Quiet breasts? . . . She laughed aloud. No, no! Breasts not quite so quiet! Hands a little less spiritual in their errands! Kisses an hour long, and not on the eyes either, but kisses that made shapeless the mouth, that satisfied, at least until the next one! –
Again her hands flew to her head, this time in a frenzy of energy.
Though she hated him she would love him! Loving him she would still hate him! But not for another hour would she go without!
In each of her fingers a devil sprang to life. There followed the linen head-gear to the floor a second garment, and a third. Her voice came in broken, suppressed, disordered interjections.
‘Arms? He shall see, he shall see! . . . No, mother, you’re not to kiss my arm . . . That was this afternoon, was it, Pamela? Too late now? Wait, Freddy! . . . And then perhaps I shan’t hate you quite so much, Jane . . . “And she stretched out her arm quite across the bedroom and the light was put out . . . ” My feet will be dusty . . . And then you can go, Freddy. I shall have finished with you. I shan’t want ever to see you again . . . Now these –’
Off they came. She showed white as a peeled wand in the transparent darkness. Her rich hair made a wavy heraldic mantling where not a single piece of armour was. Then approaching the sofa, she passed the holland dust-sheet about her, while the Lady Jane watched ironically from the wall.
Past where the turned-down lamp stood in the angle of the guests’ corridor there stole a barefooted sheet-wrapped figure that paused listening, now at one door, now at the next. At the door where the corridor turned it listened a little longer before putting its hand to the knob. All seemed to be still within. With infinite precaution she turned the knob. The door was not even locked. She slipped in and softly closed it again.
A man’s suitcase lay on the stand at the bed’s foot, a man’s toilet-things strewed the table. But the morning moonlight that came in at the window showed no man’s dressing-gown. It lay across an unpressed pillow and an empty bed.
She stood still for a moment before opening the door again and drawing it to behind her. She had not even the key of her own room; that lay by a tumble of masquerade garments at the other side of the house, on the picture-gallery floor.
And why should she have taken his key from the lock and fastened his own door against him? Would that have been any help? What help – when from behind the door on the opposite side of the corridor there stole the scent of a freshly-lighted Turkish cigarette?
The Rosewood Door
I am a little world made cunningly
Of elements, and an angelic sprite;
But black sin hath betrayed to endless night
My world’s both parts, and O, both parts must die!
Donne
1
The house was of moderate age, mid-Georgian perhaps; it certainly did not date back to Charles, or anything like it. But its owners were amateurs in houses up to their fairly comfortable means, and Mr James in particular, if he happened to be passing a demolition that looked interesting, would instantly make for the door in the hoarding, risk the falling débris, and potter about on the look-out for a bargain. In this way he had acquired, from an old house in Soho, the Adam mantelpiece that beautified one end of his long drawing-room. At a Bloomsbury rebuilding he had picked up a very beautiful cistern of old English lead, with neoclassic figures upon it, and this, mounted on a stone plinth, stood in the pond of his lily garden and had been converted into a fountain. In one place he had found a piece of inlaid pavement, in another a pair of gates of wrought iron; but it was in Chelsea, at the breaking-up of an old Caroline house, that he came upon the rosewood door.
The demolition was in the preliminary stage that always provided Mr James with his happiest hunting, and he happened to be passing the place during the workmen’s dinner-hour. The house stood open, and past the contractors’ boards at the gate Mr James looked clear along the passage and through to the garden at the back. The rosewood door had been dismounted and leaned against the passage wall in full view, and something uncommon about it had already caught Mr James’s quick eye. He lost no time, for on these trespasses of his he was occasionally approached and politely asked what his business was. He walked up the paved path and entered the house.
The unusual thing about the door he saw to be its slight curve, as if it had come from the wall of a circular room; but hardly less singular was its beauty. It was gracefully panelled, the lower part in tall linen-folds, and its proportions were exquisite. Even its solid brass hinges were tooled like the backs of slender volumes of poems, and Mr James noted with a pang the care with which it had been unhinged and taken down. Evidently somebody else knew its value too. Mr James looked along the passage for a curved wall. Then he began to roam over the house.
He found little else of interest. The house was historic in a middling sort of way, but as he went over its empty rooms, from attics to cellars, he found no trace of a curved wall. Possibly he had been anticipated by a century or two, and the door’s history included an older house still. He reached the hall again and approached the door anew. His fingers touched its mouldings lovingly. He did not know exactly where in his own house he should put it, but the first thing to do was to make sure of it. He would cheerfully pay twenty pounds for it. And at that moment a pleasant young foreman entered, and Mr James fell into conversation with him.
The door? the foreman said. But it was curved! Now if it had been a flat one – not that it wasn’t a pretty enough piece of work . . . He spoke almost in disparagement of the door’s most singular beauty, and Mr James wished that the foreman had had the selling of it. He asked which room the door had come from, and the foreman scratched his head under his cap. That was odd now. He hadn’t noticed. It would be Bill or Burkie who had taken it down, Bill probably. Sold? No, it wasn’t sold, not that he knew of. They had only started on the job that morning. If the gentleman was a dealer and cared to make an offer for the lead –
After another covetous glance at the door Mr James left. At the gate he made a note of the contractors’ address, and looked at his watch. It occurred to him that workmen began work earlier and had their midday meal earlier than the clerks in the offices, and there might be time to catch some responsible person before he went out. The address was quite near, in Pimlico, and the bus at the corner would pass the door. Mr James hastened to the bus, and five minutes later descended again.
