The Strange Attraction/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II
I
W hen Bob introduced her to him Valerie saw the importance of Jimmy to the Dargaville News. Indeed, Jimmy did more than work with the energy of six boys. He cast a glamour over the littered office and the second-hand machinery and the smelly composing-room. His work was more to him than a job, those circumscribing four walls fell down before his roving eyes, and the cantankerous old printing machine was an enemy after his own heart.
Jimmy was a boy of uncertain fatherhood, and the eldest of a family of five. When he was an inconvenient infant his mother had come to Dargaville dressed as a young widow, and though obviously not of the servant class had begun to keep herself and her child by doing washing. Women who watched her suspected that she set her teeth on this work, and one day one of them asked her if she could sew, and offered to start her as a dressmaker. And Jimmy’s mother became one of the best sewers in the town. Then she married a decent youth employed in Roger Benton’s stores. They had four children, the youngest but a baby, when the father was killed in an accident. The town rallied to help the game little woman whose children were always clean and well behaved, a subscription was got up for her, and she started out again as a dressmaker.
Jimmy had known for years that a great responsibility rested on his shoulders. He had to show the town that it had not wasted its time when it had helped his mother. He had just left school and was looking for work when there was talk of the coming paper. But it did not occur to him at first that it would have anything so wonderful as a job for a boy.
He was fishing off the station wharf when one of his school friends told him he had just heard a boy was wanted for it. He jumped up, left his line and bait, and ran along the river to the office where two men were unloading the new jobbing machine. He was told the boss had gone to lunch. He ran all the way to Mac’s hotel, stopped panting in the hall, hesitated a moment about storming the dining-room, but bursting with anxiety lest he be too late he stuck his head in at the door. He saw Bob Lorrimer eating alone, quite unconscious of the portentous power he seemed, and got a fit of horrid funk, but conquering it as he did Red Indians in his dreams, he strode hot and grubby and fishy to Bob’s table, and stood nervously twisting his cap in his hands. He was sick with shame at feeling the eyes of the room upon him, and humiliated by the sight of his filthy fingers, but still something supported him in that dreadful moment.
“Please, sir,” he began miserably, as Bob looked at him.
“Well, son, what do you want?” asked the arbiter of fate quite amiably.
“Please, sir, I heard you want a boy, a boy for the paper.”
Jimmy ached to sink into the earth as Bob covered him with a shrewd glance. He could not know that the man was immediately prepossessed in his favour.
Jimmy was a short stocky boy with very bright brown eyes and bronze-tinted hair. Usually his round face shone with some secret amusement of his own at the world about him, an amusement curiously mingled with the solicitude he had acquired from helping a tired mother and keeping a watchful eye on little ones. Bob did not see the solicitude at this moment, but he saw something that held him. He knew the job mattered enormously to Jimmy.
“Do you really want to work, son?” he asked. “It will be hard work.”
“Yes, please, sir.”
“What have you done?”
Jimmy drooped pitifully. “I—I haven’t done anything, sir. I’ve just left school.”
“What standard have you passed?”
“The sixth, sir. I’m fourteen.” There was nothing boastful about the latter statement, but it was given hopefully.
“What’s your name?”
“Jimmy Paul, sir.”
“All right. Come to the office at nine to-morrow morning, Jimmy.”
The boy stared at him swallowing hard. “Will—will you take me, sir?” He could not realize it was done.
“Yes, Jimmy, I’ll try you. You can be a fine help to me if you really want to work, and I’ll pay you what you are worth. I’ll see you at nine to-morrow.”
But Jimmy still stood fumbling with his cap, unable to move. And Bob understood.
“I say, Jimmy, do you know any boys who would help to deliver the paper at night?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Fine. You pick out three of the best and bring them with you in the morning. They must be reliable, you understand, and be willing to stay on the job. They must be ready to come along after school if they’re still at it. They’ll get a commission on the papers they sell and a wage for delivering. And it will take an hour or more according to the number of regular boys you can get. I’d like three at least. Can you look them up this afternoon?”
“Yes, sir.”
And bursting with pride at this amazing trust in him, and with eyes that would have lit up a dark night, he strode out of the dining-room and dashed off to tell his mother that he had the grandest boy’s job in the town.
Bob smiled after him. He had been told by the committee the night before that Jimmy was the boy he should get, but even without that recommendation he would have known Jimmy was the boy. And Bob was satisfied with the three that Jimmy brought with him the next morning, and saw that it was a regular boy gang with its acknowledged code and leadership and loyalty.
