The Strange Attraction/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII
I
V alerie lay in the shade of a solitary clump of five stunted trees on the edge of the cliffs about two miles north of the ravine. It was the Sunday following the headache. She had finished up her work that morning, buoyed up by the thought that she would get out to the sea in the afternoon. It was a fine windy day, cool and clear. The breeze was strong on the cliffs and below her the surf tumbled riotously.
She had found on the very edge of the cliffs a rushgrown pocket like the pit of an old Maori fortification, with one end worn down so that sitting she could see the surf splintering itself into harmless froth below. She sat down, drew her chin up to her knees, and began to dream of that magnificent future when she should have literary London at her feet. Then she turned to the last number of the Sydney Bulletin that she had brought with her, and reading, grew dozy and settled herself to sleep. She lay on her side facing the sea, with a light cloak drawn partly over her and the sun and wind burning her right cheek.
And it was thus, unconscious, that Dane wandering along the cliffs came noiselessly upon her.
Astonished and then amused he stood looking down on her. He had taken his pipe from his mouth at the first sight of her, but he put it back and puffed on. He was aware of the fine lines of her figure under her serge dress and the cloak, and of the easy way she lay. He was vaguely regretful that a soft hat kept the sunlight off her hair. He remembered how she had looked when he had kissed her. He had a ridiculous impulse to kiss her again, to waken her with his kisses, and to hear what she would say. He was conscious, too, as he looked at her that he had been lonely for a long time.
He told himself to go on. But something held him.
He had never analyzed, any more than anyone else ever does, the beginnings of adventures in friendship. He had always drifted pleasantly, unquestioningly, into acquaintance with women as if there never was any further stage in the relationship. He had learned little from the experience that the affair almost always proceeded on some inner compulsions of its own to the passionate and then to the tragic climax. Born to love life and love and to respect them both, he had taken them in their flow with simplicity and childlike trust, and with for a long time an incurable ignorance of the unpleasant fact that life and love by no means meant the same thing to all men or to all women. He had been a trustful lover, and inevitably a betrayed and terribly hurt lover, quite unable to realize the effect of his looks on women who had nothing more to give him than a crazed infatuation.
He had loved for their beauty and charm a few unscrupulous women who had left him bereft of any idea as to why their affections did not last. He could never imagine what it was that had wrecked the ship on a smiling sea, for he never looked out for sunken derelicts, but was always gazing at the stars or searching for enchanted islands on the skyline. He had been astounded and then embittered to learn the tales that were told of him. Why of him and not of others, he wondered. In fact, like many artists of exquisite sensibility and far-reaching imagination, he lived in a continual state of wonder at the goings on in the world about him, at motives that were not his, at animosities he could never feel, at rivalries that never touched him, at meannesses that could not have lived for a moment in the generous expanses of his mind.
But, as he looked now at Valerie, he forgot what other women had done to him. He moved very quietly to sit down on the edge of the hollow till she should wake. But something, the sense of life, or the smell of his pipe startled her, and she sat up quickly, and seeing him rubbed her eyes as if she were in a dream.
“Why, it is you!” she said, staring at him.
He looked down whimsically at himself as if he needed corroboration, and then he smiled at her. Now, as for the first time she saw him in broad daylight, she saw that the sun worked magic in his eyes, turning them to gentian blue, and that something in the optical machinery in his head darkened and lightened them, as if they were lenses at the ends of tubes lit and dimmed by multiple lights and screens behind. And she thought of the words the King of the City said to Shrí in the old Sanscrit tale, “Thy dark blue eyes have utterly destroyed my sense of right and wrong, which are now mere words without meaning, impotent to hold me.”
“I didn’t mean to wake you. I was going to play the guardian knight. You are all right again? I rode in on Friday evening to ask Doc Steele.”
“I know you did. He told me. Now tell me the story. What did you do with me?”
With the omission of his own emotional moments he told what had happened without elaboration. She watched him as he talked sitting now opposite her with his face turned towards the sea, and his hair stirring about his head, very fine black hair, that even in the sunlight had no suspicion of a sheen upon it.
“I wish I knew who it was who came in,” he said, at the end.
“Goodness me, are you still thinking about that? You had a perfect right to be in the office.”
“That’s the trouble,” he smiled, “I wasn’t in it.”
“Oh, pooh!”
He looked quizzically at her. “I wish you’d teach me to go through the world with my thumb to my nose as you do.”
She laughed out merrily. “Is that the way you see me?”
