The Strange Attraction/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
I
B ob, Valerie and Father Ryan lingered at their table after dinner. There were only two other men in the room. The priest had been talking of a strange family he had visited that day up the line.
“One wonders what it is that holds such people together,” he said.
“It’s because they are tame,” said Valerie. “Fear of the unknown and lack of an adventurous spirit.” She nodded down the room at Mac who came in as she was speaking and sat down at his table. “Do you think it’s religion?” she went on turning again to Father Ryan.
“Well, I wouldn’t dogmatize about that,” he smiled.
“You know, you’re no good for an argument. You never come out and say anything that one can talk against.”
“You deprive her of an awful lot of pleasure,” grinned Bob.
The priest smiled into her pugilistic eyes. “I’m not as sure as you are about many things,” he said softly.
Bob chuckled.
“I’m not as sure as I seem, but it amuses me ———”
Bob turned his head to see what had stopped her so abruptly.
A man had entered at the other end of the room and had sat down with Mac. His appearance in the most gilded dining-room in the world would have been arresting. There it was miraculous.
“Is that Dane Barrington?” asked Valerie, knowing that it was.
“Yes,” Bob answered.
“Have you met him?”
“I’ve been introduced to him.”
“It’s funny you never told me he was here.”
“He isn’t here. He lives out somewhere. Comes to the pub occasionally to gamble and drink.”
Her eyes flashed. “Dear charitable old Bob, so sweet and wholesome?” she sneered.
Bob got red.
“Now, children,” said Father Ryan, spreading out his peaceful hands. “Mr. Barrington would tell you that no man was worth that remark.”
“Do you know him, Father?” she asked.
“I don’t think anybody knows him.”
“But you don’t judge him by what is said of him?”
“I’ve nothing to do with judging him.”
Valerie shot her eyes significantly intensified at Bob.
He got up to go.
“I’m going to have another cup of coffee,” she said. “Oh, you needn’t stay, Bob. Are you going off to the Bentons right away?”
“Yes, I am.”
“All right. Good-night. You’ll be back Monday morning?”
“Yes.” Bob strode out of the dining-room annoyed with himself for being angry about nothing.
Father Ryan made a move to rise.
“Oh, stay and talk to me,” said Valerie, beckoning to Lizzie. “I’ll have another cup of coffee, please. It’s just silly,” she went on as the girl moved away, “that one man should judge another on hearsay.”
She was staring frankly now at Dane Barrington. Beside Mac he looked like a boy. Mac was a canvas in heroic size daubed in freely in splotches of red and gray. Dane was an etching in black and white, as vivid as a silhouette, as delicate as a drawing by Whistler. She was rather pleased with this comparison, and she felt a keener sense of life as she looked at his fine black head and alabaster profile outlined there beside Mac’s great ruby face.
She turned amused eyes on Father Ryan’s placid features.
“My old set ostracizes that man. Speaks of him with bated breath. But I don’t feel contaminated by his presence. Do you?”
“Not in the least. He has never hurt anybody half as much as he is hurting himself.”
“That’s it, and I have no doubt that as a sinner he has been absurdly overrated. As a matter of fact this rubbish about sin, this idea of what can hurt one is one of the most ridiculous things that can be told to a thinking person. The real sins, the real corroders of souls are overlooked. People are not ostracized for overeating, but from my point of view, if you’re going to ostracize at all, they ought to be. They are not ostracized for prying into your personality, but they ought to be. They are not ostracized for whispering behind doors, but they ought to be. They are not ostracized for grumbling and nagging and opening other people’s letters, but they ought to be. Those are the things I’m out to ostracize people for.”
She glared at Father Ryan.
“You and I will not quarrel about that,” he said simply.
“I don’t suppose Mr. Barrington is a bit worse than my father,” she said musingly.
This frankness surprised the priest, who had heard the current rumours of Davenport Carr.
“Well, I take men as I find them,” he went on gently. “Mr. Barrington is a man of contradictions. But he is more at war with himself than anyone else need ever be with him. The man I would be afraid of would be the man who accepted himself without a fight, or the world without a fight.”
“Ah,” she patted his arm, her eyes flashing, “that’s it. That’s it.”
