The Strange Attraction/Chapter 20
CHAPTER XX
I
One night in the beginning of January Valerie walked alone back and forth along the drive on what she called her side of the house. She had not seen Dane all day. She had asked nothing about him, and supposed him gone to Dargaville. For a week he had been aloof from her, tired and listless. She did not know whether he had done any work. He had looked at her in a queer appealing way, she had thought, several times, and she thought she had done wonders in the way of ignoring his mood.
She had remembered when she woke that morning that it was the third anniversary of their wedding day. Though she was as unsentimental as ever about the conventional ceremony she had wondered if Dane would give any sign of memory, and was absurdly hurt that he had not. It was the first time he had forgotten to tease her about it. And now she had not even seen him.
Whether it was remembering it or what, she had come to another crisis this night. She was taking stock again of her endurance, wondering desperately how many months she could go on. For it seemed to her now that Dane was going down hill fast, and she had lost every scrap of hope that he would ever be better. She was certain beyond all doubt that he could not save himself, and that she could not save him. If their love could not do it nothing could. She had suffered tortures during the last two months over the lines that were deepening on his face and over the sallowness that was tainting his fine skin. And she knew she could no more bear to stay and helplessly watch that descent than she could have borne to stand on a beach and watch a gallant ship going to pieces on the rocks. For that was the most tragic thing about it, it was a gallant ship. If he would only degenerate comfortably as her father had done! But he was dying hard. And he was only forty. She could not stand it. And the war, which was remaking so many men, could do nothing now for him.
But when was she to go from him? How was she to go from him?
She could not forget the pledge she had given him in her own mind, her determination to be fair, to give him what she owed him. But there was the rub. What exactly did she owe him when it came to considering concrete things? How was she to decide when she had reached that obscure boundary line, that elusive boundary line, that disconcertingly wavering boundary line where consideration for him must end and consideration for herself begin? Could fairness and loyalty be computed in so many months or years of one’s company, in carefully modulated tones and carefully regulated moods? How many hours and nights of sleepless struggle were to be endured before one came to the last? What was endurable? What was unendurable? How many chances should one give a person? How many times should one renew one’s hope, how many times make the effort to forget?
And there was the strange fact that she still cared, that when he came to a high mood (he had not had one for weeks, she remembered) he could still carry her with him. But she could not bear to think that sex was the best she could do for him now. She did not realize how much, apart from that, her company still meant to him. And she was afraid of being chained to him by that alone. She knew she would come to hate him if that were the chief bond.
“I don’t want to stay till I hate him. I cannot stay till I hate him. It would ruin it all. But is that what I have to do? And why should I ever hate him? What is the matter with me? Why can’t I just stay, and stay, and wait—oh, why?”
The fact that he had told her to go did not help her at all. He could look at her and say go, but his eyes and his spirit chained her there. And she could not face the actual packing up and going out of the gate for the last time. Kissing him for the last time. Eating the last meal. Impossible! Good Lord! How did people ever get away from each other? And she was not thinking of herself then. She could see him left alone, lying alone in his hammock, wishing she were there to play to him, looking for her to come through the study door. She could see him pacing the verandah and the garden alone with those terrible despairs of his. She could see him sitting down with his knees drawn up to his chin and the dogs licking his face and hands. The lost child. She wished he had never told her that story of his boyhood; she always saw him like that when she thought of leaving him, that forlorn boy deserted by his father. And she knew she could never bear herself again in life if she deserted him.
And so after all, as she walked, she decided again as she had decided before. She would not leave him so long as his eyes could light up when she went through the study door, as long as anything she could do helped him to write, as long as he counted for something among people who were helped by the thing he was still able to do.
Sacrifice, was it? That bogy of her free and independent youth. That Frankenstein foe of individuality. Well, what of it? She thought of what was happening in Gallipoli and France.
She had run through many shades of feeling as she walked. She had shed tears and stumbled, and had used her handkerchief frequently. She had stopped and looked up at the stars, and had stood still and stared at the ground. She had walked twice into the stream of light from a lamp in the study. Two hours of it, and worn out and ready to go on again, she went inside.
II
Dane had not gone to Dargaville as she supposed. Unable to sleep the night before he had gone out on the river and had wandered up and down creeks till at last he had fallen into a doze on the floor of the Diana. The sun was well up when he waked but he did not go home. He went to Te Koperu for some coffee, had some sandwiches made up, and drifted along up the shady bank of the Wairoa trying to screw himself up to the action he had known for some time to be inevitable.
