Читать книгу The Woman at the Door - Warwick Deeping - Страница 15

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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 tree 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.”