The Woman at The Door

by Warwick Deeping

  Luce gave a shrug of his big shoulders and went on towards the sandpit and the track that led up out of the lane. His blue eyes seemed to be confronting some inward issue. Surely, no human involvement was possible over the selling of a jug of milk? How very ridiculous! It was no desire of his to insert his peaceful and rather otiose self into some rustic tragedy. But why use the word tragedy? Possibly he had misconstrued the whole situation, and most certainly it was no affair of his. He would give Beech Farm a wide berth in future, and manage with tinned milk. Tinned milk was preferable to spilt milk, especially when the spilling of it was in the hands of other people. Luce was not a very social creature; he had withdrawn into this solitude to dream and think and scribble, and since his wife’s death he had become more and more separative and sensitively aloof from the most obvious of life’s discords. He did not want to be bothered with people, and most certainly not with people who were living in a state of untidy, primitive emotion.

  He came to the place where the path skirted the Brandon woods. Here were banks of rhododendrons twelve feet high, and in places the path ran like a secret passage through the undergrowth. The track branched in a little, open, sunny space, a narrow path continuing towards the tower, the main way turning sharply to the right into the sudden shadows of trees and rhododendrons. These banks and mounds of dark foliage were brilliant with blossom.

  Luce was within three steps of the point where the track forked when the woman whom he was proposing to avoid appeared in that green entry. Luce had the sun behind him, and the figure that confronted him was bosom high in shadow, but her face was lit by the sun, and the startled pallor of it had the effect of a flash of light.

  Both of them stood still, staring at each other. Then Luce pulled off his hat.

  “I’m sorry. Afraid I startled you.”

  The breath seemed to escape from her with a little sighing sound. Her eyes had been large and blurred and black. Now, they caught the light.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Was he sorry, or were the words mere symbols? But the interplay was too swift and subtle for self-analysis. Something in him had been touched by her frightened face. There was a streak of anger in his compassion, for he had begun to understand her fear. She had a very live devil, and no skeleton, in her cupboard.

  “These paths make one’s feet like ghost’s feet.”

  He smiled at her. She had discovered the empty jug in his hand. The frightened look had returned. Was it that she had cause to dread even the casual appearance of a stranger? And quickly he was inspired to tell her a white lie.

  “O, yes, the jug. Thank you for the milk. I was taking this back, and then I remembered that I had forgotten the money.”

  Her look of relief was instant and unconcealed.

  “O, you needn’t bother. I’ll take it.”

  She had a largish basket with her, and she took the jug from him and slipped it into the basket so that it was hidden. He remarked the concealment.

  “How much do I owe you, Mrs. Ballard?”

  His use of her name seemed to startle her.

  “O, please don’t bother now. Leave it until the end of the week.”

  It was his turn to be startled. So, she was assuming that this milk business would be permanent. Well, between two reasonable people why shouldn’t it be? But this husband of hers could not be described as a reasonable person, and Luce felt bothered.

  “You would rather I left it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was wondering whether it might not be rather a nuisance to you. I mean—my——”

  His voice died away. She had been looking at him with wide, clear eyes, and suddenly their expression changed. She appeared confused, conscious of some secret shame, and of his being wise as to it. Her lips trembled, but no sound came. Luce’s gaze had dropped. He was looking at her basket and the hand that held it. He seemed to be sharing her silence and her distress, and absorbing from it an emotion that was both hers and his.

  But this silence had to be broken.

  “Shall I go down and see your husband—about this?”

  She looked up at him quickly, momentarily, almost like a woman glancing round the edge of a curtain.

  “My husband does not like strangers. I mean, we used to have the Tower for our men, and when Mr. Temperley took it away——.”

  “I see. I’m an interloper,” and he made himself smile; “that’s quite understandable. And I’m rather like your husband in not being sociable. I dare say I can manage on tinned milk.”

  “O, no, why should you?”

  “It won’t kill me.”

  “But it’s such a little thing, so silly.”

  “Isn’t life made up of silly little things?”

