The Strange Attraction/Chapter 16
CHAPTER XVI
I
As far as Dargaville was concerned, Valerie’s marriage to Dane did not cause anything like the talk her staying on the paper afterwards aroused. It was strange that certain feminist claims were almost unheard of in the country that boasted the most advanced legislation in the world for women. A married woman who had struck disaster in her husband or in her financial affairs could, of course, earn her own living with the understanding and blessing of the community. But that a bride of established position should wish to do so was carrying the theory of independence a little further than it had so far been carried, even in that land. It could only mean, it was thought, that she was eccentric or unduly desirous of attention. Still, though it talked, Dargaville soon calmed down. It was her relatives who continued to be disgusted and indignant, and the more so as she utterly ignored their letters on the subject.
Dane went to Auckland two weeks after Davenport Carr’s visit, and when he returned he waited in the town till Valerie was finished on the paper and took her home with him. He had been away less than a week, but she had missed him, and she was delighted to get away this sizzling February day to the shades of his garden. She could have gone out in his absence, as he had begged her to, but she had not done so. She had walked out to the coast at night instead.
“Did you see dad?” she asked, when they were out in the launch.
“Yes, dear, I went to see him. I told you I was going on business.”
“Oh. And what did he say to you?”
“Well, he was rather pathetic, if you want to know. Absurdly hurt that you had not told him before about the marriage.”
“What! But he would have opposed it.”
“Yes, he would.”
“Well, Dane,” she stared at him.
“Absurd, I know, dear. But he is not opposing us now. He’s beastly humble.”
“You’ve made him so, then.”
“No, no. He did some thinking after what you said.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“He wants to get me into his club.”
“What!”
“I know, it is funny, isn’t it? But I told him I’d never use the damned thing, that I did not want it anyway.”
“Oh, I am glad. You never want to go back to that kind of thing, do you?”
“No, dear, I do not.” And his tone was emphatic enough to please even her.
That night after dinner as they lay together in the hammock he took a paper out of his pocket and handed it to her. She opened it and stared at it in astonishment. It was a cheque for a thousand pounds. He thought her reception of it was the most extraordinary thing of the kind he had ever seen.
“Why, what is this?” she asked, raising puzzled eyes.
“Have you never seen a cheque before?” he smiled.
“You are giving me this?”
“Well, what is surprising about it, dear? You are my wife, you know, and a man may give money to his wife. He may even give money to his lover, if you wish us to ignore the ceremony terms in our dealings with each other. I’m not buying you, you ridiculous child. Good Lord! you do carry your theories over the mountains and into the sea, don’t you? What is it you suspect me of? For I can see suspicion in your eyes.”
“I’m beginning to suspect you of the sinister innocence of the drop of water that wears away the stone,” she said, half smiling, half glaring at him.
“The stone doesn’t mind.”
She had risen, and she now dropped down into his arms.
“I must seem a bit queer, dear. And, please, I think it’s lovely of you.”
Two weeks later her father sent her five hundred pounds as a peace offering and as a wedding present. The night she received it she sat out late by herself on the balcony. She had now almost two thousand pounds, and one of the reasons for her staying on the News had ceased to exist. It was this fact that she sat there considering.
But she had considered other things besides money in her decision to go on with her work. She felt very strongly that love was soonest killed by its own tendency to burn itself up. She had already learned that she and Dane were potently stimulating to each other, and that it would be difficult living together every day to preserve the balance between abandonment and discipline that she desired.
And then she liked the contrast between her week of activity and her week-end of petting and luxurious relaxation. She had a fresh thrill every Saturday afternoon when she met Dane at the launch, and she had another kind of stimulation when she walked into the office on Monday morning.
He had not said one word to shake her decision. But he thought with a smile of the heat and the flies and the ugliness of Mac’s hotel. And he made her week-ends alluring and beautiful.
About the middle of the autumn Valerie asked herself again, as she walked on the coast road one night, if she really did want to go through the winter on the paper. Various influences had been at work upon her in the last month. As a place of residence, Mac’s was becoming unbearable, her room more like a box every day, and the dining-room the last word in sordidness. The curtains, always sagging and uneven, had become intolerably so by the number of times noticed. The serrated and ravined cut glass on the sideboard, viewed with indifference for a thousand times, had become painful at one thousand and one. And always as she lay in bed now she could smell the amalgamated pungency of the beer from the front and the stables at the back. Even Bob and Father Ryan had suffered some kind of eclipse, and as table company, had become dull.