“Yes, it is. And I’ve come to the conclusion it’s the only way to take the world. I hope you will keep it up.”
“I mean to, and when they put me in my coffin my hand will set that way.” She laughed again at the picture this conjured up in her mind.
“Gorgeous youth,” he said, a little bitterly, looking away from her.
She sobered at once. It was absurd that he should speak of youth as something in the long lost years behind him, for he was looking young enough as he sat there. She thought of something to divert him from introspection.
“I say, that leader of yours was stunning. I couldn’t have done it without being sentimental. You make me green with envy. And do you know that you have had quite a lot to do with the making of me?” He followed her glance to the Sydney Bulletin. “I’ve been taking that for ten years, ever since I read an article by you on Joseph Conrad.”
“Oh, really!” He looked quickly at her and away again.
“And you have been my literary adviser ever since. You introduced me to Shaw, Wells, Ibsen, George Moore, Oscar Wilde, Synge, Yeats, Lafcadio Hearn, Ambrose Bierce, Nietzsche, Turgenief, Dostoievsky, oh, hosts of men. And I’ve just read your article there on Masefield. You know, you’ve kindled fierce fires in my brain. You’ve filled me with a glorious discontent. You’ve made New Zealand too small for me. You’ve made me want to write, to travel, to get to London and Paris and see the world. See what you’ve done! Made a raving fever out of a perfectly good lotus eater.”
He had turned to look at her as she talked, and thought again she was the most vivid thing he had ever seen.
“Good God! I apologize. How little one realizes the devastating effects of one’s work.”
She laughed out again. She was becoming a little excited at seeing she could interest him. He took up the Bulletin and began idly turning the pages.
“I haven’t this number myself yet,” he said. “I suppose it is in my mail.” He came to a clever cartoon and showed it to her. “The chap who does those is a friend of mine, a cripple, but one of the jolliest fellows I ever knew.” Her face clouded. “Oh, don’t pity him. He hasn’t missed much. After all it’s what goes on in your mind that matters, not what goes on in your legs.”
She agreed with her eyes, and then got him talking about Sydney and the men he knew there till the sun was down glaring in their faces across the sea.
She took out her watch.
“Do you have to go?” She was only too disposed to hear regret in his tone.
“Well, no—but I’m awfully hungry.”
He looked into her eyes and fell for her intention as he had so often fallen for women’s intentions.
“I say, will you come along and have tea with me in the tent? There is nobody about now.”
Belligerency danced into her eyes in an instant.
“What the dickens does it matter whether there is anybody about or not? I’m going to settle this with you now. Are you afraid to be seen with me or do you think I’m afraid to be seen with you, which?”
He was astonished at this brutal frankness. “Good Lord! do you go at everything like that?” He looked helplessly at her.
“Well?” she demanded.
He shrugged his shoulders.
“Is it your reputation you’re worried about? Do you think I don’t know it, and everything that has been whispered and rumoured and concocted about you by people who sin by wallowing in the supposed sins of others? Why, I’m far more of an authority on your reputation than you are. And that’s what I care for it!” She snapped her fingers. “Or is it that you’ve heard I’m engaged to Bob Lorrimer? Well, I’m not, and I never will be. So much for that. Now what is it?”
Then her eyes fell before his, which were burning with a curious intensity. But he got lightly to his feet and held out a hand to her.
“Come on then,” he said softly.
“I believe you understand me,” she said lightly, as she stood beside him.
“You flatter me, Miss Freedom. I don’t even understand myself with whom I have lived these thirty odd years.” He picked up her cloak and the Bulletin and his stick.
II
They scrambled down the cliffs and went along the beach delighted with the lovely evening growing stiller as the wind went down, growing grayer as the burning fan of gold and rose faded out of the radius of the sun. As they went they startled seagulls whose strange behaviour attracted her attention.
“They’re catching toheroas,” said Dane. “They watch for the air bubbles, and then they bore into the sand. They have to be awfully smart, for even the little fellows suck down amazingly fast. Then they fly up and drop them, and if the first fall does not break the shell they take it up again. Let’s catch some. It will take you all your time to get a big one out.”
They sat down together and soon saw the little bubbles of a creature coming under the surface to breathe. She dug fast with her two hands as the shell-fish sucked away from her spitting as it went. She had quite a tussle to get it out.
“I wonder if it feels any fear,” he said.
“How queer it must be to have a blind instinct without consciousness.”
“Well, a vast number of the human race have little else. Except for physical pain they have no vivid sense that anything is going on about them. They are no more alive than that—why, it has gone already.”
