# The Strange Attraction/Chapter 17
### I

“Where you like your lunch, Meesis Barrington? Meester Barrington not very well. He stay alone.”
Valerie turned in her chair, her expression as impassive as Lee’s. “It’s rather cold outside, isn’t it?”
“Yes. It windy too. There is a fire in the study, Meesis Barrington.”
“Then I’ll have it there, thank you.”
She put down her pencil, and after he had gone she sat staring at nothing in particular. Then she shook together the sheets of paper scrawled in her flowing hand that littered the table in front of her. She got up and went to the bathroom to wash her hands. When she entered the study she saw at once there was no sign that Dane had been working there that morning, as he usually did when he wrote at that time of the day. A fine fire crackled its preliminary way to a solid blaze.
The restrained beauty of the room affected Valerie every time she entered it, but her pleasure in it was a little clouded now by a pang of loneliness. She was always ready to meet Dane by lunch time. She liked to have his suggestions and criticisms on what she had been trying to do in the morning. His interest and encouragement were a fine stimulus to her uncertainty. And she had lately been very pleased with herself because an Australian magazine had accepted her humorous article on the evolution of personal taste. Dane had liked it too, ​and had given her an idea for another in the same tone. It was this she had been working on this day. So she missed him all the more.
But she sat down determined to eat, and to shut off disturbing thoughts. However, something about the situation hurt her. Once before that autumn he had been away from her for a couple of days. She had not known then, any more than she did now, whether he was at home or at Mac’s. She had taken the information as Lee had given it to her, and without asking any question, had waited for Dane to reappear. But she had found that her love was being denied something it desired, that if he were ill she wanted to take care of him, and yet she did not want to see him ill. She would have shrunk from him unshaved, been shocked by any demoralization of his looks, that was one of the penalties of her passion for his beauty, but at the same time she could not bear to think that she was not equal to that test.
And she knew, also, that he detested being fussed over. When she had spoken that autumn of his loss of appetite he had irritably begged her to ignore it as nothing unusual. Like all sensitive people he hated to think he was under any kind of inspection, and hating it as much as he did, she had been very careful not to make the same kind of observation again. She was more than ever determined to help him by being happy in herself.
And so she ate a good lunch, and then changed her clothes and went out to prepare a bed for winter bulbs. She had renewed a childhood passion that year, and all the past summer and autumn there had been gorgeous patches of colour in the sunshiny spaces of the garden. After two hours she put away her tools, and sat on the front verandah to smoke a cigarette and to relax. She did hope Lee would come to tell her that Dane wanted her ​to have tea with him. But no, he brought a fully equipped tray for one out to her.
As it depressed her to take it alone she did the most sensible thing she could afterwards. She got up her horse and went off riding in the direction of Te Koperu, turning up a track on the ranges to get a fine view. There was a fresh, cool wind that stimulated her, and she was sufficiently philosophical when she reached home to face the rest of the day with her own company. She played to herself all the evening. She was now working through the piano scores of the Beethoven symphonies, so that she would the more enjoy them when she came to hear them played by the great orchestras of the world. They were an endless source of delight to her, and this night she lost herself in the art she loved, and forgot all about Dane until Lee brought in the supper tray.

### II

Dane had waked late that morning from an intermittent dozing to find himself in a wretched state of nerves. He had been sleeping badly for a week or two, and had fought every night the temptation to take morphia. He wondered why some men were born to sleep so well and others so ill. He had seen bushmen sound asleep on the tops of logs that were being drawn along tramways by patient, reliable horses that needed no guidance, he had seen men asleep on wagon loads of hay, men asleep about the decks of timber ships, men asleep in the fields, men asleep on timber stacks in the dinner hour at the mills, men asleep on chairs and on benches in the pubs. And it seemed to him as if he were the only person he knew to whom the dark goddess denied that elementary right of man.
He wondered sometimes if his erratic, ill-regulated ​childhood was the cause. Whatever it was, his terrible awakeness was the curse of his life. He had done what he could in recent years. He had lived more and more in the open air, and that had helped a good deal. And marriage with Valerie had helped him. He had been better in the first year than he had been for a decade. But this autumn the shadow had fallen on him again, and he had as well the fits of indigestion and nausea and depression that he was beginning to dread.
Even the strong coffee that he took did little to buck him up this day. He paced the garden on his side of the house for an hour and found himself exhausted. He went into his den and drank a stiff whisky and lay down on his lounge, hoping the warmth of the room would help him to doze the morning and the mood away. But it was no use. When he got up the bones in his body seemed to dance under his skin like the ridiculous antics of marionettes moved by the jerks of a capricious string. His nerves were driving him mad.
He forced himself to eat a little of the chicken jelly Lee brought him for lunch. He asked about Valerie, and was glad to hear she had gone out to garden. He went out to his verandah and tried to get some distraction from the whistling of the wind in the trees and the scurrying of the leaves about the paths. But he was beyond the stage when nature was any use to him. He went into his back room, and from the window caught a glimpse of Valerie wheeling a barrow of manure to her flower-beds. He heard her whistling. It did not hurt him that she could be happy without him. It was the one thing that helped him to bear himself, when he did bear himself. As he looked at her then he was hardly conscious of her as a woman he loved ; he was so weary and so hounded by some insatiable demon within. When he heard she had gone off ​riding, he went down to his launch and turned up the river, as he had done before when he was away from her. At least it would not be at Mac’s, and under the eye of Bob Lorrimer, that he went under.

