The Strange Attraction/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI
I
“Y ou know, Val, I do think we ought to go just once to the Bentons’ for a Sunday. It does seem so dashed uncivil not to.”
This came out unexpectedly as Valerie and Bob sat in the office about half-past eight. She waited a few seconds before replying. Her eyes had hardened.
“Good heavens, Bob, do I have to decide for you whether you go or not? I’ve decided for myself and told you my decision. If you can’t make up your mind what you want to do, I do not see why you should bother me with it.”
Bob took a long puff at his pipe. It annoyed him that Valerie was the one person he could do nothing with. And it annoyed him that some devil in him continually prompted him to try to change her. The fact that irritation and friction resulted did not deter him from beginning it all over again.
“Well, I can’t see why you don’t want to go,” he snapped.
“Then you’ll have to go on living without seeing, Bob. Do you know you are getting more like the relatives every day? Yes you are,” she repeated, as he squirmed in his chair. “You promised if I came up here that you would treat me as if I were a man and an independent stranger. And you have done nothing of the kind. I feel your criticism every day. You were mad when I ordered ale for my lunch. You were mad when I walked past the barroom door and you heard some harmless creature inside enquire who I was, as if that could hurt me. You were mad when you heard that I played to a party of sailors. You are mad because I’m talked about. I’ve always been talked about, and I always will be, not that I get up in the morning meaning to be, but it seems to happen. Now I won’t go to the Bentons’ because I want rest on my Sundays. And if, after seeing me all the week, you still want to see me on a Sunday, all I can say is you’re a glutton. If I hadn’t tried to regulate this friendship of ours you’d have killed it years ago. You men are all alike. You want to swallow a woman whole, and then you wonder why you get sex indigestion.”
“You’ll live to be knocked down yet,” he retorted, annoyed that he could never get the best of her.
“I wonder why that thought seems to give such pleasure to a large proportion of the human race?” she said meditatively. “It doesn’t thrill me to think that anyone who differs from me will get a crack on the skull. That’s just like the relatives, Bob. They used to curl their tongues with joy round the things fate had in store for me.”
“Look here,” he groaned, “if you compare me with those damned relatives again ———”
“Then don’t be like them, dear Bob.”
He turned back to his desk. “I say, have you any more to do here?”
“A little.”
“Well, I don’t care, clear out. I’ve got to write this leader.”
She made a face at him, kissed the top of his head, took her things and went out. As she walked towards the centre of the town she stopped once and drove her right heel into the clay path as if she were crushing a centipede. “My God,” she thought, “if I ever make any claims on any human soul may I be struck dead.”
And a man coming up to her looked curiously at her, wondering why she had twisted round in the path like that.
II
When Valerie came to Queen Street she paused. She could just hear the heavy roll of the waves on the coast. She considered that it could not be much after nine and that she could walk to the gully and back with time to spare before the hotel closed at midnight. She knew the cottagers had returned three days before, and that she would have the road to herself. Few people from the town ever walked up there on the flat. The moon was nearing the full, and she knew it would be wonderful out there by the sea.
Sounds of voices and laughter floated out as she passed Ray Bolton’s house. They were playing bridge in there. She paused a moment to listen. The windows were open and the light streamed out through the lath blinds that screened the verandah. She could hear Mrs. Harris’s high laugh, that undiscriminating laugh that took the flavour out of everything. She could imagine the chatter round those tables, the punctilious behaviour as a thin veneer over brittle tempers and personal predilections. What she detested most about these people was that they were poor copies of other imitations, all straining their imaginations in the process of worshipping the “correct thing.” She wondered if little Mrs. Rhodes was there struggling to keep her personality intact in that circle, a victim of her husband’s position.
Ten minutes after she had left the town behind her she had forgotten it. She drew in long breaths of the rising breeze that wailed about the bushes with a vague threat of rain. Clouds crept up from the west and blotted out the moon and uncovered it again as they drifted on. She felt extraordinarily free and happy.
