The Strange Attraction/Chapter 13
CHAPTER XIII
I
“Well Miss Freedom, where are you now?”
“I don’t know.”
The question had been asked with a quizzical raising of the black eyebrows and had been answered with a comically pathetic frowning of the amber ones.
It was the following afternoon, and they lounged together on a rug that Dane had spread on a flat rock above the river at one end of the garden. They had been dozing with their arms about each other. She had waked up finally at the pressure of kisses on her mouth and the question. She had drawn herself up resting her chin on her knees, and was looking down on the river.
“No thoughts at all on freedom?” teased Dane.
“No thoughts about anything,” she answered, gazing into space across the river.
He lit his pipe and puffed contentedly, turning often to look at her, vividly conscious now of her every movement. Fantails flew inquisitively about them, and a pair of wood pigeons courted each other with a shameless lack of vocal reticence upon the branches of a totara tree. The hum of bees in the garden behind them was a drowsy and insistent monotone. He felt wonderfully relaxed and happy.
Valerie was full of the glory of this lifting of herself off the earth. She had never supposed that the man existed who could bring love to her clothed with the beauty and delicacy of some romantic dream. But wonder of wonders this man beside her had brought it to her that way.
Dane envied her her complete submersion. He was happier than he had expected to be again, and was not disposed to question his happiness, but he was less overwhelmed by it, much more conscious of the world about him, and when the tea-gong sounded he was glad to hear it, whereas Valerie had forgotten there was a world in which tea was served.
He got to his feet and pulled her up to him.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Tea, dear.”
“Oh! Are we really on the earth? I must wake up.”
“Don’t. You are very charming asleep. You remember I fell from grace the very first time I saw you so.”
She flashed a brilliant smile at him. “So you did. It was mean to steal a march on me like that.”
They came out upon the path and hand in hand went up the verandah steps.
It did not surprise Lee in the least to find them both in the hammock. Valerie could not see that any signal passed between him and Dane. But the boy stayed to pour for them. With perceptions of his own he had put on the tray valuable little vermilion cups that Dane never used for himself. That was the only sign he gave that he understood this was an occasion. He enquired solemnly of Valerie as to her taste in sugar and cream. He handed them their cups and the biscuit jar. He put the table beside the hammock and transferred smoking apparatus to it. Then he moved off like a leaf going by on the wind.
Dane looked after him with huge appreciation. “Perfect, isn’t he?” he said.
“I think they’re both wonderful. But then everything about you is. Where did you get them?”
“I found them in China and arranged to have them come out to me. I couldn’t live without them now.”
“How long have you had them?”
“Oh, years, I forget exactly. I sent them back once for a while to see their people when I came over here with my wife. She wanted to live in hotels, and they were not happy.”
“They seem to be such an astonishing combination.”
“Yes, aren’t they? They beat us Anglo-Saxons hollow at that. You see how they run the house. They do menial labour as if it were a sacrament. They spiritualize it. It never spoils their manners and habits. There is not a trace of vulgarity about them. I never think of them as servants. They are presences to me, and when I want them to be company they are. They never make a noise. I rarely go into the kitchen, but when I do it is never in a mess. They never get irritated. They never seem to be tired. They understand me in some extraordinary way. They know how to take care of me when I am ill. They pay no attention to my irritation, my restlessness, my nerves. They are adaptable. I think they are happy here. I’ve tutored them in English and in French and in our money system. I’ve taught them to play chess, and most of the time they can beat me at it. How they find time to have the vegetable garden they do I don’t know, but a Chink of any kind can make things grow by looking at them, I think. But the thing that interests me most is their ungetatableness, if I may make so clumsy a word, their subtlety. I never know what these boys are thinking about, and sometimes I would give my soul to know.”
“Well, that’s the Eastern problem, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“That you can’t trust them?”
“My dear, you can trust a cultured Chinaman as you can an Englishman.”
“But I mean—in a crisis, with women, or in a panic.”
“Of course you can. You’ve got in mind the ignorant and superstitious coolie, but what about the ignorant and superstitious cockney or any other corresponding class? Both have to be kept decent as a last resort at the nose of a pistol. There’s no difference there.”
“And you think there’s no difference between us and them?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. The Chinese are superior to us in subtlety, endurance and some mental capacities. And they never needed to have lawyers till we obtruded our pleasant casualness about debts upon them.”
She laughed. “You may be right, dear. But I should be surer of the Anglo-Saxon mind for all that.”
“H’m! How much do you think you know about mind? What does one ever know about anybody’s mind? Some of us fuss because we don’t know what is going on on the other side of the world. Why, the fact is we don’t know what is going on in the same room with us. Sit down at Mac’s to dinner with twenty men, your Anglo-Saxon mind. You don’t know how many of them are heading for black despair, or why, or how many of them have the least idea of what they’re after in the world, or what things really matter to any of them, and if you knew them for ten years you might not find out. You don’t know what goes on inside any person.”