He had been far more abstemious in the last months than Valerie had any idea of. He was suffering from abstemiousness. For weeks the only stimulant he had taken was coffee. He knew well enough as he drifted about in the launch that he had been listless and aloof from Valerie. For days now he had been wondering most of the time just how much of a mask she was wearing, whether she had come to the time when she would be happier away from him than with him. He had been puzzling about it. How was he to find out how much she wanted to go, how far she was disguising her feeling for his sake? He could only do it by getting her off her guard somehow. But she was never off her guard.
Then he got the idea that he would sneak home after dark that night and spy upon her. He did not take the launch into the bay, but secured it on the point further on, the point, he remembered, where she had trespassed. Then he made his way cautiously along the rocks among the trees and into the shrubbery in front of his house. As he moved forward he saw her white dress on the drive. In a dark suit himself he was invisible as he stood in a thicket of micracarpa.
Valerie came towards him, blowing her nose. She did not swing along. She walked unevenly kicking at stones in the path, stopping, going on again. She turned and disappeared along the drive, and appeared again. That time, as she moved in the line of light from the study, he was able to see her face. It startled him. Four times he saw it thus, desperate and haggard. He clenched his hands and set his teeth. Good God! Had she got as far as that in disillusionment without his knowing it? He was stunned.
He watched her go inside. A match came to light in her own front room, and then the lamp. He stole nearer till he could clearly see her face against a background of red curtain. He saw her take his picture and look at it. But there was no hatred in her face as she stared at it. The meaning in her expression came over him with the force of sudden revelation.
He crept off through the bushes and round to his back room and sat down on the step of the one door that opened outside. How long he sat there he did not know. It was a fine warm night. Weary of sitting and staring at the sandy path, weary of trying to think, of trying not to think, he got up at last and went to lie in his hammock. He dozed off in spite of himself, and did not wake till the sun came streaming through his cutting upon his face. It was half-past five. He went very quietly into the house to the kitchen and washed and shaved there, as he often did when he did not wish to disturb Valerie by making sounds in the bathroom. Lee came in in his pajamas to know if he wanted anything, and Dane had him get the remains of a cold chicken for him, and told him to tell Valerie that he wanted to take her out on the river that afternoon. After he had changed his clothes and drunk a glass of wine, he went out and along to the place where he had left the launch the night before.
As he went down the river to Dargaville he thought it funny thab the mere resolving to do a thing he had long shelved should give him such a feeling of strength. He remembered the mood of exaltation he had had up at Hokianga for days after he had decided not to shoot himself. Was it that when one had accepted Fate the relentless goddess gave one some potent stimulant to enable one to live calmly by her stern decrees?
As it was very early he went some distance beyond the town. Nothing was stirring there except men on the decks of a timber barque at the railway wharf. He was soothed by his aloneness in the new day. There had been a time in his life when eleven o’clock at night began the thrilling hours, but now, of all the twenty-four, he liked best the dawn.
But the dawns were tragic these days, he remembered, and he began to wonder how many men in Europe would be out of the world by night, never to see another day.
He turned back, and walked into Mac’s pub as the first lot of breakfasters were finishing their second cup of coffee. He drank his with the big Irishman who asked him no questions, nor cast at him enquiring looks, though Mac did wonder what mood had brought him there so early. Then Dane found Michael, and asked him to get a message to Doctor Steele to come to him there. When the physician arrived he took him upstairs to the room he always occupied when he spent nights in the hotel.
The doctor sat down on the one chair and waited. Dane walked to the window, where he stared out a moment. Then he turned back and looked down at the other man.
“Doc, do you know much about cancer?” he asked quietly.
The gloomy brown eyes did not change their expression as they looked up at him.
“I wouldn’t call myself an expert. I wouldn’t operate. Why do you ask?”
“My father died of cancer in the stomach. I’ve been wondering for some time if that is what I have.”
There was a dead silence for a few seconds. Then the doctor spoke in his low monotonous manner.
“Cancer is hardly a thing to go wondering about. And there’s a theory now that it is not hereditary. It may only be indigestion.” He asked him several questions which Dane answered in a hard detached tone.
“It looks bad, Barrington, but really, it may only be indigestion.”
“That’s what I’ve preferred to think, Doc. I’ve shirked finding out. But I’ve got to know now.”
“Go at once to Alleyne, and get him to make the tests. If it is that, he’s the best man to operate, none better in the colonies. You mustn’t let it go on.”
