The Strange Attraction/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
I
O ne evening in the middle of March, as Dane lay smoking in his hammock immediately after his dinner, the dogs which were chained on the other side of the house set up a ferocious yelp, and almost simultaneously Lee stood in the nearest doorway.
“Mr. Benton coming in,” he said.
“All right. I’ll see him.”
Dane did not move as Roger came with his spurs clinking round to that side of the house.
“Hello!” he said as his visitor came to the steps.
“Hello, Barrington, are you sociable this evening?”
“Yes, really pleased to see you. Did they get away from the coast yesterday?”
“Yes, everybody has gone and you have it to yourself now.”
“Good. Sit down. Have you had dinner?”
“Yes, at Hill’s, as I came along. I’ve got to look in at the railway men’s meeting to-night, but there’s plenty of time.” Roger sat down where he could see his host’s face.
Lee came through the doorway with a tray and bottles and glasses.
“Wine or whisky, Meester Benton?” he asked.
“Whisky, thank you.”
“Meester Barrington, what for you?”
“Wine, please.”
The boy poured out the drinks, saw that the smoking apparatus was complete, and disappeared.
Roger Benton took out his pipe and filled it. “I’m glad the summer is nearly over,” he said. “I don’t mind the heat. But we have had so little rain this summer. That’s so bad for the stock.”
“Yes, why the deuce don’t you manage better than to let your animals die? The sight of dead cows floating down this river makes me sick. I bumped into one the other day. Couldn’t get that poor brute’s eyes out of my mind.”
“Well, we don’t see ’em die for fun, Barrington. It’s impossible to watch them all the time, and the damned things will walk into the river to get cool, and then down they go in the mud and drown before anyone can get to them.”
“What a pathetic tragedy,” said Dane, drinking down the last of his wine. “How are you getting on?” he asked after a silence. “Have you formed a committee yet?”
“No.”
Dane turned lazily on his cushions. “You ought to hurry up with that, Benton. And drill them in the history of the Opposition. You’ve got to talk Massey, you know, as well as yourself. And Mobray has a pretty intelligent group going already.”
“I know. I will hurry up. I’m going to do it this week. I wish you’d come on the committee.”
“Good God!” Dane laughed suddenly, seeing this was what Roger had come in to ask. “That wouldn’t do you any good, my friend. The world hasn’t your easy tolerance. No, thanks, I won’t go on your committee. But I’ll help you all I can.”
He looked out through a clearing he had cut through his trees to the river. It put into a leafy frame a picture that varied with every day. In the foreground there was a little bit of river and then the stretch of a long valley, at the end of which the sun rose and the moon rose. He saw the silver arc now upon the horizon with the shapes of trees etched in vivid black across it.
“The men like you,” persisted Roger, “the fellows around the mills and the camps. They are the chaps I’m afraid of.”
“My dear chap, my singing to them occasionally won’t affect their politics. But you get your committee going as soon as you can. And make George Rhodes chairman of it. He’s the most intelligent of that lot in Dargaville.”
“Yes, I will.” Roger stretched out his legs. “I envy you, Barrington.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. Really I do. You have no ties. You don’t have to be respectable. You don’t care what men say about you.”
“Don’t I?”
“Well, you don’t show it.”
“What men don’t show, my naive friend, is often the most vital thing about them.” Dane took another cigarette and lit it at the one he had just finished. He turned a little and readjusted his cushions. Then he looked quizzically at Roger. Besides Doctor Steele he was the only man he had asked to come to this place. He would never forget that Roger had called upon him at Mac’s hotel before he had been there a week and had invited him out to his sheep run. He had not accepted the invitation, but he had accepted the spirit of it. Dane liked Roger. He was like a blanket on a cold day. He appeared to enjoy life. And there was something about his big loose body, his strong limbs, that gave physical comfort to the other man with his nervous organism and his much too ready weariness.
“It must be an awful bore to have a public job,” said Dane after a while. “The last thing on earth I should want would be to run for Parliament. What on earth do you see in it?”
“Oh, I’ll like it well enough if I get in, but I don’t like the bother of getting there.”
“Yes, it pleases your vanity and that of your wife. You fool yourself into thinking you can do more for the district than any other man because your friends have told you so, and your wife is dying to go to Wellington ever winter and cut a dash, and you like the idea of dining with the Governor—all that.” He waved a hand contemptuously.
Roger would have been annoyed at anyone else who put it this way. “You are right,” he said amiably. “Well, I’m not in, and a man who has been in fifteen years will take some beating. But it’s the general swing in the country from Ward to Massey that I’m reckoning on.”