### III

In spite of her determination to be detached, Valerie felt a chill when Lee came to ask her at lunch the next day where she would have it.
She knew she would learn nothing if she asked that boy questions. She was both irritated by having him as a buffer between her and Dane and attracted by his admirable matter-of-fact air. As she ate again by herself the situation began to get on her nerves.
As before she went out to soothe herself by working with the earth, and as she dug she heard the launch come into the bay. She slipped back quietly to her rooms and was in time to see Dane emerge from the trees and disappear on his own side of the house. He slouched along with a stoop like an old man. She had not been able to see his face. She sat down so overwhelmed with pity for him that hot tears oozed painfully out of her eyes and dropped upon her grubby hands. But she tried to comfort herself with the thought that perhaps men did not suffer nearly as much about this kind of thing as women did for them. Perhaps he felt much better now that he had fed that demon in him. He would be weak and sick for a day or two, but his mind might be at rest. She knew well enough he drank for no mere self-indulgent reason. Whatever it was, it was not that. There was a continual fight going on there, and it was knowledge of that that saved him from her condemnation.
She decided to ride into Dargaville, so that if he had ​been at Mac’s the night before, as she supposed, the town should know she was not crushed by the fact. She stopped as she usually did at the News office, and learned that Dane had not called for the paper. She stopped at the post-office and found he had not got the mail.
When she got home she took the papers and the mail into her room with her. There were several letters for Dane. She separated them, thinking that having this excuse she would go to his verandah, and that if he were not there she would call him. She felt it ridiculous that she could not make a move towards him. But even as she thought it, Lee knocked on her door.
“You have the mail, Meesis Barrington?” he asked.
She gave him the papers and the letters for Dane.
But something about this incident annoyed her extremely. And it was humiliating to be cut off from the man she loved by this boy. And yet, if the man she loved preferred it this way, she had to abide by his wish.
She ate her dinner alone again that night, and became so restless and upset by her isolation that she was in no mood to play the piano afterwards. She went out into the dark and began to pace the drive between the house and the gate. The quality of the night did not help her. There was still a wind, but it was not the fresh wind of the west with a tonic in its rushing air. It was a brooding northeaster of the three-day kind, swaying the pines to a melancholy whine and the poplars to a metallic hiss. It was a wind that preceded a storm of rain. It was a wind that hinted at pain and trouble and unutterable sadnesses. It was a wind that glued one to the earth, that put weights in one’s boots and turned one’s muscles to lead.
At last she felt she was tired enough to sleep. She found her supper in the study. She was able to drink a glass of wine and eat some crackers, but she felt so lonely ​when she got to bed that it was a long time before she fell into an uneasy dream.
“Come in,” she said at one o’clock the next day, as she heard the knock.
She had expected Lee, but it was Dane who walked in, closing the door behind him. He looked pale and tired, and there were circles round his eyes, but he was not frantic any more. He seemed relaxed and a little drowsy. There was a delicate scent about his fresh white shirt, and he was wearing the navy suit and the blue tie she liked best. His obvious attention to her likes touched her.
Afraid though he was of her judgment, he stumbled in to her like a child, with an appeal radiating from his whole expressive body. But he had no need to fear her. Her eyes flashed when she saw who it was. She sprang to her feet with her arms out, as if he had returned unexpectedly from a journey, and before he could speak he felt her kisses upon his lips and her hands caressing his head.
“I’ve been a beast to leave you alone, dear,” he said hoarsely, when he could find his voice.
“Oh, don’t, please. I understand.”
“I’m better alone.”
“Yes, yes, I know. Don’t think about it. Kiss me.”
He thought it wonderful that she could blot it out like that. But she was only too glad to blot it out, only too glad to have him restored to some measure of peace with himself.
It was the storm that broke upon the place that night, lasting for three days, that brought them to talk of going away. He did not particularly want to go. Changes in food upset him and he could not work so well, but he saw Valerie thought a change would do him good, and he thought she wanted it for herself. Each was thinking of the other and thinking wrong, as is the strange way of so ​many people who care. So they went to Rotorua for a month. And on the whole it did Dane a lot of good. The fine winter climate of the Dominion’s most famous resort helped him to eat, and the mineral baths and electric treatment he took restored his nerves. They spent most of the time walking and driving about the hills and launching about the lakes, and Valerie was rejoiced to see how, much better he seemed when they returned home.