“I guess ‘letting’ has nothing to do with it, Doc,” said Dane with a twisted smile. “There is an inevitability about cancer, a damnable inevitability. It’s that I don’t like. I resent it. God! what a rottenly feeble thing a man is! Limited by his stomach! Regulated by his stomach! Hounded by his stomach! Made or marred by his stomach! To think that that ugly uninteresting organ, a mess of a place, should be one’s dictator, a thing made beyond one’s control, ruined in one’s youth beyond one’s control! Ugh! Excuse me, Doc. I’ve faced it long enough. I ought to be used to the idea.”
He walked to the window and looked out again before turning back.
“I say, Doc. You must promise me something.”
“Yes?”
“You mustn’t hint this to a soul. Under no circumstances must Valerie get a suspicion of it. She thinks I’ve got indigestion. You promise?”
“If you wish it, certainly.”
“I more than wish it, I insist on it.” He went on feeling a relief in talking to someone remote like the doctor. “You see, she wants to go to the war, and I want her to go. I particularly want her to get away now before I get any worse. If she knew of this, thought my days were limited, she’d think it her duty to stay by me to the end. She’s so damned conscientious. And women, some women, have a ghastly capacity for self-sacrifice, and then they grow to hate the thing they have sacrificed themselves for. Many wives have told me that. And perhaps she would, and I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t stand having her about me if she knew. I should be driven to end it. I shall do that some day when I can’t stick it any longer. But she must get away. And then one has no right to impose such a thing as cancer in the stomach on any human soul—don’t pity me, Doc; that’s the last thing on earth I can stand ———”
“God damn you, I’m not pitying you, Barrington.”
Dane smiled at him.
“I don’t know that you’ve got cancer. And if you have, Alleyne may save you. For the Lord’s sake, though, go at once and find out.”
“I will. I’ll go down to-morrow. And not a word, please, Doc.”
“Oh, shut up, D. B. It’s part of my work to be silent.”
But all the same the doctor told himself that Valerie should know some day.
III
When Dane left the hotel he walked through the town and onto the flat above. He had a craving to get out to the open sea. Though the interview with the doctor was not final it made no difference to his own feeling about it. But it struck him as he wandered across the hot sandspit that it would be funny if he discovered he had nothing but indigestion. Would that knowledge help him to get well enough to go away with Valerie? Perhaps it would. He had been hypnotized by the fear of the other thing for a good while, or rather he had accepted it as inevitable. He wandered aimlessly along, oblivious of the glaring sun, till he came by chance upon the little hollow on the cliffs where he and Valerie had had their first attaching talk. Thinking of it he remembered that he had left her very much alone for some time, and that here was a day, perhaps the last (though he had not at all clearly in his mind what he was going to do), a day that he could make a pleasant memory. For he felt fairly well, and now he wanted to comfort her for the night he felt she must have spent.
He walked back to the town hardly feeling the heat, and ran home as fast as he could. It was much too early for lunch, but he wanted to see her at once. He walked past the front steps and saw that she was sitting at her desk.
“Hello, Val, are you very busy?” he called.
The question seemed absurd to her. It seemed so long since she had done anything that was worth a pin. But she was glad to hear him call like that, and not disposed to question the reason for it.
“Not if you want me, Dane,” she answered cheerfully enough.
As he came to the verandah she scrambled through the window. She was surprised at his air and saw that he had not been drinking, and that his eyes looked clear.
“Why, you are burned,” she said.
“I’ve been running about in the launch a good deal, dear. I’ve been very unsociable lately, Valerie, but I feel better to-day. Let’s go off now in the launch and find a cool spot.”
Her face lit up as she felt he had come back to her. She had spent a lonely, wretched, sleepless night, and she was much afraid her eyes showed it. They did, but he made no remark upon them. He was lost in admiration of the manner in which she had greeted him. He deliberately shelved the past and the future, and determined, as he had many times in his life, to live for that day alone. And he knew he could make her live with him.
They went off with their lunch. At first he thought he would go to the rimu pool, and then he thought he could not face it. He chose another place, beautiful enough, a willow-girdled backwater, where they ate their lunch, and dozed happily in each other’s arms.
Then they landed, made a fire and had tea, and went back as the sun dropped behind the range. They were both now in a real party mood. Valerie wondered what had happened to him. In moods like this he was irresistible. They dressed up for dinner and had it by one of the open doors of the den. Dane wore his black dinner suit and a tucked white silk shirt that she thought very swagger. She knew he was trying to atone for his past aloofness, and she was only too glad to have him atone. What man could ever atone as he could, she thought. She herself wore one of her most charming garments, a diaphanous blue thing, appropriate not only to her mood, but to the climate of the day. They drank Benedictine in a mood of strange gaiety, and then he teased her about the three years.