“And he is a generous man, though he would not admit it. He gave me fifty pounds last week for a wretched family that has tuberculosis. And when he handed it to me he said, ‘Ryan, this isn’t Christianity, it’s damned foolishness, and you know it as well as I do. If we had a grain of sense we’d have prevented those people being born, or once born we’d chloroform them. What the devil have they got to live for? This money will only feed their diseases. But you can have it on your conscience. I’ve enough on mine.’”
Valerie threw back her head and let out a peal of laughter that surprised the four men eating in the dining-room.
“That’s Miss Carr, I suppose,” said Dane to Mac, who nodded.
“Father Ryan must have been telling her a good joke,” he added.
II
Valerie had meant to play the piano that evening, but she felt self-conscious now with Dane in the hotel. She stood uncertainly in her room for some minutes. She had not changed for dinner, she seldom did, as she usually went back to the office. She wore a dark linen dress with a little white at the pointed neck. She solemnly surveyed what she could see of herself in her mirror, and then she turned and went hatless down the side stairs and out to the river. The venom had now gone out of the heat, and the night was balmy and soft. She strolled along towards the centre of the town. At Queen Street she paused. She wondered if Dane Barrington were going back to the coast that night, and whether if she took that road she would meet him. She turned up a few yards, but then abruptly swung round and went on past the town wharf, the office, the railway wharf, and on towards the northern hills.
She had discovered four main roads leading out of Dargaville. One that she did not care for ran south along the Wairoa to Aratapu. The second was the camp road. The third went off across the flat in a northwesterly direction towards the forest and Kaihu, touching the railway here and there, and the fourth, the one she now explored, ran due north by the river.
About two miles from the town she came to a wooded point and saw the beginnings of a track trailing off into it. She could never resist a track, so she walked on through a bit of mixed bush that ended in a picturesque point and a rock projecting high over the water like a lookout. From it she got a fine view across the Wairoa of valleys filmed with indigo-tinted mist, and of bush-clad ranges outlined on the horizon like the coasts on a map with undulating layers of pigeon gray and rose fading off into a luminous opaline sky.
She threw herself down with delight at finding a retreat like this so near the town. As she sat, the little black steamer that ran between Dargaville and all wharves up to Tangiteroria came chugging down on the evening tide, and a small launch went racing by. She wished she could afford a boat. She wanted to go to the beginnings of the river in remote hills and lonely places. There was something fascinating about seeing a little trickle of water grow and grow till it could carry an ocean-going ship. She loved the places that rivers came from, the mangrove swamps they cut across, the lagoons they sneaked out of, the gullies they watered.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of footsteps coming along the track. Before she could move a man slipped out of the bush, and in the dusk she saw his slight boyish figure above her and his white face framed in his soft black hair.
“Oh, I beg your pardon,” he said quickly and resentfully, not seeing who it was, and thinking he had surprised a pair of lovers. Before she could speak he turned and was gone.
Valerie could not bring her mind back to the river and the birds. She began to think of Dane Barrington.
She was fifteen when she had first read an article by him in the Sydney Bulletin. That was ten years ago and since that time he had become the finest critical writer, and one of the best writers of stories and verse in the colonies, and was generally acknowledged to be the best all-round journalist in Australasia. He was an Australian, born in Sydney, and even before he achieved a reputation as a writer he had achieved one on his looks and fascination. Almost every well-known Sydney artist had painted him or drawn him. A black and white drawing of his head by Norman Lindsay had been the feature of one winter’s exhibition, and had been reproduced in papers and magazines. As a girl of seventeen Valerie had come across a print of it and had cut it out and pasted it in a little book with heads of Byron and Shelley, and Keats and Napoleon and Caesar, and other dramatic heroes of her adolescent passions. She still had that little book.
Then Dane Barrington had figured as co-respondent in a divorce case that rocked the city of Sydney and spread ripples of luscious scandal to the dinner-tables of New Zealand. Nothing but the bare announcement of the affair appeared in the press, and when he afterwards married the woman concerned the talk died down. Articles and verse from his pen appeared at intervals, and Valerie read everything he wrote with a strange feeling that he was writing for her. Then she heard at a dinner in her home one night that he had left Sydney and had come to live in New Zealand, at Christchurch. And there was a whisper that he and his wife did not get on. Because of his magnetic looks rumour could not let him alone. He was one of those men who accumulate publicity without any personal effort. Then again came the bare announcement in the press that his wife had divorced him and had returned to Australia. The name of the lady concerned this time was suppressed.