When Valerie arrived Jimmy was managing his runners, and trying not to be lordly about it, for his mother had impressed on him that pride goeth before a fall. He counted out their papers, checked up their sales and returns, put the pennies into a cash-box of his own and entered each boy’s record in a three-penny note-book that was the treasure of his life. He would have died to save it from injury, and he never had a more wonderful moment than when after Bob had audited and balanced it for the first time, he had turned with the words, “First rate, Jimmy. Not a mistake. Go on as you have done this week and I’ll raise your salary at the end of the month.”
And listening to him that night his tired mother dreamt wonderful dreams for him, mingled with hopes of rest some day for herself.
But Jimmy did much more than manage the runners. He swept out the office and the composing-room, he sharpened the pencils, filled the inkwells, washed the paste brushes, filed the papers and exchanges, ran all the errands, greased the machinery. He helped the foreman to make up, and he learned to set type and to follow copy. And all these things he did as if the world moved only because they were done.
“What a gorgeous boy,” said Valerie to Bob at the end of the second day. “This place is a continuous revel for him.”
“Yes, and you’ll be part of the revel soon.”
“Well, that won’t hurt him,” she retorted.
II
Valerie was alone in the building at four o’clock the following Saturday afternoon for Bob had gone off to report a dairy conference, and the staff had also gone, as they did at the week-end when possible, since it was not a publishing day. She had just smiled the last of them out with the comfortable feeling that she would have no antagonisms there. From the first day she had regarded them as co-workers with herself, and her friendly attitude had been returned with good measure. She knew that the foreman Ryder, and the jobbing-man Johnson, and the leading woman typesetter, Miss Hands, who had all been brought from Auckland, were sophisticated artisans ready to jump at the first pin prick, but because she had read history with insight, and understood the background that had contributed to their sensitiveness, and because she had in herself no class consciousness, she met them frankly on the ground of common interest, eager to learn all they could teach her.
And she had won their gratitude by insisting that awnings be provided for the windows of the composing-room, a matter Bob had let slide.
Valerie leaned back in her chair stretching herself. She had to admit she was tired with the long hours and the unusual weather. She had worked till after ten every night. She had as yet seen nothing of the town. Her only exalted moments had been those when timber vessels had gone by. And it was wonderful to look through the clear upper half of the office window across the dusty road, past a fringe of rushes, and to see stealing into the smoke cloud on the river a phantom ship slipping from nowhere into nowhere, like the fabrication of a dream. She thought of one that had gone by that morning, a black brig etched in for a few unforgettable minutes in a world of vagueness before it faded out.
She was glad she had come. It was good to have a real job, to feel that she was independent, that at last she had got clear away from the relatives and their set, and that a new world was before her.
She worked on till after half-past six. She saw she would have to come back after dinner and probably the next morning. But then there was the afternoon when she would walk with Bob to the coast. The thought of the open sea lifted her spirits. She closed her books, locked the front door behind her, and turned towards the hotel. It was half-past seven when she reached the dining-room.
It seemed to her to be unusually full of men. Then she remembered that it was Saturday night, pay night, half holiday night for the bushes and the mills, and she was prepared for it to be noisy till late. That dining-room at the end of a hot day would have wrecked the nerves of a sensitive person who had not a sense of humour. Colossal designs had been an obsession with the decorator employed by Mac to do the house up in style. The wall paper was heavily embossed with gigantic dark brown chrysanthemums which stood out in a manner that made it surprising that pictures could be hung against them. The pictures, with the exception of one of a ship, were advertisements of whiskies, ales and stouts set in wide gilt frames that had not been cleaned since the house was built. The room was high, but a varnished ceiling and a high varnished dado, to the height of five feet all round it, diminished its liberal proportions. A huge sideboard blatantly displayed enormous pieces of silver that had apparently been designed to show how many bunches of grapes could be moulded to the square foot. Competing for attention were bowls and bottles of cut glass ravined and cliffed like a mountainous land. The two smaller sideboards that held piles of plates and silver for the tables were dwarfed to an undeserved insignificance. It was evident that the linoleum had been intended to match the wall paper. But the intention was better than the result. The eight windows along one side were hung with curtains of lace no longer white, elaborate in pattern and heavy with a design to match the silverware. Stretched in the wash to different lengths they formed an irregular line above the floor, and threatened in places to trail upon it. The room was lit with four gas lamps suspended from the centre.
But hideous as it all was, it was one of the cleanest rooms of its kind. The campaign against flies was vigorous, varied and continuous. Every sugar bowl and milk jug and butter cooler and bread board was protected with circles of netting hung round the border with heavy blue beads. The table-cloths were changed twice a week and the floor washed daily.
To Valerie this was ugliness carried to the point of humour. And then it was inevitable. She could not change it. And she had as extraordinary a patience with disagreeable facts as she had extraordinary an impatience with disagreeable ideas.