He bought the door, for ten pounds – half the price he had been prepared to give. But as the firm would have accepted five pounds for a quick-sale-and-be-done-with-it, both sides were content. On his way back to the old Caroline house Mr James stopped at a furniture removers’. Here again all went smoothly; nothing, in fact, ever went so smoothly as the buying of that door. The firm had a packer actually doing nothing at that moment, and if it wasn’t a long job . . . No, it was only to pack up a door, Mr James said, and he took the packer and his packing materials along with him. The door was carefully sewn up in sacking, with even the spare screws tied up separately, and Mr James gave a card. The thing was to be delivered at that address, he said, and despatched it was, that very afternoon. At four o’clock on the following afternoon it was lifted from the van at its destination, Mr James’s home, which was some forty miles out of London, but whether south, north, east or west does not particularly matter and need not be told.
The house stood in about seven acres, and had a fanlighted window over the middle door of its façade with two rows of flat-sashed windows extending to left and right. It had been photographed in Country Life, a complete file of the bound volumes of which periodical, together with books on Landscape Gardening, Armour, Domestic Architecture and Italian Fountains, formed a good portion of the library – the second door on the right as you went in by the fanlighted door, level with the foot of the wide shallow staircase; and the room had tall windows that gave on the lily garden at the back. It was into
the library that the rosewood door was carried, and there unpacked by Mr James himself, in the presence of the family.
They were unanimous in their praise of it and truly, by the time Mr James had finished with it and the mess of sacking and newspaper and cleansing-materials had been removed, it deserved all they said. Its flat curve was sufficient to allow it to stand up of itself and it had been placed facing the light, with the family and one guest gathered in a dark group against the window. It gave back the group from its depths, and the tall library windows also, and the garden outside, and the sky over the trees. The white bearskin rug at its foot met its own reflection, and the beautiful object did all this while remaining itself, true to every delicate level of its moulds and panels.
‘What an adorable thing, James!’ said Miss Virginia. ‘What did you say you paid for it?’
‘Ten pounds,’ said Mr James, with modest satisfaction.
‘Absurd! And was there anything else?’
‘Nothing worth bringing away.’
‘Can anyone guess at its date?’
‘The house was Georgian, but I shouldn’t be surprised if this was older.’
‘The linen-folds suggest Tudor.’
‘It may be.’
‘It takes the light like a – like a –’
‘Like a breastplate –’
‘Like a curved decorated shield –’
‘The question is where are we to put it?’
And that remained the question until Agatha Croft made a laughing suggestion. She was the single guest, and she had the gift of being frequently in the house, but she came each time as if a personage came, so that it counted almost as a sort of merit in the one who had had the happy thought to ask her.
‘You’ll most certainly have to have a door-warming!’ she laughed. ‘And in that case there’s only one place for it, and that is to make it the door of the room of the constant guest!’
‘Capital!’ they applauded as they turned to one another. ‘It always is her room, and the door will look straight down the stairs – quite the chosen spot of the house!’
‘It seems almost a pity to have to put a lock on it.’
‘Oh, I can’t sleep behind a door without a lock!’ laughed Agatha.
‘A lintel and posts could be made to fit it –’
‘Then need we say anything more? James must put it in hand at once!’
‘It shall be put in hand tomorrow,’ said James, and at that moment a gong sounded through the house and they departed to their several rooms to dress.
There was a smile on Agatha’s face as she ascended the broad shallow stairs. They were dear and kind, these friends of hers, but oh, how old-maidish! All this excitement about a door! The smile broke into a contralto laugh. James, she sometimes thought, was the most spinsterish of them all. She remembered him over the Adam fireplace. He had fussed about it like a hen with only one chicken. Agatha herself sometimes caught a trace of their dainty amateurism; it is difficult to be often in a house and not to share the thoughts and interests of the people of that house. But Agatha sometimes turned round on it all. When all was said, wood and marble were not flesh and blood. She was in her room and half-way out of her clothes as she mused thus. She had taken her bath an hour before, to leave the room free for Virginia, and on her quilt a maid had left out her evening frock of Malmaison pink. She was a statelily-made creature, as if some special earnestness of intention had gone to her moulding, and there was a responsibility about her grey eyes, which nevertheless could dance with mirth. Wood! Marble! . . . She wanted something more in touch with reality than all that. Men had asked her to marry them, but she had shaken her head. She was six-and-twenty, but she could wait. She never doubted that the thing for which she waited would come. It might not be a happy thing, but at least it would be hers, gay or tragic or both. And him she would marry. They would move in this world, but they would also move in a world shared with none. It would be a fulfilment, an appointment made from the ends of known space and time, and faithfully kept. Never – and the grey eyes twinkled again – would he be the kind of man who ‘carried’ a proportion or a contour in his eye, as a woman ‘carries’ the colour of a ribbon she wishes to match.
