The Strange Attraction/Chapter 18
CHAPTER XVIII
I
One warm night in the following February Valerie lounged on Dane’s verandah, as near as she could to the edge without letting the chair topple over. Such little coolness as there was on the river came up through the clearing to be dissipated by the lingering warmth and heavy scents of the garden.
A half-finished cigarette disintegrated into ash in a copper tray beside her. She had put it down when Dane had begun to sing L’heure Exquise. She always forgot that there could be any other kind of hour when he sang to her. He had not a strong voice, but it had a quality that filled her with a tingling delight. She forgot now her hours of anxiety about him in the last months, her increasing sense of some invisible disrupting influence that was coming up between them. But they still loved each other after two years, loved each other beyond any doubt, she told herself.
Valerie had changed in those two years. Her manner had softened. Her voice was fuller and lower. She was less positive in expression, more sympathetic in judgment. Physically she was more alive than she had ever been. Her maiden leanness had disappeared, and her shapely limbs were rounded to alluring curves. And about her there was always the glow of splendid health. It was this that made it hard for her to realize at times what it could mean to lack vitality.
But as Dane sang she was not thinking of his health, she was not looking into any doubtful future. She was lost in a subjective sweetness, conscious only of the flute-like notes that floated out to her. She felt a jar when they stopped.
He came out through the study door looking for her. He leaned over the back of her chair, putting his face against her hair, and one hand under her chin.
“I’m not in much of a mood to sing, dear, I feel lazy.”
He moved round her chair and dropped into his hammock with the motions of a man who is tired.
One of the boys came into the den and lit two of the lamps, and by the streamer of light that fell across Dane’s face Valerie saw with a little pang that there were heavy circles under his eyes. She could never bear to think of anything but beauty on his face. She wondered at times how far she was hypnotized by it, how far she loved the man behind that face. Of course there were definite qualities there that she could name as lovable, his appealing affectionateness, his whimsical sense of humour, his softness, his uncanny understanding, his personal charm, but behind all these was that baffling man she did not know, the man she could not help. She had speculated a good deal about his duality, the spartan mind in the hedonist body, as she put it to herself, and she wondered if the fight was between those two, if it were as simple as that. She knew now there was a deadly battle going on behind those eyes, but she could not tell what the opponents were, what armour they wore, what gods they fought for. But she could see the smoke of it, like a person watching from a far-off hill.
As she looked at him she was afraid that the trip they had taken that summer, a wandering trip about the North, had not toned him up as she had hoped it might.
The warm weather lasted for two more days before it broke with a thunderstorm that left the air fresh. The change seemed to make a difference to Dane. He recovered some of the fire he had lately lost. As Valerie sat with him after dinner, and saw the good mood he was in, she ventured to make an observation that she had wanted to make for some time.
“Dane, I do wish you would do something about your indigestion. You are better to-day, but you have been getting worse for months. You know diet can do wonders for that. Now don’t frown, dear. You men are all so deplorably careless about your health, and you know I happen to care a lot about yours.”
“I’ve always had a weak stomach, Valerie. I can’t do anything about the damned thing. Please don’t worry about it. It’s really going away that upsets me—this last trip—we had such a lot of greasy stuff.”
“Well, then, we mustn’t go to the wilds again.”
“Oh, please, dear, don’t bother about it. I’m all right.”
She saw that her reference to it had chilled and irritated him. To make amends, she moved her chair beside the hammock, and took one of his hands and kissed it and rubbed it against her cheek. They smoked and sat still for a while, and then, seeing that he was aloof in mood from her, she began deliberately to try to bring him back to her again, to put him in the mood when he could forget everything but her.
He felt her vitality about him like a glow in the night. There had never yet been a time when she could not stimulate him, but to-night he felt as if the springs of his forces had run dry. There was a fierce inhibition somewhere.
Valerie got up abruptly, walked to the steps, and looked up at the velvety sky where the Milky Way was like a trail of quicksilver pulverized to luminous dust. She stood still there for a few minutes, and then she went in and began to play.
He was lying with his arm across his face when she came after an hour to the study door.
“I’m going to have some supper. Do you want any?”
“No, thanks. I’ll stay here for a while longer.”
Chilled by his manner she went back and ate alone, and then restless and unhappy she went out to walk on the other side of the house.
