The Woman at The Door Read online

  “You mean, you want solitude?”

  Luce smiled at him.

  “I happen to be built that way. And there is so little solitude left to us. Even the sky.”

  Mr. Temperley nodded.

  “Aeroplanes, mechanical blow-flies. But hadn’t you better view the place?”

  “I should like to.”

  “I have the key in my office. Also, may I remind you that—the domestic details—would be rather difficult.”

  “Water?”

  “Yes, there is a well. But no road, hardly a trackway. No shops nearer than ours.”

  “How very—restful,” said his visitor.

  Mr. Temperley’s pipe had gone out. He relit it. He was enjoying the occasion.

  “Well, you would not be worried with visitors; but, unless you propose to be your own staff?”

  “That,” said Luce quietly, “would be the exact situation. I happen to be one of those perverse people who try to penetrate—reality. The top of a Babylonian tower—and the stars! Quite absurd, of course, but the absurd and fantastic qualities—of the ultimate reality.”

  Mr. Temperley’s white head seemed to catch the firelight.

  “Yes,—I get you. Ascending into heaven—shall we say, but without the smell of petrol! Very crude and limited things, aeroplanes, after all. Well, I dare say we could let you the tower. If it had not been so devilishly remote, I expect some practical person would have pulled it down years ago and used the bricks to build—pigsties. But I think you had better have a look at its interior.”

  Luce said quietly, “I will.”

  II

  Leaving his pack at the Chequers, and having arranged to stay another night at the inn, Luce marched out of West Brandon with the tower key in his pocket.

  It was a day of sailing clouds, splashed sunlight, and distant blue-black shadows. The wind was from the south-west, one of those winds which sets dead leaves dancing, and stirs the tops of the pine trees to murmurings and strange gestures. There was magic in the morning. A cuckoo was calling, and the old thorn trees were clouded with sudden green.

  Luce did not meet a soul as he made for the high ground. Here and there the pines stood crowded, crown touching crown. Patches of pale tussock-grass filled moist hollows with a kind of ghostliness. Solitude, a solitude so complete that Luce was conscious of a kind of tension, a sharpening of the senses that was as primeval as this woodland. He knew the feeling well. It was as though ancient associations revived in him; he was wild man, befurred, with a club or stone axe upon his shoulder. A shadow flitting across a tree trunk would take on the semblance of some figure slipping to cover. A screaming jay might scold a warning, or a sudden rabbit bolt into dry fern and startle your footsteps. Sometimes you felt you must stand still and listen, and watch those strange spaces where shadow and sunlight spun fantasies. What was that—there? A branch jerked by the wind? Or—that sound?

  The track dipped into a valley, threaded a grove of beech trees whose buds glimmered in the sunlight, and began to climb again towards the sky. The path forked where a number of scattered thorns showed green above the crumpled fern. Luce paused here, hesitant. Should he turn right or left? And then, a sudden sound came to him on the wind, startling and strange and poignant.

  He stood, head up, listening.

  Someone weeping, and weeping like a heart-broken child in this solitude!

  The sound drifted to him on the wind. He saw a mass of gorse in bloom away on his left, and he turned that way over the fern.

  “Hallo, is anybody—hurt?”

  The sound ceased with utter suddenness, like the song of some frightened bird. And Luce stood still. Who?—A woman. And what affair was it of his? Besides, he might be blundering upon some double situation, and the silence was significant. It suggested that his interference might be tactless. He turned again, retraced his steps, stood a moment listening, and then held on towards the tower.

  The gorse bushes concealed a disused sandpit, and in the hollow of it a woman and a dog were hidden. She was sitting with legs drawn up, her body leaning to the left, part of its weight upon a straight left arm, the fingers of the hand spread and slightly arched. Her face had a transparent pallor. The brown dog was watching the woman’s face as though he understood the meaning of her silence. She had laid a hand upon his head when Luce had challenged.