The colonies will stand one divorce, and if the details are not too unpleasant, will suspend judgment and give the parties a chance. But two divorces inside of four years strain their charity. And when not long afterwards Dane Barrington was blackballed out of the best club in Christchurch every door, save those of a few newspaper men, was closed to him. Nothing as to this final blow appeared in the press, so that lovers of scandal drew all the more upon the inexhaustible resources of their imagination. Dane Barrington himself would have been amazed to discover that the mere mention of his name conjured up in the breasts of the pure pictures of depravity that it would have taxed his own powers to depict.
Valerie had learned next that Dane had come up to Auckland and that her father had met him. For some time after that his name did not appear in print. But Rumour knew all about him. He was drinking himself to death on the gumfields, that El Dorado of lost men.
Then after a year of silence his stories and articles and verse began to appear again as good as ever. One night a discussion of something he had written began among men sitting with her father after dinner, and the talk drifted to the man himself, and to the circumstances of his banishment, and she gathered that no one present believed the tales.
“Well, he was a damned fool not to fight it,” she heard her father say. “There’s no sense in being sensitive about things like that.”
Most of her relatives, however, banned his name from general conversation, but they had long since taken the meaning out of language for Valerie. She herself had ceased to be a lady so often that it did not disturb her to hear a man had ceased to be a gentleman. She merely wondered what fine adventure he had been up to.
And then there was her own father. He had been the most illuminating experience in her life. It seemed funny to her that Dane Barrington should be an outcast while her father sat in the seats of the mighty. Of course he had been clever enough and wealthy enough to keep out of divorce cases.
And now this strange being who had been a kind of phantom flitting in and out of her dreams for years, was here somewhere, to be actually seen in the flesh, to be encountered unawares on the roads, to give a sense of adventure to an evening stroll.
Seeing his head as it had appeared for a moment against the dusk of the trees it was hard to think he was anything but a phantom, and if it had not been for the memory of his vibrant voice, that said “I beg your pardon” over and over again in her brain, she would have thought she had seen a vision. She got up wondering why he had come that way. Had he walked from the town just to get the view from that point? In any case, he knew it and wanted something from it and he had been irritated to find an interloper there. She would have felt just the same. When she reached the road there was no sign of him. He had been swallowed up in the night.
III
Valerie looked out of her window at the river the next morning and revolted swiftly and completely against the idea of work.
“I’ll do it to-night,” she said to herself.
“Lizzie, would it be possible for me to have a few sandwiches? I want to take my lunch and go off for a picnic. I could make them here at the table if I could have some cold meat.” She looked up at the waitress with a half-humorous, half-pleading appeal, as if she knew she were asking an outrageous thing but could not help it.
“Why, I will make you some sandwiches, miss. It isn’t a busy morning. There’s some nice cold beef, and do you like tomato sauce on it?”
“Yes, I do. That’s fine. And ask Michael to get me a bottle of ale.”
She turned to Father Ryan.
“I’m going to play truant,” she said gleefully, “and have a lovely day all to myself. I get awfully sick of people, don’t you?”
“One needs a rest from them, I think, to restore one’s forces.”
“Well, it’s more than that. I like myself.”
“You have every reason to, I’m sure,” he smiled gallantly.
“Oh, I don’t mean to be conceited.”
“No, no, I understand.”
With her lunch and her ale and George Moore’s Esther Waters tied up in a package, Valerie set off a little after ten o’clock. She had on a plain serge dress and a cloth hat, and carried a hooked stick. Beyond the station she had the world to herself, and as she walked she whistled and whisked the heads off the monkey grass. She went by the point she had discovered the night before, and a mile further on found herself climbing into hills. Presently she stopped at the top of a low range to look down upon an old house buried in trees on a point below her.
“Oh, how lovely,” she said under her breath, with a quick lifting of her spirits, as if she had just caught a glimpse of the sea at the end of a long valley.
She could see only the red roof and two brick chimneys, from one of which a column of smoke rose lazily in the warm air. By the size of the pines and poplars that mingled with the native bush to make a wall about it she gathered that it had been built by an early settler. Anyway it had a charming old-world air like that of some deserted mission station. Removed from the house a little she saw patches of colour and fresh light greens that looked like vegetables, and across the road she saw in a clearing a cow and a horse.