When she got to the top of the ravine she dropped down upon the edge of it between bits of stunted ti-tree. Down below her she could see the moon whitening the line of surf.
The breeze was fresh here and the sea was rising. She was lost in a rambling wonder at the miracle of space above her when she heard steps on the road. In her dark dress she was almost invisible in the shadow, and could have stayed unobserved, but instinctively she jumped to her feet, and startled a man who stopped suddenly not more than a yard away from her.
“What the devil—oh, I beg your pardon. Good Lord, Miss Carr, do you jump down from the stars in a parachute, or what?”
Valerie struggled against the instantaneous effect that Dane had on her. “I thought everybody had gone from here,” she said lamely, as if she had to account for her presence. And then she was vexed that she seemed to be apologizing for herself. It was so unlike her.
“The cottagers have gone, thank God. But I don’t regulate my life by them.”
“I should hope you didn’t,” she said with emphasis.
She saw now that he was stooping under the weight of a large knapsack strapped to his back. He held his smoking pipe in one hand and his snake stick in the other. His head was vividly black and white against the sheen of the moon, and the wind stirred in his soft hair.
As he saw her with the moon full upon her face he caught again that sense of abundant life he had got from her before, and a sense of bodily poise and pliancy from her easy limbs.
“You are alone?” he said, dropping his voice into a richer and wondering tone.
“And why shouldn’t I be?”
He detected the belligerency, good-humoured though it was, of the person frequently on the defensive against criticism.
“Well, it is unusual to find a woman who is sane enough to be alone, and on such good terms with the night that she will wander about with it. But you must be very lonely, Miss Carr.”
This simple directness amazed Valerie. She did not know what she had expected him to be, but he was saying things that struck her as astonishingly unusual. Or perhaps it was that his glamorous personality infused ordinary syllables with an extraordinary force.
“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I have always been happiest alone.”
He instantly raised the hand that held his pipe to a salute. “I won’t disturb your dreams,” he said softly. “Good-night,” and moved on.
“Oh, I didn’t mean you to go like that,” she exclaimed spontaneously.
But he waved his hand at her and did not stop. She stood still looking after him till he had disappeared, and he knew, with a funny vague premonition, that she did.
She thought of him all the way home. She compared him again with her father. Davenport Carr had been born into the Brahmin caste, and Dane Barrington into the artist. Though Dane’s marriage and his looks had projected him into the other for a while, Valerie doubted if in spirit he had ever belonged there. Her father had talked of his fascination as a dinner host, had excused his informal dress, had called him a special case, always with the implication that he was a privileged outsider. It had always amused her to hear the outsiders discussed by the elect. She learned as she grew up that there were a multiplicity of elects each with its own group of outsiders. She was amused at the queer game played by those “outside” who wanted to “get in.” She had heard the most solemn conversations on the subject. She had never been able to take seriously the enormous importance of the “ins” over the “outs,” because the importance seemed to her to be such a frail bubble, and one so easily pricked. And why did anybody ever want to get “in”? Why not stay “out”? Why not make your own “elect,” if you had to have an “elect”?
She had listened to her mother making out dinner lists. That well-intentioned but sadly unintelligent parent never dreamed that her terrible child was formulating a philosophy about the elect out of so simple a thing as a dinner list. And when Dane Barrington had been crossed off the dinner lists of the country Valerie had wondered if he was foolish enough to think he would lose by it.
And now she felt, without knowing any more of him than the pictures of his beautiful old place by the river and of the tent snuggled in the sand-hills, that this man had learned there were things he could well do without. And it seemed to her that the cleverest thing in the game of life, as in bridge, was to know what you could discard.
She felt now with a lift of her spirits that she would get to know him. The place was too small to keep apart two people who wandered about in the night. She was rather afraid of him mentally. He was brilliant in a profession where she had little more than dreamed her way, and even in their two brief encounters she had felt a cool mental poise balanced against her impetuous dogmatism. She knew she was crude beside him. But she was no depreciator of herself. She had never met a man her personality could not affect if she chose. But she was not planning any onslaught on the peace that Dane had made for himself. Her thoughts did not run on into any sentimental future. All she thought was that it would be nice to have him to talk to sometimes, perhaps to ride with, while she stayed in Dargaville.