  But there was no further sound, and with a relaxation of her limbs she turned and sat straight and still. Her eyes were wide and very dark. There was sand on her black skirt, and a powdering of it on one sleeve. But she sat soundless and still, letting her shoulders droop, and presently the dog, with a little whimper, crawled into her lap. He put up his muzzle and licked her chin.

  The touch of his tongue seemed to break the kind of staring anguish into which she had fallen. Her pale lips fell apart. She took the dog’s head between her hands and kissed it.

  Luce was in sight of the tower. He saw its greyness through the branches. A great blue sky stretched overhead. Peace,—solitude! But, somehow, there was a different look in the eyes of the morning, and when a sudden swirl of wind made the birch tops sway, and set the dry fern rustling, he turned sharply and looked behind him. It was as though the wind——. But what a strange thing that he should have been assailed in that solitary place by the sound of a woman weeping! O, well, what concern was it of his? He would never know who and why. He looked again at the tower, and saw that a cloud shadow had fallen across it.

  When he came to the green door at the top of the flight of steps he became conscious of a pleasant feeling of possession. He had only to make up his mind, and the tower was his, nor had Mr. Temperley’s candour discouraged him. “If you are not afraid of solitude and the simple life, and of strange sounds at night.” What strange sounds? “O, just the wind rushing past.” He unlocked the door, and stepped into a kind of little vestibule from which a staircase spiralled upward.

  He did not hurry. He had come to believe that life should be taken deliberately, and that at forty-five you should not rush at your adventures like a boy. And the exploring of this tower was his adventure. A door, hanging half-open, seemed to bow him into the first room, and entering it he found himself looking towards a big sash window that was like a woodland vista painted on a wall. Certainly, the glass was blurred and dusty, and the paper on the walls more than shabby, and the paint as old as time. The room had a musty smell, but when he went and threw up the lower sash, the wind blew in and seemed to make the room alive.

  “Not so bad,” was his thought.

  The paper on the walls might have been there for a generation. Little faded pink roses tied up dimly with blue ribbon on a grey ground. He smiled as at some Victorian memory. His feeling was that the previous occupants had been self-respecting people and had left the place very clean. That paint had been scrubbed. But the steep staircase piqued him. A tower was made to be climbed, and he had promised himself that the view from the top window and the leads would be immense. It was. He opened each door as he ascended, and found on three floors the same sort of hexagonal room. Plenty of space for a bachelor! The topmost room was divided by a wooden partition, and from the near half a ladder sloped to a trap-door in the ceiling. Luce gave the ladder a shake to test it, for he was a heavy man, and then went up it. Spiders had been busy up above, and when he pushed up the trap, the sudden draught blew dust into his eyes.

  Blink he did, but the dust was forgotten when he emerged upon the leaded roof. He seemed to be in the clouds. The parapet was not more than two feet high, and the wind slid over it in a flat race. Standing there he was level with the chimney-stack and its five red pots, and the wind made a humming in them. He could remember as a boy the wind making just such a humming in the barrels of a gun. Around and below the tops of firs and larches swayed and sailed. The sky seemed to rush overhead. The wind was in his hair, and bellying out his coat.

  And the view! He stood and stared, turning slowly like a mechanical-clock figure in some German steeple. The world
rolled below him; almost it seemed to be in movement. Oak buds glittered; the red throats of Scotch firs seemed to swell as though the trees were singing, and so indeed they were. He saw green fields, young wheat, the red roofs of far and solitary houses, villages, deep valleys pocketed with shadows, hills beyond hills. Yes, that must be the Thames valley over yonder, and in the south the North Downs surged up in a grey-blue wave. But there were trees everywhere, and to Luce trees were living things and yet always mysterious. What a platform was this for a dreamer of dreams! He could imagine it on some still summer night with no wind breathing and the woods asleep. Above him,—the throb of the stars. Even the fret and the petulance of the world’s progress would not vex him here, for in this year of grace the Portsmouth road had not yet become a track for little tin toys. Motors had not reached the million mark, nor did suburbia leave bottles and wastepaper in the woods.