Valerie wriggled to a sitting position in the hammock.
“I’ve often thought that about you. All kinds of things go on inside you at the back of those eyes of yours, things I shall never know.”
“Nothing that need ever frighten you, dear, really.” He put a hand on one of hers.
“I don’t know. The despairs that people face are often more fearful to others than to themselves.”
He gave her a quick penetrating look, and then a whimsical smile crossed his face.
“Valerie Carr, this is a spring day. And I’d like another cup of tea.” But he thought of her remark many times in the next week or two.
Valerie carefully manœuvred herself out of the hammock and sat down at the tea-table.
Dane watched her, amused that it should delight him so much to have her raise the cream jug over his cup and watch him till he nodded “enough,” amused that he should find it so important to balance the hammock carefully while she got back beside him, and then so entertaining that they should drink sip by sip to each other, their eyes shining across the rims of those elegant red cups.
When Lee had taken the things away Dane insisted on music. For nearly two hours he lay listening to her, thinking it a wonderful thing that life could still make dreams come true, and anticipating the time when she would be there with him to play to him when he wanted her to.
Thinking of it he could even be philosophical about the fact that he had promised to have an early dinner and to run her afterwards in his launch to the Aratapu hospital to see Bob. He knew she would have preferred to stay with him, but he admired her all the more because she had not wavered for an instant about going.
II
It was the next Wednesday night before Valerie could take an hour to go out on the river with him again. She had had moments of regretting that they had not waited till the election was over. And then she told herself that the strain of waiting would have been worse than the reaction from letting go.
Dane had run the launch into a lagoon at one end of the big swamp opposite Dargaville and they sat on the floor at the stern with their arms about each other. They had been working together all day sternly repressing all signs of their feeling for each other. And after three long days she was very tired. He was determined to relax and rest her, but his first words after they settled had results strangely remote from his intention.
“I wish the darned thing were over,” he grumbled. “How soon afterwards can you get away and marry me?”
He felt her stiffen against him. She withdrew her arm, turned a little and stared at him.
“Why, Dane—you don’t have to ask me to do that!”
There was enough of a young moon for them to see the startled questioning on each other’s faces.
“Have to!” he repeated. “My dear girl, what do you mean by that remark?”
“Do you mean that you have meant marriage—all along?” She did not know why his look made her flush to the roots of her hair, but it did.
“I say, my child,” he said very quietly, “I want to know why you have assumed I meant anything else.”
“I—I don’t know,” she said helplessly.
“Oh, I know. You did take some notice of gossip after all, didn’t you?”
She drew a deep breath. She was speechless.
“You haven’t thought of marrying me?” he went on, in the same quiet way.
“No.”
“I’m very sorry.” Something about the crushed way he said it, and the way he moved just a little from her, snapped her control.
“Oh, now you don’t understand,” she gasped, and she dropped her head into her hands, and began to sob.
Dane pulled himself together and put an arm about her shoulders. “I’m going to understand before I’m a day older. Stop crying, Valerie, dear. I can’t stand it.”
It was the irritation in his tone that helped her to control. He particularly loathed seeing a woman cry. And then he was annoyed with himself that after all his experience he should be as much at sea with a woman as he now felt he was with her.
“Dane, will you be frank with me? Because it’s all going to be spoiled—awful if you’re not.”
“As far as I know how to be, my dear, yes.”
“Why do you wish to marry me?”
“Why—why—because I care for you in the way I do, Because I want you to come and live with me.”
“You’re not thinking of my father, my family ———”
“What the hell do you mean, Valerie?” he said with a burst of anger that startled himself and her. “Good God! I thought you cared for me. What is the matter with me that I never can understand your sex? And honestly I did think you were above insult.”
He sprang to his feet and stumbled along to the bow and stood there looking away from her. He was so hurt that he was blind.
And Valerie saw how badly she had blundered. “Dane, will you please come back to me?” she called, struggling for control.
Because he was above foolish temper he turned almost at once and went slowly back and sat on the seat above her. She got up, and sitting very tensely with her hands gripped about her knees, she looked at him.
“Please, Dane, I put that very badly. I thought that after the way I’ve talked about marriage you knew I didn’t want to marry anybody, but that you were afraid of the trouble dad and the family might make for me if you did not. What I thought was that you were not considering your own real wishes at all, that you were just being—well, conventionally decent about it. But I see that you never took the things I’ve said about marriage, or a career, or living my own life any more seriously than anybody else has ever done. And the trouble is, that however mad I seem to you and everybody else, I am serious about it.”