III
The next Saturday evening Dane Barrington wandered back and forth on the beach beside the surf, so near it that he had to dodge unexpectedly encroaching runs of frothy water. He wore a rough tweed suit without a vest, as the air had been chilled a little by heavy rain the night before, but he was hatless as usual, and his low collar was loosely held by a dull red tie.
His mind was clouded by one of the moods of boredom and loneliness that he could so seldom fight off, and he was playing with the impulse to go up to Mac’s. He cursed himself that he could never go light-heartedly now in the matter of folly. Many men he knew, Davenport Carr, for instance, could drift into a night of drinking with gaiety, and did not have to pay afterwards the price he did. What a wretched creature man was with a body that was never equal to his imagination. There were physical limits to his capacity for eating, drinking and forgetting; physical limits to his capacity for love. And, worse still, there was that awful mental limitation, satiety.
He reflected that it was pitiful that he did not know what to do with himself in this mood. He could get just so far in fighting it and then everything went smash in his brain. He turned off the beach, walking towards his tent.
Rounding a hillock and mounted on a bay horse, Valerie nearly ran over him.
As she had hoped she would meet him she was prepared to some extent. She pulled up suddenly. But she misunderstood the first look in his upturned eyes.
“I’m sorry to seem to get in your way, but as you get in mine you will have to get used to the sight of me.” Safe up on her horse, gathering something from the life and magnetism of him, she felt snippy.
As he looked up at her something in her flushed and glowing face, in her exuberant health, in the way her uncovered head was set on her shoulders, with her hair in two long plaits hanging down her back, brought light back into his mind. And at her words the light flashing into his mind diffused itself over his face.
“Oh, Miss Carr, I wish ———” he began impulsively and stopped, remembering unpleasant things.
“Yes?” She stared down expectantly, surprised by his manner.
“Oh, it wasn’t anything.” He looked away from her, making a hopeless gesture with his shoulders.
To his astonishment, before he could move, she vaulted off her horse and stood before him. “Please finish that sentence,” she commanded.
She was surprised to see that he looked at her quite helplessly.
“You were going to ask me to do something for you. What was it?” More than her words her youth and her own particular glamour spoke for her.
“Why, how did you know that?” Some of the pain had gone from his eyes.
“When a person has a face as expressive as yours, well ———” She waved her hands. “I know what is the matter with you. The goblins have got you. Now what do you want me to do?”
She felt a quick sense of triumph as she saw the smile gather at the back of his eyes. She had spoken with the pert ease of a spoiled child, and it had amused him and surprised him into the simple truth.
“You’re right. I am blue. I was going to ask if you would let me ride on the beach with you. I have my horse down here in Benton’s stable.”
Her eyes widened and she felt very warm inside. “May I ask why you hesitated at first?”
“Well, it would take a long time to tell. Hesitations have a complicated background.”
“That may be. But I want you to understand something this minute. You don’t have to hesitate about asking me anything. I don’t run my life on hesitations. I’d have you know I’m a free spirit.”
Her head went up as she said it, and he thought he had never seen a more ravishing picture of youthful defiance, and absurd self-assurance.
“I salute you, Miss Freedom,” he said with a charming gesture.
He stood poised before her in the sand with his head a little to one side. The despair had gone out of his eyes over which a whimsical questioning now flitted, and she could see in the fading light that they seemed to be blue. But they were the most baffling eyes she had ever seen. She knew there was a great deal going on behind them, and she wondered if she would ever know even a fraction of what it was. She wondered what they would look like when he put love into them, for they were wonderful even when they were lit with polite interest.
“You don’t believe me,” she went on pertly.
“Well, let’s postpone a discussion of freedom. I take it that I may ride with you?”
“You certainly may.”
“Shall I help you up?”
“Help me up!”