  That building down there in the valley was man’s nearest landmark. He recognized the place as the farm he had passed yesterday, a red-tiled house lying amid a smother of old trees. He could distinguish a few cows in a meadow, and in another field a white horse was pulling a roller with a little figure walking beside it. There were broad tracks like swathes where the roller had passed over the grass.

  “I could buy milk and eggs down there,” he thought, “if I decide to stay.”

  If? Yes, he was still pretending, playing the pleasant game of yea and nay. The “If” in life kept you young, and guessing. But, already, something in him knew that the tower was inevitably his.

  He took another look at the landscape before disappearing into the hole in the roof and closing the trap-door, and half-way down the ladder he remembered that human sound which had startled him in the woods. Why should it recur to him just at that moment? A woman weeping. Just one of life’s unexplainable and casual incidents.

  But he had more of the place to explore, the tower’s nave-like attachment, and he descended the stairs. The original banisters were there, and the wooden casing, and each flight had its window. Water? Yes, it was very necessary that he should make sure about the well; a two-mile tramp for water would make his tenancy impossible. He had reached the last turn of the stairs when some movement below surprised him.

  He paused abruptly. He had left the green door of the tower ajar, and the movement that startled him was the swinging inwards of that door. The wind? No; the motive force was human. He found himself looking down at the foreshortened figure of a man in old khaki breeches and leggings and a tweed jacket. The brim of the man’s felt hat hid his face.

  Luce did not challenge the apparition; he stood and waited. And suddenly the man below became conscious of some other presence. His head jerked back, and Luce saw his face.

  For some five seconds they regarded each other in silence, rather like two animals who have met unexpectedly in a solitary place. Luce was conscious of telling himself that the man below had an unpleasant face. It was wide and hard, with patches of colour on its high cheekbones; there was a certain insolence in the eyes, a knife-like thinness about the mouth.

  He was aware of the man smiling, and that the smile made him look even more unpleasant.

  “Morning. Just looked in.”

  “So I see,” said Luce.

  “Didn’t know anyone was living here.”

  “No one is. But there may be.”

  The man nodded at him, and his eyes seemed to narrow. His glance fell away from Luce’s face almost like a hand being surreptitiously withdrawn.

  “Funny place to live in. Hope you’ll like it.”

  His hat hid all but the lower part of his face, and Luce saw the flash of teeth. The fellow showed them just like a snarling dog, and suddenly Luce felt moved to tell him to get out, though the impulse was unnecessary. The stranger turned quickly on his gaitered legs and disappeared, and through one of the stair windows Luce saw him making for the gate, walking with a slight limp and an irritable jerk of the opposite shoulder.

  Luce went down and closed the door. Well, probably that was the last he would see of the fellow. An empty and curious place like this might attract an occasional stroller. He would put a chain and padlock on that gate.

  And then he laughed. So, that was the reaction! Already, his secret genius had taken possession of the tower, and was prompting him to propertied precautions. It even went on to suggest that he should put up a notice, “Private—Keep out.” Luce quizzed his secret self: “You Anglo-Saxon with a clearing in the forest, treating every stranger as an enemy to be shot at!” And, smiling over the incident, he went on to explore the rest of his hermitage. He found a well with a bucket and chain.

  And where would he take his bath?

  Certainly not on the tower’s top where his towel would look like a signaller’s flag. The privacy might be complete, but the bath would have to be in the basement. Humping buckets of water up these stairs! That was not practical. And by the time he turned the key in the lock of the green door he had almost forgotten the man in the brown leggings. He was walking back to see Mr. Temperley.

  From among the birches and the firs he turned to look at the tower. His decision was made. He was going to live here through the spring and summer, scribble, meditate, dream.

  2

  Mr. Temperley was a man who did not allow his curiosity to cheat him into shirking details. So, Mr. Luce was satisfied that the place was habitable. Very good, and did Mr. Luce realize that the sanitation was primitive, and the water just well-water, and that in muddy weather you could not get a car within a mile of the place?

  “Thank God for that,” said Luce.