“Why, I thought you had forgotten all about it,” she said.
“Oh, no,” he smiled over his glass at her, “I’ve been thinking of it.” He looked round. Lee was not in the room. “And you still love me, don’t you?” His eyes bored into hers.
“Indeed I do,” she said, over-emphasizing her tone a little. He put his glass to her lips, and his at the same place. And then Lee came in with the chicken.
They smoked together in the hammock afterwards until he asked for music. When she had been playing for an hour he went round to the front and looked through the window at her. He saw that for the time being she was lost, lost in that wonderful world of harmony where she could forget even him. He was glad that she had that. He forgot what she was playing as he looked at her, trying to fix that picture of her in his mind. He wanted it to blot out the one of the night before.
How near had he come to her, he wondered. What secrets had she still hidden from him? Love had not meant domination for either of them, nor had either tried to clutch at the other’s personality. They had kept their own freedom side by side, he thought, but even so, love was not enough. And he knew the end would have come some time, somehow.
He did not know exactly what he was going to do as he stood there watching her. He did not try to see beyond the fact that some time in the night when she had fallen asleep he would steal away from her, and would dress and pack and go off to catch the steamer in the morning. What happened after that would depend on what Dr. Alleyne had to say.
He came back to thinking of the picture she made at the piano. He wished now he had taken her hair down so that she would look what he had often called her, a goddess in lapus lazuli and gold. He had to smile a little sadly to himself. He was incurably a lover of colour and light. And she was colour and light. He suddenly remembered the hours were going. He went up the steps and in to her and flung his arms about her.
“Don’t play any more. I want you,” he said, taking her face in his hands.
IV
Dane managed to get an appointment the day after he arrived in Auckland with Dr. Alleyne, a fine and sensitive London surgeon who had come to the colonies for his own health a few years before.
“Where’s the trouble, Barrington?” he asked as soon as Dane sat down, for he could give him only ten minutes that day.
“It’s probably cancer of the stomach.”
The doctor raised his eyebrows at the man who said this as if it were a matter of no concern.
“What makes you think that?”
His patient told him all he knew about it.
“Good heavens, man! Why haven’t you come to me before?”
“Oh, I’ve shirked it. It won’t make much difference in the end, will it?”
“It might have, if you had come to me a year ago. Look here, I’m pretty rushed these days. Can you be here at eight-thirty to-morrow morning?”
“Certainly.”
At the end of four days Dane knew his fears were justified.
“You must be operated on at once, Barrington.”
“What for?”
“What for?” Dr. Alleyne looked at him. He had already discovered he had an unusual patient.
“I was really speaking to myself,” said Dane with a twisted smile. “Might the operation be fatal?”
“Well, I don’t want to boast, but I don’t have fatal operations.”
“So I’ve heard, but you could make one fatal, couldn’t you?”
The doctor stared across his desk at him.
“You might have a year or two after an operation, if you were careful, kept off stimulants, meat and drugs. Isn’t it worth it? It seems to me the stuff you’re writing these days ———”
Again the smile on the other man’s face stopped him.
“If I don’t have the operation how much time do you give me?”
“It will depend largely on yourself, whether you do as I’ve told you. But it is pretty far gone, and sometimes those things go quickly at the end. You might have six months. You might even have a year. It would depend on your endurance. It’s a matter of slow starvation.”
Dane got up from his chair and walked to the window. But he saw nothing of the street below. Indeed, he saw nothing that bore any relation to his immediate environment or to anything he had just heard. What He saw was a picture that had come into his mind many times in the last two years, a picture that had etched itself upon his brain. It was a picture of a snow-bound world, of a little hut, of a certain Captain Oates taking a “little walk” out into that undiscovered country, and of a certain Captain Scott, and his friends Wilson and Bowers, left behind to die composing a story that would never die.
He turned back to the doctor and dropped into the chair facing him.
“Alleyne, it’s this way. If I have the operation, my wife will find out. She thinks now that I have indigestion. She wants to go to the war, and I want her to go. She must not know what is the matter with me if I live. So unless you will guarantee to finish me I won’t have the operation.”
They looked at each other, and the doctor put this story among the small collection of things he liked to think about when he got despairful of the human race.
“Barrington, I might agree that your life is in your own hands, but it isn’t in mine. I couldn’t do it yet, not with as much left to you as I think there is. If it came to the last weeks and one could be pretty certain there was nothing left but pain—well, I won’t say. But you are asking too much of me now.”