“Oh, I beg your pardon, Miss Independence. Have you no weaknesses?” And again a slow smile crept out of his eyes and rippled about his features like a wavelet on a pool.
“You can find out,” she retorted, vaulting into her saddle, and looking down at him.
“Will you wait on the beach? I won’t be five minutes.”
She was a little disappointed that he had not asked her to the tent. She was excited as she rode on, and told herself not to assume a manner that really did not belong to her. She was not at ease with him yet, and his looks kept attracting her attention away from the man inside. “Gosh,” she said to herself, “no man ought to look like that unless all men do. He’d make a vampire of a haloed saint.”
But she had felt something besides his looks, something that came out of him to meet her, a sudden joyous something that had delighted her. He had peered at her as one elf might at another passing in a green glade. She thought of some of the furtive looks that men on her father’s yacht and men at her father’s dinner-table had given her, and marvelled at the difference there could be in the admiration of a man’s eye.
As Dane saddled his horse he stifled an unpleasant suspicion that he had no business to snatch at this chance of breaking up his mood. Though he might go about with no outward consciousness of his looks, he knew only too well the effect of them on women. And then, Valerie was the daughter of Dave Carr, a fact he must not forget. But he had the impression that she was a mere girl, and a good deal of a tomboy. His estimate of her was hopelessly wrong, as he was to find out, but he had never been at first any judge of the character of women.
IV
Valerie watched him as he rode towards her. He rode as all Australians do, as if he had been born in the saddle. The horses recognized each other. His was black, lined like a racer, and a more nervous animal than hers.
“Where did you get him?” she asked.
“From Benton.”
“Oh. That’s where I got mine.”
He gave one look at her and one at the beach ahead. “Let’s go it,” he said.
They started on a canter and broke into a gallop. She hung down on her bay’s neck like a jockey urging it to keep up with the black which kept shooting ahead. The surf was a blurred gray line beside them as they raced on, letting the animals run themselves out, and when they slowed down panting and foaming, the last bit of lemon light had faded off the cool sea.
Valerie had lost her hair strings and her plaits were half undone. She picked her tumbled hair out of her eyes and both she and Dane searched hurriedly for their handkerchiefs, and tried to recover their natural breathing. It took them some time to bring their excited beasts back to the tame pace of a walk.
“That outpaced the goblins, I think,” he said, smiling at her.
“Were they very bad goblins?” She put the sweet sympathy of a child into her tone.
“Rather. But what do you know about goblins?”
“What do I know about them? Well, I like that! I’ve goblins of my own. Haven’t I a right to them?”
“Of course, if you insist on having them. But yours, I should imagine, are rather jolly.”
She gave a contemptuous snort. “How like a man! Superior even about his tragedies.”
“Good Lord, you can have all mine any day you want them,” he said, with a tinge of bitterness in his voice.
They rode on in silence for a few minutes. Enough light radiated off the beach and the surf for them to see each other’s faces. They had now reached a place on the coast where trees came down to the shore, and there was a little gully a few yards further on.
“Would you like to get off and smoke a while?” he asked.
“Yes, indeed.”
He fastened the horses, and they sat down on the roots of a tree near them.
“How did you hear of your old place by the river?” she asked, after he had lit her cigarette and his pipe.
“Oh, I came wandering by it one day and saw ‘For Sale’ on the gate. I went in, and I never made a quicker decision about anything in my life. I bought it the next day. It’s one of the few sensible things I ever did.”
“I wonder if they have been so few,” she said softly.
“I’m afraid they have. I haven’t lived sensibly at all. I’m not like you, you see.”
He shot a quick look at her.
“Oh dear! Have I suggested that I’ve lived sensibly?”
“Well, I may have misunderstood you. Suppose you explain yourself.”
“Good Lord!” she laughed, but very pleased that he seemed interested. “Wherever shall I begin?”
“Well, let’s go backwards. Why do you want to work on a paper?”
“Why ———” she paused considering.
“Don’t tell me if you don’t want to,” he said quickly.
