“We can do it, guvnor, if we go slow.”
The green slopes and the cedars and Scotch firs of somebody’s park lay behind them. There was still some bottom to the track, and when they came to the heathland the sandy soil was not too loose to hold the wheels. Luce had gone on ahead. The track plunged into a shallow valley thick with woodland and high banks of rhododendron; the soil was moist here, and old wheel furrows were full of water and black slime.
Luce turned back to warn the driver.
“A bad patch ahead.”
The cockney got down to investigate. He was an optimistic soul.
“I can get ’er through that, guvnor.”
But his optimism proved a little previous. The van lurched, wallowed, skidded, stuck. The back wheels spun round in the black mud. Nothing would move her. She assumed indifference when her master addressed her as a ruddy she-dog.
There was nothing for it but to unload a part of the cargo and manhandle it. Luce took off his coat and hung it on a rhododendron bush.
“I’ll take that box of books.”
The two men lugged it to the tailboard.
“You can’t hump it, guvnor. Too bloody ’eavy.”
“Get it on my shoulder,” said Luce.
They did so, and watched the big man go stodging solidly through the muck. “Bit of a surprise-packet,—Bill, what?” Luce got that box of books half-way to the tower, but in the end he was constrained to return it to mother earth. The edge of the box had bitten into his shoulder, and his heart was beating a hundred to the minute.
But with half the cargo removed, the black van seemed to sit up and take notice. The cockney and his mate discovered a stack of faggots, and dumped the wood into the worst of the morass. Luce and the assistant were told to shove behind, and the black van, after some wheel-spinning, consented to go forward. There was drier ground ahead and the thing was done.
By midday the whole load had been carried by the three of them into the tower. The cockney was perspiring and humorous.
“Mind the new paint, Bill. Gawd, I could do with a drink.”
Luce remembered that he had a case of bottled beer, and the three of them sat round the kitchen table and ate bread and cheese, and drank beer.
Luce went down to see the van through the mud-patch. It negotiated the slough successfully.
“Cheeri’o, guvnor.”
Luce had paid them an extra pound for unexpected and additional perspiration, and they were loving him.
Said Mr. Owner-Driver to his mate: “Fancy dossin’ down in that bloody old ruin!”
His mate was lighting a fag.
“A bit balmy, what?”
“Anyway, ’e’s a gent.”
“Gents do funny things. Blimy, that case o’ books!”
“Guess ’e’ll need ’em. Anyway, they’ll do for bumph.”
III
Luce spent the rest of the day in putting his house in order. He had decided to use the two lower rooms of the tower, and to disregard the rest of the building, with the exception perhaps of the west room on the fifth story. Here he would set up his writing-table and his bookcase, and from that high window look out upon a green and spacious world.
And very green it was on that day in May, though he did not climb to the leads and survey the scene until the evening. He remained busy in those two lower rooms with their fresh, primrose-coloured walls and clean white paint, unpacking and arranging and putting away. Meanwhile, he discovered various slips in his staff-work, omissions that were both amusing and chastening.
The rooms were minus blinds or curtains, and he had forgotten to provide either. Well, for the time being a blanket would have to serve. But in this solitary place need he trouble his head about an unscreened window that was more than twenty feet from the ground? No, of course not.
He had remembered to provide a lamp, one that could be suspended from a hook in the ceiling by a length of stout wire, but what about a light in his bedroom? Candles? He had no candles.
“You silly ass!”
Moreover, the men had left his hip-bath in the lobby, and the bath’s proper place was his bedroom. It proved itself an awkward object to persuade up the winding stairs; it would not be compressed, and Luce’s solution was to invert the bath over his head and shoulders, and ascend, wearing it like some huge steel helmet.