“Yes, the old Liberal Party has had a long innings; eighteen years or so, isn’t it, since Dick Seddon jumped into the lead, and there was someone before him, wasn’t there?”
“I forget just now.”
Dane thought he was the most casual candidate he had ever met.
Night was now settling down on the river and the garden. Lee and his brother San, who was cook, came into the big room beside them, drew back the curtains, and lit two lamps that cast bands of light across the verandah and created mysterious shades beyond the trunks of the trees outside. Then they went into the other room and it came to light also.
“You like some music?” asked Lee from the doorway nearest the sleeping cot.
“Care for the victrola, Benton? I got one out recently. It amuses the boys.”
“Why, yes, I’d like it.”
Dane nodded at Lee.
II
Roger turned in his chair a little so that he could look into the room with the three doors. He had never been asked into it, nor, indeed, into the house since his host had reconstructed it. As Valerie had thought, it had been built by an early missionary, and no less a person than Bishop Selwyn had once lived there. It amused Benton to think that the same walls should have housed two such dissimilar men, for Roger had supposed many of the rumours about Dane were true, even while he remained tolerant to the man.
The house had been constructed with some taste, for the studs were high, the ceilings of the main rooms beamed, and the brick fireplaces large. Dane had replaced the old wall paper with linings of oiled rimu. The room with the three doors had originally been two, but he had taken out the partition to make it spacious enough to house most of the Oriental things he had picked up when travelling in the East.
Roger had heard Davenport Carr say that Dane Barrington’s Indian rugs and Chinese things were so valuable that he had willed them to the Sydney Museum, but this did not impress him so much as did the suggestion of silken rakishness that he got through the curtained slits of those tantalizing doors. He had once managed to sit opposite one of them long enough to have his senses tickled by the riot of gold and vermilion and wondrous blues and greens that lit the room and the walls.
The place was indeed something of a treasure house for a good deal of the Chinese porcelain, the nephrite and jadeite brush pots and jars and ornaments, some of the ivories, three carved boxes of Peking lacquer, many of the bronze incense burners and covered jars, an enamel box inlaid with jewels, and a wonderful little bottle of lapus lazuli had come from the loot of the Summer Palace at the suppression of the Boxer rebellion, and by devious ways had found themselves in the hands of Dane’s father. He had, besides, a varied collection of less valuable but beautiful vases and jars of apple green and powdered blue and red porcelain, a collection of small things carved out of the hard stones, some fine bits of Foochou lacquer, and a marvellous carved box of rock crystal in which he kept cigarettes. These things stood on lacquered tables and cabinets, and the most valuable were locked in one behind glass. He had two large screens, one old Chinese in black and gold and the other Japanese in red and black. The three lamps in the room were oil set in red porcelain jars and had shades made of gay silks. A nest of scarlet lacquer tables, of which the one on the verandah was part, stood between two of the doors.
There were no pictures on the walls which were hung with Indian silks and rugs, and the floor was covered by one large and very valuable one in the prevailing colour. To tone this down the deep lounge set directly in front of the brick hearth and the two modern upholstered chairs were done in black silk, but their sombreness was in turn vivified by numerous brilliant cushions. At one end of the lounge there stood a fire-screen of fine black lacquer ornamented with mother-of-pearl.
This was the kind of thing that looked mysteriously wicked to people brought up on the Victorian antimacassar, wool work, and the ænemic proportions of spidery furniture or the severity of mission art. Roger was not at all sure of it himself; it wasn’t the kind of thing he would go in for, and yet it stirred him pleasantly. He supposed it was only because it was on the banks of the Wairoa that it took on the significance it did. Of course he had told his wife all about it, and it was too good a glimpse of sin to be kept in the family. All Dargaville knew that Dane lounged about like a woman on gorgeous cushions, and that his rooms were filled with colour and scent. The pioneer spirit, conveniently recent enough to be quoted, was offended.
III
The two men listened in silence to records by Harry Lauder and Melba and Caruso. But Roger was not fond of music. After a while as he refilled his pipe he turned to his host.
“Have you seen Miss Carr yet?” he asked.
“Yes, turned her off my land one day.”
“What!”
Dane raised his face a little, peering at Roger, who was blurred against the wall out of the line of any light.
“Fact. But I did not know till afterwards that it was she. Then I went to the office and apologized.”
“Oh, you did?”
“Why, of course. I wouldn’t willingly be a beast to the daughter of Dave Carr, or to anybody else’s daughter, for that matter.”
“She’s a character.”
“Is she?”
“What did you think of her?”
“Why, nothing. I noticed she had fine defiant eyes and a lot of hair. Are you getting sentimental about her?”
Roger stretched out his legs. “I might, if she’d let me,” he said.