She walked slowly down the dusty slope, breathing in the cool of the heavy bush on either side, till she came to an old post and rail fence buried in great geranium bushes and old briars and moss roses, that honeyed the air with the sweetness of their leaves. Convolvulus crept about everywhere, and stretches of periwinkle formed a carpet back into the trees. But she could see no sign of the house. It was barricaded from view many times over by shrubs and bush and pines. Set back in the hedge she came upon a moss-covered wooden gate, and for a moment the glory of the place was spoiled for her by the menacing notice that was nailed to it: “No Admittance. Beware of the Dogs.”
The neglected driveway inside turned and twisted among the trees, but in spite of that inhospitable warning the whole place had a seductive air of peace. Fantails fluttered about it unafraid of the invisible dogs, and a million bees thrived among the mingled scents. Wood pigeons flew over her head, and as she stood still a cock pheasant nervously trailed his beauty across the road a little way off.
Regretfully Valerie moved on, wondering who on earth lived there. Coming to a track leading towards the river she followed it, and found herself on a point the next beyond that on which the old house stood. She could see nothing of it even from here, but she could see the steps cut down the rocky face to a little landing where a small boat was tied outside a boathouse. Between the two points the river widened in an arc-shaped bay, rock-bound and overhung by lovely mixed bush. The water in it was clearer than that of the main stream and it was very still and cool. She investigated her own point, found a hollow where she could lean back, and for some time mooned in a peaceful sensuousness listening to birds and the wash of the tide, and staring up through the green elegance of a titoki at clouds that dissolved into puffs and melted away in the vivid blue.
Her dreaming was disturbed by the sound of a launch. She listened, envying the person who was racing down the river. As the sound grew sharp she stood up and looked over the top of a bush. Then seeing that the boat was heading straight for her point she ducked quickly, and peered out cautiously as it went by into the little bay. It was a white launch of fine lines, with a broad band of scarlet round it just below the gunwale. She could make out the name Diana near the bow. There was only one person in it and she recognized him immediately, despite the fact that his dark head was almost hidden under a slouch hat.
Very much alive now, she watched him make for the boathouse. Half-way across the little bay he turned his head suddenly, looking straight where she crouched. She ducked again, hoping he had not seen her. She saw him run the launch into the shed, shut the doors, go up the steps and vanish in the trees. She wondered if anyone lived there with him. She wondered if he were now back from the coast for good. She wondered if it was from this peaceful place that he had been for the past year sending out the fine stories of lost men that had been among the best things he had ever done.
As she speculated she raised her head, listening. Before she could get to her feet the figure of a Chinese boy cleared the bushes. She stared at him in amazement for a second. Then she remembered that one of the things accounted to Dane Barrington for a suspiciously excessive love of luxury was the fact that he kept Chinese servants.
“Please, miss, you trespass,” said the boy, bowing low.
“Trespass,” she repeated quickly getting to her feet.
“Yes, miss. You please to go away.”
Just for a minute she was furious, and the boy’s eyes fell before hers.
“Whose land is this?” she unnecessarily demanded.
“It is Meester Barrington, miss.”
“Did he send you?”
“Yes, miss.”
Her eyes gleamed. “All right. You give Mr. Barrington a message from me. My name is Valerie Carr. You hear it? Valerie Carr. Tell him that, and tell him I think he is the meanest man I ever heard of, the meanest man. You say that.”
The boy’s impassive face was raised to hers.
“He not like the people who make a picnic, miss,” he said gravely.
“I understand, but you tell him what I said.”
She took up her things and followed him out to the road.
“How far does his land go?” she asked.
“There, to that big tree, miss,” he pointed.
“I see. Be sure you tell him what I said, and my name, Valerie Carr,” and she walked on.
She was not angry now. She was amused and excited. If the boy gave Dane her message she knew that he would be bound to tender her some kind of apology. She wandered on wondering if he would and how he would do it. Then she resettled herself on the bank of the river a mile further on, and tried to forget the incident. But it kept intruding itself upon the pages of Esther Waters and upon her rambling thoughts. The only time she was really oblivious of it was when for two hours she lay asleep.
