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CHAPTER XII

oh, David, what is it? Have the booms broken?”

“No, no. Now do stop anticipating.”

As the storm that had raged since early morning prevented Alice from hearing his steps, she had started at the sound of the porch door being slammed against the wind and rain. When Bruce stepped dripping on to the sack placed just inside the kitchen door, she could think of only one thing, the thing that had driven her wild with anxiety all day.

“They are all right?” she asked, still doubting.

“Yes, really. I've just come to have a look at you. I knew you would be worrying. And I want something hot for the boss.”

As he spoke he took off his peaked oilskin cap, and undid the straps on his waterproof coat.

Alice put down the sewing she had in her hand, and came round the table to help him. But he waved her back, for he was too wet to touch.

“Do take it off, and have a cup of tea. I was just going to make some. Are you wet underneath?”

“No, I'm fairly dry. I won't harm. Yes, I can stay a few minutes.”

She turned from him with an attempt at lightness, and got out the teapot and cups and saucers.

Bruce hung his coat on the door, and wiped down his face. Above the howling of the wind he could hear the voices of the children playing peaceably in Asia's room. Alice saw that he moved stiffly as he walked to the table and dropped into a chair.

Although it was not yet four o'clock night was beginning to close down upon the bay. After eight hours the storm page 168 showed no sign of a break. It was a healthy giant of a storm gone mad. In fierce gusts it lashed itself against the house, with now and then a lull more sinister than all the racket. With an incessant pelt and patter and swish and hiss it drove against the windows, through the sashes, and underneath the ledges, and spread damp splotches on the lining boards inside. The rain beat through weak places in the roof, and dripped with leaden drops into the tins Alice had placed to catch it. With each blast the linoleums heaved up on the roughly fitted floors, the doors strained on their hinges, the whole place rocked alarmingly on its wooden blocks, and the zinc roofing rasped against its heavy nails.

As Bruce sat down something shrieked in the wind with a sound that scraped the lining of the ears, and a piece of spouting, wrenched by a gust, carried away and beat a short tatoo against the wall, before breaking off to be blown against the fence.

He gave one glance round before looking at Alice's startled face.

“Spouting,” he said reassuringly. “Don't be frightened. The house won't blow down.”

“I hope it won't, David. That really would be the end of everything.” Though she tried to smile he knew she was not far off tears.

This third winter had been the worst they were ever to know. Twice before, during storms, the booms had broken in critical moments, and the logs had been swept for miles up and down the river banks, to be recovered only after weeks of search and the patient manipulation of high tides. Also, a dam in the bush had been wrecked, and the tramways broken up. Roland had worked two shifts of men to repair the damage, and to try to keep pace with his orders. At the same time he had planned a mill of his own, to be begun with the spring. He now had shipments of machinery on the way from England and America, he had everything page 169 he possessed mortgaged, he had borrowed to his limit, and he owed a number of his men three months’ wages.

The booms, which stretched from the beach below the house right across the river, were now packed with logs ready to fill the largest order the boss had ever had from the Wairoa, and the tug steamers were due to tow them away. Bruce knew how desperately the boss needed the money, and that if the booms broke again and the shipment was delayed it would be a crippling blow from which he might never recover. Bruce had watched him that day as he had recklessly jumped hour after hour from log to log, straining his eyes for signs of a break, and muttering at intervals, “If this damned thing busts, I'm done.”

Bruce also knew that, though Roland had carried himself pluckily enough that winter in public, he had used to the full what he supposed was his right to work off steam on his family. There had been occasions when his inflamed nerves had snapped even in the presence of his foreman. There had been an anxious and hushed air about the house all the winter. Bruce saw that both Alice and Asia hailed his every appearance with looks of relief that were more eloquent than words, and as he knew Roland never resented his presence he had made the most of his privileges as Uncle David, and he had acted as a buffer between the opposing nerves of the strained household.

But he knew they had all reached almost the limit of endurance, and as he looked at Alice now, knowing, though she had not yet spoken of it, how it was with her again, he felt love and pity for her surge through him afresh.

Her face became less anxious as she made the tea. He saw she would try to be light so that he might have a diverting moment. When he rose to place a chair for her, she waved him down.

“Don't get up, please. You look too tired to move. I suppose you have not sat down all day.”

He smiled.

“No. One doesn't, on those booms.”

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The anxiety came back to her face as she sat down.

“David, do you think they'll hold?”

He realized as he looked into her eyes, hard with sleeplessness, how much it now hurt him to see her suffer.

