Chapter Nine
CONTACT
The court yards and lawns of the University were as he had never experienced them, completely deserted. Max stopped walking and peered about. He felt like an intruder on the University's sacred rest. He was the only person not currently joined with the institution in its single focus and felt that if anyone were to come across him now he would look to all the world like he was sneaking about and up to no good.
Behind him, back in the Engineering Quad, he could hear the noise of the crowd. It was a most surreal experience. An unexpected objectivity. On the outside looking in. Truly alone, but only yards from hundreds of others. He put his head down and marched on, out of the University.
Soon the hum of the crowd faded and was lost and then replaced by the normal sounds of Excellent Street. In the bustle of the work day traffic there was no sign that anyone was aware of what had just taken place inside the University. The disconnection felt strange, and he watched the comings and goings for a moment, on the threshold, before joining in. When he did it was as if he had just passed between two different worlds, maybe three. The noisy quad, the silent grounds, and the busy street. Each seemed to have no idea that the other existed.
Maybe tomorrow morning's newspapers will change that.
The door bell jangled again as Max stepped off Blenheim Street and back into the coffee scented Revolution Industrial. It was busier than earlier. With the productive part of the day nearly over more customers had found permission to pause. These would be those who could afford the luxury of time, city dwellers, not needing to catch a train out to one of the towns. Less commute more coffee. Max understood the appeal.
As he approached the counter Alice smiled knowingly and produced his books, placing the pile on the bench in front of her.
“Thank you Alice. Very kind of you,” he said, tipping his hat and retrieving them.
“Not at all...” she looked at him questioningly.
“I am sorry. Max, Max Skilton,” he provided at once.
“Pleased to make your acquaintance Max.”
“And I yours Alice...?”
“Alice Stone,” she confirmed
“Miss Stone, thank you again for safe keeping my books.”
"You are welcome."
As much as Max was intrigued by Alice he didn't have time to stay and chat… if he wanted to make his train. A quick glance around the room confirmed that Stewart and Lavisham were still present and that they had been joined by others. At least five more young men lounged at their back table. Max tipped his hat to Alice once more and headed for the door.
Back outside he slipped the small Von Tempsky paperback into the inside pocket of his waistcoat. It had caused him enough grief for one day from Dickie alone. Now he felt slightly mortified that Alice Stone had seen it too. If anyone studied him currently they would notice only Arthur Rigg's Practical Steam Engine Treatise.
Back in Victoria the crowd was dispersing, and the greater part of the campus had its life flowing into it again. Students wandered in happy groups toward their residential halls, bars, or transports. Max would have to keep moving at a good pace if he wanted to both make the 5:30 and have a seat on it.
Dickie's whole story about Captain Stewart and then his answers to Max's own questions about Gilbert Lavisham had all been... Max found it hard to place... a revelation... a shock. Many issues had arisen from this single day, most needing further meditation and dissection at a later time. Foremost amongst these was the tale of murder.
However, Max's mind was currently occupied with the discovery that Gilbert had not attended Harriet's race. Max was unsure what it meant but took it as a good sign. He doubted that they had split, surely Dickie would have said. But it must say something about their relationship. To Max it served simply as an example of how Lavisham must take Harriet for granted.... and was thus clearly the wrong man for her. A basic analysis, but Max happily added it to his arsenal. He found the idea of ever growing complacent with Harriet impossible to imagine and knew that if he ever got the chance he wouldn't be following suit.
Ducking past 'Streamers' he caught snatches of celebratory singing coming from within the crowded café. Pausing at the golden lit windows he listened to the happy, boisterous chant. Max was sure that Harriet would be in there somewhere, in the midst of it. She was, after all, public property, a celebrity, as the Americans would say. He felt a sudden spike of bitterness at this thought, for unlike so many other students, he was outside her world, unable to step in and share the party. His admiration for her was as if through one way glass. Standing there he felt, for want of a more masculine image, like the Little Match Girl that fateful Christmas Eve.