Dane stood up. “All right. Then I won’t have it. I can stick it out for a while—I hear you are going to the front, Doctor?”
The surgeon looked up at him. “Yes, I go in about two weeks.”
“As soon as that? I wish I could have gone and ended it that way. I’m going to stay here two or three days to fix up some business. If you have time to dine ———”
“I shall make time with pleasure.”
V
Valerie felt chilled when she read the note Dane had slipped under her door before leaving for Auckland. This erratic behaviour seemed so unnecessary. If he had had to go to town suddenly about a change in investments why had he not told her the day before? There was nothing disturbing about his having to go. But there was about the way he had done it. He was really carrying her own theories of independence much further than she carried them herself. And it seemed unfriendly.
She tried to console herself with thoughts of the day before, of the high mood he had been in, and of the fact that he really seemed better than she had seen him for some time. But something puzzled her. He had looked at her at times in such a curious way.
She tried to work that morning. She had put her novel aside, and was working disjointedly, jotting down in a note-book things she felt from day to day, her feelings about the war, stories of men going away, of women left behind, even some of her feeling about Dane. It did not satisfy her. It was at best something to pass the time. She was really frantic for action. She could picture herself leading groups of women, doing heroic things, working as few people could work. And here she was in a pampered garden, waited on by servants, her heaviest task the making of her own bed. She made up her mind the second day of Dane’s absence that when he came back she would join Mrs. Benton in the organizing of the women of Dargaville; anything now but this sitting around.
On the third day she got a letter from Dane, affectionate and humorous, telling her the latest news, and on the next she received one saying he would be delayed a few days longer. Then the temptation came to her to go while he was away. In spite of her attempts to put it out of mind the idea obsessed her, but always when it came to standing in her room and visualizing the packing process she could get no farther.
One morning it came over her more clearly than ever how strange her life with him had been. She had never really belonged there. She was like a person passing by. She had had that feeling often. The place was in no sense hers. She had never asked a person to it. She did not feel that even in Dane’s absence she could have asked Mrs. Benton to come to tea, or to stay the night. It was completely his place, and even when he was away his spirit seemed to hover over it. His personality dominated it. And she had left no mark on it save the flower-beds. Perhaps that was one reason why she wanted to go. And yet she had been so happy here. She wondered if she would ever be as happy anywhere else.
She gardened, she rode, she walked, she played, she tried to write. She tried not to think. She tried to see some glory still ahead in the future for her and Dane.
And then she got the letter.
“Dear Valerie: I think you will understand what I am going to say. You and I went through a conventional ceremony three years ago that seemed absurd to us because it made impossible demands upon us, and so we made a ceremony of our own that we did mean to live up to. I don’t know what you said in yours, but I can guess a little. But the thing I’m remembering now is what I said in mine. I wanted a little of your life, a little of your youth and love. There were times when I thought I had no right to it, and then I felt I had a right if you cared enough, and if I was prepared to live up to my contract with you.
“Now, my dear, you have given me three years of your life, of your youth and love, and with them you have given me more than I ever dreamed you could. You have given me more than any woman ever gave me. You have done for me the greatest thing one person can do for another—you have justified my continued existence to myself.
“I have always known that some time there would be a descent from the mountain top. I have not unhappily anticipated it. I have been content with what the days brought. And as long as you were happy the garden was fair. But you have not been happy lately. You have been very fine about it. You have tried to keep it from me. But I know it now, and I cannot be happy in my old place any longer with you unsatisfied there. One side of you is being starved, and I will not have it go on. You want to go, and because you do I want you to, I insist that you do. And I cannot face thinking about it, arguing about it. I’m not going to let my health interfere. My mind is made up about that. And it would have come just the same if there had been no war. In the end you would have had to go.
“And Valerie dear, you will go now while we still love each other. You will go because we love each other. I will not have our three years spoiled by any silly ideas about sacrifice. Our three years shall end with that night last week. I shall keep the picture of you as you stood in my den with me after dinner, and as you sat at the piano. And you shall keep some picture you had of me that night. I insist that the dust of lingering farewells be not allowed to settle on them.
“Now, old girl, I cannot command you, but I beg you to carry out the spirit of this letter. I am getting out of Auckland to-morrow for a week, and I wish to come home at the end of that time. Will you please be gone by then? You see I am turning you out, turning you out because you won’t go of your own accord. And I know why you won’t go. It is very wonderful of you, but you must go now, please. And I am a coward. I cannot stand in my garden and see you go out of it. So you must go before I come back.
