The Strange Attraction/Chapter 1
THE STRANGE ATTRACTION
CHAPTER I
I
“I do hope you will like it,” said Bob Lorrimer rather doubtfully.
“I don’t care a cuss if I don’t. I shall stay till I’ve got all I can out of it. But I say, this is hot, isn’t it?” answered Valerie Carr.
“Yes, it’s the worst since I came. You couldn’t see much of the river, I suppose. There’s a big fire to the north of us.”
“Not a thing,” she said in a disgusted tone.
They stood on what was known as the Dargaville main wharf beside the steamer that had just brought Valerie from Helensville. Passengers still moved cautiously down the unrailed gangway with packages and bags in their hands, and relatives still greeted each other with forced gaiety or honest affection, and acquaintances with laconic nods. The donkey engine swung the first net full of trunks and boxes in dangerous imminence above the heads of all who stood on the limited area of the narrow landing.
“Look out! Look out!” impatiently yelled one of the steamer hands, annoyed that it should be his job to save people who did not seem to want to live.
There was a scramble out of the way. Bob and Valerie drew aside against the wall of a zinc shed. She looked into the pile of luggage that was dumped at her feet, saw that her own belongings were not there, and turned again to Bob.
“What do you think of it so far?” she asked.
“I think the paper is a promising thing. They will turn it into a daily next summer if we make a good start. Anyway it is a stepping-stone, and we can make it pretty much what we like so long as we boom the district and Benton’s candidature. The committee’s fine, and as they all have work to do and know nothing about running a paper they will not be fussing about the office all the time.”
“And the place?”
Bob shrugged his shoulders. “Well, you’ll see.”
Valerie looked about her, seeing the wharf, the sheds, the steamer, and the uninteresting line of low shops across the street. But the rest of the place blurred off into the pall of smoke that was choking the life out of the little flat town. Even the opposite bank of the river was clouded in a hot mystery. The Wairoa itself, usually a restless stream, dawdled along on the top of the tide, a turgid yellow, carrying charred debris gathered up by its far-off rambling tributaries, and doing nothing that a river should to cool the air or refresh the eye. It was hotter, if anything, on its surface than it was in the sandy town.
Valerie gave little thought just then to the passengers or to the people who met them, though she knew that she and Bob were being stared at. The town already knew him as the editor of the new tri-weekly paper, and it had known for some days that he was to have a woman assistant from Auckland. While this was a matter of real interest in a place that had a population of under two thousand, it was not a matter for astonishment. Nothing was a matter for astonishment in Dargaville. That was the town’s pet pose.
But such of the town as met the steamer that day looked curiously at the newcomers for several reasons. Bob was the son of the Bishop of Auckland, and Valerie was the daughter of that city's cleverest and best-known lawyer, Davenport Carr. The glamour of this combined social distinction made the local dignitaries look a little weak. Not that the town would have admitted it in public. Indeed it was prepared to resist any undiplomatic move on the part of the outsiders to teach it anything with the undue haste usually showed by outsiders in impressing little towns. But it stared this day with a friendly feeling, for the two were good to look at, and the town immediately sniffed the possibility of romance.
II
Bob and Valerie were radiantly healthy, with the kind of vitality that did not wilt even in that dissolving atmosphere. They stood tall and straight, unaware of smoke-choked lungs, their eyes untroubled by the glare that radiated off the zinc roofs of the sheds.
In spite of her tedious train and steamer journey Valerie had contrived to arrive with the air of having merely strolled out of a nearby street. She wore a plain dark linen dress with a narrow pale blue collar round the pointed neck, and a soft linen hat to match. She wore white canvas shoes that had stayed white, and white open-work cotton stockings. There was not a superfluous inch of material about her. She carried a good black travelling bag which Bob now held.
Valerie was not conventionally beautiful, but she carried an internal dynamo that shot sparks at the passerby and made him forget his manners, turn his head and wonder who the deuce she was. And there was something in the carriage of her head, and the fashioning of her limbs and the assurance of her manner that confirmed his first impression that she was that desirable thing, somebody, not only in her own right, but with the added prestige of ancestors.