This night as she walked to her table her feet dragged a little. She was relieved to see Father Ryan was away for she could not have exerted herself to talk. She sat down, sympathized with Lizzie who looked pale, and glanced idly about the tables near her. A little way off a tweeded Englishman and another man eating with him returned her casual look. The Englishman did not particularly interest her, but the other one did for she saw it was Doctor Steele, of whom Bob had talked significantly.
The doctor was the best physician and surgeon on the river. He was also a man with a skeleton in the cupboard, only it was a skeleton that never stayed in the cupboard, but danced grimacing upon the public streets to the scandal of the passerby. He had a wife who was a pathological case or a vile old hag according as to whether the critic were scientific or emotional. Men often wondered why the doctor allowed her to live on with him, but he was of those who having once loved a woman recognized some obligation to care for her ever afterwards. In the hotel Mac saw to it that he had peace, for he once, in a notable passage of arms, had informed the lady in no uncertain terms that she could not set foot in his house. The doctor spent most of his leisure time there. He never drank to excess. His great diversion was poker which he played incessantly with anyone who came along, caring nothing whether he lost or won.
Valerie looked beyond him down the crowded room, and at once her eyes were held by a figure at a table on a line with her own at the other end. It was Mac’s table, and now for the first time she saw him there. She stared curiously till, raising his face, he caught her fixed gaze. She instantly looked away, and then had a funny feeling of self-consciousness as she felt his hard scrutiny. She went on eating without raising her head till someone came up to her table. It was Michael, with a tray and a glass and a bottle of wine.
“Mac’s compliments, miss,” he said with a sly smile, as he poured her out some.
She was absurdly pleased. She looked down the room, waited till Mac looked back at her, and then she raised her glass and drank to him. He answered her by a jerky movement intended to be some kind of salute. And that was her introduction to Thomas MacAlarney. Almost a week went by before she spoke to him.
III
The owner of the Dargaville hotel was the largest and most inarticulate Irishman in New Zealand. He was, for his race, singularly unapproachable. He had been born in Australia three months after his parents arrived there, and had early become a nomad about the gold fields. It was at Calgoorlie and Coolgardie that he made the money he afterwards put into the hotel business. He had drifted to New Zealand and Dargaville as men drift about the colonies, and finding only one poorly run house he had settled there and set himself out to get the trade.
Many adjectives would slip to the tongue at the first sight of him, but not the word prepossessing. He stood six feet two and required the seating space of two ordinary men. But he was not a floppy fat man. His enormous stomach was hard, his great arms were hard. The clutch of his hand was as inescapable as that of fate. His tomato-coloured skin looked very dry and shiny if he had just washed and very damp if he had not. He had a large round head covered with a lot of coarse gray hair, and a pointed beard always tidily trimmed. Heavy black eyebrows that showed hardly a streak of gray bristled over his protruding blue eyes in a manner that alarmed small boys, and, indeed, many an adult when he frowned. The eyes themselves had a curious expression of mingled amusement and hostility. He looked at all people with a fixed hard stare, and one had to know him for some time to realize that he did not crave to murder the whole human race.
He was never known to wear a coat save at the start and end of his annual trip to Auckland. No tailor seemed equal to the task of making his vests capacious enough, for he was never seen in one that was not split down the back. But his shirts and trousers were impeccable and his boots always brushed.
In his hotel he was an autocrat. Though his house was public in the eyes of the law, there were people he would not allow to set foot in it, and he had ways of making the local law agree with him. It was his pride that he ran the best public house in the north of New Zealand. He sold unadulterated liquor even before the prohibition party got after the trade, and he gave the best shilling dinner in the country. He was famous for it. He never allowed a drunken man to be seen leaving his house. He had two rooms beside his stables at the back with cots in them, and there he calmly dumped and locked up the obstreperous drinkers till they should be able to walk off without attracting the attention of the constable. He felt it was only fair to keep them out of the clutches of the law.
Thomas MacAlarney rarely spoke to a woman other than his servants, whom he managed himself. Few people suspected that he was mortally afraid of the sex and confused in its presence. He was conscious of his vocabulary, which was liable to be unprintable at any moment, and having but little knowledge of the English or any other language apart from its curses and violent epithets he was not equal to the amenities of ordinary conversation.
He had an uncanny knowledge of all that went on under his roof. He took great care of his girls and men knew it was not safe to flirt with them. The newspaper committee had had hard work to persuade him to take Valerie, but they did not guess his real reason for hesitancy, which was that he was almost certain she would not be comfortable. It solved the problem a little to have the priest on one side of her and Bob on the other. Otherwise he would have felt bound to leave empty the rooms next her. But at the end of a week he was easy in his mind. He knew she smoked cigarettes in her room, that she had twice ordered ale with her lunch, that Father Ryan called her a remarkable woman, that she gave no trouble, and that already his servants adored her.