“I have had a long talk with your father. He understands my action thoroughly. He will ask you no questions. The war will blanket your going away. So many are going now. I have left money with him for you, and later when you need more you shall have it. Of course, dear, I’m not regarding this as the end of everything. Please understand that. It is merely a change. Of course we shall write to each other. I want to hear from you before you leave Auckland. But please, please, do not think it necessary to leave any letter for me in the house. Please, don’t, Val ———
“Dear old girl, I write all this because I am sure you will understand. Ever since I met you I have been, and for the rest of my life I shall be yours. And for a time at least you have been mine, perhaps as much as you will ever be anybody’s. I’m not afraid that you will forget me. Perhaps you will remember too well.
“I’m rambling on—it is hard to end this.
“I’m not going to say good-bye.
“Just good-night—dear Valerie. Dane.
“P. S. Please don’t turn me into a ghost. I should be the most uneasy spirit you have ever known. But if you do, let me have a cemetery all to myself. I insist on it. I will not be put with the relatives.”
VI
Valerie read it in the middle of a lovely summer afternoon after she returned from Dargaville, and it blotted out the sun for her and turned the day to blank despair. She stumbled through it twice, and though her eyes appeared to move she did not see the flower-beds, or the oleander bushes, or the magnolia tree. She sat as if paralyzed in every limb and in her mind as well. When Lee brought out her dinner she stared strangely at the boy as if he were a phenomenon. She tried to eat, but her throat seemed to be swollen shut.
As she paced the garden afterwards the opposing statements “I must go,” “I cannot go” began a tormenting fire back and forth in her mind. But apart from that she could not think that night. She could only feel that she was one hard pain from head to foot. And she did not know why she was suffering so much about it. Here it was, her freedom to go. The one thing she thought she most wanted. And it meant nothing but pain to think of it. She slept at last and woke to wonder what had happened to her. Then she remembered the letter. She got out of her cot, clambered through her window, and took it out of the box on her dressing-table, and sat down in her nightgown to read it again. And now she perceived the strength of it, the finality of it, the something between the lines. There was something she did not know. Should she try to find it out or leave it? There was a desperate appeal in the letter. What was it he knew that she did not? The conviction came to her that whatever it was he did not think her equal to the knowledge. Or was it that he wanted to save her? In either case she felt she was failing him. That was a terrible thought on which to begin the day.
Then the postscript arrested her. She had not taken it in the night before. That humorous protest coming at the end of the rest of it astonished her. But he need have no fear, she told herself. She did not make the ghosts. They made themselves. And he had done the one thing that would keep him alive forever. She had a presentiment that henceforth all men who came into her life would have to stand or fall in comparison with him, that perhaps no man would ever again be seen by her for himself alone, but be merely a substitute. She might, indeed, remember him too well.
Then she saw that she was really thinking about going, that in spite of what he had said she was seeing the end of things as they had been. All the morning she walked about the garden unable to make a move. She looked about the beautiful old place, hearing the birds and the bees. Oh, no, she wasn’t going away from here. It was absurd. She began to think of his coming back to it alone. She could see him coming along the path from the boathouse steps, to the verandah, listening for her—no, no, she must not think of it. She had to go, at the back of her mind she knew that, even though she went on all day protesting against the idea of it. And she protested against it all through a second day, making no attempt to pack.
She read his letter every day, and every day it seemed to be a greater thing, more heroic, more uncannily right. But every day the fact that they could not go on together seemed more hopelessly stupid and wrong.
On the third day she was surprised to read in an Auckland paper an article by him written to calm the feelings of people wrought up by recent alarms. It was a moving piece of work. It called to mind the picture of courage and endurance that Captain Scott and his companions had given to the world. There was nothing in it to show that the man who wrote it was sitting in the midst of the ruin of his own hopes. Valerie wondered why she was amazed that he could write it at that time. Then she remembered that she could still play the piano.
That night she played for the first time since she had received his letter, and found that she could forget him. When she had played for a little over an hour she jumped from the keyboard electrified. She thought she had heard her name called. She was sure she had heard it called. It was a still warm night. There were no confusing sounds to deceive her. She stood rooted to the study floor, but she heard nothing more. She told herself she must not let her nerves play tricks on her. But she was afraid to go out of the room, afraid to look round, what of, she did not know. It was some time before she convinced herself there had been no call.
She went into her own study and sat down. What if Dane were back watching her? She had never known in his absences whether he were really away from the house or not. Supposing he had come back to try to keep her after all. Then she saw how much in those three days her mind had turned towards going, and the thought that he might come, that there might be a tragic scene or a battle of wills, tormented her. Her nerves got into a ferment. The thought that he was there grew upon her. But she could not bring herself to go through the house and see.