She was supple and loose-limbed and tanned from a summer spent largely in the open air. Her vitality had run over from her limbs into her amber hair. It had a curious luminousness, which caused many of her acquaintances to wonder what she did to it. She coiled it about her head in two thick ropes which usually dragged a little down her forehead, and often made her look like the queen of vampires, the very last lady of life and imagination she would have bothered to imitate. Beneath that amber hair, and beneath heavy eyebrows of the same colour, her deep-set and amused blue eyes softened a face that was a little too contemptuous, made one forget the nose, a little too strong for beauty, and antidoted a mouth that was curiously voluptuous. For the rest she had a fine skin, splendid colour, dimples, a good chin, and her head well set on a proud neck.
Bob stood over six feet, a well-developed and athletic male. The lines of his face were straight and his features cut with strength, but with little suggestion of delicacy. His heavy black eyebrows met when he frowned over humorous brown eyes that found the world a pretty good place to live in. In fact most things were pretty good to him. He had a healthy crop of coarse black hair on his well-shaped head, and it was always cut the conventional length and combed in the conventional way. He was always carefully up-to-date with his clothes, and looked exceedingly well in them. At twenty-seven he had extricated himself from the perplexities of youth and adolescence, had had his conventional time of knocking around away from his home associations, had returned in the conventional manner to settle down to his life-work.
The main difference between these two was that you looked at Bob and dogmatized, and you looked at Valerie and wondered.
III
After her glance about the wharf Valerie brought her eyes back to his face.
“Where am I to stay?” she asked.
“Mac’s pub,” he grinned.
“Oh, Lord! Beer and flies.” She made a comical grimace. “Then there’s nothing else?”
“No. We have tried everything. Nobody has any room, and you’d hate boarding with anyone here anyway. Mac’s is all right, clean as pubs go, and the food is jolly decent, on the whole.”
“Any other women stay there?”
“No.”
“Thank God for that.”
“Mac refused to take you at first. You see he can fill up most of the time with men who spend a lot at the bar, and women don’t pay. And then, well, the pub is a bit lively sometimes. However, the committee spends a lot there, and Benton fixed it. So you are on trial. Whatever happens you must not complain about anything.”
“Dash it all, Bob, did you ever hear me complain about anything?”
A broad grin spread over his face.
“Oh, yes, you’ve heard me complain about hosts of things, fusty old ideas, the cowardly virtues, etc., oh, yes. But you never heard me complain about physical discomfort, now, did you?”
“No, gentle Val. And I told Mac that if you found your bedroom full of rats and the soup full of cockroaches it would be nothing to what I’ve seen you oblivious to, and that you would be out of the place all day and most of the evenings at the office. Oh, hullo! Here are some of the committee.”
He turned as two men came round the corner of the shed.
Valerie looked keenly at Tom Allison and Ray Bolton, the bank managers of the town. One glance at them told her they would mean nothing in her life, and that they probably meant little in the lives of anybody else.
“Sorry you had to arrive on our hottest day, Miss Carr,” said Allison, looking at her with a deliberately inviting and admiring gaze. Young women of manifest attractions did not constitute one of the reasons for the fame of Dargaville.
“Oh, I shan’t judge the town by its hottest day,” retorted Valerie.
Just then the second net full of trunks and boxes fell about their feet. She pointed out her belongings, and Bob beckoned to a carter waiting near. Then they all walked the few feet of wooden planks to the dusty sidewalk of River Street.
The bankers claimed Valerie in conversation. They assured her that Dargaville was quite a live little place, that there was a nice exclusive little set, and a good bridge club. They parted from her and Bob at the corner of Queen Street, remarking that their wives would call as soon as they returned from the coast.
Her eyes twinkled at Bob. “Is that the best the place can do?”
“Well, Benton has a good deal more juice,” he smiled back.
Valerie looked curiously about her as they went on by the river. Along the bank there was a clay path, a few sheds and boathouses set on piles, and poles to which boats were moored right against the steep edge. The shops and stores faced them from the other side of the street, for this was a one-sided thoroughfare. People stood there in the doorways trying to get some air. There seemed to be a little breeze now coming out of the west. A limp farmer passed by in a creaking wagon, his horses drooping. There were several men ahead of them walking to the hotel. There were no sounds about them but the rattling and clanking of the steamer unloading at the wharf.
