The Strange Attraction/Chapter 19
CHAPTER XIX
I
Valerie and Dane were at Rotorua when the war cloud burst over Europe at the end of July. For two weeks he had been much in the company of some Englishmen talking over the rumours. One of the travellers had been only recently in the Balkans. They all thought it would blow over till they read the cable telling of the Russian mobilization.
Dane was much more roused than Valerie over the news of the next few days. His health, much improved by a month at the resort, was further improved by his preoccupation with the outbreak of war. On the first of August they packed up, weeks before they had intended to, and returned to Auckland, where Dane could get the news as it reached the newspaper offices. He spent a good deal of time in them with the little groups of men who sat waiting for news, frantically waiting for news, cursing the lack of news, hating their isolation from the maelstrom of action. There seemed to be a conspiracy of silence against newspaper men. The cables were meagre and fragmentary. The Government, probably left much in doubt itself, kept a maddening silence.
And because of this lack of information, any man who had any European knowledge, any wide knowledge of international affairs, above all, any knowledge of German schemes and philosophy, was listened to with keen attention. Dane had lived in Germany, and had read and seen something of the policy of blood and iron. He knew Nietzsche and Treitschke. He knew German history, and he had seen in many countries of the world how their tentacles were reaching out into the entrails of other nations. So when he walked into his club men gathered round him to congratulate him on the articles he was writing on the crisis, and to his amusement his reinstatement was complete.
And Valerie, with her imagination now fired by his, as the possibilities of the war’s lasting were discussed, began to look ahead and to wonder what her part and his in it might be. And forgetting personal things she consented at last to go home to dine with her father and mother, providing relatives she disliked were not present.
In the week before they returned to Dargaville Davenport Carr invited several men to dinner to meet Dane. Valerie, the only woman present besides her mother, was content to be still, to sit back, and to watch Dane lead the talk. In her eyes he had never looked handsomer, and he had certainly never talked better. She did not mind that he had forgotten her, that he was lost in the subject of the Belgian opposition. She had again that curious feeling as to his phantom-like quality that arrested her at most unlikely times. She forgot all about his weaknesses as she listened to him talk that night. They did not matter at all. What mattered was that he could rise above them as he had done that last month or two. Indeed, as far as she knew, he had never touched drugs or drunk to excess since the night she had sat by him in his den. All she saw that night was the picture of his pale and brilliant face surrounded by a ring of tense and interested faces, listening fascinated to all he had to say.
Valerie’s spirits went down as they packed up to go home. Things were just beginning to happen about them. The little Dominion was moving. Men were coming into the cities from the back-blocks everywhere to form the Legion of Frontiersmen. Everybody remembered the Boer war and the contingents that had sprung up in a night. It was this stirring all about them that caught Valerie’s spirit of adventure, that excited her, and that made the return to Dargaville seem a very flat affair.
Most of the way home she was wondering what she could do if the war went on. No one had begun to think yet of the part women would play, but they had gone to the Boer war in all kinds of capacity. And both she and Dane were free, and had the money to go. She did not doubt then that she would be able to persuade him to go, or that it would take any persuading.
When the steamer reached Dargaville Roger Benton, George Rhodes, Bob, Allison and Bolton and several other men were gathered together on the wharf. It did not strike Valerie at first that, eager for news, they had come to meet her and Dane. It ended by their all going to Mac’s to dinner. Mysteriously the hotel filled up with men, and seeing what they wanted Dane turned himself into an informal lecturer, and stood half-way up the stairs talking all he knew of the last week’s doings to a tense group gathered about in the hall and round the bar door.
It was after ten o’clock when they went out to the Diana, which Dane had left in one of Mac’s boathouses. Valerie had a funny feeling as she got into it that she was being cut off from the world, as if she had been dropped down a deep well. It was bad enough to live in a place like New Zealand at such a time, isolated from the biggest thing in history, a thing that was actually going on in your own day and not in dreams, but it was worse to be going away from such avenues of information as there were. She wondered how Dane could do it. And just for a minute she felt a hostility to him of which she was ashamed.
She wondered what he was thinking of as they went in silence up the Wairoa. He had been talking continuously for hours and was tired. Was he thinking as she was of the marching men, of the men who were being huddled into hastily improvised camps, of the men hurrying into special night trains, of the scares from the sea, of the rumours that had sprung up everywhere ? She did not know.
He ran the Diana at full speed by the light of a half moon, and sat tense, his head a little forward, his hair pressed under a tweed cap, his hand ready to turn the launch from any snag that the river, flooded by heavy rains, might spring upon him.
Valerie had a sense of unreality when they turned into their own little bay. The peace of it was a challenge to the folly of a world gone mad. And why not turn one’s back on a foolish world and wait in peace for it to come to its senses again?