Something in the mysterious depths of the range stretching up to the stars, in its potent silence, the weight of life it carried so secretively, stirred her out of her little petty mood, calmed her senses. She told herself it was absurd to put the significance she had been doing on Dane’s manner. He could not always be responsive, but it was the fact that this was the first time he had not been so that arrested her.
He lay still for a few minutes after she had gone to eat her supper. Then he turned over and buried his face in the cushions.
“Oh God, if I were only ten years younger!” He stretched his lips on his set teeth. He thought rather bitterly of the fate that had brought Valerie to him as the last woman he should love instead of the first. He was romantic enough to think his life might have been very different. They had had two years together, even more than he had hoped in the beginning, and there was still more of it. She still loved him, he knew that. She was still happy there. They were not yet looking at each other with that premeditated and deliberate politeness that decent people used to disguise the death of spontaneity. Whenever he was well life was wonderful between them.
He did wish she had not spoken of his health. It was the one thing he could not bear to be reminded of, the one thing he was trying to forget. He simply must not think of it yet. That awful suspicion—and her words had had an appalling effect upon it, had given it a kind of stability as fact. All at once he felt terribly alone. He could not lie there and think of that. He wanted her arms about him, wanted her life beating against his own to assure him that it was a sure and positive thing, and that it could not be spirited away from him. He got out of the hammock and went in to look for her. He had not heard her go out. He knocked on her door, and getting no response he went into her room wondering now if she had been hurt by his coldness. When he could not find her he was sure she had. He could have kicked himself.
He went round the house calling for her, and down to the boathouse, and back along the drive to the gate. He worked himself into the state of a lost child when she did not answer. When at last he saw her coming along the road, he hurried to meet her and caught her to him.
“Oh, don’t go away from me,” he begged, clinging to her.
“Why, my dear, my dear, I—I thought ———”
She wondered whatever had changed him so, and she wondered it again many times during the night.
II
“Valerie, I want to go to Roland’s Mills for a day or two to hunt up some fresh stories. I’ve heard of an Englishman over that way I’d like to see.”
“Oh, good. Give my love to David Bruce, and tell him we haven’t been divorced yet,” she answered lightly.
He smiled back at her.
They had just finished lunch on a cool April day. Dane’s proposal did not disturb her in the least. He had many times gone off for a day or two after copy, and had never suggested that she go with him, nor had she asked to do so, knowing that she could not sleep in men’s camps or lonely huts. She was glad now to hear that he was to be out in his launch, for he had been depressed the last two days, and she felt the trip would do him good. She saw him off later with a supply of food without a question in her eyes.
She spent the rest of the day with no sense of loneliness. She was becoming used, in a measure, to his absences. This was partly because they were not, as yet, so frequent as to be continually depressing. The interludes meant so much.
And then she was becoming absorbed in her first novel. It was crudely written as far as she had gone, she knew, and would take a lot of polishing, but the thing that interested her was the power to create people in her own imagination. It was a wonderful diversion. She had starved considerably for companionship till she had met Dane, and now she discovered she could make people to please herself, she could make them talk as she wanted people to talk, make them live as she wanted people to live, and she found they became extraordinarily real. And it was becoming more and more interesting to explore her own mind, to see what would come out of it in a morning, to see what her people would say and do, for they had surprising ways of their own; they would defy her intentions sometimes, and scamper off on her pages and do things of their own accord. The whole thing enormously diverted her, and she felt now that if she kept on she would some day succeed with this thing.
And so it was that she worked and played away the day after Dane left without thinking much about him. In the evening she lay in his hammock listening to the crickets and rather enjoying the mood of sweet melancholy that the autumn night gave her. The wind had changed from the west to the east, but she hoped the rain would not come before Dane got back.
She wished the boys would light up the den, for she liked to look into it from the outside, but when their master was away they always kept his rooms in darkness, and she had never attempted to go into them or change a single one of his ways. She had no vulgar curiosity about him. It would never have occurred to her to look over his desk or papers in his absence. She had never thought about possible relics of other women. What did those things matter? She sneered at the people who thought they did. She had never even tried the doors of his back rooms to see if they were locked, and she had never yet set her foot in those two rooms. She knew that the things she did not know about Dane would never be learned by poking about among his belongings.