“My dear girl”—as he took his cup from her—“they've held all day and we haven't found a weak spot. We've doubled every outside chain, and two men are standing by every post and wedge. We have half the bush force down to go on to-night, and not a man has balked on the job. They're good for the night if they are needed. Now I think we'll weather it. Try not to worry.”

Impulsively he held out his hand across the table, and without a word she put hers into it. Though they had done this before in crises without too significant emotion they both now felt a sweep forward, something akin to the storm that revelled in its strength to toss the world about outside. After a minute he gave her a quick, strong grip, and then began to drink his tea.

“Where is Asia?” he asked, just missing her.

“Oh, she's milking.”

“What! Why, Bob would have done that.”

“I know. But she wanted to. She has been pining to get out all day. You know, she loves storms.” She smiled grimly.

“The children good?” he questioned, as if he owned them.

“Yes, for a wonder.”

He ate rapidly for a few minutes.

“Could you get me a couple of sandwiches for Tom and a hot bottle of tea? I must go:”

While she got them ready he vulgarly stuffed bread and butter and cold meat as fast as he could into his mouth, making no apologies. Then walking to the back door he strapped himself into his oilskins.

With the bottle of tea and the package of sandwiches Alice walked over to him and put them into his big pockets. Then, as she looked up at him, he felt as if something swept out of her to clutch his soul.

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“David, is it very dangerous on the booms?” There was no diffidence in her voice or in her eyes.

“Well, it's a risk if one is not very careful.” He saw what was coming.

“Have you been there all day?”

“Yes.”

“Promise me you won't go on them again.” As she spoke she stretched out her hands to him.

As he seized them he saw her through a mist. He hesitated only a second.

“I promise,” he said hoarsely; and then, taking up one of her hands, he kissed it, and crushed it against his cheek.

Swept off her feet, she swayed towards him, but in a flash of clear-sightedness Bruce saw that they must not lose their heads. He put an arm about her shoulders, and held her firmly, but made no attempt to move or kiss her. As they stood like that they could hear the beating of their own hearts above the roar of the storm. Bruce deliberately extended the time of his hold upon her, knowing that he was giving her a memory to help her through the night. When, at last, he drew away from her, he took her face between his hands and looked calmly into her eyes with all the understanding she craved to see, and with all the force of the declaration she had begun to want.

She stared back helplessly at him.

“You know I understand,” he said simply. “That is all that I can say, isn't it?”

“Yes,” she whispered, lowering her face.

His manner lightened.

“Now, to please me, you try to rest. And don't worry.”

She looked up again, her eyes shining.

“It's all right, David. I can go on—with you to help me—” Her voice broke.

“Cheer up,” he smiled. “You are not going to lose me. You'll find me as adhesive as a Spanish fly blister.”

Before she could answer he stooped and kissed her hair with a touch so light that she felt only the thrilling sugges-page 172tion of it, and then he was gone through the door into the rapidly gathering dusk.

She ran to the front room window, and he, seeing her, as he came round the corner, smiled and waved gaily at her, and again when he had passed through the gate.

Though he had tried to minimize its significance, Bruce knew that this was but the beginning of something whose end he could not see. He knew that to say “Stay there” to sex emotions once started would be as foolish as to say it to logs bursting through a tripped dam. He foresaw that the conflicts between the “dont's” and the “I musts” was likely to be long and troublesome.

As Alice watched him she, too, felt that what had just happened was inevitable. Though she told herself that her love for him was entirely spiritual, that she never wanted it to be anything else, she had craved to know whether he felt anything “special” for her. For the two years, during which, as Uncle David, he had outwardly preserved the manner of a favoured relative, he had given her no sign that he was in love with her. The friendship had been all that she could have dreamed of the ideal, all that was safe for a Christian wife and mother, and yet—she had wanted the sign, just the sign, she repeated to herself, of something more.

Now that she had the sign she knew she did not want it to alter anything. She just wanted Bruce's love as a beautiful secret to hug to her soul as compensation, as food for her starved emotionalism. She had ceased to argue about the right and wrong of it. So long as it was spiritual she knew she was entitled to it. It did not occur to her that David Bruce might not be able to keep his love for her on the same plane of exalted spiritualism where she expected hers to abide for ever.

As she watched him go down the slope in the driving sleet she felt that the terrors of the coming night had been mysteriously lessened; that, after all, even if the booms did page 173 burst, she could face Tom's ruin. For the moment the thought of the coming child ceased to trouble her.