“You can be as serious as you like about it,” he said. “I know well enough you’re serious about it. But marrying me will neither kill your career nor stop you living your own life.”
She turned her troubled eyes full upon him.
“You don’t believe me,” he said harshly.
“Please, Dane, oh please,” her voice trembled. But as he sat aloof and made no move to soothe her she controlled herself.
“Will you listen to me if I talk?”
“Yes, of course.”
It was a cold tone, hard to talk against. What she had said to hurt him like that she did not know. But she forced herself to go on.
“I suppose I’m morbid about freedom. I had to fight so for every bit of mine that I’ve swung to the other direction. And you see I heard such rubbish talked about ceremonies, all kinds of ceremonies, christenings, confirmations, weddings, everybody confusing the form with the feeling, or rather taking no account of the feeling at all—and you see the feeling was everything to me, and I came to throw all the forms overboard, all of them, I despise them. And I have made my own ceremonies—I say things to myself, and I try to live by them. On Sunday night, before I went to sleep, I had my ceremony for you ———”
She found herself being swung over into his arms, and her lips stilled by his.
“I’m sorry I was angry, Valerie dear.”
“You weren’t angry. You were hurt, and I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“I’m sure you didn’t.”
He sat still for some time, his hold of her tense, but he kept his face away from her, raised as if he were keeping a fixed gaze upon a star that twinkled feebly above the valley horizon. Presently he looked down at her.
“What do you intend to do with me, Valerie?”
“Do with you?”
“That is what I asked.”
She raised herself and he released her without pressure.
“Why, Dane, can’t we go on loving one another?”
“I hope so. I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? Then, Dane, you are thinking of something—of something besides just us.”
“We are not on a desert island, child.”
She became belligerent at once. “Dane, I will not have my father or my family or anybody dictate to me what I shall do or how I shall live. I will not have you think of them. And besides, do they have to know? Aren’t we equal to keeping this to ourselves? I shall not tell a soul, not a single one. I’m fond of several women, but I would not trust one of them to keep a love secret. We can manage here perfectly well. Nobody at Mac’s knows what I do or where I go. I never began by telling them. Nobody there will ever spy on me.”
“How long had you thought of staying in Dargaville?”
“Why—I—when I came I thought of two years.”
“What do you propose to do with me at the end of that time?”
She looked away from him and did not answer.
“Did you put anything about time into your ceremony the other night?”
She did not answer.
“What did you put into that ceremony, Valerie?”
“I shan’t tell you.”
A smile spread over his face and lit it up as a field of golden grain lights up a brown hillside. She was so glad to see it that she flung her arms round him. But he responded only soberly, and with a very chaste kiss, and she sat up again.
With a comical resigned air he took out his pipe and began to smoke. She knew perfectly well that the question was not settled between them, but she did not know what was in his mind. She began to smoke too, and they were quiet for a while.
“Valerie, I want you to think about marrying me,” he said very softly, at length.
“I can’t avoid thinking about it now,” she answered, but her tone was not as compliant as it might have been.
“I want to know just one thing more to-night. Is it anything about me that you’re afraid of?” He looked into her face as he said it.
“Why, I love you, Dane. I couldn’t possibly love you if I were afraid of you.”
“You’re quite sure? It’s not personal at all?”
“No, it is not! Good heavens! What is the matter with this world that nobody ever can believe that I have a principle, an idea I want to live by! I’m not the first woman in the world who didn’t want to marry, and yet everybody treats me as if I were. I’m not the first woman to say I want a career and a lover instead of husband and children. Women have been acting that all down the ages, and yet I have to scream and yell and fight to make anyone take any notice of me. And you who have been all round the world, I have to shout it at you. Will you understand me? I’m not domestic. I do not want to darn your socks. I do not want to put your slippers by the fire. I do not want to put buttons on your shirts. I do not want children. I’m probably a horrid unnatural brute, but I did not make myself, and I can’t make myself like the women who want to do these things. I do want to love you. I do want to play the piano to you. I do want to talk to you. I do want to rest you. I do want to help you to forget the things in life you don’t like. And I do want—I do want—to take—some of the pain out of your eyes ———” Her voice broke, and she dropped her head in her hands.
For some seconds the only sound in the night was that of little fishes sporting around them in the shallow water.
Then Dane leaned towards her and kissed her neck and the back of her bowed head.
“Valerie, it’s just because you are what you are that I love you. And we won’t talk any more to-night.”
III
He was sorry to see when he walked into the office on Friday morning that she looked as if she had lain awake a good deal. He had himself in the meanwhile made up his mind that all his powers of persuasion should be used to get her to marry him. Though he despised the marriage ceremony as much as she did for the things it was used to cover he had a wholesome respect for it as a convenience in a crazy world. And he had never had any idea of carrying on a clandestine love affair with her with the danger he knew there was of being found out in a small place. And then he wanted her in peace, he wanted her with him. He wanted so much more than sex from her.