  He drew a smile from her.

  “Yes. Do you know the old sandpit, Mr. Luce?”

  “I do.”

  “I could leave you a jug there.”

  He stared at her. Probably she did not appreciate the implications such a piece of deception might involve.

  “Could you?”

  “Yes.”

  After all, what a harmless subterfuge was this, and why all this pother about his daily supply of milk? He would not meet her there. It was like leaving a letter for some obliging person to post.

  He laughed.

  “But why should you trouble? Are you sure?”

  She nodded at him.

  “I take my dog out nearly every afternoon. Good-bye, Mr. Luce. I ought to be home.”

  Home! As he stood and watched her disappear into one of those green tunnels he realized that she was going back to that mad dog of a fellow. A moment later he had reached that other more significant conclusion. Assuredly, it had been Ballard’s wife whom he had heard weeping in the sandpit on that April day.

  V

  Rain.

  It spread from the west in the night, windless rain, straight and heavy. Luce heard the rush of it in the grey of the morning, and the musical gurgling of that fifty-foot pipe from the leads to the earth. His window showed him a world of wet green gloom, dripping trees, soaked soil. So low was the sky that it seemed to rest on the tree-tops. Fingers of grey vapour seemed to trail across the woods.

  Well, if he desired a shower-bath he had only to go up on to the leads. A rain-bath! The idea piqued him, and slipping out of his pyjamas and into a brown mackintosh, he climbed the stairs, pushed up the trap-door, and felt himself among those streaming clouds. He took off his mackintosh, and hanging it on one of the chimney-pots stood there naked.

  So large were the drops that he felt their individual impact upon his body. A thousand ghostly fingers seemed to be tapping his skin. The deluge soaked his hair, and ran down into his eyes. How beautiful and exquisite was Nature when you had no sodden cloth to clog you! Almost, he felt himself to be a brother to the tall trees who stood with their heads and shoulders dripping, so still and so greenly glad.

  This would be a book day. No work in the garden. He collected his mackintosh from the chimney, and went down and towelled himself. His indoor mood was satisfied with a shirt, slippers and a pair of old grey flannel trousers. He dawdled over the preparing and the eating of his breakfast. He had opened the window and sat listening to the wet whispering of the woods. How peaceful and profound was Nature.

  He got up to fill a pipe. Hallo,—he was getting rather short of tobacco. The tin accused him of having smoked more than his usual ration; there was less than two days’ supply left. Well, why shouldn’t he walk over to West Brandon; the woods would be wonderful in this rain. He might even buy a daily paper, and find the pulp of it more useful than its news.

  His mood was for the rain in the woods. He shaved himself, substituted rough knickers and stockings for the flannel trousers, buttoned the mackintosh to his chin and put on his oldest hat with its brim turned down. The track through the Brandon woods was a wet black squdge, with the banks of rhododendron flooding it like green roofs. In five minutes he looked like a wet tr
ee trunk, and his grey hat had become black. The drenched woods streamed. They smelt of wet leaf-mould; the red and mauve flowers of the rhododendrons were like clouded lamps.

  Brandon looked like a deserted village. Luce noticed a row of May flowering tulips in a cottage garden with their cups closed and heads bowed against the rain. A drenched lilac drooped across the path. The village shop, standing back with white windows behind six pollarded limes, had not troubled to put out its newspaper boards. Luce felt like apologizing to the shop and its owner, for he dripped on its floor like a wet sheepdog. He did apologize.

  “Afraid I’ve brought in the weather.”

  “That’s quite all right, sir. We wanted rain.”

  “We’ve got it. A quarter of a pound of Player’s Medium, please.”

  “I’m afraid I have only ounce packets, sir.”

  “Never mind.”

  Luce groped with a wet hand for the silver in a breeches pocket. And then he remembered the perpetual problem of the daily milk. He could hardly expect to find a jug in the sandpit on such a day as this, and as an insurance against fate he bought two tins of milk and stuffed them in his mackintosh pockets. As for the daily paper he left it unpurchased, for the thing would have been pulp unless he had carried it like a poultice under his shirt.