“So it has.” She gazed at a little patch of heaving sand. “Yes, I know what you mean. Beauty everywhere, and no eyes to see it. That struck me as a child. I remember once two of my old aunts sat on the verandah one glorious spring morning and fought about whether Queen Victoria had ever really appreciated Prince Albert or not; they gorged on details of the Royal Family, and they got so furious about it that they did not speak to each other for a week afterwards. I listened to them for a whole hour. There was the lovely garden and beds of flowers just beside them. And that’s what they were doing! And I wondered why I was supposed to love and respect those two awful old women who never saw the sun and never knew when it was spring. Oh dear! I’m talking too much. You must stop being such a good listener.”
“Must I?” His eyes held hers for a minute. Then he stood up. And they went on to the gully.
She sat down on his narrow cot sniffing the smell of the canvas and the snug air of the tent. She took in the details of its spartan simplicity in a glance or two—the box cupboards, the plain kauri table, the rickety camp chairs, the few cooking utensils, the Chinese matting pressed over the uneven ground, the small typewriter, piles of books and papers, and socks and ties and clothes overloading a standard pole. Nothing less like the abode of a sybarite could be imagined. And he seemed strangely out of place in it as he moved about like an aristocratic cat, but feminine and feline only in his grace. She felt again there was nothing in his quality to suggest diluted masculinity.
“Will you have tea or wine?” he asked.
“Well, I would like tea.”
“Good. Come on and carry some of these things out to the fireplace.” He handed her various utensils, and then he filled a billy from a covered bucket.
Valerie’s spirits rose with every minute. It is doubtful if there is a more friendly thing on earth than a picnic fire built to boil a billy for tea, and when it is tea for two it gathers a mysterious glamour as a human mob accumulates intensity.
And there never were two people more susceptible to any kind of enchantment than Valerie and Dane. They stood watching the smoke curl up into vanishing wisps among the tree tops and the shadows deepen about them. As he puffed contentedly at his pipe he reflected that a fire must have been the first dissipater of loneliness in the days when a timorous humanity struggled with the beginnings of things, that the desire to dance must first have been stirred in the heart of man by the leaping of lambent flames, and that love as an art must have been begun by the warmth of glowing coals. Anyway, the sight of his fire and of Valerie sitting on a stump engrossed in it made him feel happier than he had done for some time.
He left her when the water began to hum and went in to set out the meal, leaving her to make the tea and bring it in. She saw the tent lit up with a lamp and his shadow moving like a grotesque on the wall. She felt very gay and alive.
He made no apology for the plainness of his food, for as he was going home the next day he had but remnants left. But Valerie never knew what she ate that evening. It was sufficient to eat with a man who had the air of presiding at a great feast.
“Ah, give me this any day before your satin couch civilization,” she said, looking round soon after they began.
“You think you despise the satin couches, don’t you? But what you really despise is the fact that they have been over-emphasized.”
“But I do despise them. I love the primitive for its own sake. The satin couch world is cluttered up with a lot of unessentials, such a lot of meaningless stuff.”
“There is meaning back of it. But the meaning has been obscured or perverted. You are the product of satin couches, even if you are a reaction against them. You would not appreciate this tent if you had not been brought up on satin. The primitive is fine for the nerves, but it is not stimulating to the modern mind. The caveman had a strong stomach but a poor imagination. It takes supremely sophisticated people to perceive the beauty of the simple life. No plebeian gumdigger sees the picturesqueness of a nikau whare. It’s the man who comes from marble halls who does that. I can write inspired articles about the bush, but the man born in it can’t. It’s really because you had your grandparents that you love this. So don’t despise that background.”
He had come alive while he talked and his voice had deepened a little.
“I don’t despise the best of it. But I do despise its assumptions,” she retorted with spirit.
“My dear Miss Freedom, every class has its assumptions. Every race, clique, caste and set has had them all down the ages.”
“Well, I dislike all assumptions then.”
“What about your own?” His eyes flashed an amused challenge at her.
“Mine!” She glared at him. “Oh dear, have I any? That’s one of the diseases I have been determined not to have.”
“You have some about freedom, I think.”
“Oh, of course you’d say that,” she retorted. “But I know I’m only free comparatively.”
He raised his eyebrows at her. “I gather you did not breathe easily in the Remuera set. May I ask if you find it less difficult in Dargaville?”
“I’m having nothing to do with Dargaville. I’m just living here for the work.”