“Oh, but I do. I was just thinking—about what led up to it. I’ve always wanted to get away from home, be independent. I want to write. Don’t smile. I never expect to write half as well as you do.”
“I’m not smiling. And why should you not write as well as I do?”
“Well, I never expect to, but I want to write. I won a prize story in the Weekly News a few years ago and that set me going. But I don’t expect to do it yet, nothing much before I am thirty. And dad said I’d better get a practical education as well. And so I took a commercial course. And then I thought I’d better get on a paper. I was on the Star for a while—society, rotten job. I couldn’t stick it. And then dad got in with the News committee here and sent Bob up. He was on the Herald. And Bob saw it would take two of us. And he offered it to me and here I am. Of course that’s not quite the whole of it.”
“Nothing ever is the whole of it. But why should you want to write when you can play the piano as you do?”
“Why, I want to earn my own living, be independent.”
“But you could do that with your music.” He turned and looked at her.
“What! I care too much for music to play it in public! To a pack of unsympathetic boobs who rustle programmes and wriggle in squeaky chairs! Not I! I never played in public. I couldn’t even play to my relatives. If there was one person around who did not like music I should get up and smash something.”
He was astonished at the intensity that had welled up in her. She threw her cigarette away and sat up very straight glaring at him.
“But you play at Mac’s?” he said.
“Oh there, yes, places like that, yes, but not on the stage.”
“I understand that. They wanted me to go on the stage when I was a boy, but I could not sing that way.”
“Oh.” She turned warmly to him. She was craving to have him talk about himself. “But you sang one night in the hotel.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you go on?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Did you want me to?”
“Of course.”
They both looked out over the gray sea for some minutes.
“You know dad pretty well, don’t you?” she began again.
“I’ve met him several times. He’s a ripping good sport.”
“Yes, isn’t he quite something of a father? He and I always stood together. I don’t know where I would have been but for him. It was he and I against the rest of them. The relatives, you know. Awful bunch! Awful!”
She felt the smile playing about his face.
“Didn’t you run away from them once, or something?” He was curious now to hear her version of the tale.
“Why, where did you hear that?”
“I was in New Zealand at the time, on a visit in the South Island. And the story stuck in my memory along with your name. It was quite an adventure, wasn’t it?”
“It was,” she laughed.
“Do tell me about it.”
“It is a long story.”
“Well, what of that? I want to hear it.”
She felt warm and excited at his interest. “It was more than an adventure,” she began, “it was a crisis. It was my last stand for liberty.”
“Good Lord! How old were you?”
“Fifteen.”
“Liberty at fifteen! All right. Go on.”
“I won’t if you are going to laugh at me.”
“Go on,” he insisted, flashing a disrupting look at her.
V
“Well, it all goes back to the fact that I happened to be born among my relatives.”
“Most things seem to go back to that.”
“Yes, don’t they? And you see, they could never account for me any more than I could account for them, and the trouble was that they were always trying to account for me, while I had the sense to accept them for what they were. You know the kind of thing my family is.”
“Let’s see. Coronetted stationary, the younger son end of it, a name that goes back to property in the Doomsday Book, women who read The Queen and know every ramification of the Royal Family.”
She laughed delightedly. “That’s exactly it. And they were probably a nice harmless lot in England, but something happened to them on the voyage out. They were gods when they got here, and as gods they set themselves up. There were an awful lot of them all under the Elegancies, my mother’s parents, you know. She was one of seven, and then there were the aunts and some old cousins, quite a party. And the Elegancies ruled them all. They were beautiful old pictures, I grant you that.
“Well, you know, they ran Auckland society. They gave two balls every winter that decided who was ‘in’ and who was ‘out.’ They entertained the Governors. They were old personal friends of Sir George Grey. And nobody ever questioned their right to rule like that—till I came along. They captured dad for mother as they captured men for every daughter but poor Aunt Maud. That failure must have cost them some sad hours. Well, to come to me. Goodness knows what happened to me when I was an egg, but I got a queer poke from somewhere. Do you ever try to account for yourself?”