She drew the possum rug up over her and drifted into speculation about the future. She was absorbed and contented at present, realizing the chance she had to work, but she wondered what she would do when her novel was finished. Of course she wanted it to come out in London. She was rather sniffy about colonial undertakings. And how would she get it to London? Would Dane be willing to go with her, and if not, what?
But she shelved that disturbing question. She went inside, closed the study door, and ate her supper by the dying fire, mooning there for some time because she found the coals good company. It was nearly midnight when she stepped out of her bedroom window to her cot. She stood by the railing a moment looking up at the faintly clouded stars before she lowered her screen. Something startled her to stretch out her head and to listen. Then she heard the launch more distinctly, and she knew well the pulse of its engine. It came at slow speed into the bay, and a little later she heard the rattle of a chain and the closing of the boathouse doors. And then the stumbling steps on the other side of the house. The dogs roused a minute to growl and then lay still.
Valerie found herself very wide awake. Why had Dane come back? He had hardly had time to get to Roland’s Mills, even if he had gone at top speed all the way. She sat down on the edge of her cot with a hard pain inside her. If he had meant to get drunk why had he lied to her? He had never lied before. For the first time a real despair took possession of her. This thing was growing on him, was getting ahead of him. The time would soon come when the interludes would not balance the black moods, would not compensate.
She got into bed and lay with her eyes open staring into the blackness under the verandah roof.
She asked no questions of Lee at breakfast, and the boy said nothing about his master. She wondered if she was supposed to know that Dane was back so that she would keep away from his side of the house. At times like these she felt like an outsider in the place, as if she had no part there at all. She felt more than usually upset that morning, and could only make a pretence of working. Her characters seemed unreal, their actions trivial and their emotions silly. She could not get hold of them at all.
When he brought her lunch Lee said: “Meester Barrington back. He not well. He wish himself alone.”
Valerie knew it was useless to be angry with the boy who could do so much more for the sick man than she could. But it was just this that maddened her. And she reflected what a grim Nemesis it was that should have brought to her the kind of thing she had supposed she wanted. One of her reasons for hating marriage had been the boring and ugly physical intimacy of so much of it. But Dane had imposed none of the things she feared upon her. She had never seen him unshaved. She had never seen him dress or undress. He had been even more fastidious and delicate than she was. He had never come near her when he was ill. She had never been asked to lift her finger to do a thing for him. And now she hated what she had thought she desired. It seemed so cold and inhuman. It made her feel she was failing him in vital ways. But there was nothing she could do about it.
That afternoon she rode through Dargaville and out to the coast. The gully was deserted, and the tent no longer there. They had been down together after the cottagers left, but the things had been brought home two weeks before. She looked at the place where she had first heard of Dane, and thought of the glorious hours they had had down there. Try as she would she could not keep from her mind the ominous sense that the glory of their adventure was departing. She galloped back and forth on the beach till she felt better.
It was gaily enough on the way home that she stopped in front of the News and whistled for her paper. She fancied Bob looked at her a little intently as he came out with it. And then as she rested before dinner she read what had happened to Dane.
III
He had left her with every intention, as he had said, of going to Roland’s Mills. He intended to get to Aoroa for the night, to make an early start, and to get round into the Otamatea and to pass their honeymooning place in the early morning. It did not alarm him that he wanted to get away from Valerie for a few days. There were times when he liked to get away from her because he so enjoyed going back to find her there.
He was about a mile above Dargaville, and looking up at a pile of cumulous clouds, when he felt the launch bump something. He had not noticed anything conspicuous on the water ahead of him. Looking back he saw a horrible thing, the water-bloated face of a man. He gave a shuddering groan and felt instantly nauseated. Automatically he ran on for a few yards, then he slowed down and began a tormenting wrestle with himself. He wanted to run on and leave it. It made him sick even to think of it. What did it matter what happened to it, a hideous dead thing? But somebody would want it. And if he left it now it might sink, and never be heard of again, and women and children might go on crying for it. And he could not face anyone with the tale that he was afraid of it, that he loathed it. He looked up and down the river. There was nothing in sight. No one would ever know he had seen it. But he would know himself that he had seen it and deserted it.
“God damn it!” he raged. “Why does this happen to me?”