So absorbed had he been in putting his hermitage in order that he had not noticed the passing of time. What did his watch say? Half-past five! The sun had swung well to the west and was pouring in through the high sash-window. Tea. He was more than ready for tea. But when he proceeded to fill one of the lamp-containers of his oil stove he found that even though he had remembered to provide himself with a funnel, a five-gallon drum was not an easy thing to handle. The paraffin slopped out all over the floor, and he was constrained to carry both drum and container into the garden and perform the rite there. Here was another omission to be made good. He needed a tin can to act as an intermediary. Meanwhile, he was to learn that his kitchen living-room would smell for days of paraffin.
He had the stove alight and the kettle on. A cheap American clock on the high, black mantelpiece had not yet been put into action; he wound the clock up and set it by his watch. He collected teapot, cup and saucer, spoons, plate, bread, butter, jam, sugar, and glancing over the table, realized that he had forgotten the milk. Where the devil had he put those tins of milk? He searched everywhere, and could not find them, nor did he find the tins till three days later, when he happened upon a small white deal box lying under a clump of heather. It had been unloaded there and overlooked.
Well, tea without milk appeared to be inevitable, but was breakfast to be milkless also? He remembered the farm he had seen from the top of the tower. Why should he not stroll down there presently and get a jug filled? The farmer might be willing to sell him milk, eggs and vegetables. Yes, vegetables. He was proposing to grow his own salads, lettuce and radish, and ridge cucumber, and a few onions. Having washed up and lit a pipe, he went down to look at the garden. He had brought a set of garden tools with him, and it was not too late in the year to put in some potatoes. The garden was producing a splendid crop of chickweed, groundsel, docks, sorrel and couch-grass. Spadework was needed, and it would give him exercise. Yes, he would make something of that garden, and to begin with for his immediate joy he would scatter the seeds of annuals when he had dug the ground about the tower—godetia, mignonette, sweet sultan, marigolds, eschscholtzia, nasturtiums, Virginia stock.
Meanwhile, he was minus milk. He collected a white jug and a stick, and locking the green door, set out upon this adventure. Perhaps the farmer’s wife would sell him a couple of candles. It was a still and windless May evening, and the world was very green with the infinite and varied greenness of spring. The silver stems of the birches supported emerald lace. The green of the beeches had a more metallic brilliance. The oaks were still bronze and gold, and here and there an old yew looked very black in contrast. Scotch firs were set with new candles. The thorns were in flower, and smelling sweet. The crooks of the young fern were beginning to unfurl, and in the moist places patches of grass gleamed vividly. In the corner of a wild plantation he saw bluebells like blue smoke.
A blackbird singing; tits uttering their queer creaking notes; a chaffinch calling for a little bit of bread and cheese. A cuckoo, flying overhead, settled in a tree and challenged the wild woodland. An occasional rabbit scuttled. Following the track downwards he passed through a plantation of firs where the crowded trunks made mystery. There was no wind in the tree tops. How good and strange and peaceful it all was, wild country, unvexed by God’s prime egoist, man.
In due course he came to the valley where man did function. Here were beechwoods, glimpses of green fields, a pond with water flags, sedges, and white crowfoot. Rushes clumped the grass. Heather and bracken ceased, and green hedges controlled the vista. He struck a lane, and its ditches were riotous with green growth. Presently he saw the redness of weathered brick, a w
hite window-frame, a chimney plumed with smoke, the high thatched roof of a barn, a roller idle by a hedge, the jagged outline of a haystack that had been cut for feed, a field gate weathered to a greyish green, the white slats of a fence, two old rhododendrons brilliant with carmine flowers.
A magnificent beech tree overshadowed the gate. It gave its name to the farm. Luce paused at the gate; he leaned upon it and gazed.
The farmhouse, its garden, outbuildings and yard were set back from the lane in the centre of a small paddock. It was shaded by a dozen scattered trees, oaks and beeches, and the meadow itself had been planted with shade trees for its cattle, and the effect was that of parkland. The house, set obliquely to the lane, faced the south-east. It was of tile and brick, with a hipped roof, a central chimney stack, and a little latticed porch painted white. A low brick wall surrounded the garden, and placed symmetrically in front of the house were two old yews, cut in the shape of pyramids. An orchard, sheltered by high thorn hedges, lay on the west, and these shaggy, unclipped hedges were white with flower.