“Quite often,” he smiled. “Go on, I’m awfully interested.”
Feeling that he really was, Valerie loosened up as she went on. It seemed a long while since she had had someone to talk to. He puffed contentedly at his pipe, nodding occasionally, turning his face to her and smiling as she got more worked up with her story.
“Well, I was the third child, all girls to dad’s disgust. But he always said I was a mistake in form. And then I had a queer twist. I couldn’t believe the things that were told me. Something used to come up in my throat and say it was all wrong. And I had a most awful temper. I don’t know what would have happened to me but for dad and the servants, because I couldn’t stick the things the others did. And it was a fight. I was always being sent to bed without food, and the governess was always sneaking it up to me, God bless her! And I was always running out with my woes to the gardener. He was Irish, God bless him! I’m afraid I had no class loyalty. My best friends were the servants. It was better when I learned to play the piano and could read. And then dad got horses and the yacht, and the Lorrimers came to live next door. Bob and his sister had my kind of disease, too, in those days, and we had a conspiracy of our own. And there was a lot that was glorious. We had a beautiful place. You know that point in Remuera with a lot of pines out on the end. And I used to sit on the rocks there and watch the seagulls and dream of London and of living by myself and being famous. Well, I must get on with the story.
“Of course the relatives opposed everything I ever wanted to do. But dad stood by me. He let me go to the grammar school. Of course I got on. Learning was no trouble to me. And I won a host of prizes that first year. And of course I went home a little puffed up, and I thought at last they would be proud of me. But Bob had taught his sister Doris and me to smoke cigarettes. It’s funny now to think what that meant ten years ago. And the week after I got home mother poked about in my things, and found a packet of cigarettes and a love letter from some boy in one of my boxes. Well, I never poked about in anybody’s things. I know what I think about people who do. And when the people who did things like that to me came to talk to me of morality or behaviour they couldn’t impress me at all.”
She paused for a moment, clasping her hands round her knees.
“Well, this was the grand row. Dad was away on the yacht. Mother summoned the Elegancies. I knew something was up and I was fighting mad. You see, I was so sick of it. There’d been a row when they found I wasn’t in bed at ten one night and that I was sitting on the point wrapped up in a rug listening to a glorious gale. That was wrong. There’d been a row when I was discovered talking to the gardener in his room one night. They would have sacked him but for dad. That was wrong. There’d been a row when they found Byron’s poems under my pillow. That was wrong. There’d been rows when I wouldn’t go to stupid girls’ parties, when I wouldn’t go to the Elegancies for Christmas dinner (that was an awful one), when I wouldn’t go to boarding-school, when I stopped saying my prayers, and when I wouldn’t be confirmed. And I knew they just had the habit of opposition. But of course it was awful. I’m not saying that it wasn’t. And I was so sick of it. But I had learned they couldn’t do anything to me. I remember how wonderful it was when I discovered that they could not put me down the well in a sack, or lock me up in a cupboard, or things like that; that all they could do was just talk. And my dear old governess had taught me a wonderful thing when I was a little child, when Daphne and Rose used to pester me. You know that silly little jingle, ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me’? I can see her now as she said it, dear old thing. And I learned the philosophy in that old jingle, and it was a grand weapon. Of course I had ceased to be a lady so often that the word came to mean nothing. What I found was that I was still myself, with my own loves and hates, no matter what they called me. Goodness! I am rambling. Does this bore you? You see it’s wonderful to have someone to talk to.”
She peered into his face. He saw she was excited.
“I was just thinking how fine it was to hear someone really talk again. Go on. You are not boring me at all.”