  Did he propose to furnish the tower? O, very sketchily. He was accustomed to sleeping in a camp-bed. And could Mr. Temperley tell him how the last tenants had moved their furniture? He could. They had managed to get a waggon and a team within two hundred yards of the tower; it had been dry weather and the old trackway through the Brandon woods had been usable.

  “I shouldn’t advise you to send down a pantechnicon.”

  Luce laughed.

  “I shan’t. I’ll charter a light motor-van, and a couple of stout fellows. I’m not exactly a weed myself.”

  Mr. Temperley smiled at him, for Luce suggested a Viking who had ceased from plunder and the blood lust, and become gentle.

  “Well, we had better have an agreement.”

  “Yes,—I’m a complete stranger. But what are you going to charge me?”

  “How would forty pounds a year strike you? And the tenancy to be a yearly one? Though, if you want to give us notice—I daresay we can meet you.”

  “I shall get quite a cheap country house. But would your people sell?”

  “Possibly.”

  “You might put it to them, Mr. Temperley. If I like the place—I might buy. By the way, I suppose it is insured?”

  “Against fire? Yes. That’s our business.”

  “And what about repairs? You won’t expect me to decorate all five stories? I propose having the lower two rooms and the kitchen papered or distempered and painted.”

  “O, we’ll do that for you.”

  “Soon?”

  “We still employ our estate workmen. I can put them on at once.”

  “So—I could move in in about a fortnight?”

  “I should think so.”

  And then Luce invited Mr. Temperley to dine with him at the Chequers. Not that the Chequers’ dinner was in any way unique. Mr. Temperley chuckled. “Very good of you. Better come and dine with me.” Luce thanked him, but confessed to a feeling that Mr. Temperley was conferring all the favours. But he did agree that an old gentleman in the seventies might prefer to be humoured, and to drink his own port and mix himself his own glass of toddy.

  “You’ll get a much better dinner here, Luce.”

  “I expect so, sir, and much better company.”

  “Thank you. Interested in flint implements, and pottery?”

  “Yes,—I happen to be particularly so.”

  “Splendi
d! I’ll show you my collection, all local produce. I’ve got some bronzes too, and a few Roman things from Forley. Yes, you may remember that wretched fellow Hugo Hodge plundered Forley in the ’forties. I would like to have had his scalp.”

  3

  To make a pun of it Luce could say that his entering into possession was a veritable tour de force. A Ford motor-van chartered for the day carried him and his impedimenta down the Portsmouth Road, and diverging by way of West Brandon, picked up the old heath track. The van’s load might have served a Crusoe. Luce had drawn out an elaborate list, though its details were of the simplest. It included a camp bed, and bedding, a hammock, a kitchen table and a shelved dresser, crockery, cutlery, silver of sorts, an old-fashioned hip-bath, two Windsor chairs, two basket chairs, a wash-hand stand, a chest of drawers, one small mirror, two second-hand carpets, a case of books, and an oil cooking-stove. Luce had been very particular about this stove. He was something of a cook, and he had had the stove demonstrated to him by a young lady in the firm’s showroom. Lastly, he had included stores, an assortment of tinned goods, two large boxes of biscuits, jam, marmalade, six tins of Ideal milk, tea, sugar, coffee, bacon, eggs, and a couple of loaves of bread and a pound of butter for immediate use. A stout fellow sat beside the driver, and Luce himself occupied one of the basket chairs inside the van. Beside him stood a five-gallon drum of paraffin, and a faint odour of paraffin graced the spring morning.

  All went well until the van took to the rough water of the old trackway. It rolled and pitched and creaked on bottom gear, and Luce, who had abandoned his basket chair and slipped over the tailboard, went ahead to scout for snags. They had another mile to go before they would come within hail of the tower.

  “Might be the Menin Road, sir,” said a voice.

  The owner-driver was a cheerful cockney who had handled a Ford ambulance during the war. It had been his boast that he could—when the crisis arrived—“shake the old bitch art of a shell-’ole.” He was not to be discouraged. He pulled up and got down to look at his load to assure himself that the goods were playing no monkey-tricks.