Читать книгу The Woman at the Door - Warwick Deeping - Страница 13

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Should he go down to the farm?

For the second time in one day he admonished himself: “John, you are an ass.”

Why this hesitation, this sudden shyness? Yet a part of him was asserting that this daily pilgrimage in quest of a jug of milk might become both boring and embarrassing. He would get hold of one of the farm cottagers and bribe a child to deliver his daily milk. Yes, that was the solution of the problem.

Meanwhile, the immediate necessity confronted him. Confound it, why all this fuss and vacillation? One could presume that tinned milk was to be bought at West Brandon, and if he was going to be so shy of Beech Farm, a supply of tinned milk would render the cow superfluous. It was said that some people preferred tinned milk. He lit a pipe, washed up the tea things and put them away. Now for a book, something adequately testing, Jolland on “The Quantum Theory.” He sat down with Jolland, his back to the window and the sunlight in the trees. The day’s digging had made him feel good, and the tobacco in his pipe had a new fragrance.

Jolland was an abstruse fellow and so was his exposition of certain hypotheses. Jolland buried himself in long sentences and in paragraphs that were Germanic. He led you along labyrinthine passages, and when you had reached the end of one of them you had forgotten how you had entered it. Was that Jolland’s fault, or was his mind failing to concentrate? He put the book aside for a minute, and turning his head, became absorbed in contemplating sunlight, shadow, and trees. The interlude was fatal to Jolland. Luce found himself becoming involved in a mood upon which was imposed the claims of the intuitional as opposed to the analytical. Those trees and the sunlight were just so many million corpuscular forces in swift movement, and he—a complex of like minute centres of force, and their interaction resulted in the thing one called awareness. But why trees? Why not beefsteaks or aeroplanes? But that was quibbling. According to his other dimensional dreaming man should so evolve as to be capable of divining things super-sensuously. For instance, it was his intention to go and stand by starlight on the top of this tower and attempt—like some ancient seer—to project himself.

Abruptly he sat up straight in his chair and Jolland slid to the floor. Someone had knocked at the green door of the tower. That—according to his auditory sense data was reality. He hesitated. Who was the visitor? Old Temperley perhaps? He remembered that he was collarless; he had not resumed his collar since his bout of digging in the garden. But why boggle about a collar? He got up, went out into the vestibule, opened the door, and found—nothing.

No, not quite nothing. A jug of milk had been placed on the top step with a neat paper cap fastened over the mouth of the jug. Someone had scribbled a few words on that piece of paper. He bent down, took the jug in his right hand and read—“I had to go to the village. I thought I could save you trouble.”