Читать книгу The Woman at the Door - Warwick Deeping - Страница 12

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“My good John, you are—an ass.”

Yes, it had not been very intelligent of him to carry two buckets of water up two flights of stairs and bathe in it, without having visualized the eventuality that the bath would have to be emptied. What was he to do with that surplus water? Carry the hip-bath to the window and tip out its contents, or return the water to its bucket and carry it downstairs? Yes, how very unintelligent of him. But on that first morning he allowed the tower to have the laugh of him. He threw up the lower sash, carried the bath to the window, and poured a libation to the great god Pan.

But he felt reproved by the slovenliness of the act. Even a hermit——. But, by the way, hermits had been very unclean saints. The new sanctities of sanitation and a sense of humour could not permit an Oxford Master of Arts to empty his bathwater out of a window. It might be done once perhaps, but to make a habit of it, even in this solitary place, would be unseemly.

What was the solution of the problem? Abandon his bath or make a weekly ritual of it, or take it in the garden? And having served and eaten his breakfast and lit a pipe Luce went out into the weedy wilderness, and was instantly reproached by the dirty work he had perpetrated. There was a great wet stain down the face of the tower. It seemed to accuse him like a woman over whose clean apron——!

But what a morning, sunlight and the young green of the year! He felt moved to take himself and his pipe to the top of the tower. Work in the garden could wait. He climbed the stairs, swung back the trap, and emerging upon the leads, was confronted with a solution of the sullage problem. Here, in fact, was a lead-lined bathroom open to the skies, and so arranged that the rain ran off it and was carried through the parapet into a rain-head and down a pipe to the ground below. Should he carry his bath up here? And two buckets of water? Well, after all, it would be an economy of labour. And then he laughed, loudly and deeply, like a man who has caught himself in a ridiculous and delightful piece of clowning. Damn it, he would have his bath up here on the leads, and just tip the thing over, and call the resultant—rain.

Meanwhile, the day was waiting for him in its green coat of many shades. There was not a cloud in the sky and no wind moving, and the horizon was far and clear. Old Temperley had told him that the Chilterns were visible from the tower. Luce pulled at his pipe and smiled. He was in a happy mood, and ready to quiz himself and the occasion. What an advertisement one could insert in The Times should one wish to sublet the tower! “Open air bathroom with a view of the Chilterns.” But with other fancifulness he began to survey the middle distance, and like a robber baron in his tower consider possible assaults and his defences. The ground fell away steeply on the south and east, more gradually so on the north and west. He had the Brandon woods as a barrier between him and the village. A by-road traversed the valley on the east, but it was so smothered in trees that only an occasional loop was visible. So far as he could judge, the farmhouse with the big beech tree was the nearest habitation, and searching for it he found that he could see the chimney, one gable and strip of roof. A thin spiral of smoke was rising from the chimney.

Well, they were almost as solitary down there as he was in his tower. A pretty little creature—that woman, with her creamy skin and her sloes for eyes. But why had she looked frightened? Was it just her cast of countenance, or in that lonely place had she something to fear? And then with peculiar suddenness he remembered that incident of a month ago when he had walked from West Brandon to look over the tower, the sound of a woman weeping in the woods, and his unanswered challenge. Had it been——? And if it had been, what concern was it of his? He sat himself down sideways on the parapet as on the edge of a precipice, and pulling reflectively at his pipe, reminded himself that women were emotional creatures. For example, the very idea of sitting on this parapet would have made his late wife shudder. Poor Norah had had no head for heights,—poor Norah. And then he was conscious of another curious linking up of associations, the emergence of an impression that appeared to have been shaping itself at the back of his mind. The woman at the farm had reminded him vaguely of someone, and now the resemblance became actual. Why had his memory been holding its cards under the table, to produce them at this particular moment? Let the psycho-analyst explain that! The woman at the farm reminded him of his dead wife, or to put it more conventionally, she belonged to the same sensitive, sensuously-spiritual type.

The discovery moved him to unexpected emotion. He sat down to confront it, that is to say, he swung both his legs over the parapet and sat poised above fifty feet of blank wall. He remained there in that singular position, smoking his pipe, and looking down at the chimney of Beech Farm. He and Norah had been such good pals. She had understood him; she had suffered the large, impulsive unpractical child in him. He had missed her horribly. For a year he had drifted about rather like a dog without a mistress, and then time had placed a large, cool hand upon the hurt. He had accommodated to things, become perhaps a little more solitary and visionary, a shirker of noise and of crowds and of social involvements. But, somehow, the woman down yonder had revived the old smart.

He was quite sure now, though he could not say why, that it was she who had been weeping in secret on that April day.

But this sort of thing would not do. He suddenly realized his rather precarious position and his duties. He was a middle-aged oddity who had chosen the life of a recluse, and even a recluse possessed responsibilities. He had his books to unpack, and his breakfast crockery to wash, and that weedy garden demanded attention. Pivoting, he swung his legs back over the parapet, and went down the stairs. He found that his pipe had gone out. Well, that was a hint to him that man should labour, and not dabble in suggestible sentiment.

So, in a mood that demanded self discipline he went forth with a spade, took off his coat and began to work upon the weedy garden. He had been accustomed to spade work in the old days, and this light soil was very different from Sussex clay. The spade buried itself almost without the weight of his foot, and the quick turn of the wrist came back to him. He had taken out a trench two spits wide and flung the soil back over the plot. Chickweed and groundsel were buried in the trench, docks and couch extracted and flung into a wooden box. Couch was a test of a man’s conscience; every confounded little fragment had to be picked out of the soil, and Luce gave his conscience full play. He put in six hours of digging and by tea-time his back was protesting.

He went in to put the kettle on the stove, and in taking the milk jug from the cupboard he remembered that the supply would have to be renewed. That meant going down to the farm.