She had had the boys that afternoon bring her trunks and boxes from a room at the stables where they had been kept. They were now on her front verandah. The idea came to her to get away the next day. She could not stay another night in this place with the thought that Dane was watching her. She closed her window, drew the blind, and began feverishly to prepare things to go into her boxes. She packed most of the night. It was a horrible business, and her lips bled from the setting of her teeth into them. She could not take her own furniture, and yet she felt she should leave as few reminders of herself as possible. The things one left behind were always so terribly pathetic. And yet if she left her furniture and her books it might give him the idea that she would come back. That might be a comfort. And she could not take those things with her out of New Zealand. Finally she packed only her clothes, and of the things he had given her, took only a little jewellery and the Lindsay drawing of his head.
The first thing in the morning she sent Lee into Dargaville to arrange for a carter to come that afternoon after the steamer had arrived so that her things could be put directly on board. She meant to get away without seeing a soul, or having anyone in the town know. They might be hurt afterwards, but she could not help it. She went through the day as if she were in a dream. It took her most of it to pack, and she was only just ready for the carter when he came.
The boys had not shown the least surprise at her orders or at her strange behaviour. She had been on the point that morning of asking Lee whether his master were home, but she decided not. It would have been worse to know he was than merely to fear it. After the carter had left she had Lee make her some sandwiches, and then told him she would not be there to dinner, and that she was going to town to join Dane.
“Yes, Meesis Barrington,” he said, and she learned nothing from his tone.
She could not bring herself to take a last walk about the old garden. She had no need to assist her memory with any last walk. She would never forget that garden, or any corner of it. And once she had put her rooms straight after her trunks had gone she was frantic to get away from it, and come to some peace of mind, if she ever would again.
It was with dry eyes, but with a heart of lead, that she walked out in the early evening, trying not to think of the glorious day when she had first walked in.
She did not go straight into the town. She went round the back of it out on the flat to the coast road, and by a track she knew well to the cliffs. There in the dusk she managed to eat a sandwich, and there she stayed soothed till late at night. Then she went back to the town, and to the steamer, and astonished the steward at midnight by demanding the whole of the small ladies’ cabin of four berths all to herself for the trip the next day. She got it because she paid for it. And there she stayed alone till the little steamer chugged into Helensville. She revived a little in the train, and looked at things out of the window as if she knew them for what they were.
She had not told her father she was coming. She had sent no word to anyone. She wanted to land in the city alone, to go to a hotel alone, to stay alone for a day or two, till the life and movement about her should help her to put out of mind the picture that haunted her, the picture of Dane in the garden alone. But even before she reached the first suburban station the sense of forward movement began to stir within her, a vague exciting sense of the adventure that might come with a to-morrow, and she saw that already she was beginning again.
VII
Dane wrote the letter to Valerie the night he dined with Dr. Alleyne. The two men had had a great talk, somewhat coloured by presentiment. They knew at least that they would never meet again, but neither guessed that the man who had just pronounced the sentence of death on the other would himself go first.
Dane walked afterwards to his hotel. He thought it strange he should be feeling so cynically indifferent to his limited future, and also that he should be feeling fairly well. He had these respites in which he recovered his nerve.
He had, after several conferences, finally told Davenport Carr that day the real reason why he wished Valerie to get away at once, to get off to Egypt, London, anywhere. As he walked to his hotel he saw his father-in-law as he had left him, standing speechless in the middle of his comfortable office. And for a minute he rather pitied Davenport Carr.
When he got into his room he knew he would never be in a better frame of mind to take the step he had rather dreaded for days, the irrevocable step of writing to Valerie. The talk with the doctor had keyed him up. So he sat down and began steadily enough. But he wobbled towards the end, his head dropped on his hands, and it took him over an hour to pen the last few lines. Then his head went down again, and stayed still for some time. Then he took up the letter and looked at it. He was not trying to read it through. He was hoping it would not hurt Valerie too much. Then an imp whispered in his ear, and he added the postscript. With a spurt of decision he sealed the envelope and stamped it, and took it out to the hotel letter box, afraid to leave it with himself till the morning.