Luce contemplated this lonely farmhouse with the pleasure of a man to whom such places seemed to grow out of the soil. To him the reaper and the shepherd and the ploughman were allegorical figures, signs of the human zodiac, infinitely right and significant. Peace, green pastures, cattle feeding, the ploughland purple under the setting sun. He had the eyes and the heart of a poet. He looked gently at life, and saw himself in it. If there was any cynicism in him it was tempered by a little, humorous smile.
But he had come here to buy milk, not to soliloquize; he pulled back the catch of the gate, and closing it like a man of conscience, followed the road across the paddock. The place had a deserted look. There were no cattle grazing within view, and no human figure to be seen. He could suppose that the work of the day was over, beasts fed and milked, and the labourers gone to their cottages. A white cock and a few hens were scratching in the farmyard. Pigs grunted somewhere. A stable door hung open as though someone had just passed in or out, but the house and its trees stood strange and silent in the sheen of the evening sunlight.
When Luce came to the white gate in the brick wall, he got a different impression of the place. It had looked mellow and well cared for at a distance, but when you approached it there were things that caught the eye. The white gate needed painting; so did the little lattice porch. The garden was untidy, the path and beds weedy, the grass uncut. A few old-fashioned plants were in flower, Love Lies Bleeding, Turk’s Cap lilies, Honesty, a few clumps of polyanthus. The roses on the house had not been pruned for several years. A blind hung awry at a window, giving that particular window a strange and sinister expression.
Luce opened the white gate and walked up the weedy path to the porch. Was anybody at home here? The door had a plain black knocker, and he put a hand to the knocker.
From within came the barking of a dog.
2
He heard a woman’s voice speaking to the dog.
“Quiet, Peter, quiet.”
Luce was sensitive to voices. His very largeness liked a little, low, gentle voice in a woman, in a world that was full of bright trebles and the silly nasal shrillings of a pinched refinement. The voice in the house had a bird note—a blackbird’s note—and Luce, in his fanciful moments, assigned colour to voices. Some were hard and red, others a flat grey, others canary yellow, but violet voices were rare, and this voice was of that colour.
Apparently she shut the dog into a sitting-room before coming to the door. She hesitated there. She was alone in the house with the dog, though solitude might be blessed.
“Who is it,—please?”
Luce understood her reluctance to unlock the door.
“I’m afraid it’s a stranger, but it’s quite all right. I wondered if you could let me have some milk.”
If he was sensitive to voices, so was she. She unlocked the door and opened it, and he saw before him a little woman dressed in black, one of those dark, pale creatures with pansy eyes. She was all cream and jet as to skin and eyes and hair. In age she might be thirty. But the one thing that struck him about her was her frightened look; not that she was frightened of the immediate occasion, but of life as she was experiencing it. Her pale lips were sensitive and poignant, and there was a suggestion of shadows under her eyes. Moreover, her pallor gave him the impression of coldness, not of the heart, but of the skin.
He smiled at her and raised the jug.
“Please forgive me for bothering you. I have just moved into the old signal tower.”
She stood staring at him like a shy and solemn child, but those darkly lashed eyes of hers were not a child’s eyes. He would have described them as the full, ripe fruit of some unhappy tree of knowledge.
He went on talking.
“I thought I had some tinned milk to go on with. Couldn’t find it. Just like a man. So—tea—was milkless.”
And suddenly she smiled. Her dark eyes remained fixed on his very blue ones. His eyes were like his voice, large and gentle and reassuring to timid creatures.
“You’re at the tower?”
“Yes.—My name is Luce.”
She glanced at the jug.
“Well, yes, I can spare you some.”
“Thank you so much. I suppose you couldn’t let me have a regular supply?”
She looked frightened. Why should she look frightened?
“We don’t—deliver——”
“No. I could fetch it. And perhaps half a dozen eggs now and again?”