“H’m! You really mean to work, don’t you?” He looked hard at her.
“Of course. Why not?”
He looked away from her without answering. It seemed to him that He was getting fresh impressions of her every hour.
“People aren’t real, if they have not work,” she went on eagerly. “That is one of the things I saw as I was growing up. I don’t mean just a hobby. I mean work. It’s wonderful what it does to people. Take all the ordinary people in our office. And Lizzie, that girl at Mac’s who waits on me. It makes them originals, not imitations. And Mac, look at him. Something in his own right.”
“Yes, you have the idea,” he smiled. “Stick to it. I’m glad you can admire a man like Mac. You ought to see him in the bar. That is where he is really great. He broods like a gigantic puck over that motley crowd with a kind of puzzled expression, contemptuous and amused.”
Dane talked on about him and the types of men about the river till they had finished. Then he produced a bottle of wine and they began to smoke.
“It’s wonderful to have someone who understands,” she said impulsively, after they had raised their glasses to each other. “I wish you could see how my relatives would look if I told them I admired people like Mac.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Well, you don’t worry about them now, do you?”
“Not in the least. They’re all dead.”
He raised his eyebrows enquiringly.
She sat up talking eagerly, so much so that he wondered for a moment if the wine could have affected her so soon.
“You see, I killed them all years ago, all but dad. It was a grand scheme. I don’t remember now how the idea came to me. But I made ghosts of them. I said to myself, ‘Let them be like the furniture. There’s a chair. It is an object. It can’t hurt me. It is a dead thing.’ And I began to imagine them dead one by one. And I learned what you could do with your imagination. Aunt Maud was my first ghost, because she was the worst. And then it did not hurt me to see her any more, or to hear her nasty old tongue any more because she was only a pathetic spirit. And as it worked so well with her I killed them all in my mind. I appointed a day for them to die. I even wept over it for some of them, mother and Rose, because you see, I had cared, I had expected them to be things, and it was hard to come to see they would never be any different. But I had no peace with them alive, and so they all had to go. And then it was funny to see them come into a room. I used to say to myself ‘How queer. There you are moving about as if you were a live thing. But you are just like the chair to me, and quite dead, because I don’t expect anything of you any more.’ And then, of course, I could be nice to them. For who would snub a ghost? And they all began to tell me how improved I was.”
She stopped, for Dane had taken his pipe out of his mouth and turned his face to her, and there came out of his eyes a look that abashed her. “You’re pretty ruthless, aren’t you?” he said quietly.
Then to his surprise he saw her bite her lips, and a mist come over her eyes. “Oh, no, I’m not. All that hurt, really it did.” And he saw the expression on her face that he had seen as she lay unconscious in the yard.
“I didn’t mean to imply that you can’t feel,” he said quickly, seeing that he had hurt her.
“Why, I feel far too much!” she cried. “That is why I could not stand it. That is why I had to fight. That is why I had to kill them.”
He put out a hand and patted her arm lightly. “I know. I understand.”
She subsided at once, her face flushing up. “I’m silly to be so serious,” she said, lighting another cigarette. A moment of awkwardness followed. Then Dane stood up.
“Well, you’re only another poor mortal crying for the moon,” he said lightly.
“And don’t you ever cry for it?”
“Good Lord, my dear, sometimes it seems to me that I never do anything else. Come on, let’s go out to the fire, and smoke there.” As he spoke he took a sweater and a heavy coat off a hook, and collected tobacco, cigarettes and matches.
III
When they had piled up sticks and logs and started a fine blaze, they sat down in the sand and rushes a little way above it. He had wrapped his coat about her and had put on his own red sweater. The light of the flames played about their faces and lit up their eyes. They sat still for a while and then she turned to him.
“You were born in Sydney, weren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of a family did you have?”
“I didn’t have any except a father. That is, my mother died when I was born, and I was the first.”
“No relatives! How joyful!”
He turned with the flash in his eyes that she was trying to encourage.
“That’s the ironic part of it. Having none I always wanted some.”
“Tell me about it. What did you do as a boy?”
“Well, I think I had a funny childhood, very irregular, but it had its interesting side.” He picked up a piece of stick and threw it down into the fire, and talked on quietly and rather monotonously, quite without the reminiscencing fervour that Valerie had shown. “As a man my father was quite a character, but he was somewhat negligent as a parent, indeed I may say he was a lamentable failure as a parent, and you can be under-fathered just as much as you can be over-fathered. But he was a great character. He was very handsome, much bigger than I am, and I get my colouring from him. He was on the stage as a young man, with Brough and Titherage, and then he met with an accident that badly lamed him. So they made him advance agent for the Brough Company, and he was with them till he died. He began taking me round with him when I was about six years old, and for years I travelled with him all over Australia and in Africa and India. He was very well known, fortunately for me, for as a kid I was a lot alone. I was really awfully lonely.” He paused, putting down his pipe in the sand beside him. “I say, do you really want to hear this?”
