The Woman at The Door

by Warwick Deeping

  “Good night, precious.”

  She kissed him, and went quickly into the house as though afraid of her own feelings. It was terrible to care too much—even about a dog. She returned to the sofa and sat down and stared at the still straight flame of the candle. She found herself thinking about the stranger who had come to the door. He had kind eyes, and a pleasant voice, and large slow gentle movements. She sat and wondered about him.

  The jarring of a gate in the deep silence, footsteps on the path, familiar, frightening footsteps. Her husband walked as though his temper jarred and jerked and twinged inside him. She had left the front door unlatched. She heard it thrust open so brutally with the toe of a boot that it struck the wall.

  Something shivered in her.

  “Rachel.”

  She stood up. She had grown so dreadfully wise as to the significance of these home-comings, and she could tell by his voice and his movements just what she had to fear. His sober home-comings were sullen and silent, his drunken ones rough and silly. But to-night she knew that he would be in one of those sane and savage moods when the devil was thin-lipped and ruthless in him, sufficiently inflamed to be brutal like some ring-master with a whip.

  “Your supper’s ready, Tod.”

  She had lost the courage to fight back at him, nor had her courage ever been very great. Her sensitiveness had always been at his mercy. He came limping into the room.

  “Why the hell haven’t you lit the lamp?”

  Yes, why hadn’t she? Was it that she preferred the dim light of that candle?

  “We’re rather short of oil, Tod.”

  “We would be.—Light it. Here, give me the matches.”

  He lit the hanging lamp, and as though fascinated she observed his face. It had a kind of hard, polished brightness; the lips were drawn back from the teeth. His hands were quite steady, remorselessly steady.

  “Afraid of too much light, are you? Sit down.”

  She made as though to sit on the sofa.

  “I have had my supper, Tod.”

  “Well, you can have some more, can’t you? Sit down at the table. What have we got? No bloody surprises in this house, what? Cold mutton and spuds! My god, you’re some housewife! Well,—you’ll eat it too.”

  He carved two large wedges from the ragged joint, piled on cold potatoes, and thrust the plate at her.

  “Eat it. Sit down; I’ll get another plate. You want feeding up. You’ve got a face like a waxy potato.”

  Her meekness had been her life’s mistake, or rather—her marrying him had begun it. She had been tricked by compassion for a man who had come back crippled from the war. She sat down at the table with that plate of food in front of her.

  “Really, I don’t want it, Tod.”

  He had limped into the scullery for a plate, and a knife and fork.

  “Eat it,—damn you, and don’t argue.”

  He sat down opposite her, and seizing the loaf, cut bread as though the loaf was a live thing to be savaged.

  “Where’s the dog?”

  “In his kennel.”

  “Suppose you’d like to pitch that to him, but you won’t.—You’ll sit there and eat it, my girl. Starving yourself, what! The little martyr! A lot of use you’ve been to me, haven’t you? Milk and jam. I ought to have married a woman with some guts in her.”

  Head bent, lashes lowered, she made an effort to eat the food he had piled upon her plate. She was aware of a feeling of tightness in her throat as though some hand was compressing it. She was going to cry. She mustn’t cry. Tears exasperated him.

  She was conscious of being watched. She—was—crying. The tears ran down her cheeks.

  “My god, blubbing again! Stop it, can’t you?”

  “I can’t, Tod.”

  “Well, blub, damn you, blub.”

  IV

  “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.

  2

  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.”

  3

  His ultimate decision was a strange one, though he did not reflect that the solution had caused him far more conscious effort than had Professor Jolland. He was in possession of two milk-jugs, a white and a brown, and the brown one belonged to Beech Farm. It would have to be returned. He had removed the paper cap, and instead of throwing the thing away, he smoothed out its creases and slipped it between the pages of “The Quantum Theory.” The milk was transferred from the brown jug to the white one. He put on a collar, collected a hat, and set out to return that jug. It could be done without his meeting her.

  On this windless day the woods were very still. Sounds travelled far, and the air was full of bird notes. A humble-bee boomed past him, mimicking the sound of a distant train. A yaffle went winging and laughing over the young bracken to disappear behind a group of thorns. Peaceful sounds these, and good for the ear, but as he struck the lane and followed its windings he became aware of other sounds, voices that were as discordant as the voices of a couple of scolding jays. He saw a tumbril standing in the lane close to a hedge, its shafts cocked in the air, and in passing he noticed the name painted on it. T. Ballard. Beech Farm.

  But his immediate concern was with the voices. They appeared to come from the farm. Already he could see the spread of the great beech tree by the gate, but a high hedge on his left hid the paddock and buildings. The two voices were coming nearer, and happening upon a thin place in the hedge he straddled the ditch and looked through. He could see the two quarrelling men. They were in the paddock half-way between the house and the big beech tree, and not more than fifty yards from where he stood. He recognized the man who was facing the gate as the fellow whom he had found standing at the foot of the tower stairs on the day when he had first explored his new hermitage.

  Moreover, he could hear what was passing between these two. The man with his back to the gate was obviously a farm hand, a tall, round-shouldered fellow whose jacket looked too small for him. So, the other man must be Ballard, and Ballard’s mouth was an ugly slit in a face of bleached fury.

  “See here, you bloody swine, you’ll fetch that cart in——”

  “Not me. You be careful, Mr. Ballard.”

  “I’ll be careful with you,—you slinking brute. You’re not worth the dirty boots you loaf in.”

  But the venom in the voice was more wicked than the words it uttered. Nice person this! Luce’s eyes were fixed for the moment on the round-shouldered figure of the carter. The man stood quite still, but in his stillness there was the tension of a restraint that had reached breaking point. His right fist was pressed against his thigh, the arm straight and rigid.

  “Shut your foul mouth,” was all he said, “I’ve finished here.”

  And then Ballard made a rush at him. Th
e man stepped quickly aside and the blow went over his shoulder, but Luce saw that rigid arm double itself and shoot out. His fist caught Ballard full in the face, and the smack of the blow was audible to Luce in the hedgerow.

  It sufficed. Ballard was on his back, a man who could be counted out, and the carter turning his head to spit, swung round and walked with a deliberate and characteristic slouch towards the gate. He had reached it and had flung it open when Ballard sat up and getting on his feet staggered like a drunken man across the grass.

  He screamed.

  “Come back, you swine, and I’ll kill you.”

  The carter pulled the gate to with a crash, and unconcerned, like a man who had finished his day’s work, walked off down the lane.

  Luce, standing there in the green hollow of the hedge, decided that this was no moment for the returning of milk-jugs. Moreover, Ballard, with blood on his face, had rushed to the gate and was shouting after the man who had floored him. “If I catch you round here, Lovel, I’ll blow your bloody head off.” Yes, this screaming little bully was best left to recover his temper. Luce came out of the hedge, and keeping to the grass, made his way back up the lane towards the woodland.

  So, that hard-faced, venomous little blackguard was the woman’s husband, and his impression of her as a woman who lived under the shadow of some perpetual fear was understandable. Probably, it was just as well that he had not happened to introduce himself to Ballard with that empty milk-jug as his visiting card. Such a fellow might be prone to misconstructions. But was that the reason why she had left him his milk on her way to West Brandon? O, very possibly. She was afraid of this violent little beast. And suddenly he paused and stood still as though to listen to the cooing of a wood-pigeon in a beech tree on the rising ground above him. Was it in her mind to call for the empty jug on her way back to the farm?