As they stood on the landing stage, their bags beside them, Dane took off his cap, turned to her, and put an arm about her shoulders.
“It’s good to come back to this, dear, isn’t it?”
She gave one look into his face and forgot the war.
The house was lit up. The dogs bounded to welcome them. The boys came out to the verandah. The light streamed through the three windows of the den into the shadows. And there was a delicate breath of spring about the still garden. The world was falling to pieces outside, but the old station kept its air of incorruptible peace.
II
Two months later Valerie rode alone one afternoon into Dargaville to get the papers and the mail. Dane had not been well for a day or two, and he had lain in his hammock all that morning reading papers and feasting his eyes on a bed of anemones and rununculas that she had made on that side of the house. In spite of the fine spring weather Valerie did not feel at all cheerful. And it was not the news from the outside world that was the sole cause.
She stopped in front of the News and whistled the call of the tui. As Bob came out to her with the paper she sensed something from his manner. He looked up soberly into her face.
“Val, I’m off,” he said simply.
“Off,” she repeated.
“Yes, Johnson and I are off in two weeks’ time. We’re volunteering for the Expeditionary Force. Why do you look surprised? We’ll all be in it soon, if it goes on.”
“You are off,” she repeated again. “Oh. I’m not. surprised, Bob. Dash it! I wish I could go, could do something.”
“Well, the women will be in before long. And you can start now, if you want to. Benton asked me if I thought you would come back here. I don’t know whom he can get. Men are going to be scarce.”
“Oh, good Lord, Bob! I don’t want to come back here. I want to go to the war, to Egypt, or wherever it is you men are all going.”
“Think you could stand it?” grinned Bob. “It’s going to be pretty ugly, you know.”
“Dash it, Bob! I can stand a thing if I have to. You never will understand me, will you? I could nurse a man the war had smashed up, but I’d hate to nurse a man who had deliberately fooled about in the rain and got pneumonia.”
Bob looked up at her wondering what it was she was regretting. But he was not preoccupied with women now. He was concerned excitedly, doubtfully, and a little fearfully with very different things.
As she rode home Valerie’s mind was in a ferment. The thing that Bob had told her had shown her with the force of a revelation the tormenting division of her own interests.
For a month after she and Dane had come home he had been absorbed in the war, had written excellently about it, and had seemed so much better in health that her fears about him had subsided. Then for no reason that she could see he had slumped. He had kept on writing, but under stimulants again, she feared. Sometimes she had not seen him till night and then he was often listless.
But they were still in love with each other. It was still possible for him to surprise her, to move to her like a shining presence. She loved not a bit the less his looks, his grace, and the compelling music of his voice. She cared more than ever for his love-making. But he did not overwhelm her as he had done in the beginning. She was recovering dominant factors in her personality that he had submerged for a time. There was a large part of her that loved a fight, that loved riding head first at obstacles and sweeping over them, and the work on the News had taught her what she could do in that direction, that she could think and act quickly, revel in responsibility, and make people do their best for her. And she craved to use these gifts, to show what she could do now. But she wanted the big field, not the little one.
And though life at the old station had now its own tests for endurance they were not the ones she wanted.
Dane was still lying in his hammock when she took him the mail. As she sat down, Lee brought out the tea-tray. Dane put his correspondence aside, ready to be sociable.
“Don’t you want to read your letters?” she asked.
“Yes, presently.” He took his cup from her, sipped from it and put it down on the red table beside him.
“What is it, Val?” She felt annoyed that she had let him see something was the matter with her.
“Bob’s going, and Johnson. They’re off in two weeks.”
Dane took another sip of tea and lit a cigarette. Then he looked out into the garden before turning his face to her.
“We needn’t be sorry for them. I guess they want to go.”
“Oh, I’m not sorry for them, Dane. I’m envying them. I never wanted to be a man before, but I do now.” She spoke with a little impatience.
He gave her a quick look. “What do you want to do, Val? Aren’t you going on with your novel?”
“Well, I’ve not been getting on very well with it lately.”
“Do you want to stop it and get into something?”
This was the first time he had put the question to her. He had been thinking about asking it for a week or two, for it had seemed to him that something was working in her. But he had seen no sign that she wished to get away.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she answered evasively, wondering why she could not tell him frankly what she did want.
“Do you want to go back to the News now that Bob is going away?”
“Oh, heavens no! Not there, no.”
“Well, what is it, dear? Do you want to go to Auckland, to get into something bigger there?”
“Would you come too?”
He looked at her and away again. He knew it was the first serious challenge that had passed between them.
“I don’t know about going for any length of time,” he said quietly. “I can work better here. But wouldn’t you go without me? You can if you wish to, you know.”
The words fell like clumps of lead on Valerie’s ears, and she must have shown something of what she felt. He turned his face away from her and stared out into the trees. The way he set his mouth, as if he were shutting off intolerably painful things from expression, upset her. She could never bear to hurt him. To his astonishment she got up from the table, and struggled into the hammock beside him and clung to him.