  A waggon and team were going by as he emerged from the shop, the carter walking beside the leader, with a sack over his head and shoulders. Luce stood to watch it pass. A figure in a white mackintosh came round the angle of a red wall, old Temperley out in the rain, and loving it. His fresh face had a rain-drop pendant from the tip of its Roman nose.

  “Good morning, Mr. Luce. Enjoying a shower-bath?”

  Luce had just taken off his hat to shake it.

  “Hallo, sir. You out?”

  Obviously so! No sort of weather kept Mr. Temperley within doors. Like a boy he was capable of paddling wilfully through every puddle, and at the age of seventy-three the crossing of a village street is something of an adventure.

  “How’s the tower, Mr. Luce?”

  Luce, having shaken his very wet hat, replaced it much as a Viking might have helmed himself.

  “Everything that one could ask for.”

  “Not disturbed at night?”

  The question was ironic, and Luce countered its playfulness.

  “You might have driven a much harder bargain with me, sir. You might have advertised the place as the most silent spot in Surrey.”

  “God forbid, Mr. Luce.”

  “Exactly. But there is one thing I do complain of. I’m roused up at dawn by a most infernal shouting.”

  “Shouting, Luce?”

  “Yes, the birds.”

  And having caught Mr. Temperley out, he made the suggestion that it was unwise to stand about in such rain. Mr. Temperley had his answer ready; he had been born under the sign of Gemini, and he liked the last word. “Well, come in and have a glass of sherry.” Luce confessed that he had not cultivated the old-fashioned sherry and biscuit habit, or its modern variant. Moreover, his wetness would be an insult to anybody’s carpets and chairs. Mr. Temperley disposed of the objections. If Luce was not in the habit of drinking sherry, an occasional glass would not create a crave; as for the carpets, they were like Mr. Temperley, of an age to welcome society, even though its feet might be muddy.

  “Besides, I have one or two flints to show you. Veritable Mousterian, from a gravel patch near Woking.”

  Luce humoured old Temperley, for—after all—this old gentleman was a very charming person. He was taken into the Georgian house, and allowed to remove his boots and parade in wet socks. Mr. Temperley kept his sherry and his latest treasures locked up in a black oak corner-cupboard.

  “Sit down, Luce. Here we are. Now, what do you think of that?”

  He passed Luce a piece of flaked flint, and Luce, holding it in the palm of a big hand, examined the primitive artifact.

  “A nice specimen, sir.”

  “A double-edged scraper, what? And look at this for a coup de poing.”

  Luce held the pointed pear-shaped weapon in the hollow of his hand, just as primitive man might have held it. He was visualizing the primitive creature as the ethnologists described him, and suddenly he was reminded of a certain long-armed, slouching, sinister figure—that fellow Ballard at the farm. Ballard’s head was not Neanderthal, but there was something in his poise—and in his bent-kneed walk that might have linked him with this flint tool.

  Mr. Temperley was watching Luce’s serious, absorbed face, and the way his fist grasped the flint. This big man’s blue eyes were the eyes of a visionary, and Mr. Temperley could imagine him laying a hand on some old sword and becoming in the spirit the dead man who had wielded it.

  “Not a bad weapon that—in a fist like yours.”

  With a peculiar smile Luce placed the flint on the table.

  “These things can infect one. Almost, one might become a primitive. By the way, sir, I have a rather primitive sort of neighbour.”

  “Oh,” said Mr. Temperley, raising his white eyebrows and filling a sherry glass.

  “That fellow at Beech Farm.”

  “Ballard?”

  “Yes.”

  Mr. Temperley passed Luce the glass.

  “Had any trouble with him?”

  “No, nothing of that sort. I found him at the bottom of my stairs—one morning.”