As Alice looked back over that long nightmare of a winter, she felt she could never have come through sane without David Bruce. She had had the feared second miscarriage two springs before, and then a baby boy, now a ferocious little mass of vitality, almost a year old. One of the worst things she had had to endure that winter had been the eternal restlessness and screeching of this terrible infant, which Roland had resented as if it had been all planned to annoy him.

Then, even before the winter had begun, they had faced extreme poverty. Alice had taken much too seriously her husband's statement that they had only so much a week to live on, and that he couldn't go into debt for food. Thinking all women were naturally extravagant, he had given her quite unnecessary warnings about economy, and he never noticed the strained literalness with which she carried them out.

The winter had not progressed very far before Bob Hargraves put it to Bruce one night in the store.

“I say,” he began, “it's none of my business, but I don't think they are getting fat up there. It's been pretty plain feeding this last month. And yet, at the men's kitchen, they are living on all the expensive tinned stuff we can get them.”

Bruce, who had begun to have his suspicions, looked into Bob's kind eyes.

“What have they had?” he asked.

Bob read out so many pounds of oatmeal, barley, flour, sugar and salt.

“Is that all? No meat, no butter, no eggs?”

“That's all. I say, Bruce, hang it all, I'm willing to wait a month or two for my screw if they're as pushed as all that. And I guess some of the others would too.”

“Thanks, Bob. That's decent of you. I'll find out.”

And it was two or three evenings later that a deputation page 174 of men had astonished the boss by telling him they could wait for their wages till the spring.

Then Bruce had gone to Mrs. Brayton.

“They're actually going hungry!” he declared wrathfully. “I've found out from Asia that she and her mother have been going for six weeks on two meals a day. They've had no meat except those fowls you sent. Their own fowls are being killed one by one for the boss, and the children have the bones when he's done with them. They get little more than enough butter from the cow for him. Their vegetables are nearly done. And that crazy girl would starve before she'd say a word, and she'd starve before Roland would see that she was starving! God! The stupidity of it!”

“And things wasting here!” exclaimed the old lady, as furious as he. “But how are we going to make her take them? You know she will think she is an object of charity, one step off the workhouse.”

“I'll fix it with the boss. For God's sake send them down something to-morrow.”

The next day, when Harold Brayton arrived at the house with a sledge, Alice stared into his non-committal face.

“You say Tom ordered them?” She looked down at the packages.

“Yes. Where shall I put them for you?”

Alice kept quiet while he carried in a sack of potatoes, a side of bacon, and a box containing a cheese, some pots of honey, a bag of dried apples, a salted ox tongue, a dozen eggs, some keg butter for cooking, some fresh butter, and a pair of fowls all ready to go into the oven. But as soon as he had gone she dropped into a chair by the table and burst into tears of humiliation. She did not believe her husband had ordered them.

Asia ran in from the back garden, looked at the sumptuous array, and then at her mother, whom she took to be weeping from happiness.

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“Oh, Mother, don't cry any more. Let's eat some of it. Let's have a party. I know Granny sent it.”

“You know!” Her mother sat up. “Did you tell her we were poor?”

“No, Mother—”

“Asia, you have told somebody—Uncle David—I see you have. I'm ashamed of you! You know we should keep our troubles to ourselves. Other people can't feed us.”

But Asia was learning wisdom, and refused to be upset.

“If they want to, Mother, I don't see why they shouldn't. Do be sensible, and let's have a party.”

But all the party spirit Asia was able to coax into her mother was destroyed when Roland came home.

“Yes, I ordered it,” he said angrily, “and they'll send stuff every week. You didn't have to starve and make me ridiculous in the eyes of everybody. All I said was we had to be careful; but, of course, you couldn't get it right.”

“You know I have always been careful,” she replied, weeping afresh.

“Oh, of course, you're never wrong.” And he stamped out of the room.

It took Bruce all his time during the next day or two to restore Alice to peace of mind.

“There's no charity in it,” he protested, in answer to a remark of hers. “It's a business deal. Every one lives on a credit system. And between your husband and the Braytons the advantages are theirs. Tom's plans will make Brayton. The township here will mean better roads, a bigger local market, increased price of land, and by and by a weekly steamer and a quick route to Auckland—doubled and trebled prosperity for every one who lives here. And no one knows it better than the Braytons. If they could not wait for the money for a little dairy produce it would be a pity.”

This view of it had comforted Alice. But Bruce had not ended with that.

“And even if it were charity, you have as much right to page 176 live as any one else. For heaven's sake, my dear girl, bury that damned conscience of yours, and get up and kick something. Kick Tom; he needs it. Kick anybody who bothers you. Forget you're a lady. Get rid of your disgusting humility. Don't take everything lying down.”