They greeted each other as they always did with impersonal warmth and were immediately plunged into the rush of the day. It was not till six o’clock, after the staff had all left that they were alone.
“Have you to work to-night?” he asked.
“Yes, but only for an hour and a half. What about you?”
“Oh, I’ve finished up with Johnson. So I’m going home. Shall you be able to come out on the river to-morrow afternoon?”
“Yes,” but she was disappointed that he said nothing of that evening.
“Good. I’d like to take you down towards Aoroa. Meet me by that bit of bush half a mile below Mac’s. You know it?”
“Yes, I know it.”
“All right. Be there by three.”
“Are you going now?”
“Yes, I’m going home. Good-night.” He kissed her lightly, smiled airily at her, and saluted her as he went past the counter. She stood up to watch him cross the street and get into the Diana and go off upstream.
As she ate her dinner and as she worked afterwards in the office she kept thinking he would come back. But he did not come back.
They met each other, however, gaily enough the next day, and she was delighted to find he showed no inclination to talk seriously. As the day was cool and showery she wore a tweed suit and carried a cloak as well, and he had on a light oilskin. The wind was strong at times and as they ran into the broader stretches the spray flecked their faces.
Valerie drew the fresh air into her lungs and felt relaxed. She was interested in seeing a part of the river she had not yet observed. With delight she watched Dane who always took a keen pleasure in getting what he could out of his engine, and who loved this inanimate thing of his that had brought him so much enjoyment. At intervals he turned and smiled at her, and she began to anticipate the evening and the charm of his old house. She was a little surprised to find he was going a good way down the river, and then that later on he headed the launch into a small sheltered bay with scattered bush about it.
“I thought it would be nice if we had a fire and a picnic here,” he said. “I brought food. We may have another shower, but a little damp won’t hurt you, will it?”
“Oh dear, no,” and she entered into the spirit of it willingly enough, though she had a vague feeling that she was being managed to some end.
The night came upon them before they had finished their meal. Dane piled driftwood upon the fire. They sat side by side to smoke with their arms about each other. They both knew they were shelving the subject they most wanted to talk about. And they were both irritated to think they would not have real peace again with each other till they had talked it out. A shower drove them to cover. But he did not suggest the cabin of the Diana, the one place where they would have kept dry. He drew her under a puriri tree, and they stood close together trying to avoid the drops. She began to see that he had no intention of taking her home with him that night.
“Well,” he began abruptly as they stood lit up occasionally by the sputtering flames of the fire, “have you thought about marrying me?”
“Of course I’ve thought about it.”
“It’s stopped raining.” He led the way back to the fire and respread a dry rug on the ground near.
“What’s the trouble, Valerie? We have to understand each other before we go any further, and I cannot see at all why you cannot go through the marriage ceremony with me. I know as well as you do that it is properly only a matter for statisticians. But you and I are too conspicuous to carry on any love affair without being found out.”
“Well, what on earth can they do to us if we are found out? I would have to leave the News, of course. But you said, didn’t you, that you wanted me to live with you?”
“As my wife, yes indeed.”
“You mean ———”
“I mean, my dear, that I’m not going to be happy about having you come there often in any other way. I don’t wish to be selfish in this business, but have you thought of me at all? Have you thought what it would look like if with my reputation I allowed you to come and live with me, or allowed you to become openly compromised with me? Of course I forgot it all myself last Saturday. I shall forget it again if you make me. But I do remember, however mad it may make you to hear it, that your father was the first man to call on me and to ask me to dine with him when I came up disgraced from Christchurch, and he is my lawyer. He might prefer a love affair to marriage if we could keep it quiet. But we couldn’t keep it quiet. I know the conventions of the world, my dear. It’s being found out that matters. But why are you so serious about the blooming ceremony? You are being conventional about it, not I. Why can’t we go through it and then ignore it and live by our own ceremony. That is the intelligent way to take it, child.”
She stared into the fire saying nothing.
“Valerie, I have to know what is in your mind about this. What are you afraid of?”
“Dane, I lived with somebody else once.”
“I have wondered if you had.”
“You have!”
“Yes. Why, you haven’t been afraid to tell me that, have you?”
“No, not exactly afraid. But—will that—do you still wish to marry me?”
“Are you trying to be funny, or what?”
She turned from the fire to look steadily into his face.
“It would be all right to put that question to a boy of twenty-one, if you had been rotten enough to let a boy of twenty-one fall in love with you without being told it, but to put it to me is ridiculous. You know, I’m beginning to see that you are not as unconventional as you think you are; that was an absurdly conventional question, and it had behind it assumptions that I am an intolerant and hypocritical blockhead.”