He turned the launch back, went alongside it and looked at it. He broke out with an oath, an explosion rare to him. He knew the dreadful face. It was that of an Australian, who had drifted six months before to one of the mills on the river. He had been a jolly reckless chap, and Dane had had many a drink with him. Now he knew he could not leave him to drift down the river. There was an irresistible human cry in the pulpy eyes upturned to the sky and in the peeling face. Grinding his teeth Dane took a handkerchief out of his pocket, and with nausea threatening to overcome him, he tied it round the head, for he could not bear to feel it staring at him. He saw he could never get the body into the launch. Indeed, he could not have borne to have it there. And he was afraid it would fall to bits. He had an appalling moment wondering what on earth he was to do with it. Then with his pocket knife he cut holes in the coat. He tied a rope through them and fixed it to the stern of the launch. He tried to wash his hands, shrinking from them. The perspiration stood out on his forehead when he was finished. He started slowly down the river, feeling he would go mad with that trailing after him.
Bob Lorrimer, Doctor Steele and Mac were standing near the barroom door when Dane plunged in as if he were followed by all the devils in hell.
“What is it, Barrington?” asked Bob anxiously, thinking at once of Valerie.
Dane did not see what he meant. “A corpse,” he shuddered, “at my boat. I ran into it coming down.” And he went on up the stairs to wash his hands.
Even before Doctor Steele and Bob had got the body into the hotel on a stretcher Dane was at the bar drinking whisky, and when he was called upon by the constable for evidence he was already reckless.
“What the hell do you want in the way of evidence?” he raged. “Isn’t it a corpse? I found it in the river, curse it! What more is there to say?”
“Look here, Mac, don’t let him get drunk,” said Bob aside.
Mac grinned. “You bloody fool, you can’t stop a man in that mood. He’s got stacks of stuff at home anyway. And he’s better drunk than seeing that ——— ——— corpse all night.”
Later on in the evening Mac and Doctor Steele got Dane upstairs.
“I wonder why he had to find that thing?“ said the doctor, looking down upon him as he lay on the bed. “Borrow came down half an hour before. It wouldn’t have hurt him to pick it up.”
“Oh, there ain’t no reason in this ——— ——— world,” growled Mac.
IV
Valerie also felt there was no reason in the world when she read that Dane had run into that calamitous object. Her first feeling was one of blind rage that such things were always imposed on the people who could least endure them. She stamped about the garden that night shouting her little defiance at the stars. She was roused against the fates on behalf of Dane. But when this mood wore itself out she was a little weary, and though she would not have admitted it, a little resentful that he should be so sensitive to hurt.
As it grew near lunch time the next day she hoped she was going to hear from him. Not only because she missed him, but because it would mean that he was better. She had not worked well that morning. His personality seemed to clutch at her through the walls. She might have worked if she had known he was away, but now the thought of him lying alone there somewhere distracted her.
But he did not appear at lunch. She went out to garden afterwards, for nothing so well soothed her.
At half-past four Lee called from the verandah. “Your tea, Meesis Barrington.”
There was no sign of Dane, and almost before she had finished dusk came down upon the garden. The days were shortening fast, and when it was cloudy as it now was it was dark at five. The atmosphere was heavy, threatening rain.
Valerie tried to settle down to read till dinner. She did not like to play the piano lest Dane be out in his cot asleep and be wakened by it. But she could not sit still. She was desperately restless. She went out to walk on the drive. For the twentieth time she told herself this way of living could not go on. When Dane was well again she would talk it out with him. It made her feel like an alien in the house. She could not stand it any longer. She told herself she would rather see him drunk, unshaved, sick, if it had to be that kind of thing, than go on with this disrupting isolation. She would enter into the fight with him, make him win.
Where was he now, she wondered. She sneaked round in the shrubs to his side of the house with a strange feeling that she had no business to spy upon him. The canvas blinds on the sleeping end of his verandah were down, and she could see nothing there, and the blinds of his den were down also, but the room was lit within. She stood hidden looking from one French door to the other, looking for what she knew not. But she could not get it out of her head that something tragic beyond her imagining was going on in that room. It was as if she could see the shadows of battling figures posed against the blinds.
She grew frantic thinking of it. Inaction was the one unendurable thing to a person of her disposition. A clod might have stood it, but not a person of her imagination.