  Mr. Temperley sat down and held his sherry glass up to the light. He liked good wine and good gossip, but both wine and gossip should have the kindness of age. Yes, the Ballards. A case that went to prove that a woman should not marry out of pity, for the thing that you pitied might turn and rend you. It was true that Ballard had been badly smashed up in the war, and it could be argued that a crippled body need not house a crippled soul. Mr. Luce’s experience had been otherwise.—“When there’s an outward blemish, Luce, I’m always suspicious of some mental scar. In Ballard’s case there is a very definite scar.—I’m sorry for the wife.”

  Luce was sufficiently disingenuous to ask a question that might keep Mr. Temperley talking.

  “Is there a wife?”

  Yes, most certainly there was a wife, though she combined the functions of domestic drudge, house-mate and scape-goat. She had been a nurse in the war, and that was how she had met Ballard, and taken pity on him. Ballard had been something of a dandy as an officer and a stout fellow who had won the M.C. and a Bar. Superficially, Ballard had presented quite a good appearance when he had taken up Beech Farm. A hard nut and a hard drinker, perhaps; but farming was sometimes such a brutal business. Who was it who had described life on the land as muck and misery? Mr. Temperley had lived with the land, leasing it, conveyancing it, loving and hating it almost like a man who had to struggle with it for a living. There were some farms that were like rogue elephants. They got a man down and crushed the life out of him.

  Luce had finished his sherry and he sat holding the empty glass.

  “Yes, the French understand some of the ferocity and meanness that can grow out of the soil. You get it in Maupassant.—But it is hard on a woman, unless——”

  Mr. Temperley took up the point.

  “It’s one of those cases of—well—I’ve forgotten the word for it. No matter. There appear to be women of a particular emotional make-up who will put themselves under the feet of some trampling little brute, and make a religion of the thing. They may even derive satisfaction from it.”

  “In this case?”

  “Well, she has stuck by him. It has sometimes amazed me what some women will stand.”

  Luce put his glass down and glanced at the clock.

  “I rather take the view that some people are noxious animals, and would be better dead. I think I’m due for my second shower-bath, sir.”

  He rose slowly and stood looking into the wet garden.

  “Good for the hay, and for the birds.”

  Mr. Temperley was putting the sherry away.

  “If you should have any trouble with Ballard�
��—”

  Luce turned and smiled at him.

  “I don’t have trouble with people. To begin with, I’m rather too big for most men to quarrel with. And I don’t quarrel.”

  Mr. Temperley chuckled.

  “Yes, I suppose—if one is built like a St. Bernard, little snarling tykes don’t matter.”

  2

  She was one of those foolish creatures who even when a trivial promise has been made, can be worried by the thought of breaking it. Should she go out in such rain? But what if he walked all the way from the tower to find no jug of milk in the sandpit? Poor man, he would have no milk either for his tea or his breakfast. And he would think of her as a bric-a-brac creature who either forgot, or broke a promise if it did not suit her to keep it. She did not want him to think of her in that way.

  She looked out of a window. The rain hung like a curtain, blurring out the landscape. But how very beautiful was the wet greenness of this spring world. The grass was lushing up in the paddock, and when the sun shone it would be a cloth of gold. She remembered that her umbrella had two rents in it; she had no money to pay for it to be re-covered.

  But, her husband? He was in the waggon-shed overhauling the reaping machine in readiness for the hay harvest; it was an old machine, prone to fail in a crisis, and causing him to rage. The reaper was like her umbrella—a product of penury. Supposing he——? She stood there hesitant, a sensitive creature to whom any deception was somehow repugnant and humiliating. It was her heritage, this over-quick conscience, and she was the victim of it, like one who looks in a mirror and sees more than the reflection of a face. As a child she had suffered from this too-sensitive conscience. It had compelled her to quaint little confessions, self-ordained penances in a white nightgown. Always she had been so afraid of hurting people and of smirching that something in herself by the petty lyings and slynesses that cause cruder children no qualms. She could remember at school an older girl sneering at her. “You—are—a soppy little fool. Or do you think that by sneaking about yourself—you’ll suck up to old Grogan?”