Alice had been able to smile at his shots, and much advice in the same strain had helped her to adopt various measures of mental self-defence. She was learning to care less how her husband spoke to her, learning to make more allowance for his nerves. She would have got on still better with her own attitude of mind had it not been that she could get no more sleep than he did, and sleeplessness was her most deadly foe. Bruce suspected much of what she had to put up with, but he did not know everything.

Alice turned from the window as she heard the children calling for her in the kitchen, and as she got their supper Asia came in dripping from head to foot.

“There won't be a thing left in the garden,” she said sadly, putting down the milk pail.

“Never mind. We will manage.”

Asia looked at her mother. This cheerful remark was unexpected.

Asia was growing lanky, and some of her childish gaiety had been submerged by the sense of responsibility she had developed in the last two years. The buoyancy of her naturally sane and eager temperament was to triumph later over her present riot of seriousness, but at twelve years old she was prematurely aged by two great emotions. Alice had no idea of the complexity of Asia's outwardly natural devotion to David Bruce, or of the depth of her understanding of her mother's tragedy. She never knew how many nights the child sat up in bed, wretched beyond description at the sounds of Roland's sleeplessness. She had no idea how much she saw and heard.

But she did see and rejoice in what she would have called the noble qualities of her child: the devotion, the sacrifice, the sense, the usefulness. She could not have managed page 177 without her any more than she could without Bruce. And, if it could have been possible for her pride in her to have become greater than it was before, it would have increased that winter.

Asia began to shed her wet clothes as she stood on the sack.

“Oh, dear,” said Alice, looking into the pail, “is that all she gave?”

“That's all, Mother. She was in a bad mood. No wonder, poor thing, shut up all day in that little yard. I explained to her, but, of course, she couldn't understand. And I sang to her, but it was no use.”

Alice could not help smiling.

“Well, it can't be helped. You and I will have to go without milk for tea and breakfast.”

“All right.” Asia picked up her wet clothes.

She wondered all the evening why her mother did not seem as anxious about the booms as she had been earlier in the day. As far as she could see, the storm was as bad as ever. They sat up late, Asia reading to her mother while she sewed.

After she had gone to bed Alice stood by the window for some time staring out into the night. She wished some one would come to tell her how things were going. She wondered more than once if Bruce were keeping his promise. Again she hated the feeble part of waiting that women had to play in a crisis of this kind. As she caught sight now and then of dim lights moving in the swirl down below her, she could imagine the men fighting for dear life to save the boss's logs with a loyalty that she had learned to value. She knew they would be swearing and laughing with a recklessness that fascinated her. To her it seemed superhuman that they could fight the gale for hour after hour in the cold and wet.

After a while she began to walk about the room restlessly, wondering what the future would bring, wondering if she and David Bruce could keep their beautiful friend-page 178ship unspotted from the world, wondering if she could possibly go on living with Tom Roland and having his children, wondering what would happen if the booms burst.

At last, worn out, she threw herself down on the front room sofa, covered herself with a rug, and fell into a nervous sleep. There she still lay when the opening of the back door at three o'clock startled her into a sitting position. Dazed, she jumped up and walked to the kitchen door.

“The booms,” she muttered, staring at her husband and David Bruce, who were helping each other out of their heavy coats.

“Safe,” said Bruce quickly. “And the storm's gone.”

All at once she realized the sharp stillness.

“Safe,” she repeated stupidly.

“Yes, yes,” exclaimed Roland impatiently. “And we're frozen. Can't you get us something hot?”

While the two men went into the sitting-room to strip and beat warmth back into each other's bodies, Alice revived the kitchen fire, where the night logs soon blazed up. Before the men were ready she had hot soup and a kettle of boiling water. She was wise enough to see that they were beyond answering questions as they staggered out and dropped into chairs. While they ate and drank she got hot water bottles, and made up a bed for Bruce on the sitting-room sofa. She had taken the precaution to put all the children into Asia's room, so that there would be no noise to wake her husband in the morning.

But Bruce decided he would go to his shanty, and, without a chance to look significantly at Alice, he took one of the hot bottles and went out, more tired than she had ever seen him.

Without a word Roland fell into bed to sleep for fourteen hours without a break.

Before Alice had cleaned up the mess of wet clothes the first glow of a golden sunrise was blazing a background for page 179 Pukekaroro. With a queer, vacant feeling, now that the strain was over, she lay down on the bed she had prepared for Bruce, and slept lightly till she heard the sounds of the children awake, in the back room.