She stole back to the front verandah and sat down. The glow from the study fire streamed out through the window and cast distorted streaks of light up and down the trunks of trees. She turned her chair to look into the room. This was her favourite room. It expressed the best of Dane, she thought. She liked the den well enough for exotic hours, but she always felt she wanted to go out into the air afterwards, or to come to sit in the study with its satisfying balance. Everything about it seemed just right. It was a beautiful room to play in, to read in, to eat in, to talk in, or to dream in by the fire. There was only one .thing lacking in it now—the presence of the man who had made it.
As she looked in, Lee carried in the dinner tray set only for one. With a chill at her heart she went inside.
But there was a folded note on the tray. She did not see it till she had eaten her soup.
“Val, dear, play to me to-night, and please don’t worry about me. I’ll be all right in a day or two.”
Tears oozed out of her eyes and ran unheeded down her cheeks.
She sat down at the piano at eight o’clock, determined that she would play her way back into his mind. Abnormally intensified, she never played better than she did that night. As she went on the wind, which had been increasing all the evening, blew up to a gale, and moaned and whined about the chimneys and the eaves. Her mood moved with it. She played the stormiest things she knew from Tschaikovsky, Beethoven and Chopin, and when her hands dropped from the keys it was well after eleven, and the fire behind her had burned low. The room moved with shadows from the two candles which flickered in the draught that came under the doors from the open window on her side of the house.
Valerie sat still at the keyboard for a few minutes, affected by the troublous suggestion in the wind. Then she sprang to her feet electrified. She had heard her name called, called as if it had come out of a long distance, a weird sound like a wailing from the storm. Her pulses raced as she stood listening for it again. But she heard nothing more than the moaning about the old house and the swishing of the poplars and the pines. She walked to the hall door and opened it, straining her ears for sounds inside the house. She saw her supper on the hall table. She stole softly along as far as the bathroom. There was no light under the kitchen door. But there was a light under the door of the den.
She could see there was a fire by the ebb and flow of the light. There was no sound of any kind. She felt Dane was in there alone. He must have been listening to her playing. She felt a fierce impulse to open the door, to go in and see what he looked like, what he was doing. It seemed ridiculous that she could not. The first thing that restrained her was the thought that he might have fallen asleep, and not for worlds would she have disturbed him so. But she played with the impulse for some minutes. And then she hesitated, because whatever was going on in there was in a large sense his own affair, at least more his than hers, she felt. And that was the thought that turned her back.
She carried her supper tray into the study and sat down. Then she heard her name called again. She wondered if her nerves were playing tricks with her. But it seemed a clearer call. This time she acted without thought. She went straight to the door of the den, opened it, and went in, closing it at once behind her. What she had expected she did not know, but she stood with her heart beating furiously. She looked at once at the lounge placed in front of a fire that had been banked up to burn most of the night.
Stretched out on his back upon it, with his face turned to the ceiling, Dane lay in a curiously lifeless way, with one arm hanging over the side and the other flung across his breast. His skin was so colourless and his features so peaceful that for a shattering second she thought him dead. Then she saw a smile play about his mouth. She recovered herself, but was afraid to stir, thinking him asleep. She saw that he was partly dressed under his blue silk dressing-gown, that he had on socks and evening slippers, and that he had evidently recently shaved. There was a small cut on his chin and a tiny streak of blood. She wondered if he had meant to have dinner with her, but had been unequal to the effort.
A piece of wood fell in the fireplace making quite a startling noise. She jumped nervously herself. But she saw he did not stir. Then something about the dead whiteness of his face arrested her. She spoke his name fearfully. She moved up to the lounge and spoke again. He did not move.
Seeing him thus for the first time unmistakably under a drug it came to her with the force of a blow, though she had felt for some time that he was using something to put himself to sleep. She looked at his wrists, and it was not the first time she had looked there for significant marks. She knew nothing of the effect of narcotics. She had thought once or twice lately that he had had a strange expression in his eyes, that he had looked through her and beyond her as if he were seeing things not of the earth. How far he had gone with this thing she did not know. Whether he was powerless against it she did not know. How long it would be before he was unbearable because of it she did not know. But she imagined the worst.