Her face broke into a smile.
“Yes, for God’s sake let’s laugh at ourselves. This seriousness is awful.”
“How old are you?” she asked abruptly.
“Thirty-seven, and old and full of days at that.”
“I’m twenty-six.”
“And absurdly young for that.”
“I am not.”
“Well, you seem so to me, but I like you that way.”
He lit a cigarette for her and drew the rug about her. The wind had gone down, and the night was fresh but not cold. The growing crescent moon peered down at them through a space between two trees.
“Haven’t you a good deal more to say?” he asked presently, with a teasing smile.
“Look here, you’re not going to laugh me into marrying you, you know,” she said fiercely.
“I know no better way.”
She caught his nearest hand and kissed it, and continued to hold it between her own.
“I suppose I am being too serious,” she said thoughtfully. “But that other affair taught me a lot. It all went wrong, you see. I don’t know now how I ever came to begin. It only lasted three months, and it is all over and done with.”
“Is it really? I didn’t know that anything was ever over and done with.”
“Oh, now, you know what I mean.”
“Yes, I won’t interrupt. Go on.”
“Well, then, because we hadn’t married, we got out of it without any trouble.”
Dane took his pipe out of his mouth and waited a moment before he spoke.
“Really? You got out of it without any trouble? Then it must have been a highly immoral relation, without a scrap of feeling on either side.”
“I see. Of course I don’t mean it that way.”
“No, you meant that you didn’t have to go through the business of getting a divorce.”
“Yes.”
“And you don’t want to marry me because you’re sure it won’t last long and that you will wish to leave me or I you.”
“Oh, I’m not sure of anything. Oh dear, why do we have to talk about it?” She dropped her head in her hands again.
“Yes, I think it’s a beastly bore myself. It would be so much pleasanter to drift on with our thumbs to our noses, and much more exciting, and incidentally that end you are anticipating so seriously would be much nearer.”
He relit his pipe and went on smoking. Then he got up and put more wood on the fire, and after raking in the straggled pieces, he stood looking down at her. The fitful light showed him that her face was absurdly troubled and serious. He dropped down beside her and laid his pipe on the ground.
“Valerie, I ask you to go through the marriage ceremony with me because it will save us a lot of trouble. I don’t attach any more meaning to the damned thing than you do. Everybody jeers at it to-day; I mean everybody with any knowledge of human beings, and uses it merely as a passport, and it happens to be a perfectly good passport. I’m one with you in making our own ceremony, the thing we shall live by, or try to live by, the thing that shall be at least a living force to us. Now take your own objections to marriage. You don’t have to be domestic for me. The boys run my house much better than you could. You don’t have to look after me when I am nervous—or seedy. I much prefer that you should not. I don’t ask you to change your ways and I don’t propose to change mine for you. And then—I’m not asking you to have children. I have always wanted kids, but somehow I have always cared for women who did not. I have to accept that ———”
“Oh, Dane, I cannot help it,” she broke in angrily. “Don’t you suppose that if I could be different I would? Do you think I’ve had an easy life trying to be myself? If I’m not to be myself what the devil am I to be? A shadow of my mother, my father, my sisters, my aunts? What? If I could be a nice plump purring bovine sentimental ass, slobbered over by men and called ‘that sweet thing,’ everybody would let me alone. But I can’t be that thing. I look at women like that and they make me sick. I’m sorry I don’t want children, but I don’t want them. I’m afraid of them. Children do awful things to you. There are two things in this world that kill courage in people, children and possessions. And I won’t have either of them. The terrible thing about possessions is that once you acquire them you will sell your soul to keep them, and the terrible thing about children is that you want possessions for them you never had for yourself, and so you get fears for them you never had for yourself.”
“Yes, a number of the old religious orders had that idea.”
“I don’t care who had it. I’ve learned it from watching the people about me. All the fight goes out of people when they get a house and furniture and a child or two. I mean the fight about ideas. Of course they fight more than ever for a bigger house and more furniture.”
“All right, dear. What has all that got to do with marrying me? We’ve settled the children, and my possessions are willed to the Sydney Museum. Under no circumstances can you have them. I’ve only just enough income to feed you. I shall have to work overtime to buy you jewellery ———”
Valerie laughed helplessly.
“Oh, Dane, what am I to do with you? You don’t see it at all. I want to go on with my work. I want to stay on the paper.”
“Well, stay on it, if you want to, as long as you want to. And, my dear child, I’m not supposing we are any different from lots of other people. Love will change with us, and if it becomes something you want no longer, well, I want you to understand that you will be free to go. I couldn’t bear to have anything near me that did not wish to stay. And when you wish it you will find nothing easier than getting a divorce from me.”
