The Luminaries

‘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 i

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 ca

Shepard sat back, and replaced his pipe in his mouth. His ma

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 pe

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 A

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?’