Soon she saw a large building looming out of the haze. It was a typical New Zealand small-town wooden hotel of two stories, with verandah and balcony along the front and down the side farthest from the centre of the town. Two men were lounging at the front door. Already she could smell the beer and feel the flies.
A large sign across part of the front told the passerby that this was the Dargaville hotel and that the proprietor was Thomas MacAlarney.
IV
Bob led Valerie down the near side of the house to the night entrance, along a narrow corridor to the hall, and up the back stairs to a room numbered nine without meeting a soul.
“Here you are,” he said. “Now I must get to the office. I’ll be back about six. If I were you I’d always use the side way. The front stairs come down beside the public bar. This is the quiet end. I’m on one side of you and Father Ryan is on the other. The bathroom is opposite us. So long.”
Bob’s parting smile was meant to be heartening. He was always forgetting that sympathy was wasted on a person who persisted in regarding everything that happened, whether good or bad, as some kind of adventure.
Valerie opened her door and carried her hand-bag inside. She threw her hat on the bed, dropped into the one plain chair, wiped her face, and began a survey of the possible horrors. She saw that the room was fairly clean, that the clothes cupboard would do, that there were two pillows to the single bed, an unusually generous equipment, that the quilt was aggressively white, that the tops of the chest of drawers and the washstand were not stained as badly as many she had met before, that the pattern on the one mat had faded to a less irritating result than newness would have been, and that the wall paper did not have the one sickly greenish-yellow tone she could not possibly have endured. The worst being thus satisfactorily absent she heaved a sigh of relief. There were flies, but she had had flies before, and most of them would go with the heat. She was no victim of optimism, but when she was using a present as a means to a future it was the future and not the present that conquered her senses and her imagination.
She walked to the window swishing out the flies. She was glad to see that it opened on the balcony and she hoped that she would have it mostly to herself. She looked across the river, and could just make out the rush-fringed edge of a large swamp. She turned back and smiled into the spotted mirror that hung above the chest of drawers.
“Well,” she thought, “we begin again.”
V
She sat down on her bed wondering whether her luggage would be brought up or whether she would have to go in search of it. She knew there was no service beyond the weekly cleaning of her room and the providing of meals. There had been no maid visible in the hall, and none would ever come. There were no bells to ring. Some time she would have to capture her chambermaid and see what could be done with her. She took some soap out of her bag and a towel off the rack, and walked out to the bathroom. A porter was dragging her largest trunk down the hall linoleum.
“Fine,” she said as he came up to her. “I was wondering what I should do about it.”
He straightened his back, and to her surprise touched his forehead. She looked into the approving blue eyes of a thin, seedy Irishman whose favourite occupation was advertised somewhat blatantly in the colour of his nose.
“Ah, and it’s the heat you’ve brought, miss,” he said, wiping his face with his sleeve.
“More than usual?”
“Shure. It has been cool till this. I’m thinking it won’t be very comfortable here for a lady.”
“I shall be all right. I can be all right anywhere. Do you belong to the house?”
“Indeed and I do.”
“Fine. If I get into any trouble I’ll come to you. What’s your name?”
“It’s Michael O’Shay I am, miss. And I’ll tell Nancy to take the good care of you. I’ll be after her when I go down.”
“No, no, thanks. Don’t do that. The girls are probably resting now, and if they are not they ought to be. There’s nothing I want, really. I hate disturbing tired girls.”
He beamed at her.
“God bless you for a kind one, miss. He might have made a few more while He was about it. But I must be after working.”
When he was returning for the last time Valerie wondered whether she should tip him. She wished she had asked Bob what the custom here was. The minute she reached for her purse she saw she had made a mistake.
“Nothing from a lady like yourself, miss,” said Michael with a hurt look.
“Indeed no, Michael. But I want you to go and get me a bottle of ale, and bring it up here. Can you do that for a thirsty person?”
“Indeed and I can,” and with a look that included her in a secret fellowship, he went off to return in a few minutes with a bottle, a corkscrew, a tumbler and sixpence change.
She waved back the coin. “You must drink that to me for good luck in Dargaville,” she said gaily.
“God love you, miss, and there’ll never be anything but good luck for the likes of you.” He opened her bottle, touched his forehead again, and backed out gallantly.
Valerie drank her ale, and after a cold shower began to unpack. She heard no sound immediately about her till Bob knocked on her door at a quarter past six.