Later in the afternoon she crossed the road and climbed a hill by a rough track. There was a fine view from the top, and she ate her remaining sandwiches and stayed there till the sun dropped out of sight behind her. It was dusk when she reached Dane Barrington’s retreat. She lingered along by the old buried fence listening for sounds from within. She wondered again if anybody but his servants lived there with him. She craved to go in, defying the notice at the gate. She thought it the most seductive place she had ever found beside a lonely road.
It was seven when she reached the News office with three or four hours’ work ahead of her. Reluctantly she went in, drank a long draught of water to wake her up, and settled down to her evening’s work.
IV
When Dane Barrington entered his house from the launch that morning he struck a little gong.
“Lee,” he said to the Chinese boy who appeared instantly in the hall doorway, “there are some people picnicking on my point. Go and tell them they are trespassing, and that they have to clear out. God damn them, there are plenty of places for them to go to.”
He turned back through a French door to a broad verandah, that ran most of the way round the house. On this side, that nearest the river, it was furnished in two sections for living and sleeping with a bare space between, where steps came up from the path. The sleeping end was at the front against the side wall of a large study. It was screened on two sides by heavy canvas curtains now drawn up almost to the roof. Besides the cot there was a plain table littered with books and magazines and an Italian stool upholstered in worn red tapestry. An Indian rug, much worn, in shades of red and blue covered the floor for the length of the bed. Opposite the steps and making with them a passage between the sections was a French door opening into the room beyond.
The living end was comfortably furnished with a specially made wide hammock of white canvas, two low chairs upholstered in dull red rep, a footstool covered with the same material, a couple of old carved English chests, a solid mahogany reading table with a pile of books on it, and a beautiful small table of vermilion lacquer decorated with black dragons. The hammock was loaded with red silk cushions, and a fine possum rug lined with dull red cloth was doubled across the foot of it. Another such rug lay on one of the chests. The small table had on it a fine Chinese enamel jar used for tobacco, a cigarette box of bronze, and a tortoise-shell cigarette case inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The two floor rugs were, like the one by the bed, of old Indian work, with faded flowers trailing along a strong red ground. The predominance of this colour everywhere warmed up the gray unpainted floor and the weather-beaten walls. From this section of the verandah three French doors opened into one large room with the windows at present shaded by silk curtains, the colour of burnished copper.
Dane leaned down to caress two Airedale terriers that stood looking expectantly up at him. Then he told them to lie down. They watched him as he got into the hammock with the grace of a woman, and then they settled obediently on the floor underneath him. Dane drew beside him the scarlet table, lit a cigarette, searched among the cushions for a book, a volume of plays by Chekov which he had left there, and finding it, fixed the pillows at a comfortable height and began to read.
After a short time Lee rose up beside him like a mushroom.
“What is it?” There was a trace of irritation in his voice.
“The lady tell me to give you a message, Meester Barrington.”
“Lady? What lady?”
“The lady who trespass.”
“Oh well, what? Was it only one lady?”
“Yes, sir. And she very angry. She say to tell you she is Valerie Carr. She say it many times and she say ———”
“Oh damnation! Confound it! Well, what else did she say?”
“She say ———”
“Go on, Lee. Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to blame you for what she said.”
“She say you the meanest man she ever know. She tell me tell you that.”
Dane laughed suddenly. “She did, did she? Good for her. Which way did she go?”
“Along the road, that way,” he pointed.
“All right, thanks, Lee.”
The boy glided into the house.
Dane lay indecisively for a few minutes. Then with a wriggle of impatience he dragged himself out of the hammock, slouched off the verandah waving back his dogs, and went round the house and down his grass-grown drive to the road. He went on past his boundary expecting that Valerie would have turned in at the next attractive point on the river. He explored it, but found no trace of her. He stood where there was a long stretch of road visible but she was nowhere to be seen. He walked another quarter of a mile, and finding no sign of her he turned crossly back, angry at her now for disturbing his morning.
At nine that night, intent on her books in the silent office, Valerie heard steps pause on the clay sidewalk outside. Then she heard the door open without a knock. She wondered if Bob had got back sooner than he expected. She swung round in her chair to see Dane Barrington moving round the corner of the counter. He was without a hat and as she looked up at him her eyes were arrested by the glitter of the gaslight for a second on the eyes of a green snake curved over the top of a black stick he carried. She almost thought the thing alive.
He stood easily before her for a little before he spoke.
“You are Valerie Carr?” he began unceremoniously.
