Friday, the day before the concert, marked the beginning of a crescendo in the affairs of Wai-ata-tapu. It began at breakfast. The London news bulletin was more than usually ominous and the pall of depression that was in the background of all New Zealanders’ minds at that time seemed to drag a little nearer. Colonel Claire, looking miserable, ate his breakfast in silence. Questing and Simon were both late for this meal, and one glance at Simon’s face convinced Dikon that something had happened to disturb him. He had black marks under his eyes and an air of angry satisfaction. Mr. Questing, too, looked as if he had not slept well. He spared them his customary sallies of matutinal playfulness. Since their drive to Harpoon two days ago, Dikon had tried to adjust his idea of Mr. Questing to that of a paid enemy agent. He had even kept awake for an hour or two beyond his usual time watching the face of Rangi’s Peak. But, although Mr. Questing announced his intention each night of dining at the hotel in Harpoon and had not returned when the rest of the party went to bed, the Peak changed from wine to purple and from purple to black outside Dikon’s window and no points of light had pricked its velvet surface. At last he lost patience with watching and fell asleep. On both mornings he woke with a dim recollection of hearing a car come round the house to the garage. Simon, he knew, had watched each night and he felt sure that the second vigil had been fruitful. Dikon fancied that Questing had delivered a final notice to the Claires, as at Friday’s breakfast they bore an elderly resemblance to the Babes in the Wood. They ate nothing and he caught them looking at each other with an air of bewilderment and despair.

Smith, who seemed to be really shaken by his jump from the bridge, breakfasted early, a habit that kept up the tradition that he worked for his keep.

The general atmosphere of discomfort and suspense was aggravated by the behaviour of Huia, who, after placing a plate of porridge before Dr. Ackrington, burst into tears and ran howling from the room.

“What the devil’s the matter with the girl?” he demanded. “I’ve said nothing.”

“It’s Eru Saul,” said Barbara. “He’s been waiting for her again when she goes home, Mummy.”

“Yes, dear. Ssh!” Mrs. Claire leant towards her husband and said in her special voice: “I think, dear, that you should speak to young Saul. He’s not a desirable type.”

“Oh, damn!” muttered the Colonel.

Mr. Questing pushed his chair back and walked quickly from the room.

“That’s the joker you ought to speak to, Dad,” said Simon, jerking his head at the door. “You’ve only got to look at the way he carries on with — ”

“Please, dear!” said Mrs. Claire, and the party relapsed into silence.

Gaunt breakfasted in his room. On the previous evening he had been restless and irritable, unable to work or read. He had left Dikon to his typewriter and, on an unaccountable impulse, elected to drive himself along the appalling coastal road to the north. He was in a state of excitement which Dikon found ridiculous and disturbing. During six years of employment Dikon had found their association pleasant and amusing. His early hero-worship of Gaunt had long ago been replaced by a tolerant and somewhat detached affection, but ten days at Wai-ata-tapu had wrought an alarming change in this attitude. It was as if the Claires, muddle-headed, gentle, and perhaps a little foolish, had proved to be a sort of touchstone to which Gaunt had been brought and found wanting. And yet Dikon, distressed by this change, could not altogether agree with his own judgment. It was the business of the dress for Barbara, he recognized, that had irritated him most. He had accused Gaunt of a gross error in taste and yet he himself had learnt to mistrust and deride the very attitude of mind that the Claires upheld. Was it not, in fact, an ungenerous attitude that forbade the acceptance of a generous gift, an attitude of self-righteous snobbism?

And exploring unhappily the backwaters of his own impulses he asked himself finally if perhaps he resented the gift because he was not the author of it.

The rural mail-car passed along the main highway at about eleven o’clock in the morning, and any letters for the Springs were left in a tin post-box on the top gate. Parcels too big for the box were merely dumped beneath it. The morning was overcast and Gaunt was in a fever lest the Claires should delay the trip to the gate and the parcel from Sarah Snappe be rained upon. Dikon gathered that the gift was to remain anonymous but doubted Gaunt’s ability to deny himself the pleasure of enacting the part of fairy godfather. “He will drop some arch hint and betray himself,” Dikon thought angrily. “And even if she refuses the blasted dress she’ll be more besotted on him than ever.”

After breakfast Mrs. Claire and Barbara, assisted in a leisurely manner by Huia, bucketed into their household duties with their customary air of laying back their ears and rushing their fences. Simon, who usually fetched the mail, disappeared and presently it began to rain.

“The oaf!” Gaunt fulminated. “He will lurch up the hill an hour late and bring down a mass of repellent pulp.”

“I can go up if you like, sir. The man always sounds his horn if he has anything for us. I can go as soon as I hear it.”

“They would guess that we expected something. Even Colly — No, they must fetch their own detestable mail. She must receive her parcel at their hands. I want to see it, though. I can stroll out for my own letters. Good God, a second deluge is descending upon us. Perhaps, after all, Dikon, you had better go for a stroll and casually pick up the mail.”

Dikon looked at the rods of water that now descended with such force that they spurted off the pumice in fans, and asked his employer if he did not think it would seem a little eccentric to stroll in such weather. “Besides, sir,” he pointed out, “the mail-car cannot possibly arrive for two hours and my stroll would be ridiculously protracted.”

“You have been against me from the outset,” Gaunt muttered. “Very well, I shall dictate for an hour.”

Dikon followed him indoors, sat down, and produced his shorthand pad. He was dying to ask Simon if he had succeeded in his vigil.

Gaunt walked up and down and began to dictate. “The actor” he said, “is a modest warm-hearted fellow. Being, perhaps, more highly sensitized than his fellow man he is more sensitive. .” Dikon hesitated. “Well, what’s wrong with that?” Gaunt demanded.

“Sensitized, sensitive!”

“Death and damnation!.. he is more responsive, then, to the more subtle …”

“More, sir, and more.”

“Then delete the second more. How often am I to implore you to make these paltry amendments without disturbing me? …to the subtle nuances, the delicate half-tones of emotion. I had always been conscious of this gift, if it is one, in myself.

“Do you mind repeating that, sir? The rain makes such a din on the iron roof I can scarcely hear you. I got the subtle nuances.”

“Am I, then, to compose at the full pitch of my lungs?”

“I could trot after you with my little pad in my hand.”

“A preposterous suggestion.”

“It’s leaving off, now.”

The rain stopped with the abruptness of subtropical downpours, and the ground and roofs of Wai-ata-tapu began to steam. Gaunt became less restive and the dictation proceeded along lines that Dikon, in his new mood of open-eyed criticism, considered all too typical of almost any theatrical autobiography. But perhaps Gaunt would rescue his book by taking a line of defiant egoism. He seemed to be drifting that way. There was a growing flavour of: “This is the life story of a damn’ good actor who isn’t going to spoil it with gestures of false modesty”; a fashionable attitude, and no doubt Gaunt had decided to adopt it.