“Oh, please, please ———”
“Why am I not to mention the thing that is looming largest in your mind? I wish to impress on you that the things you are afraid of are the least of this business between you and me. The marriage ceremony, the divorce, mere forms easily managed for people like us. But you seem to be overlooking the real thing. I’m not asking you to do any more than you are now committed to doing. You want to live with me for a time. You don’t know how long, and I’m sure I don’t. You’ve fallen in love with me, and you have told yourself that if love came to you as you wanted it you would have it. I think you’re quite right, and I hope I’m going to be happy because it happened to be me. And I know that because you are what you are, you are going to be chained far more by your own compulsions than you are by any formal ceremony. Now, since you have let yourself in for the big thing, why on earth be so serious about the little one?”
He put an arm about her shoulder and stared up at the moon.
“Please don’t think I don’t respect your stand,” he went on. “It’s a far bigger thing to have your own unwritten laws and to live by them than it is to be swayed by mere convention. You could stand in the middle of the ruin of convention and keep your ideals. You would not succumb as so many so-called virtuous women succumb on board ship, or in the islands, or in places where conventions have lapsed, simply because everybody was running amuck around you. All I’m asking of you is that we do the thing that will help us to keep this relation fine as long as possible here. And there can be only one reason now why you won’t do it, and that, because you don’t trust me.”
He took her face in his hands and held it and looked into it.
She was not sure whether she did or not, but she could never have looked into his eyes and said she did not. She knew well enough that he had every intention then of being decent if their relation broke up, but love was such a queer thing, it could fight so desperately and to the last ditch to preserve itself, as she had learned. However, it was to his intention that she answered.
“I do trust you. It isn’t that.”
He dropped her face and with a quick movement got to his feet, filled now with resentment at the stubborn fighter in her. He looked up at the west where clouds were mounting to the zenith.
“It’s going to rain again. I’d better take you back.”
Hurt by a sense of misunderstanding they both got silently into the launch. He carefully arranged every protection against the coming shower, insisting that she take the whole of the rug. He lit the lantern at the bow and headed out into the river.
The trouble was that Valerie could not let go all at once the things she had been telling herself for years. It seemed to her it would be a weak thing to succumb to the first attack. And it must be confessed that she would have loved to put up a fight and stand with Dane against the world. She was young enough and reckless enough to love the idea of it. She did not see then that the fundamental difference between them was that she was a fighter and thought a great deal worth fighting for, whereas he was not a fighter and thought little worth a row.
And then she was much too sure of herself. She was inclined to overrate her accomplishment in this matter of herself versus the world, to discount the support she had received from certain factors in her life. She had had, and always would have in her own country, the loyalty of her class whether she wanted it or not, and the power of money to shut mouths. She had never had the poverty that forces one to hunt for bread against prejudice. She had had added to the force of her own personality the glamour of her set, despise it as she might.
And Dane saw this very clearly, and was annoyed that a girl of her perceptions did not see it as he did. He was angry now that they had had to have all this talk when he had wanted merely to feel. And then he was chagrined that she could stand like that against him.
He made no response at first when she put her arm round him. She had to withdraw it when the shower descended upon them.
“You’d better go into the cabin,” he said.
“I don’t want to. I won’t get wet.”
In spite of the cloud between them they rather enjoyed the speeding of the launch through the rain. Dane drove recklessly, but the river was wide here and he knew it well. For a time the stars and the moon were blotted out and the Wairoa was a stretch of blackness in a world only a shade less dark. He began to feel less irritable. After all, he did not believe she would resist him much longer.
She sat trying to think over all he had said, and over some of the things that had not yet been said at all. She began to see that she had been thinking far more of her wishes and her convictions than of his. Indeed, she saw with a pang of self-accusation that she had been thinking mostly of herself.
The shower passed, and the moon and stars came out the clearer for the freshening of the atmosphere. Valerie shook the rug and assured Dane that she was not wet. Then in readjusting it she sat as close to him as she could and put her arm about him once more. He tried to steel himself against response. He wondered if she suspected his resolution and was trying to undermine it. He tried to think of something else, but the vision of her going with him into his old house began to obsess him. In spite of the cool night they grew warm sitting side by side. But he told himself this would never do, and he whipped up his courage and resolution, and when they came opposite the southern end of Dargaville he spoke the first word that had been spoken for some time and asked her where he should land her.
She did not answer for a minute. “Oh anywhere,” she said very coldly, moving away from him.
The Diana ran on for some distance before she came to a standstill near the bank.
Valerie stood up at once without a word, letting the rug fall at her feet, and she moved towards the centre of the boat.
Dane gave up at once. He restarted the engine and swung the launch back into midstream. Then he moved forward to Valerie who had stopped by the cabin.
“Will you please land me here at once,” she said, in a voice shaken with anger and humiliation.