“I am,” but the glint of amusement faded quickly from her eyes, and without knowing why, she got to her feet and faced him.
He went on at once with a cool detached manner that she felt was assumed.
“I didn’t know it was you I was turning off my land this morning. The last person in the world I should wish to be inhospitable to would be a daughter of Dave Carr. But I do detest picnickers messing up my place.”
Valerie found her tongue. “I wouldn’t have messed up anything,” she retorted. “There’s no person on earth who has more respect for a beautiful spot than I have!”
“Well, how could I know that?” His brilliant eyes glared at her. “And anyway, my dear girl, surely a man has a right to one spot on this earth where he can feel himself alone, really alone.”
“I grant you that right,” she cut in curtly, aggrieved at his manner. “I assure you your aloofness is in no danger from me. I didn’t know it was your place.”
Then she saw instantly that he misunderstood her, that something in her tone had lashed that extraordinary entity that was staring at her out of those wonderful eyes. She had seen the black lashes quiver.
“Oh please,” she cried spontaneously, “I didn’t mean that. I mean ———” she stopped confused. They looked at one another for a moment of silence.
She almost forgot she was looking at a man, and stared as if she were looking at a picture. She saw a perfect oval face of arresting whiteness a little tanned by the sun, a face shot through all its sensitiveness with elusive pain. But the features, chiselled with the beauty of an old cameo, had as yet no sign of looseness about them. They were straight, mobile, but firm. He had a lovely mouth, with no trace of dissipation upon the fine lips which curved ever so delicately at the ends with a whimsical little twist. It was a face that any loss of weight would have made thin, but as she saw it it needed nothing to give it perfection of proportion. She was only conscious of all this as a setting for his eyes. It was they that held and abashed her. They lit from within his whole glamorous presence. They spread the troubled questioning and nervous discontent about his features. They suggested quests, adventures, battles, defeats, despairs. In the poor gaslight they seemed to be absolutely black and she could not tell what colour was in them.
She recovered herself and went on. “I put that badly. What I meant to say was that I never encroach on people’s peace. I care too much for my own.”
He did not take his eyes off her as she spoke. He was rather astonished that she had sensed him so quickly, and still more astonished at her blundering apology. It was unexpectedly human.
“I understand you, thank you,” he said quietly. His glance fell on Esther Waters lying on the top of a fat ledger. He looked back at her.
“Was it you who were out on the point by the river last night?”
“Yes. Is that your land too?”
At the change in her tone his face melted into a slow smile that created a responsive one on hers.
“No, Miss Carr. And you may come out to that point of mine whenever you want to. But for God’s sake don’t bring anyone with you or tell anyone you come. Goodnight.”
Before she could think of an answer he was gone round the counter and she heard the door close.
He left an extraordinary blank behind him. It seemed to Valerie that he had sucked something out of her. She stood uncertainly a moment. Then she closed the door into the composing-room for no reason except that she had to do something to sharpen her consciousness again. Then she sat down in her chair and deliberately pieced him together as he had stood in front of her. He was little more than two inches taller than herself, slightly but well made, and she judged him to be about thirty-six years old. In spite of his unusual appearance she had seen nothing of the poseur in his manner. Indeed she had been surprised by a certain simplicity, an unconsciousness of himself. And he had not thrust forth any tentacles at her. Bob had jeered at his mode of dressing, but he was simply carrying the easy and conventional clothes of the artist into the camp of the Philistines, as the Philistines carried their clothes into the haunts of the artist. If he had a beautiful throat Valerie saw no reason why he should not wear low soft collars and open shirts. If he liked colour she saw no reason why he should not wear a vivid tie, provided that his manner did not proclaim it, and his did not. She had liked the cut of his navy serge suit, and the freshness of his white silk shirt and the comfort of his canvas shoes. He knew how to combine fastidiousness and finish with colour and ease. Beside him Bob looked like a bull beside a deer.
She remembered that she had heard him called effeminate, but nothing effeminate had looked at her out of those eyes of his, nor was there anything unmasculine about his voice.
It was half an hour before she could get her thoughts back on working up Bob’s notes of the county council meeting of the afternoon before. She didn’t seem to care how many tons of stone were put on the road between Aratapu and Dargaville before the winter came, or whether; Princess Street was ever shelled again or not.