To-day was only Wednesday. Three days, then, to go until he should see Petra. It seemed an unconscionably long time to wait. But why, then, had he let three years go past without inquiring from Cynthia, or the dozen other people who could certainly have told him, what had become of Petra since Farwell’s last marriage, and who was Teresa Kerr?
He turned sharply around, as if startled away from the window by astonishment at himself for this strangely belated impatience.
Chapter Three
Green Doors lay a few miles beyond Meadowbrook, well away from the main highway on a meandering country road of its own. The new house had been built on the site of the old farmhouse which it had replaced, with its front door only a few paces from the road. In a general way the new house followed the contours of the old. The long, low lines of the sheds and the high, gabled lines of the barn—all house now—gave the place, as one came on it, a casual air of simplicity. It melted into the landscape as if it were painted on it. The white walls, shadowed by old, gnarled apple trees, were friendly with the dusty white country road, while the entire landscape of meadows and fields, with stretches of brook-cooled woodland, cradled the new dwelling as no changeling but its own child, in a peaceful lap. So Lewis at any rate felt as he arrived with Dick, in Dick’s car, at tea time on that Saturday afternoon which had come, at last.
“That’s Clare’s guest house,” Dick explained of a small one-story doll-house-like place directly across the way from the big house. “It used to be the cow sheds. We found it amusing, having the estate cut in two by the public road, and we have used the road in our landscaping—up to the hilt. Autos almost never come this way, and the hay carts and occasional cows that do only add to the flavor. Isn’t it jolly!”
“Very!” Lewis agreed. “And infinitely peaceful. Does Farwell write here at Green Doors?” He was contrasting the novelist’s Cambridge home with this latest one and thinking that Clare appeared, at least on the surface, to have been successful in giving this particular artist an ideal environment for his creative ventures.
“Oh, yes. But in a little studio off in the woods. He made us build it according to his own ideas and Farwell’s genius doesn’t work along the lines of architecture. But such as it is, it’s his own, and that’s charm enough, I suppose. We’ve laughed over it quite a lot, Clare and I, but it’s well out of sight and it doesn’t matter what it looks like so very much, just so long as it serves its purpose. And it does that. The man practically lives there.”
Lewis could not help thinking of his own books written in snatched minutes at his office, on trains, in hotel bedrooms in the dead of night with the call to sleep like a fire-engine siren shrieking a warning in his brain. But Farwell’s was creative writing and that was a different sort altogether, necessitating leisure and solitude, at any price—possibly! But there Lewis pulled himself up. “Lord! This matter of price is none of my business! They may be quite decent people at heart, really, and even happy!”
The front door had its step—a big, flat slate stone—a little below the level of the road. The hall into which one entered after so unpretentious an approach was almost startling in its palatial proportions. It was the height of the old barn, and the floor and the walls—with a balcony running around the second story on three sides—were made of composition which gave the effect of stone. In its own right, this great hall was a work of art; but on such a day as this, with the whole farther end opened to the New England countryside, it became merely a neutral frame for the garden, which, a mass of passionate color, cut a flaming swathe through a wooded valley to orchard-draped hills beyond.