“I will not. Not now,” he said, as his arms went round her.
IV
“Dane, would it hurt you to tell me that tale? I’d like to know the truth about it.”
“The truth?” He smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “I won’t promise you the truth. But I could give you my version.”
“That will do,” she said.
It was Sunday afternoon a week later. They were sitting on the top of the range behind his house with a fine view spread out before them. The showery weather had cleared the air, and the day was fresh and crystalline. The two Airedales were skirmishing around them.
Dane looked off into space for some minutes.
“What a fool one can be,” he said, half to himself. Then he looked at Valerie, who like himself was hatless, lounging easily on the grass-tufted rock beside him.
She flashed a merry look at him. “Go on then with the tale of a fool.”
“I don’t know where to begin. It was always the tale of a fool. You see, I’ve never known what to do with your sex.”
“I haven’t noticed any deficiency in that direction.”
“You will, before you’re finished with me.”
“Look here, you always put it that way, as if I were managing this business.”
“You are, Miss Superman.”
“Dane, I will not be compared with that dreadful creature. But please, tell me the story. It doesn’t hurt you any more, does it?” She put out a hand which he took and kissed.
“No, not now.” He put more tobacco into the bowl of his pipe, and then as if changing his mind put it down on the ground, and drew up his knees.
“You know the names of the women concerned, I suppose.”
“The Goldens and Denisthornes are the only ones I know. Were there any more?”
“No. Those are enough. My wife had met Mrs. Golden in Sydney, and liked her, God knows why, and when we came over to Christchurch the Goldens met us, and invited us to dinner. Things were going wrong, indeed had been for some time between my wife and myself. I didn’t care about the people she seemed to like, and I didn’t like the Goldens, either of them, but I went, and at that first dinner we met the Denisthornes. I liked them both and we began to meet them everywhere around. Mrs. Denisthorne attracted me a good deal, and I knew I attracted her. I thought I was being careful—and then Denisthorne had to go to America.”
Dane picked up a stone and threw it down the hillside and watched it land in the head of a tree-fern.
“My wife and I had come to a stage where we could not go on. I did not know till afterwards that she had fallen in love with a rich Melbourne man, and that she was only too glad of an excuse to leave me and go back to Australia. And I think that before she went she must have asked Mrs. Golden to keep an eye on me. Mrs. Golden had been doing that. I suppose a man is a cad to belittle a woman who gets infatuated about him. I have tried to see the Mrs. Goldens of the world as a doctor sees them. But it isn’t easy. I would as soon be in a room with a boa constrictor smiling pleasantly at me as I would with Mrs. Golden. She was clever enough while my wife was there not to let her see anything. After she was gone she went off her head. She kept on sending me invitations which I never accepted, but the trouble was, as they were at the head of everything, I kept meeting them everywhere. And she was very hospitable to Mrs. Denisthorne. Phew! She was a devil.”
“Well, dear, Mrs. Denisthorne and I fell down, of course. I’ve nothing to say for myself. I wanted her. My marriage had been very unhappy. It had been a penance. Serves me right. I went into those things without thinking. And so I cared a lot about Mrs. Denisthorne. She was very charming. I saw she was afraid of Mrs. Golden. It seems that Mrs. Golden had wanted Denisthorne herself years before. In fact, she seems to have wanted almost everybody. You can see the situation. She had been lying in wait to get back at Mrs. Denisthorne. And my wife came back and sued me for divorce, and Denisthorne came back ———”
Dane paused for a few seconds.
“No man has ever made me feel such a beastly rotter as Denisthorne did. It always hurts me to think of it. He understood too much. He forgave his wife. He forgave me. And he cared, cared awfully. He begged me to let the thing go through without a fight. It would have been silly to fight, anyway. We had been too well trapped. So it went through quietly. The papers printed nothing but the bare fact. I saw Denisthorne wanted his wife, and I saw she really wanted him. I told him I would get out quietly. But I reckoned without Mrs. Golden. And this is where the rest of the story begins.
“I was living in the Manipouri Hotel. One wet afternoon I went out of my room leaving it unlocked, and went to the room of an Australian who had just come, to plan with him that Lake Ada walking trip, which I wanted to do before I left the south. I yarned with him about two hours, and we drank, drank too much, and I had been pretty reckless for some time. It was well after six o’clock when I remembered I had to go out to an early dinner with some newspaper men. I went back to my rooms and found Mrs. Golden there. What I ever did to that woman to make her so mad I do not know. I had been courteous to her, but I swear I never gave her the least encouragement. I couldn’t. She was the last thing in the world I could bear. She was fat and gross! Horrible! Rapacious! And somehow she had gone mad about me. I suppose I was a cad. Certainly I was a God-damned fool. When I saw her come grinning at me I must have let her see what I thought of her. I’d had enough whisky to make me reckless. And no woman could ever forgive that, I know. I told her to get out at once, and when she didn’t, I did the unpardonable thing. I went down to the office. The manager happened to be there, and I swore at him and the clerks for allowing a woman to go up to my rooms, and I told him to go and get her out. He didn’t know who it was, and he went.