“Of course I know now that it was just as hard on them, poor things, as it was on me. I must have been a horrid little brute from their point of view. But I seemed so right to myself. It’s funny how harmless we seem to ourselves, isn’t it? And the governess thought I was right, and dad kept telling me to go ahead. Well, to come back to the cigarettes. Smoking seemed funny to me, just a lark, not to be compared with telling tales and doing sneaky things. But the dear relatives thought otherwise. So mother got her moral props, the Elegancies, old mummies that they were then, Aunt Maud, whom I particularly hated, and a brother and a sister. The idea was, I suppose, to finish me with this weight of family majesty. Of course, if dad had been home she would not have done it. Well, we sat down to dinner, but if an avalanche is going to fall on me I’m not going to sit idle and watch it coming down. So I asked mother what the matter was. She said I would know presently. I said I’d know then, or leave the table and go to eat with the servants. My old grandfather held up a hand in the way he had always done to annihilate opinion. Something happened to me. I shouted at him to mind his own business, that as far as I was concerned he was dead. I wish you could have seen the faces. I’m sure they thought the moon and stars were coming right through the ceiling. If I’d had a dozen hands with pistols in each pointing at their heads they could not have looked more staggered. They were a ridiculous spectacle, and I lost my temper and told them what I thought of them. I made mother tell me about the letter and the cigarettes, and then I let them have it—all the bottled-up rage of my youth. Of course I was abominable. I gloried in the mess I was making of their nerves. Nothing short of physical force could have stopped me, and they didn’t know what to do with me. Mother took hysterics and Aunt Maud wept. When I was done I was sick too. Then I stalked out and left them.
“I went down to the rocks and the boathouse, and presently Bob came; I’d told him something was up. And I told him I was going to run away and settle the thing. Well, he’d had a row too. The Bishop had found out he was reading Ingersoll. So we decided we’d both go. I guess I egged Bob on. I had three pounds in my money box and he had five. We got out that night about midnight. I was thrilled with the idea and quite reckless. I had a beauty of a little boat that we could sail or row, and he had a tent, and we sneaked out no end of things, my mandolin and his banjo, Stevenson’s Wrecker and Treasure Island, a notebook for a diary and rugs and clothes. And there was a lot of stuff handy in the boathouse. It was a glorious night. Bob and I had often been off with dad on the yacht, you know. We could do everything, and there was nothing to scare us about the night.
“Would you believe it, we managed it for a week. We got over to Birkenhead the first night, and lay up a creek, and first thing in the morning we went and bought all the food we could carry. Then we had to hide for the day. The next night we got out of the harbour. We were awfully scared we would be nabbed, but we learned afterwards that mother, terrified out of her wits, would do nothing till dad got back, and wouldn’t allow Bishop Lorrimer to do anything either. Oh, I forgot to say I’d left a note to dad, which mother, of course, read, saying sweetly that I was running away with Bob Lorrimer. I did not see at the time what a thunderbolt that would be. And mother was more afraid of the scandal than she was of our health. We ran away on the Saturday night, and it was Monday morning before dad knew. That let us clear Auckland harbour and get up the coast.
“You know, it was just wonderful! We had to travel at night, row and sail, and sleep by day hidden at the backs of the bays in little creeks. And I said the weather god loved us, for it was the most beautiful week, and the phosphorus out there in the channel at night! And of course there never were such stars! I can thrill with it all now. I never thought of the relatives. I knew they could do no more to me. But Bob was scared at first and did not get reckless till the third day. He really was a fine old Red Indian, and we were just a pair of sweet kids, with no idea what was being said about us. Well, we came to the end of our food, and to our last night. We knew we would have to go to Kauwau Island the next day and get some more, and we guessed that would be the end of it. So we made a night of it. We had a fire, and we played, and we talked about religion and our ambitions, and nerved ourselves up to face the music. And a man riding for a doctor for a sick wife heard our banjo and mandolin, for by that time the whole of New Zealand was listening for them, and he got on the telephone, and first thing in the morning we were nabbed by two jolly yachtsmen who had been hunting us for days. It was thrilling to be caught. And my, what a row we had made.”
Dane chuckled with her. “You certainly did. I remember it. But the papers made out a grand case for you, didn’t they?”
“Oh, they were beautiful, and so was dad. He had the Auckland reporters to meet us at his office soon after we got there. They read our diary, heard what we had eaten and read and said and thought, and they came out with grandiloquent stuff about the fine old spirit of the British race, and our being fired with the days of Nelson and Drake. We were the symbol of undying youth in the great empire which was safe and sound so long as there was young blood like ours to renew the spirit of our glorious ancestors. You can imagine what all that was to the relatives.”