And as she walked there drifted through her mind with the force of a warning the lines Dane had humorously quoted to her one night when she had read to him the first letter her mother had written after hearing of the marriage—“Some little talk a while of me and thee There seemed, and then no more of thee and me.”
“No more of thee and me.” The words repeated themselves over and over in her brain. Then she told herself for the hundredth time that she was thinking only of herself, that she had done nothing but think of herself. And after all her own contract demanded that she think of Dane. She was not keeping her own terms.
He saw two nights later, as she lay with him in the hammock, that she had something on her mind.
When she had smoked half her cigarette she threw it out into the garden, and wriggled up and looked down at his face below her in the dusk.
“Dane.”
“Well?”
“I am getting a bit sick of the paper.”
A smile flashed across his eyes. “I’ve been wondering what you thought you were getting out of it now.”
“Well, that’s it. I think I’ve learned all I can from it.”
“I should think you had. If you want to do original writing you ought to get at it. You have to practise writing as you do the piano. That ought to give you some idea of what is before you, especially if you want to do a novel.”
She looked down at him. She had expected him to ask at once when she would come to live with him.
“Yes, I suppose it isn’t as easy as I think it is,” she said slowly. Then she looked past his head into the shadows deepening in the garden.
“I’ve decided this week that I’ll go to Sydney for the winter. I want to see about getting my poems published over there. Would you like to come with me?” He said it very lightly, as if he were proposing a walk round the house.
Valerie sat up and stared down into his face.
“You are going to Sydney—in any case?”
“Why certainly. I want to arrange about getting some more work in Australian papers.”
She continued to stare at him.
“What’s the trouble, Miss Freedom?”
“You would go away?”
“On business, dear. I have to. And I’m asking you to come. Of course, you’re a free agent ———”
Her hand smothered the rest, and half fiercely, half caressingly she seized his head and beat it against the cushions.
She gave Bob a month’s notice the next day.
II
At the end of June they slipped away to Sydney, passing through Auckland without seeing anyone but Valerie’s father, and they returned at the end of August in the same secretive manner.
Valerie was delighted with Sydney, delighted with Dane’s friends, and meeting for the first time in her life a friendly community of artists, found it the thing she had dreamed about, the world in which she wanted to shine. But there was a fly in the honey. The dining and wining were not good for Dane. And there were two occasions on which he disappeared for the best part of three days.
So that by the time they returned to settle down to life together at the old mission house she knew well he had chosen the better half of wisdom when he had left the life of cities behind him. And she was by no means sorry herself to have the prospect of work and peace ahead of her there for a while. She was content to leave a remoter future to take care of itself.
They had discussed on the voyage home what they would do to the house to make it a proper custodian of the rights of two such individualistic beings as they were. The first thing they agreed on was that unless one of them felt an overwhelming urge, which was not to be encouraged, they should not meet till lunch time. Dane did a good deal of his work at night and often slept late. Valerie was very anxious that his ways should not be interfered with, and he was as anxious as she that parts of his house should be private, that he should be able to be alone when he wished, and particularly that he should be able to keep his moods from her as much as possible.
The changes were inexpensively made. Across the hall from the study were two rooms, one of which had been occupied by Dane as an indoor bedroom and the other by the boys. This space was now given over to Valerie, and an extension was added at the rear of the house giving the boys a large and sunny room off the kitchen, and Dane himself a bedroom and a small study where he could write at night when Valerie wished to play the piano. This latter room opened directly into his den. This arrangement put Valerie on one side of the hall and him on the other, with common ground in the front study, and in the bathroom which was on her side next the kitchen. It was understood they would not invade each other’s privacy without invitation.
Valerie had her section of the verandah, too, that outside her own rooms, fitted up with a sleeping-cot and a table and chairs.
As there was no dining-room, lunch, always a tray affair, was to be served as he or she might fancy. The location of dinner had the same pleasant uncertainty. In some moods Dane liked it served ceremoniously in his den, in others he liked it in the study. More often, and when it was fine, he liked it out-of-doors.
