Читать книгу The Woman at the Door - Warwick Deeping - Страница 18

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Had Luce kept a diary—which he did not do—he might have recorded in it during the next week certain happenings and his comments upon them. Being the unsocial person that he was he could set out to ignore much of the machinery of civilization, but he could not elude the persistencies of the Post Office. Very few people wrote him letters, yet a man cannot live in a civilized country without possessing an address. Luce had left his address with his London bankers, his lawyers, and with the head porter of his club, and then dismissed the matter from his mind.

A perspiring and aggrieved postman knocked at the door of the tower. He had a solitary letter to deliver, and it had caused him to curse eccentric gentlemen who withdrew into the wilderness. Luce, going to the green door, was met by the man’s hot and sulky face.

“Mr. Luce?”

“Yes.”

The man thrust the letter at him, and Luce, being a human person, did appreciate the fact that he had caused the Post Office some trouble. Also, May had developed a transitory heat wave, and flies had become active. Half a dozen of them had followed the postman to Luce’s door.

“Afraid I’ve brought you out of your way. What about a glass of beer?”

The man’s grievance was instantly appeased.

“That’s all right, sir.”

Luce served him with a bottle of beer.

“In the future you need not bother to deliver a lone letter like this. Keep them till you have collected a dozen.”

The man smiled at him. The gentleman might be odd, but he was a gentleman.

“We can’t do that, sir. You’ll have your letters all right.”

“I don’t want ’em,” said Luce. “I would be much obliged if you would lose them for me, but we English have a sense of duty!”

This solitary letter was not to be disposed of like some silly circular. It was from that wretched fellow Lowndes. It insisted upon Luce meeting him at their solicitor’s office to settle some legal snag in a mutual trusteeship. Confound Lowndes! But knowing Lowndes as he did he resigned himself to the necessity of satisfying this meticulous person. Had the postman a telegraph form on him? He had. Luce wrote his message. “Meet you at Hunt’s to-morrow 11 a.m.,” gave the postman a shilling, and delivered him refreshed to the heat and the flies.

But this letter was to be a fine thread in the web of circumstance. Going down to collect his milk ration, with the pinewoods pungent in the heat, he found no milk-jug in the sandpit. Had she forgotten? Or had something prevented her from coming? And, after all, what right had he to be curious as to the cause of the omission, or to feel just a little peeved about it? Surely, he was not going to allow himself to be involved in sentiment? This milk business was becoming a little bit silly.

Let him not imagine that somebody else’s wife had the face of a Cassandra. Tinned milk and celibacy would suffice at his age, nor had he any desire to blunder into the domestic china-shop. Women could be so temperamental. Next morning he put on his one passable lounge suit, and caught the 9.25 train from West Brandon station. He settled the business with his fellow trustee. He lunched at his club. He met Hugh Pusey at the club, and in a lax moment told him about the tower. Afterwards, he accused himself of being too facile a fool. “That’s your idiotic way. You blurt things out and don’t foresee the possible eventualities.”

For, Pusey, who was a vivacious sort of ass, had shown a sudden enthusiasm for the fancifulness of the idea. He would look Luce up at his hermitage. Carlotta Reubens should drive him down in her car. In his Bloomsbury days Luce had known Lottie Reubens and had misliked her. If Hugh was her latest experiment in sex, that was no reason why Lottie should be inflicted upon him, even for tea.

Walking back from West Brandon in a shimmer of heat, and coming to the deep cleft in the Brandon woods where pines, beeches and rhododendrons shut out the sunlight, he was reminded of that little piece of ritual, the exchanging of milk-jugs. Was it just curiosity that persuaded him to diverge and visit the sandpit, or was it his fate to be afraid of hurting other people’s feelings? Without analysing the impulse, he surrendered to it, and coming to the fringe of gorse bushes, looked down into the hollow. The white jug was there, and going down to collect it, he found a folded piece of paper tucked between the jug and the sand. The message had been written in pencil.

“Please forgive me. I did not forget you yesterday. I just could not come.”

He stood reflecting, the jug in one hand, the slip of paper in the other. Was it wise of her to leave notes about?

Also, there was a little, intimate breathlessness in this short message that both troubled and touched him. But, surely, he ought not to allow himself to be affected? And what was it that had prevented her from coming yesterday? Had that primitive—her husband—had anything to do with it?

Slipping the piece of paper into his pocket, he made his way back through the brambles and gorse to the mouth of the pit. Yes, this absurd question of this daily milk was becoming rather too serious. Most certainly it was unwise of her to leave notes under a jug. And what was he to do about it? Tell her? But would not that be a rather clumsy snub like hinting that she was trying to inveigle him into an affair? And she was not that sort of woman. Something in him was quite sure that she was not that sort of woman.

On his way home the solution occurred to him. Of course, that was the thing to do. He would go down to the farm and see her husband. He would make of it a simple and conventional occasion, and suppress all the previous interplay. He would say to her husband, “I should be much obliged if you would supply me with milk and eggs. Yes, as between neighbours. I could come down and collect my supply, or perhaps one of your labourer’s children would bring it up to me?” Yes, such rational behaviour was sound psychology. No doubt she would understand, and being a sensitive creature, be grateful to him.