“Oh, please, I do.” She opened her eyes very wide at him.
“Well, my parent was not exactly fitted for the job. He used to forget about me. He’d leave me in a hotel in charge of a porter or anybody who happened to be around, and he would go off for days and nobody would care whether I ate or ever went to bed, and the porter might be sacked, and then there’d be nobody responsible for me. I used to hang round the bars and billiard saloons and drop asleep watching the play and listening to the tales. Eventually some man would find out who I was and go to the office about me, and somebody would come and wake me and tell me to go to bed. Sometimes I went to bed alone, but not often, I didn’t like it. Occasionally there’d be a boy in the place I would take to, and like you, when I began to read it was much better. I didn’t care much for roughing it then. I wasn’t very, strong physically, and I shrank from ordinary boy brutality. Well, I was always being left somewhere, and then dad would miss something and remember me. Then there would come a telegram saying, ‘Where’s that kid of mine? Send him on by the eleven-thirty to-night with my clothes.’ And often I would be roused out of bed and taken to a train and sent off to some town where, as likely as not, my father would forget to meet me in the morning. I was frequently lost. Once it was quite serious. That was in Africa. An Englishman found me asleep in a station in the early morning. He watched me a while and then woke me, and I told him my father was supposed to be there sometime. But I must have looked frightened or something, for he took charge of me, took me to breakfast and waited round with me all the morning. Then as dad never turned up, he left word at the station and took me off to his hotel. It took him three weeks to trace my casual parent who had been on a spree and in an accident. When he finally came there was a scene. The Englishman wanted to adopt me. He had had a boy who died. He was a huge chap, jolly and friendly. But my strange father had some queer affection of his own for me. He was always glad to find me again. He had an inextinguishable faith in the world’s goodness to me. He always knew I would turn up, and I always did turn up. It was a tribute to his extraordinary personality and to the fact that he always paid his debts, that I was invariably given money and shipped along with his tooth-brush and the things he continually left behind. The only thing I ever quarrelled with him about was the stage. He wanted me to go on it, and trained me for it. But I could not stand it. I could not stand the women. And I wanted to write poetry. We had some trying arguments about it. But I was only eighteen when he died.”
Dane took up his pipe again and refilled it.
“What did you do then?”
“Fortunately he left me enough money to go to London, where I’d always wanted to go. And there I looked up a sister of his, much older, unmarried. A pathetic, starved thing, as I see her now. She hugged his memory, and I let her hug it. She was living in a world of her own where all men were Saint Anthonys and Sir Galahads. And she made a Sir Galahad of me—well, I was one then. Poor soul, she got very dotty about me, but before I’d been there more than six months she died, and then I found she had left me her money.”
“And what next?”
He smiled at this inquisition. “Let’s see, I stayed on in London for a year, then I went to Paris and then to Berlin, and I rambled about Europe, and on into Persia and back to India and the East. It was the East that hypnotized me. Sometimes now I wish I had stayed there. But the climate worried me, and the life the Anglo-Saxon leads is pretty rotten, and I could not have kept out of it. I hankered after Sydney again too, and so I went back when I was twenty-four and began to write. I’ve run about the Islands and New Guinea and this country of yours since then, and, well, now I’m here.”
He took a long puff and stared down into the fire.
“Yes here, after all that,” she said slowly.
“Well, why not?”
“There must be so much you miss.”
“Yes, and very glad I am to miss it.”
“Do you intend to stay here?”
“I don’t know. But I can consider it calmly. After all a book is a book, and a boat a boat, and a fire a fire all the world over. And then this business of being in the swim in London or Paris or New York is only another of the hypnotisms men succumb to to please themselves. It isn’t as important to live in London as they think it is. You can get behind humanity anywhere in the world. Every man in earnest wherever you go has the illusion that his particular ism or place is running the world. Each believes in the final dominancy of his set of ideas. Nothing gives you such a sickening sense of monotony as going about this world listening to men talk of their ideas. It makes you long for the good old days when nobody had any ideas beyond getting a meal and chasing a woman. In the course of a week’s travelling you will meet twenty varieties of truths, each of which is the only thing that will save the world morally and industrially. And the fanatics talking these various truths are being pandered to and used everywhere by the same political and capitalist forces for the same old ends.”