Dane threw back his head and laughed out. “Grand old stuff. And how did they take it?”
“Well, I never did know exactly what happened in our absence. Mother was in the doctor’s hands when we returned, and I did not see her for a week. It was delicately suggested to me that I had shortened her life by some years. She is still, as you know, alive and blooming, and will probably live to put flowers on my grave. I did not see the Elegancies for at least a month. In fact, everybody kept out of my way. I got at what it was at last through Bob. Mother and the relatives and the Bishop and Mrs. Lorrimer had had solemn conferences about the advisability of marrying us at once on our return, Bob eighteen, and me fifteen. But dad damned them up hill and down dale and shut them up somehow. But Bob got the worst of that, and he ran away from home for years, went to the South and to Australia. And it was what they thought about Bob and me that just finished the whole bunch for me. . . . There, I said it was a long story. I do hope I haven’t bored you.”
Her manner changed suddenly.
“You have not,” he said, knocking the ashes out of his pipe. “It’s a proper story, and explains a lot.” He was as much interested, indeed more so, in the way she had told it than in the tale itself.
She wanted to ask him questions about himself. She felt hot and very alive, for she had got herself quite worked up. And after her long talk the silence seemed abrupt and likely to become significant. He looked very boyish sitting still with his hands clasped now round his knees, and his face turned so that she could see his profile clearly against the trunk of the tree. He sensed her intensity and wondered if it was just her own dramatic sense that had so wound her up.
“Yes, you have had goblins too,” he said, quietly turning his face to her. “I think it was pretty fine that you could stand against all that.”
“I rather liked standing a lot of it,” she said honestly.
She felt the smile that played about his eyes. And then he stood up, cutting off whatever mood they might have drifted into.
“Come on, let’s ride again.”
She was not accustomed to following the moods of men. She had been a good deal spoiled, and was used to having them follow her. But she felt, as she mounted, that perhaps at last she had met a man who could do a little managing himself. But she had a queer feeling of flatness after her eager talking, and it took some minutes of a brisk canter to bring her to a mood of self-possession. Dane did not seem disposed to talk any more, and they set their horses to another gallop.
When they slowed down again he began to smoke, and she ventured no more than casual remarks about men at Mac’s, hoping he would talk, and being disappointed that he did not. When they got to the ravine she supposed he would stop, but he rode on with her, letting his horse lead in the blackest part where they could not see each other or even their own hands held up before them. When they came into the light he began to talk of the sense animals had in the night, and went on to tell her tales of riding out in the great spaces of Australia. He kept the talk absolutely impersonal till they came to the borders of Dargaville. There he pulled up.
“I’ll turn back here,” he said, guiding his horse beside hers. “Thanks awfully, Miss Freedom, for dispersing the goblins.” He held out his hand.
For a moment he seemed immaterial to her, a phantom on a black horse. But there stirred about him an effulgent warmth that was anything but etherial. As she took his hot and nervous hand, she bit back a question on her lips, for she wanted it to come from him.
“I’ve had a jolly time,” she said instead. “I do hope I did not bore you.”
“You did not. Good-night.” He rode off without looking back.
She was conscious of keen disappointment as she rode on, and yet why she did not know. Had she expected more response from him, or what? He had got away from her after she had told her story, but he had seemed pleased to have her company. Was she surprised that he had come so soon to companionable silences? She did not know. But she did know as she lay wakeful in her bed that she had met a personality that was not to be disposed of in general terms. And already she wondered when she would meet it again.
Dane thought about her for a little while after he left her. The ride had shaken him out of his depression and out of his loneliness. And after all it had been pleasant to listen to a girl talk with the vividness she had and the honesty she had. And he realized she was not just the girl he had thought her at the beginning of the evening. He wondered how much of a woman she was. And he knew, too, that he would like to see her again.