Then sudden hot resentment flared in his chest, and he became at once tired of the power she held over him, of being an unnoticed spectator of her triumphs. Not that this resentment turned inward, as maybe it should have and accused his own heart of its amenability to infatuation. But rather it spiralled outwards and found Harriet in that crowded, happy room, and in its bitterness struck at her, as if she had in fact compelled Max with force of arms to fall in love with her. Max turned away, there was no point in torturing himself any longer. He also had a train to catch.
Pushing his bowler forward, a tad over his eyes, he made his way quickly through the remnants who still lingered in the Engineering Quad. Then passing between two sets of bleachers he lengthened his stride and entered a narrow arch-topped alley between the Astronomy and Chemistry departments.
With books tucked under his left arm he hissed with frustration, then as he marched he let his right-hand trail along the rough block work of the tunnel wall… his finger tips brushing the hard contours of the material world, of reality.
What a day.
All at once the far end of the alley filled with a knot of noisy students. Jubilant Steam Engineers, coming his way. Sighing he withdrew his hand and strode on; he was in no mood...
Harriet?!
She was in the centre of the group, talking and laughing with her friends, all clearly bound for Streamers. Max locked his jaw, his mouth becoming a hard line. A gentleman would step aside, push his back to the wall and let the group pass. Max walked on up the middle.
The gap closed. Max, with the sound of his own heart beating loud, stopped in front of her. She stopped in front of him, her head turning from her companions to regard that which blocked her path… him. To finally see him.
Max, his hat still tipped forward to partially cover his eyes, let the moment draw out. No one spoke. The tension built. Max let it. Then when he was sure that one or more of the Engineers were seconds from assailing him for his rudeness... he slowly let his right leg slide back, matching it with his right hand, palm open. With his side turned, the way was now open, and the group surged past on either side. Harriet, however, was forced to likewise turn sideways, and as they passed, so close, they faced each other. But Max's head did not turn to watch her, as their bodies moved within inches of each other. Instead, he focused on the far end of the tunnel, until she was past, at which point he resumed his walk.
He did not look back and thus he did not see her, alone, stopped in the tunnel to watch him go.
* * *
Max missed his train, arriving instead at Central Station in time to watch its smoke clearing and hear its whistle blowing somewhere off down The Cut, under the Lyons Street Bridge. He would have to walk home. He didn't care over much. It was a warm evening, and he knew that the exercise would somehow do his mind good.
Wouldn't have made the best company for Wiremu and Dickie anyway.
After hiring one of the stations overnight lockers for his books, he crossed the rails and set off along Rodney Street. According to the departures board there was the option of waiting ten more minutes and taking a south bound Coast & Main train to the Devil's Boots station. However, he would have still been left with a good walk at the other end and the idea of patronising the Lavisham empire didn't appeal.
He stuck to Rodney Street for a couple of blocks, following it into Newtown with all its mills and workshops. Even at this later hour brick chimney stacks still streaked the sky grey with smoke. The air in Newtown was always more parts coal than that in down town. Iron cranes swung bales and boxes onto tram wagons or waiting gurneys, while large iron wheels continued to turn slowly on the outside walls of factories, driven ever on by the great smoking steam engines within. Workers came and went, arriving depressed, leaving hours later exhausted.
What a day! A simple, standard, traditional first day at University would have been more than enough excitement on its own.
Max's mind tumbled over all the things he had seen and heard. One memory quickly pushed out by the next reflection, supplanted by the next idea, buried by the next feeling, eroded by the next suspicion, steamrolled by the following observation, replaced by the next rumour, challenged by the subsequent hint, drowned by the following fear, informed by the next story, confirmed by the next experience, confused by... First Years, Hakas, Māori, Classes, Alice, Chinese, Purerehua, Dickie, Books, Elders, Goths, Classics, Robots, Cafés, Quads, Steward, Lavisham, Harriet, Harriet, Harriet...
At the intersection with Napier Street he strolled by the Dirigible Park, home of the University’s School of Aeronautics. Behind the netting fence immense corrugated iron hangers housed dormant flying machines. Outside each building giant kauri masts, especially imported for the task, stood stark against the westering sun. These, fixed at various heights with iron rings, were the airship mooring poles. Max counted six, but none were currently in use.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
The tension began to leave his body as he walked, and he wasn't far along Duncan Street when, like smoke from the train he had missed, his mind began to clear.