Dane assumed an air of solemnity. “Look here, old chap. None of that. You’ve got to be a moral husband and father, a pillar of society. The eye of the world is on you, Roger. And then there’s Lorrimer, isn’t there? And he has a belligerent set of shoulders. Not that that ever made any difference to a determined man.”
“They don’t act as if they were engaged.”
“That’s nothing. You never know what is between any man or woman.”
“I wonder why she came up here?”
“How should I know, my dear Roger? Is she any good on the paper?”
“By Jove, yes, she is.”
“Well, it is a well-edited little sheet, I can tell you that, and they’re improving the make-up every day, and they’ve got life into it, whichever of them is doing it. By the way, I seem to remember some tale about her, an adventure, running away from home or something like that, years ago, in a boat, with some boy.”
“Yes, she did, and Lorrimer was the boy. My wife was staying in Auckland at the time, and heard the story. It was ten years ago. I forget the details now. They did go in a boat, and I believe it was a week before they were found. And she looks now as if she’d just run away with anybody any minute. She’s the most independent girl—the women don’t like her. She won’t go to see anybody. She’s refused all invitations to dinner. What can you do with a girl like that?”
“Good Lord! Why try to do anything? Let her alone.” Dane, who had lain for some minutes without smoking, lit himself another cigarette.
“Women are a pest,” went on Roger, with an air of profundity that amused his host.
“Then keep away from them.”
“Well, I can’t. I like them, I like their company.”
“H’m! That’s the one thing about them I like least. They don’t understand company. They ruin it and love and scenery and music, and everything worth having, with their infernal chatter. It’s an eternal mystery to me that men don’t strangle women in the night. I sigh for the good old days when they did it. The best women could ever do for me was to give me physical rest, and God knows I have wanted a lot more than that from them. And they don’t even understand sense. They do understand suggestion and stimulation, but they fall short when it comes to satisfying what they have aroused. And they can’t make a fine art of love. They can only be sentimental or sacrificial about it, and eternally remind you afterwards that they have given you everything. They have no honour in love.” He stopped abruptly. He had surprised Roger by this outburst.
“I guess you are harder to please than I am,” he said.
Caruso’s voice, vibrant with the passion of an Italian love song, rang out from the room further down and was smothered in the heavy silence of the garden. Dane threw one hand across his face. He did not want to talk any more. Roger sat till another record was played then he stood up.
“I must be getting along, Barrington.”
Dane roused himself and swung out of his hammock. Stretching himself, he looked up at the soft stars.
“God! What a lovely night! You will have a fine ride," he said.
They went round the house along the drive to the rather dilapidated stables outside of which Roger had tied his horse. It was a beautiful animal that whinnied and pawed the ground as they came up to it. The moon, coming up over the pines, caught its quivering muscles and put a sheen on them. Dane drew down its impatient head and rubbed his cheek against the satin of its sensitive skin. It nosed him back in a friendly fashion. Then he looked up admiringly at Roger, who swung easily into the saddle, and who was a superb figure on his big horse. Dane walked along by him to open the gate.
“I’ll go down to the tent in a day or two,” he said. “I may stay down there while the weather’s good.”
“All right. Good-night.”
“So long, old man. See you soon. Don’t forget about your committee.”
“No fear.” And in a moment Roger’s horse was leaping for Dargaville.
Dane lingered by his gate, staring into the forest that rose steeply between him and the western sky. It was virgin bush, practically untouched, with Kauri saplings further up sending slim pointers impertinently at the very stars. His one grievance against this range was that it shut him off from the sunsets. He had always dreamed of a place where he could lie in a hammock and see the sun come up on one side of him and go down on the other. But it seemed that that was one of the impossible things he had clamoured for.
He thought of Roger as he walked back, and was amused to think that he had been attracted by Valerie Carr. And yet there was nothing unusual about it. He got a picture of Valerie as she had risen out of her chair in the office to face him. He had not thought of her since, even though at the time he had felt her charging vitality. He was still suffering too much from his treatment at the hands of women to be easily rid of the exceeding bitterness he felt when he thought of them.
His dogs leapt at him from their kennels beside the path. He caressed them, and unchained them, and played his way with them back to the other side of the house. Then he began to pace back and forth on the path, stopping every now and again to look up at the trees patterned against the moonlit sky, or to peep through his cutting at the dull sheen on the river.
As he went up the steps some time later he felt something crunch under his feet, and with a little shudder stooped to see what he had done. Making a face, he scraped the unpleasant thing out of sight with his shoe. Then he grieved because he had crushed the life out of an insignificant insect, and took a moment to wonder what pathetic domestic tragedy in the history of beetles would result from his inadvertent clumsiness.