“No man in his senses would have behaved as I did, and of course I deserved to pay. Well, I don’t know what passed between the manager and Mrs. Golden, but when I tell you that Golden was one of the owners of the hotel, a little fact I did not know, you will see things. As I thought about it afterwards, I saw that being the kind of thing she was she could not trust me. So her idea was to get in first and do it quickly. What she told her husband I don’t know. Anyway I went off in blissful ignorance with the Australian the next day, and was away nearly a month and then I left him to go on to Dunedin while I went back to Christchurch. As we had been wandering about in the wilds I had heard nothing. I was met by the hotel manager who told me he was very sorry, but I could not stay in the hotel. I’ve never been so staggered in my life. I hunted up a journalist and wormed the whole story out of him. I suppose you know it. It was that I lured Mrs. Golden to my rooms when I was drunk, that I behaved disgustingly and practically assaulted her, and that I had been blackballed out of my club in consequence.
“Well, dear, I couldn’t take it in, not at all. Of course one hears that things like this happen. But to see myself the monster that rumour was painting me, well, it made me feel queer. I thought I was going mad. I told my friends what had happened and that I had the Australian as witness as to what time I went back to my room, and they believed me and started counter stories. And a few men advised me to fight it. Fight it! My God! What a sweet mess it would have been to air in the courts! And I had no money to fight it, and the Goldens were among the richest people in the country. And then I didn’t care. What was I to fight it for? The few men I cared about believed me, and to my astonishment Denisthorne was one of those who offered to lend me money. But all I wanted was to get away from that damned crowd and never have anything to do with their kind again. And then I saw I didn’t really care about them. I had imposed them on myself.
“But the thing did hurt me, absurdly so, it seems now. It was the malignancy in it, the willingness of so many people to come down on me, people I had never hurt, people I had never seen, the men who blackballed me out of that club, and it made me think all the more of the ones who stood by me. But it hit me hard. I had never passed a rumour on, or tried to disturb any man’s dreams of himself, and I had never allowed any woman to care for me if I was not prepared to see her through. And it all seemed so unfair. God knows I was glad to run away from it. I came up to Auckland. I was bitter and lonely and horribly sensitive about the whole thing. I wondered if the hotels would take me. I shall never forget my feeling as I went into the Star and gave my name. But they did, and the next day your father called on me and dined with me there. And I found the newspapermen had been written to by the fellows in Christchurch, and I was not without friends. That ought to have balanced me. But it didn’t seem as if anyone could help me. It was something I had to do for myself. I didn’t want to meet any one. I drifted on to the Bay of Islands and to Hokianga as if I were looking for something to pull me up.
“One night in a little pub at Hokianga I struck an Englishman, a strange chap. I don’t know what he had fled from. I never got near him. I can’t account for him at all. He didn’t drink to excess. He didn’t gamble. He didn’t have anything to do with any woman about. He apparently had a little money. He asked me to go home with him. I went. I stayed with him for four months. I was ill at first and he looked after me. Then I worked on his run with him. He was fattening cattle and clearing quite a large place. He wasn’t far from the Hokianga harbour. You know it? Well, I used to wander about it at night, and I think that it more than anything else brought me back to the world. I’d carried a pistol for some time, and had come near to using it. One night I sat on a little beach. It was a full moon and that harbour was the spirit of beauty itself. And I told myself it was a grand night and a grand place to die with or to come to some conclusion about living. It was funny how I did it. One can be such an incurable idiot! I sat down, and on one side of me I made a heap of pebbles each named with something I cared to live for, books I had not read, places I wanted to see, and so on, and on the other I put the stones named for the reasons for not living. It will amuse you to know I called one of them ‘women.’ Well, I was astonished to see that the arguments for going on were much more numerous than the arguments for shooting myself on the spot. I threw the pistol into the harbour and decided to go on. It gave me a curious feeling for days to go about thinking that I might have been dead, and that the thing was in my hands, and that I had put a real issue up to myself. I had drifted along so much of my life. I had a strange exhilaration. And so I came back to work and life, and now that you are going to marry me, Valerie dear—what! You are crying over that?”
He swung towards her and pulled her into his arms and kissed her wet eyes.
“Good Lord, my dear. It’s nothing to cry about on a spring afternoon. It’s funny, very funny to me now. Was it your vibrations wandering about the universe, I wonder, that caught me that night? Who knows? Oh, kiss me, old girl, and stop crying, for God’s sake.”