She stood hesitant, as though the deciding of so trivial a matter was of strange significance. But why? Had she?—And suddenly she put out a hand and took the jug from him.
“Yes, I think we might. My husband has gone to Melford. Wouldn’t it be—in the morning?”
“At whatever time suits you.”
“About nine o’clock?”
“Yes.”
She disappeared into the passage with the jug, and he heard the dog whimpering. Was this an unhappy house? And then he heard her footsteps returning. Her fingers touched his as she gave him the jug. Her hand was cold.
He thanked her, smiled and turned to go. She stood there watching him, and then—suddenly—she closed the door. Luce, carrying the jug with care, recrossed the paddock to the farm gate, and happening to glance at the trunk of the great beech tree he saw two letters and a device cut in the grey bark, an R and a T with a heart between them. Who was the lover whose knife had cut those symbols? They had been there some years, to judge by the rounded margins. And what did R stand for, a woman, Rose, Ruth or Rachel? And was she—the woman?
He opened the gate and passed through it, and the shadow of the great tree covered him.
3
A little while before sunset she went round the yard and byres and buildings collecting eggs. Some hens were separative and laid in strange places, even in the waggon-shed, and in a tumbril in which some litter had been left she found two eggs. The tumbril’s paint had weathered to a faded powder-blue, and its red wheels were caked with dry mud. On the side near the off-shaft she saw her husband’s name in white letters:—“T. Ballard. Beech Farm.”
The sky flared. A great cloud bank smouldered like a furnace, above a band of steely azure. A bat was fluttering noiselessly above the black roof of the barn, and she stood and watched it as though something in her mood fluttered ineffectually against that splendid sunset. She was thinking that her husband would have sworn at her had he found those eggs in the tumbril. How strange that this earth should be so full of beautiful and of ugly things! It was almost too beautiful—with a beauty that wounded—on this evening in May.
She remembered that she had left the dog shut up in the sitting-room. Poor Peter, he too was the victim of a vicarious tragedy, for—surely—to be unhappy was tragic. Returning to the house, she put her egg-basket in the dark, cool dairy, and went to release the dog. He was crouching close to the door, listening to her footsteps, his head on one side, his eyes watching the handle.
“Poor Peter.”
She stooped, and taking his head between her hands, kissed it. This creature was always the same, gentle, affectionate, her shadow, causing her no bitter qualms, nor forcing her to sordid concealments. What would her husband’s mood be to-night? How terrible that she should have to wait trembling upon his temper! She did not pull down the blinds or draw the curtains, for she had begun to feel afraid of this house when its eyes were closed. She lit a candle and went to look at the clock in the kitchen. There was a whining of wheels and a sudden clangour, and the candle trembled in her hand. The old clock with its solemn white face was striking nine.
She opened a door in the body of the clock, and pulling on a chain, wound it; he said bitter things to her if she forgot to wind the clock.—“No head, have you! Forget everything.” She had laid his supper on the table, and she looked carefully to assure herself that nothing was missing, so that he should have no excuse for snarling at her. But did he need excuses? And why had life turned so sour and bitter in him? Poverty, struggle, the curse that sometimes seems to lie upon the land? He had grown mean, and cruel. He took a strange pleasure in being cruel, especially to her.
She set the candle on the table and sat down on the sofa with her back to the window; the dog jumped up beside her and put his head in her lap. But even this dog’s love had to be safeguarded, like some precious thing to be put away quickly in a drawer or hidden in a cupboard. Peter’s devotion to her angered Tod Ballard. It gave him yet another excuse for being cruel to both of them.
She sat listening, and the dog watched her face.
“You ought to go, Peter.”
Peter appeared to understand her. He jumped down and stood looking up consentingly into her face. If the man creature came back with liquor in him——? Yes, Peter must be put out of his way. The dog followed her down the passage to the back door and out into the brick-paved yard, and with mute docility stood beside his kennel to have the chain clipped to his collar.
The Woman at The Door Page 3