Sharing the day with Victoria's first ever Māori and Chinese students had been relegated to the category of interesting historical trivia. The real drama had started when Wiremu appeared with his purerehua. Again, simply meeting Wiremu, the Grandson of the late Aorere Chief, would have been enough for one day.
A new friend then, and maybe five new enemies.
Newtown dipped into Addingtown with all its little box houses built for railway workers. Max didn't linger but followed Duncan Street across its intersection with Royal Sovereign Street, where a tavern stood on each corner. Looking down rough Royal Sovereign, toward the yards, he could see children out on the road playing in the mud, while wives, pausing from their end of day domestics, passed a moment with neighbours.
Duncan Street had good seal and as Max walked Newman Brother's omnibuses, loaded with home bound commuters, chugged past him. He followed these out of the city and across the plateau, past farmsteads, and lone factories.
Here in the bowl of the fertile Aorere Valley, the sky and the world were big and open, blue, and green. To the west the Wakamarama Range protected the vale from storms off the Tasman Sea and watered it with torrents of rain down its eastern slopes. Those bare limestone bluffs and forest clad hills, now scarlet with rata flowers, ran north to peter out at the tip of the island and become the long sands of Farewell Spit. South they marched all the way to Fiordland, gaining in height and joining, as they went, the Island's back bone, the great divide, the Southern Alps.
Between Max and those hills, now dusky with the shadow of early evening, ran the river, then the rail and lastly the road, each determinedly making its own way down the valley from Riverdale to the city. In the middle distance the main road was separated from the rail and river by a flat-topped hill. Nearer still the whitewashed grandstands of the racing club stood out brightly in the light of the sunset.
However, Max's eye was drawn to the long flat hill. It was called, somewhat appropriately 'The Devil's Dining Table', and on it's flank, like the castle of a bankrupt medieval baron, perched the city prison - Old Morty. No white paint had been wasted on its grey stone walls and no gardens adorned its grounds. But within Old Morty languished the Dominion's evil; rapists, abusers, debtors, felons, burglars, lunatics, and any murderers who had not yet hung.
Surely this would be the residence of Gilbert Lavisham, if he had in fact murdered a boy. What to make of that story? Moving of course, but true?
Max didn't know what to think, or indeed who to ask. Dickie had seemed disinclined to say any more.
The Revolution Industrial itself had been a pleasant distraction. Alice Stone was intriguing.
But did Dickie even notice her? How did he describe himself? Quaint and absorbed... eccentric. He said it.
Max would put both Alistair Stewart and Gilbert Lavisham in Old Morty if the smuggling stories were true. He knew that part of him hoped that they were. But out in the fresh air he began to doubt these tales too. Murder and smuggling. It was all too sinister, too dark, not the kind of world that first year students had any part in… if it existed at all.
With wheeshes of steam the Omnibuses stopped at gates and crossroads to set down passengers, then reaching the plateau edge they followed the Rim Road south-east, toward the town at 'Devil's Boots' and the extent of their run.
The town's namesake 'boots' were large limestone formations at the river’s edge, eroded by millennia of flood and flow into the shape of upturned footwear. Boots that must surely have some connection in legend to the aforementioned satanic dinner table. Although such eldritch talk, now so well-used as to lose its dark tone, seemed to belong more with that certain type of Irish Catholic than the more practical Anglicans and Methodists hereabouts.
The town at the Devil's Boots was a gateway to the rough hills of the Aorere Goldfields, the site of Dominion's first gold rush. These hills, in contrast to the valley's lush pastured floor and the forested Wakamaramas, were made of hard, poor soil. But... and it is a considerable 'but'... they were poor in only the singular agricultural sense. For as both the diggers and the multinationals continued to attest, the eastern hills were rich in... riches. With vast amounts of silver and gold being present in both hard rock sources, such as quartz, and in alluvial gravels. Thus, unlike the other side of the valley, the whole area swarmed with men. Beyond the Devil's Boots miners lived in shanty towns with names like Slateford, Bedstead Gully, Red Hill and Bungapor. On the western side there was only Chinatin.