He went to bed feeling it did not matter whether he slept or not. But the fates were kind that night. He slept till well on in the next morning. But the force of what he had done came over him as he dressed. And lie became a lost child, with no idea what to do with himself that week. With a small bag he wandered into the Auckland station and took the first train out, without knowing where it was going. He was exceedingly hurt by the surly manner of the guard who thought him drunk because he had not got a ticket, did not know where the train was going, and could not say where he wanted to get off. He paid his fine and the fare for the whole distance to Wellington, though he had no intention of going there. He found he was on a train that was carrying officers and men to the Trentham camp. For a while he was a little distracted by their talk of the war, their speculation as to what was going to happen to themselves.
“Dear me, we’re all lost,” he thought.
Later in the day he got off at Hamilton in the Waikato. He had never been in Hamilton, and had never wanted to be in it, though it was a pretty little town, but he could not sit in the train another moment. After some enquiries he found an elderly man with a motor car who was at liberty to drive him anywhere he chose to go. The elderly man thought it strange that he had to think for some time before he decided on his destination, and wondered if he were in the secret service. Finally Dane said Rotorua, and paid him in advance, or his driver would have hesitated at setting out with so desperate-eyed a customer.
It occurred to Dane the next night, as he bathed the dust of his long drive off his weary body, that he had come in the wrong direction, that he would have to pass through Auckland in order to get home, and he must not do that after Valerie had come there. He was now morbidly afraid of meeting her. He was trying to blot her out of his consciousness. What a fool he had been to start south. He should have gone north. The next morning he took the train back to Auckland, and was almost afraid to walk out of it, lest she should be at the station. He Hurried into the nearest hotel, and found that a boat was leaving that night for Whangarei. He had some food seat up to his room where he stayed till it was time to go aboard. He talked to the first officer at the wheel till two in the morning. At Whangarei he took the boat train to Kawakawa, not that he wanted to see Kawakawa again, nobody would, but he had this terrible craving to keep moving, to keep a constant succession of objects passing before his eyes so that he might not see Valerie’s face. He was so afraid he would be drawn back to the mission station before she left, so afraid he would lose his nerve and go to beg her to stay.
At Kawakawa he hired a horse and buggy and started to drive towards Hokianga. But that night, in a little pub he met two men from the Far North on their way to enlist, and he and they drank themselves into forgetfulness of all the things that trouble man. In the morning they had gone on, and he was left to lie ill and wretched for three days, nursed by the fat wife of the pub owner, who bestowed the tenderness of a kind and sentimental heart upon this strange man who seemed to have lost his hold upon the earth.
Coming finally to his miserable self, Dane saw that it was more than a week since he had written to Valerie. He sent an enigmatical telegram to Doctor Steele, and the answer came back in one word “Gone.”
Dane drove back to Kawakawa, took the train to Whangarei, was driven to Tangiteroria, and took the little black steamer down the Wairoa to Dargaville. It was nine o’clock in the evening when he arrived there. He went at once to his launch and turned her homewards.
His little bay was still and warm under the summer stars. His trees shadowed the rocks. He was conscious of the peace of it all. But as he stepped from the path through the trees into the open spaces of his garden his eyes lit on a bed of stocks, and the thing he dreaded, the remembrance that something was gone from this forever, struck him with the force of a blow. But he went on. His dogs bounded round the house barking joyously. A door opened and Lee looked out, and hurried in again to light lamps and to prepare something to eat.
Dane dropped into his hammock and lay still. He did not rouse himself till after eleven. Then his mind cleared for a little, and he told himself to go and face it. He knew perfectly well that she was gone. But he knew he would have no peace till he did the thing he shirked doing. He went into his study and looked at the piano. Yes, her music was gone. He went on to her front room. From the force of habit he almost knocked on the door. Inside he stood staggered a moment at the sight of her books, her furniture. Then a piteous smile twisted his face. Those things hurt too much. He staggered back into his library. He stumbled against one of his little red tables. Something snapped in his brain. He kicked at it, and it overturned, and the bronze things on it scattered on the floor with a harsh sound that clanged through the house. In a frenzy he seized the table by the legs and dashed it down again. Then he stumbled into his den and to the cabinet where he kept morphia.
The temptation came to end it all there and then, but he remembered even in that black moment that done that way it would reflect on Valerie, haunt her going away. He took merely enough to blot out the world for the night. Then he stumbled back to his hammock.
As he got into it the boys, who had been startled by the crash, came cautiously into the study. San stopped to gather up the things that had scattered over the floor. Lee looked out at the hammock, and took up a possum rug and laid it over Dane’s feet. Then he closed the door, and put out the lamps within.
And a late moon coming up at the end of the cutting cast a streak across the white and tired face of the man who had ceased to care for the present whether she ever rose again or not.