She had seen at once that she must take no part in the running of the house. Beyond making her own bed, dusting her own things, keeping her own writing-table tidy, and arranging with the boys to take her laundry in and out of Dargaville, there was nothing for her to do. It seemed that never in her wildest dreams could she have hoped for a more harmonious atmosphere in which to try to write.
Dane told himself he had never been happier in his life. He did not know what she did to him, but with her he was less disturbed with the sense of his own futility, and better able to work than he had been for some time. And now, too, he had a real need to work. It had cut a little into his income to give Valerie the money and the holiday, and to make the changes to the house. And though his poems had been published in a blaze of publicity and were selling well as things went there, he saw he must keep up a certain output if he was to give his wife things he now wished to give her. He had got along very comfortably before without doing much. He had set aside a sum he would never under any circumstances cut down to leave to his boys and to see them back to China, in the event of anything happening to himself. That was in the hands of Davenport Carr as a trust. He now wished to get ahead of his expenses and provide something for Valerie. This was a stimulus that did him good, reinforced his rather feeble sense of being of some use in the world.
III
“Now aren’t you glad I stuck out and refused to go?”
“Oh yes, I really am, dear. I loathe Christmas parties as much as you do. But I think you might have tempered the refusal with a little—well”—Dane waved his hands expressively,—“been a little more delicate ———”
“My dear boy, relatives don’t understand delicacy. The only thing that will make a dent in their egotism is a brick. Even then their eclipse is only temporary. If there is a more vital thing on earth than the egotism of a relative I’d like to meet it. I assure you the minute I show signs of delicacy they think I’m weakening, or reforming, or learning to appreciate the wisdom of their ways, and then they begin to wheedle and bribe.”
“Well, I must admit that when I hear you talk I feel I ought to be glad I never had any.” He looked up from the hammock at a crack in the verandah roof where a frail twig of honeysuckle had defied the opposition of shingles and was wriggling through.
Valerie, who was sitting in a chair beside him, took one of his hands and laid it against her cheek.
“You had two very effective ones, old dear, and they got a wonderful inspiration in a certain hour thirty-eight years ago.”
His eyes glowed over the edge of the hammock at her.
“You know, you’re going to spoil me.”
“Oh no, you’d nothing to do with this. They did it, and then they had the sense to die and leave you free.”
He smiled whimsically at her. “Ah, I sometimes wonder how free they left me. That is the funny part of it. I’m not nearly so free as you are, after all. Just see how powerless I have been against your father. In spite of all I could say he elects me to his club with a flourish, pays my dues, insists on my dining there in full view of Auckland’s greatest, and hey presto! I’m back in society and may be invited to a Christmas dinner. Ye gods and little fishes!”
“Well, he felt he had to do something for you after the way he behaved.”
“That’s not the point. The point is I could not resist him, and yet they cannot move you one inch.”
“They would move me fast enough if they had one honest decent emotion about us, if they had anything in their minds but their beastly curiosity and their condescension. I can see them sitting round discussing us with an awful solemnity. Mother would gather them together, and they would go into the problem as to which of the heads would be implicated in dinner invitations, as to which of them would give us a lunch or a tea, as to how much further they would have to go, as to whether the younger children should be allowed a glimpse of the star sinner of the day, and so on. You see I’ve heard it all before. Not a single spontaneous feeling about us, just a calculating fitting of us in to their scheme of things, and underneath the rules and regulations the women would want to see us, because they want to feed their nasty dribbling sensations on what they think marriage to you has done to me and on what they think being a sinner has done to you. Those aunts of mine are like radium, they bore into your insides looking for things, and they just gloat on brides and bridegrooms—what’s the matter? Am I talking too much?”
“Well, honestly, dear, though you are very eloquent about your relatives, I am a bit sick of them. Since you have turned them all into ghosts why not let them be peacefully laid?”
“But they won’t behave like proper ghosts. You see how they appear at our elbows every now and then and wave a skinny hand.” She smiled over the edge of the hammock at him.
“Oh Val, delicious Val. You ought to be on the stage. Come in here, I want to kiss you.”
“I don’t want to be kissed. I want to play Chopin.”
“You’ll play all the better if I kiss you first.”
She laughed and clambered in to him.
After a while she started up. “Oh, I forgot to give something to Michael,” she said regretfully.