And then came the impulsive contralto laugh.
‘And what does all that mean?’ she jested with herself. ‘It means, my girl, that in the end you will do as other girls do – take what’s offered you. And if you go on long enough nothing will be offered you, and there you’ll be, left on the shelf like one of James’s vases!’
She finished her hairdressing and approached the door of her room. It was of white glossy-painted wood, and she stood for a moment in the Malmaison pink before it.
Then she thought of James and his fortunate find again. She won-dered whether they would really put it up in the place she had so laughingly suggested.
The second gong rang, and she opened the door and passed down.
2
Mr James went specially to the East End of London and chose the rosewood for the posts and lintel himself. He would have given another ten pounds for the members that had originally supported it in the old house in Chelsea, but he had seen none. In any case the workmanship must be of the best, and he went to a famous firm about it. The local carpenter removed the old door with its frame, and the local builder made good the broken wall again. The new frame was put up, and the rosewood door was carefully carried upstairs as if it had been a sick person. The family was slightly unhappy when the job was finished. There was nothing now to occupy them. But they went frequently out of the house and re-entered slowly, for the pleasure of seeing the door gradually reveal itself as they mounted the broad shallow stairs. All this took nearly a month, and Agatha had long since departed.
‘But she must come and see it at the earliest moment,’ Miss Virginia said. ‘It was her idea to put it there.’
‘And didn’t she say something about a door-warming?’ Mr James laughed.
‘Why not? It’s nearly a year since we gave a house-party.’
‘What do you think, Arthur?’
‘I think it a capital idea.’
The proposed party was discussed.
They dearly liked to show their house. With a little shifting about among themselves they could sleep half-a-dozen guests. Also after a measured fashion they danced, for, as Mr James said, to behave as if you were young was to be young, and for that matter they knew young people too.
‘There are the Radcliffes, and of course Humphrey Paton –’
‘Of course Humphrey –’
‘They would drive over and go back again. But we should have to find beds for the Trevors and the Owens.’
‘I could go in with James, if James has no pronounced objection.’
‘Brother, I should be honoured.’
‘There would be no need for Virginia to move at all.’
‘And Agatha would go where she always goes.’
So, a week later, the invitations had been sent out and accepted, and the house was in a stir.
The time was early June, and the weather perfect. The cuckoo called all day long, and Miss Virginia’s bowls were already full of Lady Hillingdons and Frau Karls. Outside the library windows the lily leaves trembled to the plashing of the lead fountain, and in the house maids in dust-caps moved furniture about – for the long drawing-room with the Adam mantelpiece was to be cleared for dancing. Some of the guests might remain for several days, but those living in the neighbourhood would come for dinner and the dance only, driving back at daybreak.
The preparations went forward apace. The dance was to be on a Friday, and on the Thursday afternoon Agatha Croft arrived, met at the station and driven by Mr James. Under the fanlighted door Miss Virginia kissed her, and Mr James himself carried her two suitcases upstairs. Before the new rosewoo
d door he paused, his eyes expectantly on her face.
Agatha had fallen back, duly admiring the door. – ‘Oh! then you did put it where I suggested!’
‘Exactly where you said. And complete with lock. Let it welcome you,’ said Mr James. And he opened the door and entered with the suitcases.
Later in the day other guests arrived, and dinner that evening was a merry one. They sat long over it, since the drawing-room had been cleared of all save its chairs and sofas, and the Adam fireplace and the clear showering chandelier reigned as its two beauties. Everybody had been shown what they called Agatha’s door, and Mr James told again the story of the young foreman who had thought it a demerit that it was curved – ‘as I once heard a man say of a most glorious twisted Elizabethan chimney-stack that it had been built on the twist because the builder hadn’t known how to build a plain one,’ he chuckled. They gathered afterwards in the library, but those who had come the longer distances began to talk of going to bed. ‘We shall be late enough tomorrow night,’ they laughed. ‘Pray let us not breakfast at cockcrow, Virginia!’ As a matter of fact there was to be no set breakfast. The meal would be taken in the rooms, and they might spend the morning in bed or get up, just as they pleased.
‘So sleep well, and we shall all meet at luncheon tomorrow,’ they said; and by half-past ten there was only one light upstairs, the light behind the rosewood door, where Agatha Croft lay reading in bed.
The maid who tapped at half-past eight the next morning got no reply. She tapped again and entered. Agatha was not there. But as the maid advanced to draw the curtains and let in the morning light she saw her below in the lily garden, standing by the stone margin of the pond, apparently deep in thought. She hoped that Miss Croft would look up and see her, that she might be spared the trouble of going round, but Agatha did not look up. A few minutes later the maid sought her and told her that her breakfast-tray was ready in her room. Agatha started at the sound of her voice.
‘What did you say?’ she asked, and the maid, who knew her well enough, said later that Miss Croft seemed ‘all come-over like’.
The Dead of Night Page 22