VI
She looked with interest round the large dining-room, for there were all sorts of men sitting at the small square tables. Bob led her to one in the corner almost under their rooms.
“Is Mac here?” she asked as they sat down.
“No. He eats late. You may not see him for days, and he won’t take any notice of you.”
She looked at the place set opposite his. “Who sits there?”
“Father Ryan. I thought you would not mind. He has always sat here. He is a charming gentleman. He’s away to-night. Why, here’s Benton.”
He rose to meet a large, loosely-built man in dusty riding clothes who sauntered with spurs jingling down the room towards them. Roger Benton was wiping his face with a handkerchief that would have scandalized his wife at that moment. He held out a big hairy, tanned hand to Valerie and dropped into the priest’s chair.
“I meant to be at the steamer, Miss Carr. I promised my wife I would, but my horse cast a shoe the other side of Te Koperu, and delayed me. How’s your father?” He looked at her out of gay lazy bluish-gray eyes.
“Fine, thanks.” She looked him over quickly, liking his boyish frankness and country comfortableness.
“Join us for dinner, Benton,” said Bob.
“No, thanks, I’m on my way to the camp. I just dropped in to greet Miss Carr. I hope you will like us.” His eyes rested on her again with a vague intentness. He thought her very stunning.
“I hope so too,” she retorted mischievously.
“It’s a small town but we manage to knock some fun out of it,” he went on.
“I shall like a great deal about it, but I’m not promising to like the things I shall be expected to like.”
He looked a little uncertainly into her amused eyes. “Mrs. Benton wants you to come along on Sunday afternoon to the camp, you and Lorrimer,” he said.
She hesitated a moment. But the word camp had magic in it. And then she felt she could hardly refuse this first invitation. “Thanks. I shall like to come.”
“That’s good. Anything you want me for, Lorrimer?” He stood up.
“I think not. Things are going all right.”
Roger went off, nodding at every table he passed.
Then Bob turned to the waitress who had come up and was standing glancing at Valerie.
“Lizzie,” he said informally, “this is Miss Carr.”
Valerie smiled up at her and without a word established between herself and the girl the understanding that existed between her and all people who ever served her. When Lizzie had departed with their order she turned to Bob.
“What did he mean by the camp?”
“It’s out on the coast. The elite have cottages there.”
VII
After dinner when Bob had returned to the office Valerie continued her unpacking. She shed most of her clothes for the purpose. Through her open window came intermittent sounds of voices and laughter from the bar, but nothing passed by along the street. A little before ten o’clock something brought her upstanding, taut, like a listening animal. She bounded out on the balcony, forgetting she had on only a shirt and bloomers and was visible from the street. She looked upstream whence the exciting sounds had come, and saw a green and a red light and then the outlines of a little steamer and a big ship filigreed against the dull radiance of a hazy rising moon. She drew a long breath as the small boat tugged and the great ship glided past the hotel, so near that she could have thrown a stone upon the decks. She heard the sounds of strong, hoarse voices and the clanking of chains mingling with the pompous throb of the engine in the tug. She blew a sentimental wish to the unknown men on their way to sea, and she stood till she could no longer see any evidences of their passing.... Then she was arrested by another sound. Through the clammy silence of the night there advanced and retreated the unmistakable roll of the ocean breaking on a long beach. She hung her head over the balcony the better to hear.
She heard Bob’s steps along the hall. She rushed to his window and poked in her head.
“Bob,” she began excitedly, as he opened his door. “You didn’t tell me we could hear the sea.”
“Val! Good heavens, what are you doing? What? The sea? Yes, the coast is only four miles away.” He came up to the window. He was very tired.
“But, Bob, how wonderful! Do we always hear it?”
“Yes, when it is still. I say, Val, really, you must not go out on the balcony like that. The pub is closing, and the men come round this side of the house to the stables. They mustn’t see us here. You know, you must be a little discreet.”
“Oh hell, Bob. You are getting to be an old grandmother. Good-night.” She ran her hands viciously through his hair, patted his cheek more kindly, and with an absurdly furtive air crept back along the wall to her window.
The weary Bob was asleep in a quarter of an hour, but Valerie lay for some time listening to the surf beating like a pulse in the heart of the stifled town.
