Читать книгу The Woman at the Door - Warwick Deeping - Страница 9

III

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Luce spent the rest of the day in putting his house in order. He had decided to use the two lower rooms of the tower, and to disregard the rest of the building, with the exception perhaps of the west room on the fifth story. Here he would set up his writing-table and his bookcase, and from that high window look out upon a green and spacious world.

And very green it was on that day in May, though he did not climb to the leads and survey the scene until the evening. He remained busy in those two lower rooms with their fresh, primrose-coloured walls and clean white paint, unpacking and arranging and putting away. Meanwhile, he discovered various slips in his staff-work, omissions that were both amusing and chastening.

The rooms were minus blinds or curtains, and he had forgotten to provide either. Well, for the time being a blanket would have to serve. But in this solitary place need he trouble his head about an unscreened window that was more than twenty feet from the ground? No, of course not.

He had remembered to provide a lamp, one that could be suspended from a hook in the ceiling by a length of stout wire, but what about a light in his bedroom? Candles? He had no candles.

“You silly ass!”

Moreover, the men had left his hip-bath in the lobby, and the bath’s proper place was his bedroom. It proved itself an awkward object to persuade up the winding stairs; it would not be compressed, and Luce’s solution was to invert the bath over his head and shoulders, and ascend, wearing it like some huge steel helmet.

So absorbed had he been in putting his hermitage in order that he had not noticed the passing of time. What did his watch say? Half-past five! The sun had swung well to the west and was pouring in through the high sash-window. Tea. He was more than ready for tea. But when he proceeded to fill one of the lamp-containers of his oil stove he found that even though he had remembered to provide himself with a funnel, a five-gallon drum was not an easy thing to handle. The paraffin slopped out all over the floor, and he was constrained to carry both drum and container into the garden and perform the rite there. Here was another omission to be made good. He needed a tin can to act as an intermediary. Meanwhile, he was to learn that his kitchen living-room would smell for days of paraffin.

He had the stove alight and the kettle on. A cheap American clock on the high, black mantelpiece had not yet been put into action; he wound the clock up and set it by his watch. He collected teapot, cup and saucer, spoons, plate, bread, butter, jam, sugar, and glancing over the table, realized that he had forgotten the milk. Where the devil had he put those tins of milk? He searched everywhere, and could not find them, nor did he find the tins till three days later, when he happened upon a small white deal box lying under a clump of heather. It had been unloaded there and overlooked.

Well, tea without milk appeared to be inevitable, but was breakfast to be milkless also? He remembered the farm he had seen from the top of the tower. Why should he not stroll down there presently and get a jug filled? The farmer might be willing to sell him milk, eggs and vegetables. Yes, vegetables. He was proposing to grow his own salads, lettuce and radish, and ridge cucumber, and a few onions. Having washed up and lit a pipe, he went down to look at the garden. He had brought a set of garden tools with him, and it was not too late in the year to put in some potatoes. The garden was producing a splendid crop of chickweed, groundsel, docks, sorrel and couch-grass. Spadework was needed, and it would give him exercise. Yes, he would make something of that garden, and to begin with for his immediate joy he would scatter the seeds of annuals when he had dug the ground about the tower—godetia, mignonette, sweet sultan, marigolds, eschscholtzia, nasturtiums, Virginia stock.

Meanwhile, he was minus milk. He collected a white jug and a stick, and locking the green door, set out upon this adventure. Perhaps the farmer’s wife would sell him a couple of candles. It was a still and windless May evening, and the world was very green with the infinite and varied greenness of spring. The silver stems of the birches supported emerald lace. The green of the beeches had a more metallic brilliance. The oaks were still bronze and gold, and here and there an old yew looked very black in contrast. Scotch firs were set with new candles. The thorns were in flower, and smelling sweet. The crooks of the young fern were beginning to unfurl, and in the moist places patches of grass gleamed vividly. In the corner of a wild plantation he saw bluebells like blue smoke.

A blackbird singing; tits uttering their queer creaking notes; a chaffinch calling for a little bit of bread and cheese. A cuckoo, flying overhead, settled in a tree and challenged the wild woodland. An occasional rabbit scuttled. Following the track downwards he passed through a plantation of firs where the crowded trunks made mystery. There was no wind in the tree tops. How good and strange and peaceful it all was, wild country, unvexed by God’s prime egoist, man.

In due course he came to the valley where man did function. Here were beechwoods, glimpses of green fields, a pond with water flags, sedges, and white crowfoot. Rushes clumped the grass. Heather and bracken ceased, and green hedges controlled the vista. He struck a lane, and its ditches were riotous with green growth. Presently he saw the redness of weathered brick, a white window-frame, a chimney plumed with smoke, the high thatched roof of a barn, a roller idle by a hedge, the jagged outline of a haystack that had been cut for feed, a field gate weathered to a greyish green, the white slats of a fence, two old rhododendrons brilliant with carmine flowers.

A magnificent beech tree overshadowed the gate. It gave its name to the farm. Luce paused at the gate; he leaned upon it and gazed.

The farmhouse, its garden, outbuildings and yard were set back from the lane in the centre of a small paddock. It was shaded by a dozen scattered trees, oaks and beeches, and the meadow itself had been planted with shade trees for its cattle, and the effect was that of parkland. The house, set obliquely to the lane, faced the south-east. It was of tile and brick, with a hipped roof, a central chimney stack, and a little latticed porch painted white. A low brick wall surrounded the garden, and placed symmetrically in front of the house were two old yews, cut in the shape of pyramids. An orchard, sheltered by high thorn hedges, lay on the west, and these shaggy, unclipped hedges were white with flower.

Luce contemplated this lonely farmhouse with the pleasure of a man to whom such places seemed to grow out of the soil. To him the reaper and the shepherd and the ploughman were allegorical figures, signs of the human zodiac, infinitely right and significant. Peace, green pastures, cattle feeding, the ploughland purple under the setting sun. He had the eyes and the heart of a poet. He looked gently at life, and saw himself in it. If there was any cynicism in him it was tempered by a little, humorous smile.

But he had come here to buy milk, not to soliloquize; he pulled back the catch of the gate, and closing it like a man of conscience, followed the road across the paddock. The place had a deserted look. There were no cattle grazing within view, and no human figure to be seen. He could suppose that the work of the day was over, beasts fed and milked, and the labourers gone to their cottages. A white cock and a few hens were scratching in the farmyard. Pigs grunted somewhere. A stable door hung open as though someone had just passed in or out, but the house and its trees stood strange and silent in the sheen of the evening sunlight.

When Luce came to the white gate in the brick wall, he got a different impression of the place. It had looked mellow and well cared for at a distance, but when you approached it there were things that caught the eye. The white gate needed painting; so did the little lattice porch. The garden was untidy, the path and beds weedy, the grass uncut. A few old-fashioned plants were in flower, Love Lies Bleeding, Turk’s Cap lilies, Honesty, a few clumps of polyanthus. The roses on the house had not been pruned for several years. A blind hung awry at a window, giving that particular window a strange and sinister expression.

Luce opened the white gate and walked up the weedy path to the porch. Was anybody at home here? The door had a plain black knocker, and he put a hand to the knocker.

From within came the barking of a dog.

The Woman at the Door

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