The Chinese woman that Max had first spied on the lawn outside the Great Hall had also been in his Archaeology class. Although she had remained aloof and disengaged from any of her classmates or Professor Wynyard's introductory banter.
Yes somewhere amongst all that there had been four actual classes; Archaeology, Classics, Ancient History and Latin. All promising. The first three even interesting. Then, finally the robot race, which became robot assassination and then in-turn... what did she call it? 'The Dominion League of Robot Wars.' Amazing!
Max tried not to think about Harriet. But instead studied the mountains at the head of the valley, some thirty miles south. To the left towered stone sided Mount Olympus, and to its right the Perry Saddle, over which the 'Coastal and Main' railway, the Lavisham railway, climbed an arduous sixteen hundred feet before beginning its descent to the West Coast, connecting Collingwood with the rest of The Dominion.
Max plodded after the last Omnibus, reaching the Rim Road at the edge of the plateau not too long after the cumbersome contraption. Here, due to ancient glacial action, the semi-fertile 'pakihi' soil dropped away at a very steep angle. From his high vantage Max looked down on river-flat dairy farms and the first evening lights of the tenements, shops, and villas of Rockville town.
There also was Skilton House, his home, beside the National Aviaries and along from the Railway Station. Further up the valley a single plume of white smoke marked the location of his missed 5:15 train, already well over the big Rockville Bridge and heading on for Eeling Station.
No matter.
He would be valley-side and home in another twenty minutes. Although a number of meaner roads, lesser tracks and even the occasional aerial ropeway descended the cliff face to Rockville, he would not travel by any of these. Along the top he marched, intent on the single iron structure that thrust from the lip.
Of all the events in his day, there was, no matter how much he fought it, a single, fleeting, nonverbal, seconds long interaction to which his tired mind was repeatedly drawn... Max let out a sigh and kicked a stone... Harriet in the alley. He knew he would be replaying, analysing, and dissecting that all night long.
He mounted the steps on the iron girder pyramid, with its great spinning horizontal wheel overhead, paid the clerk and joined the queue.
A cage whipped around to pause momentarily in front of the loading point. The first four passengers in line sprung aboard before the door sliced shut again and the gondola carried them out and down.
* * *
“Drink?” asked the Professor, somewhat rhetorically as he entered the kitchen brandishing one of his port bottles.
“Just a small one,” replied Max, however the irony was lost on his Father. There had never been any question of him receiving any other size. Max sat at the kitchen table, as opposed to the dining room where the family meal had been conducted earlier and ate his dinner cold. His Father dragged in a stool, poured two glasses, and settled opposite.
“Quite a day then?” reflected the Professor without preamble.
“Indeed”
“Evans had this Māori gentleman, Hapimana, up in the Staffroom. Entertained us all, remarkable man, gracious to a fault. Reassured us about these five northern students of his. Said that they are all fine young people, well-educated and travelled. Four of them have been to London and two even to Paris. I must admit that Sir Hugh was a bit concerned about you and Master Marino's cultural interaction. But both Evans and this Hapimana went to some pains to satisfy him that no harm was done.”
“That is a relief,” ventured Max around a mouthful of potato. Max was tired and not feeling particularly given to verbosity in response, but it was a relief to hear. Professor also missed Max's reluctance to talk and continued speaking regardless.
“And then there is this Miss Harriet Leith...” Max tried to hide his shock at hearing her name spoken aloud and focused on trying to maintain the slow rhythm of his eating. “...I saw the whole thing from the second storey window of the Chemistry building. McCormack says she is a brilliant engineer. I suspect he is quietly proud of her, not that he could take the credit. He says she is even working with old Coval, her Father, on his Haast Engine…” Although he was speaking very reasonably, it felt to Max’s burning ears like his father was almost ranting unbearably. “…went to school at Ferntown, family home is out that way somewhere. Have you ever met her?”
“Who me? No,” replied Max, painfully self-conscious and aware that he did not want to be having this particular conversation. Not that the Professor had any reason to guess at Max's personal interest... or apparent acute, almost rude, disinterest. Finishing his meal, Max reached for the port glass and smiling weakly at his father, waited for his racing heart to slow down.