“Oh, did you? Well, I gave him a sovereign, so that will do for both of us. But I thought you didn’t believe in Christmas.”
“Well, now, Dane, I do have some sentiment.”
“I should think you had. There are times when you are sticky with it.”
“All right, beast. I won’t kiss you for a week.” She wriggled out of the hammock, pretending to be mightily offended, and stood frowning at him. She was piqued that he had made no move to hold her back. He merely smiled mockingly up at her.
“I suppose you think you could keep that resolution,” he said, his eyes on hers.
“I could.” She glared back defiantly.
“Well, it would be a pyrrhic victory if ever there was one,” he smiled.
She rudely poked out her tongue at him, and walked to the verandah steps, and looked out into the garden.
He looked at her for a few minutes as she stood profiled against a mass of honeysuckle, then he reached for his pipe and tobacco and began to smoke.
It was a clear evening, with the promise of fine weather for Christmas and Boxing days. The first stars projected their feeble light through the last reflection of a very red sunset. Now and again the sharp cry of a weka in the bush behind or the call of a morepork in the pines cut the air. A few crickets already reminded an optimistic world that this summer would go the way of all others as they sang of the falling of the leaves and the coming of the deadly winds.
Valerie turned from the steps, walked back to the hammock, leaned down over Dane and kissed his hair. Then she went off through the door into the study.
After a short silence the opening bars of one of his favourite Preludes floated out to Dane. He put down his pipe, settled back in his cushions, and threw his arm across his face with a feeling of great content. It was a perfect Christmas Eve.
IV
One close night the following February Valerie rose from the piano a little worn out. But it had relieved her enormously to crash through the Appassionata and the Pathetique and two of Rachmaninof’s Preludes. She had played them in a tense and rageful manner, and the sounds had swelled about the house and echoed about the garden.
She walked out to the verandah expecting to see Dane in the hammock where she had left him earlier in the evening. But he was not there. She glanced into his den, to which all three doors were wide open. He was not there either. She sat down and lit a cigarette waiting for him to appear. But he did not appear. She wondered if he had gone into his back room to write. She got up and stole softly along the path, but there was no glow or sign of light there. Then she began to wonder if he had gone off to Mac’s while she was playing, gone off to escape from the mood that had overwhelmed him all day.
It was a mood that had shaken her and the whole country. The news of the discovery of the death of Captain Scott and his companions on their return from the South Pole had reached New Zealand two days before, and that afternoon Dane had gone into Dargaville for the Auckland papers and the latest telegrams on the subject, and since his return both he and she had been speechless.
Valerie had shut herself in her room with one paper, and when she appeared for dinner her eyes were a little red. Neither she nor Dane were able to more than pick at their food. They did not attempt to talk about the tragedy. It depressed Dane terribly. He had been nervous and irritable for a week, not irritable at Valerie, that he never was. She could have borne it better if he had been, for then she could have snapped back at him. But as there was nothing personal in such moods there was nothing she could do but ignore them.
This was the first bad one he had had since they had been in Sydney. Up till then he had been so much better that she had even begun to hope that love would get the best of the weaknesses that had, she thought, been encouraged a good deal by loneliness. When she had seen him growing listless and eating less a week before, she had suggested he go down to the coast, as he had done when alone, but when he saw she did not want to go with the cottagers there he did not want to either. He was becoming more and more dependent on her for company. Even when he did not want to talk he liked to know she was near him.
She walked round the house and about the garden. She did not like to call for him, knowing that when he wanted her he would come for her himself. But she would have liked to have known he was there, and that he had not gone to Mac’s.
Then she told herself she was silly to anticipate. That was what so many women did. She began to think again of the end of Captain Scott and his gallant little band. What a story! She sat abashed and shaken before it. It seemed to her the most wonderful thing in the world that men could face death and make of it what those men made of it. Surely when men could die like that there was something beyond. Unconsciously her mind began to work on it, and she wondered if she could write what she felt about it. Dane had been wired to from three papers for an article. Perhaps he had gone off to think about that, and it would be fine, she thought, if she could do anything that was good enough for publication. After walking about for a while she went inside, and seeing the supper tray with wine and cold food that was usually left in the study she found she was hungry. She ate some cold chicken and drank some wine. Then she went into her front room and sat down at her writing-table.