And then as she looked at him a smile again mysteriously came to life upon his face, and flitted about it, and faded away. She felt a sudden choking pity for him. At least, poor soul, he was at peace. At least he had a respite from that invisible and pitiless foe that she knew he fought. She moved him a little on the lounge, and sat down on the edge of it and stared into his face. It had never seemed more beautiful in spite of the bluish hollows under the eyes.
She wondered when he had taken the drug, whether it was after she started to play, and if so why then? Had the thought of her been too much for him? Something happened to her as she sat there looking at him, a crisis in the evolution of feeling. But she was not conscious of it till afterwards. She was caught now by a flood of pity and affection. The impulse came to her to lie down with him, to be with him when he waked, and to help him to fight back to himself. She went out to the supper tray, and drank a glass of wine. She put out the candles in the study, and saw that the fire was safe.
He did not stir as she moved him to make room for herself. She thought she could stay there all night. But her mood of passionate affection wore itself out as she lay there uncomfortable and fiercely awake, listening to the storm break upon the house. And there was something uncanny about Dane, not himself, lying there beside her, like a dead man. The hot air of the scented room suffocated her. Something absolutely alien to her health and balance irritated her. The lashing of the sleet upon the roof, and the queer straining sounds made by the creepers fighting for their hold against the wind kept her nerves continually on the jump. And she got a hopeless feeling about her ability to help him when he woke.
After all, she was doing him no good by being there. And she had satisfied the sacrificial mood she had been in. With more of a dull dismay in her mind than anything else she got up about one o’clock and went back to her room. It was too wet to go outside. The rain beat against her canvas blind, and underneath it along the floor. She stood by her open window till she began to shiver, but the cold air made her feel better. Her nerves calmed down. She felt very tired. She got into her indoor bed and before very long fell asleep.
V
The storm wore itself out during the night, and the next day was fresh and clear. Early in the morning Dane staggered out of his room with a couple of rugs, and got into his hammock. After he had revived himself with the coffee Lee brought him he began to wonder what had happened to him. It was some time before he got it clearly in his mind. He remembered coming home, he remembered his struggle with his nerves the previous day. He remembered he had wanted music. And then he had gone into his den to listen to it, and he had seen that dreadful face, the face of the drowned man. He could remember no more. He was distressed to learn what day it was. What would Valerie think of him? He had told her he was going to Roland’s Mills. She would think he had lied.
He lay still all the morning fighting nausea, wishing he were dead, wondering why he had not ended it all up there on the Hokianga harbour that night. He told himself he was a miserable weakling, and that it was a wonder Valerie had ever loved him, but she had, and still did in spite of all this, that was the wonderful thing. And thinking of that his will began again its fight with his body.
At lunch time he asked Lee what she was doing, and was glad to hear she had gone out to garden. He made a desperate effort to shave so that he could take tea with her, but he did not feel equal to meeting her till dinner. Then he sent a message to her. It seemed to him that she came as buoyantly as usual onto the verandah where he lay in the dusk. He felt like a sick child as she came up to him and leaned over him and put her arms under him. It was the most comforting thing he had ever felt.
“Val, I did mean to go to Roland’s Mills,” he said miserably.
“I know you did, Dane. I read in the paper what happened. Please get well, and don’t think about it any more. I know you were not lying to me.”
Happily he did not see that it took some resolution to put the tenderness and understanding she did into her voice.
She sat down by him and took his hand and stroked it, and did not attempt to talk. It grew dark. Lee came to the door and asked where they would have the meal.
“Is it too cold for you out here, Val? I want to stay outside.”
“Not at all. I’ll get a coat.”
And afterwards she sat and then lay there with him till two in the morning, keeping the longest and strangest silence she had ever kept with any human being. But he was afraid to be alone, she saw that. Once when she moved he clutched at her fearfully, and that pathetic appeal had given her a strange thrill. Only when she saw that he had gone to sleep did she very carefully work her way out of the hammock, cover him up carefully, and steal inside.
He was much better the next morning and walked in to her as she sat in her study. She got up and kissed him and found that she was really as glad as ever to have him restored to her.
“Valerie, dear, you are very good to me,” he said humbly. “And will you come on the launch with me for a run about the rivers? Three or four days. I want to stay out in the air. We can keep warm.”
“Why, of course I will, Dane. I’d love it myself.”
And he was so much better at the end of the trip that Valerie almost forgot what she had felt as she sat beside him on the lounge in his den.