“But good heavens,” she protested, “isn’t there something more in the world than people talking about their ideas? Don’t tell me you did not get a great deal more than that from travelling. You saw beautiful places, beautiful things.”
“Yes, I know, and places are wonderful.”
“Why, of course. Oh dear, you’ve had everything, just everything I want.” She leaned forward staring hard into the fire.
“Well, you are going to get it, aren’t you? You certainly will if you want it.”
“Yes, I am,” but she did not say it with her usual positiveness, and she felt a little chill that he should himself so cheerfully contemplate the idea of her going away.
Dane got up and went down to the fire and poked the straggling ends into the centre and put on another log. He stood there a minute beside it, a rather drooping figure vividly projected against a panel of darkness between the trunks of trees. She felt a swift clutch upon her heart as she looked at him. And she saw him against the background of that wandering youth that he had so simply pictured. And she thought it was no wonder that he drank to excess occasionally. And then she wondered again if he made a habit of taking morphia. It startled her a little to see how much she cared about it.
Dane came back to her and sat down carefully beyond the reach of hands, as he had done before, and began to talk easily of his travels in the East. She listened fascinated to his impersonal account of men he had met, situations he had been in, and forces working in China and Japan. She had heard enough to be able to ask intelligent questions, and the time slipped by. It was he who thought of it first.
“What time do you have to be in?” he asked. “I mustn’t keep you here too late.”
She was not accustomed to men who considered the hours for her.
“Twelve o’clock. What is it now?”
“Nearly half-past ten.”
“Oh, I’d better go. It’s rather heavy walking.”
She had a funny sense of frustration as he went into the tent to get a lantern. She wondered why. When he came out again he thought of the fire, and covered it up carefully, for the undergrowth about was still dry enough to catch. Then they set off into the sooty blackness of the ravine. There was something extraordinarily intimate about the compressed isolation of that little gully. It shut them off from the world as completely as if they were on a remote island. Ferns and creepers gave it a jungle fascination. The trees met so thickly overhead that not a starbeam twinkled through. The rumble of the surf was smothered to a distant monotone in the heavy stillness.
Valerie felt her pulses beating faster and faster, her talk becoming more and more disjointed. Sensing the change in her Dane walked deliberately ahead of her, and quickly, fighting the temptation to stop and throw his arms about her. They recovered their equilibrium but not their spontaneity on the flat above. She had not expected him to go on with her, but he put out the lantern, leaving it by a bush, and started off with her. He lit his pipe and they went on some distance in silence. Then under the stars she lost her queer feeling of disruption and regained her poise. As far as she could feel he was oblivious of her as he swung along beside her.
After a while he asked her abruptly how she liked Roger Benton, and talking of him and his chances in the election they came to the borders of Dargaville.
“It was awfully good of you to give me your company,” he said lightly, with no air of lingering, as he held out his hand.
“Yes, it’s been a masterpiece of self-sacrifice.”
She saw the smile that lit his eyes, and then he gave her a little salute and turned away. She walked on wondering if he had wanted to kiss her in the ravine, if the thought of kissing her had yet entered his mind. And then she told herself she must not think these things. She positively must not get fond of him. Feeling the way she did about a career and about living she had no business to encourage him. Then she thought she was absurd. He had given no sign that he had the remotest intention of looking upon her as anything but a passing acquaintance.
She passed Bolton and Allison gossiping by the former’s gate and knew they looked curiously after her. She was glad to find the side door of the hotel still open, but as she slipped in quietly Mac came from the corridor with a candle to see if it were shut.
Because she had no conviction of sin Valerie never had the sense of being caught. She smiled up at Mac.
“That was a narrow shave. What would I do if it were locked?”
The big Irishman’s hard eyes softened into the beginnings of a grin. She felt her soul was naked under that shrewd omniscient stare. But somehow it did not offend her.
“Knock on the window. Mike will let you in.” He nodded in the direction of the room where Michael slept. He wondered in a vaguely interested way as she went on if she had been out with Dane Barrington.
She did not get to sleep for some time. Through her open window she caught at intervals on some drift of the night breeze the sound of the surf, and she pictured the man down there alone in his tent, and fell asleep to dream of a boy lost in a world of hotels and stations, a boy who kept running round corners after a man carrying a gigantic tooth-brush.