He turned to her and pressed her face against his own.
“What the devil is it, old girl? If anything is troubling you won’t you tell me?”
“I don’t want to go without you. I couldn’t go without you.”
“But you want to go?”
“Well, I feel I ought to do something.”
He said nothing to that, and they lay still for some time. Then she raised herself and looked at him.
“Please, dear, I’m silly. I really don’t want to go away at all.”
She got up and went in to change her clothes, and in a short time he heard her playing softly a berceuse of Chopin’s that he particularly loved.
He lay as she had left him, his cigarette burned out, his eyes watching the flitting of a fantail about the honeysuckle, and his mind working on the question as to how much she really did wish to go.
Two weeks later they stood in the early morning with a large portion of the population of Dargaville to see Bob and Johnson and a number of other men off to Auckland. Father Ryan was on board to accompany the men as far as the city. Valerie stood with Bob till the last minute. Dane kept away from them, talking to men from up the river. And he made himself very detached in manner all that day.
III
It was late on in the spring when they had finished lunch, that he handed her a cable from one of the largest of the Sydney papers asking if he would consider going to Egypt as its correspondent.
Her face lit up, and she became vividly alive in a moment.
“Oh, how wonderful! That’s the very thing, isn’t it?” Her eyes flashed at him. Then she sobered at the look in his.
“Oh, Dane, don’t say you won’t take it!”
“Would that hurt you very much?” He was looking intently at her.
“Good heavens! You wouldn’t think of turning down such a chance, would you?”
“Well, you couldn’t go with me, Val, you know.”
“But, but—I could go in some capacity separately from you. Dad can manage anything, you know. We have all the pull we want. And then we could meet there—really I don’t see—oh, do consider it, Dane.”
She saw his mouth stretch on his teeth. She looked down at the cable again and read the date. It was a week old. She raised her face. She looked at him and past him.
“You’ve refused.”
“Yes, Val, I’ve refused. Don’t look like that, old girl. I cannot bear it.”
He got up from the table, went down the steps into the garden and round the front of the house. “She thinks I’m afraid to go,” he kept saying to himself.
She sat still, feeling that the bottom had fallen out of the world. She felt rooted to her chair. But she saw that every minute only widened the gulf of that misunderstanding. And something in the expression of his eyes gripped her heart, as if she had seen a child falling onto a red-hot stove. She jumped up, ran through the house, and saw that he was stumbling along the drive to the gate, going like a man who neither knew nor cared where he was going. He did not stop nor turn as she ran calling after him. Near the gate she pulled him to a standstill.
“Dane, I didn’t mean to hurt you. What did I say? Please don’t be hurt. It makes me sick.” Her voice broke. “Dane, do you hear? Please listen to me. I want to know why you refused. Is there anything you are keeping from me? Won’t you tell me, please?”
He let his arms fall over the top rail of the gate, and dropped his head upon them.
“What is it, Dane? Aren’t you well enough to go? What is the matter? Please, I’m going to know now.”
Then he looked up. “Part of it is that I am not well enough to go, Val. I’m not afraid to go. But a man has to be awfully fit to travel in all weathers and eat all kinds of grub. It is my stupid stomach. I’d be sick most of the time, and that is not fair to the paper or to the man. who could go and stick it.”
“And the rest?”
“What?”
“The rest of the reason?”
For answer he dropped his head onto her shoulder. And she knew she could never go as long as he felt like that.
Then she felt him stiffen himself. He stood up straight as if he were bracing himself against an obstacle.
“Val dear, I wish you to do what you want to do without thinking of me. I quite understand your wanting to be in this thing. I do really. And if you want to go I want you to go. You see the work I can do is here. The papers want my stuff, and I can write it here, better here than anywhere, as you know. But that is no reason why you should not go to Auckland if you want to go, and further, Val, if you want to go further. Please believe you are free, once you make up your mind. But you must be happy about it, Val, about staying here, if you stay. I cannot have you unhappy about it.” His voice ended harshly.
She could not look at him and tell him she wished to go. She could not look at him as he stood there and even feel that she wished to go. She threw her arms about him.
“Dane, I won’t consider going away without you. Do you hear, dear?”
“Yes,” he said, much comforted, putting his lips to hers.
There followed days of peace and understanding between them, an interlude, a deliberate shelving of the future, for Dane knew she was not completely happy, and she knew she could not keep up the appearance of being so forever. But because they had so much in common, because they could always be happy in the launch, always aware of the beauty of the garden, they could keep the other side out of sight. But, watching her when he could, he saw that she was growing paler, that often she looked as if she had not slept, that her manner was becoming deliberately cheerful.
He wondered how he could really get at her state of mind, at how much she was keeping from him.