VIII
When she walked into the dining-room the next morning Bob had vanished and Father Ryan was drinking his second cup of coffee. There were a few stragglers scattered at the tables, men who had lived not wisely but too well in the recent past and looked as if they were doubtful about the blessing of surviving to greet another day.
The priest rose and drew out her chair. Father Ryan was small and thin and exquisite. His hair was like white floss silk, and his bright blue eyes were both keen and mild. He looked at Valerie as the other men had done with obvious admiration, but the quality of his approval was a very different thing.
“I hope the heat did not keep you from sleep,” he said, after they had greeted each other.
“It did not, thanks. I slept much too well. I meant to be down at eight. But that’s not the first good intention of mine that has gone wrong.”
She was pleased to see that he gave her a quick smile.
As she ate her eggs and bacon she asked him questions about his parish. She was glad to think she would have his voice to listen to, for he spoke the most beautiful English in the world, the English of the Irish scholar. He sat with her till she had finished, and bowed her through the door with a manner that made her feel as if she were in a mediæval tale.
She could see little of the town as she walked to the office. She had no idea of the extent of it as it straggled along the river with its broad streets and many open lots. It was almost entirely a one-story town, the largest on the Wairoa, and the only one to have banks and now a paper of its own. It was the terminus of a railway that ran eighteen miles north into one of the finest kauri forests of the country. But nobody knew just why it had happened to grow where it did, for it was on the narrowest part of a great barren tongue of land that stretched from the Kaipara heads for the best part of sixty miles between the river and the sea with not a thing to attract settlement except the depth of the river on that side. It had no water supply save the uncertain one of rainfall. It faced a great swamp. But it was now the growing town of a prosperous and booming timber and dairying district.
It was the river that most interested Valerie as she walked along. It was the best commercial waterway in the North Island, and on its upper reaches it was hauntingly beautiful. It stretched away into gumfields and remote valleys. Little steamers and launches fussed continually upon its strong current, and at any moment a ship might come gliding round a bend.
But Dargaville had its distinction. It was blasé, and liked to say the world came to its doors. It was used to the unusual, to men who had roamed the whole earth, to all the types that go down to the sea in ships. Governors and members of Parliament passed through it to shoot. Newly arrived Englishmen came spying out the land. Remittance men came to its banks to cash orders signed by titled names. And it was used, too, to seeing bodies that had been fished out of the river covered with an old sheet and carried on a stretcher into Mac’s hotel. It was used to seeing the constable marching solemnly between painted ladies who had just arrived from Auckland, and who had to be returned by the steamer by which they came without damage to the morals of the youth of the town and before they could escape to the bush.
Dargaville had not been astonished when a woman doctor took charge of the Aratapu hospital, three miles down the river. So it had taken calmly the information that the new paper would have a woman on the editorial staff. Nor was it unduly surprised to learn later that the woman was young and amazing, and that she was living in Mac’s hotel.
Valerie walked on as Bob had directed her till she came to a low, narrow building standing between two open lots. The paper had been housed in a store on the fringe of the town near the railway station. There she saw trucks of sawn timber which was being loaded into a brig at the short wharf. Train sheds blackened by smoke straggled along both sides of the line in the direction of the ticket office which was a couple of blocks inland. She crossed the street with her eyes on the unpretentious construction that was to house more than she ever dreamed. A newly painted sign, The Dargaville News, dwarfed its size and diminished the proportions of the one broad window, which had been whitewashed inside half-way up. She knew it was probably the smallest and meanest newspaper office in the colony, but she had learned not to despise beginnings.
As she stood a moment considering it she could hear Bob’s voice inside giving orders to somebody, and the monotonous throb of machinery in the rear. Feeling as if she had cast something behind her forever, she put her foot on the log step and jumped into a narrow passage partitioned from the office for a distance of six feet by glazed glass. Past it she looked across a high sloping counter down at Bob. He was leaning over a desk by the opposite wall, and while he wrote he was telling a dark boy of extraordinary aliveness to get a certain advertisement back from the foreman. Valerie whistled the notes of the tui’s spring song. Bob spun round on his chair and got to his feet. The dark boy, after one unabashed stare at her, darted into the composing-room to tell the staff that she had come.
“I’m ready for anything,” she said.
“I never knew you when you weren’t,” grinned Bob.