But she could not think of anything to say now. She stared at the beautiful Norman Lindsay drawing of Dane’s head that he had given her for his Christmas present, and it seemed to her that she had never before noticed how well the artist had reproduced the sensitiveness of that disturbing face. And she began to think that though she had lived with him for over a year, and loved him more it seemed to her every month, she understood him no better than she had done in the first week. It was strange to love a thing one could not understand.
She deliberately turned away from it trying to forget it, looked round her attractive study, and had a momentary delight in the peace she had in it. Her rooms were small and furnished plainly enough, except for the rugs and hangings that Dane insisted she have to provide warmth and colour. With the exception of her piano, she had brought up her own things from Auckland, and her own books and some of her own pictures were there against the tinted walls. But she had been amused to discover the changes that had come over her taste. No longer did her prints of popular Academy pictures please her. The Laughing Cavalier and her Watts and Rossetti things were stuck away in a drawer. Her bits of Crown Derby and Doulton looked merely pretty and feeble beside Dane’s porcelain and jade and ivory and enamel. So her rooms were bare of ornament, and she preferred to keep them so. She had plain and comfortable modern furniture that fitted well enough in the available space.
She had settled down to work here now, though so far she was struggling with large expanses of words which she had been unable to reduce to the form and shape that she felt they must have. She had been encouraged by Dane’s assurance that this was nothing to be alarmed at, that she might go on for some time before she achieved a sense for technique.
But it annoyed her this night that she could not manage words well enough to put down what was simmering in her mind about the South Pole explorers. Her mood was too emotional. She took up a newspaper and tried to read the story calmly, to view it in a detached manner. But it was too much for her. She began to cry again, and gave way unreservedly. But she knew that she was not crying solely because a few men had died heroically away down there in the snow.
As she sat still at last, feeling very lonely and sorry for herself, she heard the launch come into the bay below; she sat up listening, and because she had assumptions in her mind she thought she heard Dane stumble on the track through the trees.
With a quick movement she put out her lamp. Then she hurried into her bedroom and began to undress in the dark. She did not want him to see that she was still up, as if she had been waiting to see what time he came home. And above all things she did not want him to come to her the worse for drink. He had never done so, but she had the persistent fear that he might.
Dane saw her light as he came from the top of the steps, and he stood to wonder why it had so suddenly gone out. He knew it was after one o’clock. Had she been working, or was she anxious about him?
He knew he had been very depressed and disagreeable for days, but it had relieved him enormously to see that apparently she was not worried by it. She was wonderful, he thought. She did not fuss, and yet he felt her as a warm and understanding person. It would have driven him mad to think she was worrying about him. What earthly use was it to worry about another’s moods?
And now after racing recklessly about on the river he had conquered his mood. He had been more shaken by the story of those deaths in the snow than he had been about anything for years. What it had done to him he did not know, but it had given him a kind of melancholy exaltation, had put vivid pictures into his mind and a curious peace into his soul. And he had come back unable to think about it any more for the present.
As he stood there he began to think of Valerie as a warmth to blot out now the trouble of his recent days. He felt suddenly lonely for her. He had expected to find she had gone to bed, in which case he would not have disturbed her, but now that he had seen her light he wanted to feel her arms about him. He walked on past the front of the house and saw that her rooms were in darkness. But he knew she could not yet be asleep.
He stepped up to the verandah, raised the screen, and saw she was not in her cot.
“Valerie, where are you?” he called a little urgently.
“I’m undressing, here,” she answered from within. Her voice sounded ragged.
He vaulted over the railing, pushing back the light screen, and went to her window.
“Come here, dear. Why are you in the dark?”
Then she knew her assumptions had been wrong, and she was afraid he would suspect she had been worrying about him. She could not make her mood light all in a moment.
“Come here, Val,” he repeated. It was a tone that always gave her a little thrill.
She went to him as she was in her white lingerie, and he put his arms round her as he sat on the window ledge.
“Why have you been crying, old girl?” he asked softly, gripping one of her bare shoulders.
“I can’t help it—those men ———”
He did not believe that was the whole truth, but he was comforted by her good intention. And it was much easier to believe her than to question her. And there are moods when half truths do not trouble one very much. He began to kiss her hair.
“I know, dear. But don’t let’s think about it any more. It’s made me feel awfully lonely.”
“And me too,” she said settling against him.