorus Sound.
“Hal,” at eighteen, was a stocky youth, filled with his own fire, alert, elastic, careful to keep fit with walking and exercises even when busy, and finding leisure for football and boating. He was “musical,” too, though he never had learned to play any instrument. His bright blue eyes, rather prominent, often had a deceptive look of helpless- ness. To his father’s vein of humour, and his propensity for telling and enjoying a good tale, he added logic; and to his tenacious memory he added tenacious will. He had a flair for finance. Very early he determined to become both wealthy and influential in the new country.
For a while he lived in lodgings in Molesworth Street, with five other boys, including Charlie Palliser — a blue-eyed Irish youth, towering well over six feet, after whose great-grandfather the New Zealand Cape and Bay were named. In the 1870’s Molesworth Street, running parallel to the Quay, was practically wilderness. The native Waipirau whare (site of the first Government house), lay at the lower end; but except for a store and a few boarding-houses it was only a sandy road still encroached on by native bush. The six boys held a sitting, one night, over a leg of mutton. Mutton was New Zealand’s main product. It could be had for a shilling a leg; and the landlady had served it for six consecutive evenings, cold. After the sitting, the court decreed that it be put out in the road; and when the landlady came down to carve, they told her where to go to find it. With it was a note:”No more cold mutton. We’re going to have our meat hot.”
When he was twenty-six, in 1884, he married Annie Burnell Dyer, daughter of Joseph Dyer, who had been a pioneer of Australia, and the first resident secretary of the Australian Mutual Provident Society in New Zealand. Margaret Mansfield Dyer, his wife, and the youngest daughter, Bell Dyer, left the big house on the corner of Burnell Avenue, overlooking the Harbour, and went to live with the Beauchamps in Hawkstone Street.
The Dyers were all beautiful women. Annie Burnell, finely made, seemed almost too slight and small to contain so much delight in sheer living. The thrill, the novelty of simply finding herself alive never had worn off for her. An opalescent morning, a cluster of rata blossom, the mock-orange tree at the gate — almost any slight or lovely
